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His Philosophie der Religion and Philosophie der Geschichte were edited after his death. They are mainly in the form which his notes took between 1823 and 1827. He died during an epidemic of cholera in Berlin in 1831. Besides his deep interest in history the most striking feature of Hegel's preliminary training was his profound study of Christianity.
Those who hold that the mind is moulded into conformity with surrounding things by the agency of surrounding things, are necessarily at a loss how to deal with those, who, like Schelling and Hegel, assert that surrounding things are solidified mind that Nature is "petrified intelligence." However, let us briefly glance at Hegel's classification. He divides philosophy into three parts:
His complete philosophy is the attempt to show in detail that the whole universe and everything it contains manifests the process of uniformly struggling with a negative power, and is an outcome of conflicting, but reconciled forces. An impressionistic picture of the world's eternal becoming through this process is furnished by the first of Hegel's great works, the Phenomenology of Spirit.
The following selections may give some glimpse of their spirit. In conclusion, some bare suggestions must suffice to indicate the reason for Hegel's great influence. Hegel has partly, if not wholly, created the modern historical spirit. Reality for him, as even this inadequate sketch has shown, is not static, but is essentially a process.
Whether Hegel has well or ill succeeded in the task of exhibiting in each and all of these spheres the one universal movement, whether or no he was justified in reading into logic the same kind of development manifested by life, or in making life conform to one logical formula these and other problems should arouse an interest in Hegel's writings.
There have been many and varied expressions of human wisdom, and these phenomena were known to the men of the nineteenth century. The wisdom of Rousseau and of Lessing, and Spinoza and Bruno, and all the wisdom of antiquity; but no one man's wisdom overrode the crowd. It was impossible to say even this, that Hegel's success was the result of the symmetry of this theory.
Just as a game is not worth playing when its result is predetermined by the great inferiority of the opponent, so life without something negative to overcome loses its zest. But the process of overcoming is not anything contingent; it operates according to a uniform and universal law. And this law constitutes Hegel's most central doctrine his doctrine of Evolution.
The physiologic interpretation of history will indeed be found the broadest, including as complementary Buckle's climatic theory, Hegel's ideas on the influence of ideas, and Marx's on the superiority of the economic motives and forces.
From the centre in Hegel come those towering sentences of his that are comparable only to Luther's, as where, speaking of the ontological proof of God's existence from the concept of him as the ens perfectissimum to which no attribute can be lacking, he says: 'It would be strange if the Notion, the very heart of the mind, or, in a word, the concrete totality we call God, were not rich enough to embrace so poor a category as Being, the very poorest and most abstract of all for nothing can be more insignificant than Being. But if Hegel's central thought is easy to catch, his abominable habits of speech make his application of it to details exceedingly difficult to follow.
I was slightly huffed by the boy's silence. "I have come to spend the summer here," I said at last. "I hope he will come to see me. I have brought a good many books with me; perhaps he might care to read some of them." I had to talk at the boy; there was no alternative. Inwardly I was thinking that I had Kant's Critique and Hegel's Phenomenology among my books.
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