Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/646

612 his tomb in the cathedral of Haarlem. It was a superstition which still exists in Catholic Holland that a marriage so celebrated would secure the peace of the dead within the tomb.

1em  HEEREN, (1760–1842), an eminent German historian, was born 25th October 1760 at Arbergen near Bremen. He studied philosophy, theology, anl history at Gottingen, and thereafter travelled in Italy, France, and the Netherlands. In 1787 he was appointed one of the professors of philosophy at Gottingen, and he afterwards was chosen aulic councillor, privy councillor, &c., received in short those rewards which are the lot of successful German scholars. He died 7th March 1842. Hesren’s great merit as an historian was that he regarded the states of antiquity from an altogether fresh point of view. He examined their economic relations, their consti- tutions, their financial systems, and thus was enabled to throw quite a new light on the development of the old world. He possessed vast and varied learning, perfect calmness and impartiality, and great power of historical insight. A French critic has thus briefly summed up his merits—“ He had all the qualities of the historians of his nation without their defects, and there is not a French historian superior to him in clearness of thought and method of composition.”

1em  HEGEL, (1770–1831), was born at Stuttgart on the 27th August 1770. His father, an official in the fiscal service of Wiirtemberg, is not otherwise known to fame; and of his mother, who died when her eldest son, the future philosopher, was in his fourteenth year, we only hear that she had scholarship enough to teach him the elements of Latin. He had one sister, Christiana, who died unmarried, and a brother Ludwig, who served in the campaigns of Napoleon. At the gymnasium or grammar school of Stuttgart, where Hegel was educated between the ages of seven and eighteen, he was not remarkable. His main feat was a diary kept in German and toa less extent in Latin, at intervals during eighteen months (1785-7), to record and comment on incidents of the class-room, the street, and the parlour. His private industry was shown by written trans- lations of the Antigone, the Manual of Epictetus, &c. But the characteristic feature of his studies was the copious extracts which from this time onward he unremittingly made and preserved. Alphabetically arranged under suit- able heads, this strange congeries, forming his intimate library, comprised annotations on classical authors, passages from newspapers, whole treatises on morals and mathe- matics from the standard works of the period. It is the palpable exhibition of the marvellous receptivity by which he saturated himself with the thoughts of others, and absorbed in their integrity the raw materials for elaboration. Yet as evidence that he was not merely receptive we have essays already breathing that admiration of the classical world which he never lost. Even then too his chief amuse- ment was cards, and even then he began the habit of taking snuff. In the autumn of 1788 he entered at Tiibingen asa student of theology; but though an exhibitioner and on the foundation, if we may so call the “Stift,” he showed no interest in the theology or philosophy of the place: his sermons were a failure ; and, instead of seeking after acade- mical distinction, he found more congenial reading in the classics, on the advantages of studying which his first essay was written. After two years he took the customary degree of Ph.D., and in the autumn of 1793 received his theological certificate, stating him to be of good abilities, but of middling industry and knowledge, and especially deficient in philosophy. His university career, unlike that of Schelling, who, five years younger, came to Tiibingenin 1790, was not brilliant. Hegel was quietly making himself at home in the Greek and Roman world, and gathering stores of miscellaneous information. Amongst his comrades he went by the title of “old man,” such, it is said, being his withered aspect. He took part, however, in the usual walks and beer-drinking, and even it seems love-making, of the student. But he gained most from intellectual intercourse with his contem- poraries. Several of these are mentioned, but the two best known to fame were Holderlin and Schelling. The former, who was of the same age as Hegel, left for Jena about the time that Schelling arrived. With him Hegel learned to feel for the old Greeks a love which grew stronger as the semi-Kantianized theology of his teachers more and more failed to interest him. With Schelling like sympathies bound him. They both protested against the political and ecclesiastical inertia of their native state, and adopted with fervour the revolutionary doctrines of freedom and reason. The myth which tells how the two went out one morning to dance round a tree of liberty in a meadow is antedated, as the incident happened after they had left: still it is in keeping with their opinicns, if unsuited to their character. Like many a German student, Hegel was glad of a tutorship, in 1793, when his university course ended. Ft three years he taught the children of a M. Steiger of