Page:Egotism in German Philosophy (1916).djvu/93

 existing only for the mind that imagines it. What is supposed to rescue the system of Hegel from subjectivism is the most subjective of things—a dialectic which obeys the impulses of a theoretical parti pris, and glorifies a fixed idea.

When we have understood all this, those traits of Hegel’s which at first sight seem least egotistical—his historical insight and his enthusiasm for organised society—take on a new colour. That historical insight is not really sympathetic; it is imperious, external, contemptuous, feigned. If you are a modern reading the Greeks, especially if you read them in the romantic spirit of Goethe’s classicism, and know of them just what Hegel knew, you will think his description wonderfully penetrating, masterly, and complete: but would Æschylus or Plato have thought it so? They would have laughed, or rather they would not have understood that such a description referred to them at all. It is the legend of the Greeks, not the life of the Greeks, that is analysed by him. So his account of mediaeval religion represents the Protestant legend, not the Catholic experience. What we know little or nothing about seems to us in Hegel admirably characterised: what we know intimately seems to us painted with the eye of a pedantic, remote, and insolent foreigner. It is but an idea of his own that he is foisting upon us, calling it our soul.