Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 6, 2025
When Turgenev shaped the character, he certainly drew on his own memories of his stay at Berlin, at a time when Bruno Bauer was laying it down as a dogma that no educated man ought to have opinions on any subject, and when Max Stirner was convincing the young Hegelians that ideas were mere smoke and dust, seeing that the only reality in existence was the individual Ego.
Among the most thorough of these, a man on whom utter and entire freedom of thought sat easily and unconsciously, was a certain German doctor of philosophy named P . To him God and all things were simply ideas of development. The last remark which I can recall from him was "Ja, ja. We advanced Hegelians agree exactly on the whole with the Materialists."
Between the encroachments of the hegelians and other philosophers of the 'Absolute, on the one hand, and those of the scientific evolutionists and agnostics, on the other, the men that give us this kind of a philosophy, James Martineau, Professor Bowne, Professor Ladd and others, must feel themselves rather tightly squeezed.
Not romantic scepticism: for in England an instinctive distrust of too much clearness and logic, a difficulty in drawing all the consequences of any principle, soon gave to this most radical of philosophies a prim and religious air: its purity was alloyed with all sorts of conventions: so much so that we find British Hegelians often deeply engaged in psychology, cosmology, or religion, as if they took their idealism for a kind of physics, and wished merely to reinterpret the facts of nature in an edifying way, without uprooting them from their natural places.
They either jot down their thoughts bit by bit, in short, ambiguous, and paradoxical sentences, which apparently mean much more than they say, of this kind of writing Schelling's treatises on natural philosophy are a splendid instance; or else they hold forth with a deluge of words and the most intolerable diffusiveness, as though no end of fuss were necessary to make the reader understand the deep meaning of their sentences, whereas it is some quite simple if not actually trivial idea, examples of which may be found in plenty in the popular works of Fichte, and the philosophical manuals of a hundred other miserable dunces not worth mentioning; or, again, they try to write in some particular style which they have been pleased to take up and think very grand, a style, for example, par excellence profound and scientific, where the reader is tormented to death by the narcotic effect of longspun periods without a single idea in them, such as are furnished in a special measure by those most impudent of all mortals, the Hegelians ; or it may be that it is an intellectual style they have striven after, where it seems as though their object were to go crazy altogether; and so on in many other cases.
No wonder they wish to make duties for themselves. Is there any guide in deciding how far they are bound to follow conventions? I know nothing better than the dictum of the Hegelians. "Make your deed universal, and see what the result will be." If everybody who finds afternoon teas a burden stayed away from them, would any harm be done?
This resulted in the gradual throwing away of the abstract part of the Hegelian philosophy, and in the study of facts and phenomena to an ever-increasing degree. Marx had, in his youth, allied himself with the "Young Hegelians," as this school was called, and this fact had no slight influence upon his subsequent career.
I see Moses ben Amram, with his measuring-chain and his graving-tools, marking on those stone tables of his the deepest abysses and the muddiest morasses. When I kept swine with the Hegelians, I used to say, or rather, I still say, for, alas!
Word Of The Day
Others Looking