Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/647

Rh HEGEL 613 Tschugg. Tschugg was the summer residence of the family, near Erlach on the lake of Biel ; in winter they lived in Bern. Little happened in these years. Hegel had a few acquaintances in Bern; but, on the whole, intellectually he lived in isolation. He was, however, far from inactive. Local influences may explain a systematic account of the fiscal system of the canton Bern which he made for himself. But the main factor in Hegel s mental growth came from his study of Christianity. Under the impulse given by Lessing and Kant he turned to the original records of Christianity, and attempted to construe for himself the real significance of Christ. He wrote a life of Jesus, in which Jesus was simply the son of Joseph and Mary. He did not stop to criticize as a philologist, and simply ignored the miraculous. He asked for the secret contained in the conduct ani sayings of this man which made him the hope of the human race. To Hegel Jesus appeared as revealing the unity with God in which the Greeks in their best days unwittingly rejoiced, and as lifting the eyes of the Jews from a lawgiver who metes out punishment on the trans gressor, to the destiny which in the Greek conception falls on the just no less than on the unjust. The interest of these lucubrations is in general twofold. In Jesus Hegel finds the expression for something higher than mere morality : he finds a noble spirit which rises above the contrasts of virtue and vice into the concrete life, seeing the infinite always embracing our finitude, and pro claiming the divine which is in man and cannot be over come by error and evil, unless the man close his eyes and ears to the godlike presence within him. In religious life, in short, he finds the principle which reconciles the opposi tions of the temporal and ordinary mind. But, secondly, the general source of the doctrine that life is higher than (Jl its incidents and codes is of interest. He does not free himself from the current theology either by rational moraliz ing like Kant, or by bold speculative synthesis like Fichte tnd Schelling. He finds his panacea in the concrete life of humanity : he turns to history, and not to abstract specula tion. But although he goes to the Scriptures, and tastes the mystical spirit of the mediseval saints, the Christ of his conception has traits that seem borrowed from Socrates and from the heroes of Attic tragedy, who suffer much and yet smile gently on a destiny to which they were reconciled. Instead of the Hebraic doctrine of a Jesus punished for our sins, we have the Hellenic idea of a man who is calmly tranquil in the consciousness of his unity with God. During these years of arduous wrestling with the pro blems of religion, Hegel kept up a slack correspondence with Schelling and Holderlin. Schelling was already on the way to fame. He was trying (to quote his own words) to find the premises to the results of Kant. Meanwhile he kept Hegel abreast with German speculation. Both, of them were intent on forcing the theologians from their holes into the daylight, and grudged them any aid they might expect from Kant s postulation of God and immor tality t ) crown the edifice of ethics. After lamenting his want of books, Hegel concludes a letter of 1795 with the word-;, &quot;Let reason and freedom remain our watchword, and our point of union the church invisible.&quot; Great is their animus against the pietistic hypocrisy of Wiirtemberg. Meanwhile Holderlin in Jena had been following Fichte s career with an enthusiasm with which he infected Hegel. After these vehement struggles of thought, it is pleasing to turn to a short tour which Hegel in company with three other tutors made through the Bernese Oberland in July and August 1 796. Of this tour he has left a minute diary. It embraced Lauterbrunnen, Grindelwald, the Grimsel, and the valley of the Reuss to the lake of Lucerne. The popular passion for natural scenery had scarcely begun, and the days of hotels and tourists were distant. Our four tutors carried little luggage, save a pack of cards to while away the hours of rest. Hegel was particularly delighted with the varied play of the waterfalls. Still no glamour blinds him to the squalor of Swiss peasant life. The glaciers and the rocks call forth no raptures. &quot; The spectacle of these eternally dead masses gave me nothing but the monotonous and at last tedious idea, Es ist so. ; Again, speaking of the upper parts of the Hasli-thal : &quot;I doubt if the most orthodox theologian would be bold enough in these regions to credit nature with the purpose of being useful to man, who with difficulty must wrest from her the scanty pittance of which he can make use, who is uncertain whether rocks or avalanches may not crush him to pieces even as he steals a poor handful of grass, and destroy his miserable hut and cow-stall, the wretched work of his hands.&quot; Towards the close of his engagement at Bern, Hegel had received hopes from Schelling of a post at Jena. Tired of isolation, he was anxious to get away from Bern. Fortun ately his friend Holderlin, who was now tutor in Frank fort, secured a similar situation there for Hegel in the family of a Herr Gogol, a merchant. Hegel entered upon his new post in January 1797. It was apparently more agreeable, and left more time for study. At the same time he was nearer the centre of public interest. But above all it renewed the much-missed intellectual society. Holderlin was still, as formerly, enamoured of the ideal of ancient Greece. And another friend called Sinclair, a Fichtean, the author of several forgotten philosophical works, helped to animate Hegel s interest in philosophy. It may have been the political position of Frankfort that made Hegel about this time turn to questions of economics and government. He had studied Gibbon, Hume, and Montesquieu in Switzerland. We now find him making copious extracts from the English newspapers on the Poor- Law Bill of 1796 ; criticizing the Prussian land laws, pro mulgated about the same time ; and writing a commentary on Sir James Steuart s Inquiry into the Principles of Politi cal Economy, as a means of defining his own views on economics. Here, as in contemporaneous criticisms of Kant s ethical writings, Hegel aims at correcting the abstract discussion of a topic by treating it in its systematic interconnexions. Church and state, law and morality, com merce and art, are reduced to factors in the totality of human life, from which the specialists had isolated them. But the best evidence of Hegel s attention to contem porary politics is two unpublished essays one of then written in 1798, &quot;On the Internal Condition of Wiirtemberg in Recent Times, particularly on the Defects in the Magis tracy,&quot; the other a criticism on the constitution of Germany, written, it is probable, not long after the peace of Lundville (1801). Both essays show more vigour in pointing out the inadequacies of the present than in suggesting a remedy. Criticism, not construction, is their forte. In the first Hegel showed how the supineness of the committee of estates in Wiirtemberg had favoured the usurpations of the superior officials in whom the court had found compliant servants. And though he perceived the advantages of change in the constitution of the estates, he still doubted if an improved system could work in the actual conditions of his native province. The main feature in the pamphlet is the recogni tion that a spirit of reform is abroad. If Wiirtemberg suffered from a bureaucracy tempered by despotism, the Fatherland in general suffered no less. &quot; Germany,&quot; so begins the second of these unpublished papers, &quot; is no longer a state.&quot; Referring the collapse of the empire to the retention of feudal forms and to the action of religiou3 animosities, Hegel looked forward to reorganization by a central power (Austria) wielding the imperial arrny, and by a representative body elected by the geographical dis-