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182 isolate itself. We can thus understand egoism, the sin and evil in nature, the irrational in general, which refuses to conform with ideas. Thus Schelling passes into mythical mysticism. He elaborated his philosophy of religion in greater detail in works which appeared after his death, and which constituted the content of his Berlin lectures (Philosophie der Mythologie and Philosophie der Offenbarung). He regarded the history of religion as a great struggle with the Titanic elements which had been isolated by the Fall. This struggle takes place in the religious consciousness of mankind, which ascends through the various mythologies to Christianity, and finally through the development of Christianity to the religion of pure spirit.—In addition to brilliant ideas and points of view, we find here also, just as in the Philosophy of Nature, a large measure of fantasy and arbitrariness.

3. George William Frederick Hegel (1770–1831) is the systematizer of Romanticism, just as Fichte was its moralist and Schelling its mystic. He too labored at the University of Jena in his youth. Later on he went to Bavaria, first as an editor and afterwards as the director of a gymnasium. He appeared again in the capacity of university professor at Heidelberg, but soon accepted a call to Berlin where he founded a large and influential school. a. Hegel undertook to construe the ideas which, according to his conception, express the essence of the various phases of existence in a progressive series based on logical necessity. What he called the dialectical method consisted in the discovery of the inherent necessity with which one concept leads on to another concept until at last all the concepts constitute one great system. Notwithstanding this however, this purely logical character, which