Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/648

Rh 614 HEGEL tricts of the empire. But such an issue, he saw well, could only be the outcome of violence of &quot;blood and iron.&quot; The philosopher did not pose as a practical statesman. He only described the German empire in its nullity as a con ception without existence in fact. In such a state of things it was the business of the philosopher to set forth the out lines of the coming epoch, as they were already moulding themselves into shape, amidst what the ordinary eye saw only as the disintegration of the old forms of social life. His old interest in the religious question reappears, but in a more philosophical form. Starting with the contrast between a natural and a positive religion, he regards a positive religion as one imposed upon the mind from with out, not a natural growth crowning the round of human life. A natural religion, on the other hand, was not, he thought, the one universal religion of every clime and age, but rather the spontaneous development of the national conscience varying in varying circumstances. A people s religion completes and consecrates their whole activity : in it the people rises above its finite life in limited spheres to an infinite life where it feels itself allatone. Even philo sophy with Hegel at this epoch was subordinate to religion ; for philosophy must never abandon the finite in the search for the infinite. Soon, however, Hegel adopted a view according to which philosophy is a higher mode of appre hending the infinite than even religion. At Frankfort, meanwhile, the philosophic ideas of Hegel first assumed the proper philosophic form. &quot;In my scien tific training,&quot; he says (in a letter to Schelling of November 2, 1800), &quot;which started from more subordinate wants of man, I could not but be forced onwards to science, and at the same time the ideal of youth had to transform itself into the reflective form of a system.&quot; In a MS. of 102 quarto sheets, of which the three first and the seventh are wanting, there is preserved the original sketch of the Hegelian system, so far at least as the logic and meta physics and part of the philosophy of nature are concerned. The third part of the system the ethical theory seems to have been composed afterwards ; it is contained in its first draught in another MS. of thirty sheets. Even these had been preceded by earlier Pythagorean constructions envisaging the divine life in divine triangles. Circumstances soon put Hegel in the way to complete these outlines. His father died in January 1799; and the slender sum which Hegel received as his inheritance, 3154 gulden (about =260), enabled him to think once more of a studious life. At the close of 1800 we find him asking Schelling for letters of introduction to Bamberg, where with cheap living and good beer he hoped to prepare himself for the intellectual excitement of Jena. The upshot was that Hegel arrived at Jena in January 1801. An end had already come to the brilliant epoch at Jena, when the romantic poets, Tieck, Novalis, and the Schlegels made it the headquarters of their fantastic mysticism, and Fichte turned the results of Kant into the banner of revolutionary ideas. Schelling was the main philosophical lion of the time ; and in some quarters Hegel was spoken of as a new champion summoned from Swabia by Schelling to help him in his struggle with the more prosaic continuators of Kant. Hegel s first performance seemed to justify the rumour. It was an essay on the difference between the philosophic systems of Fichte and Schelling, tending in the main to support the latter. Still more striking was the agreement shown in the Critical Journal of Philosophy, which Schelling and Hegel wrote conjointly during the years 1802-3. So latent was the difference between them at this epoch that it, in one or two cases, is not with certainty possible to determine by whom the essay was written. Even at a later period foreign critics like Cousin saw much that was alike in the two doctrines, and did not hesitate to regard Hegel as a disciple of Schelling. The dis sertation by which Hegel qualified for the position of privat- docent an essay, De orbitis planetarum was probably chosen under the influence of Schelling s philosophy of nature. It was an unfortunate subject. For while Hegel, depending on a numerical proportion suggested by Plato, hinted in a single sentence that it might be a mistake to look for a planet in the interval between Mars and Jupiter, Professor Piazzi had already discovered the first of the asteroids on 1st January 1801. Apparently in August, when Hegel qualified, the news of the discovery had not yet reached him, but critics have made this luckless sugges tion the ground of attack on a priori philosophy. The theses attached to this dissertation contained some charac teristic paradoxes, e.g., that the syllogism is the principle of idealism, that a square is the law of nature, and a triangle of mind, &c. Hegel s earliest lectures, in the winter of 1801-2, on logic and metaphysics were attended by about eleven students. At a later period, in 1804, we find him with a class of about thirty, lecturing on his whole system ; but his average attendance was rather less. Besides philosophy, he once at least lectured on mathematics. As he taught, he was led to modify his original system, and notice after notice of his lectures promised a text-book of philosophy which, however, failed to appear. Meanwhile, after the departure of Schelling from Jena in the middle of 1803, Hegel was left to work out his own views. Besides philo sophical studies, where he now added Aristotle to Plato, he read Homer and the Greek tragedians, made extracts from books, attended lectures on physiology, and dabbled in other sciences. On his own representation at Weimar, he was in February 1805 made a professor extraordinarius, and in July 1806 drew his first and only stipend 100 thalers. At Jena, though some of his hearers became devotedly attached to him, Hegel was not a popular lecturer any more than Krause. The ordinary student found Fries more intelligible. Of the lectures of that period there still remain consider able notes. The language often had a theological tinge (never entirely absent), as when the &quot; idea &quot; was spoken of, or &quot; the night of the divine mystery,&quot; or the dialectic of the absolute called the &quot;course of the divine life.&quot; Still his view was growing clearer, and his difference from Schelling more palpable. Both Schelling and Hegel stand in a rela tion to art, but while the aesthetic model of Schelling was found in the contemporary world, where art was a special sphere and the artist a separate profession in no intimate connexion with the age and nation, the model of Hegel was found rather in those works of national art in which art is not a part of the common life but an aspect of it, and the artist is not a mere individual but a concentration of the passion and power of beauty in the whole community. &quot; Such art,&quot; says Hegel, &quot; is the common good and the work of all. Each generation hands it on beautified to the next ; each has done something to give utterance to the universal thought. Those who are said to have genius have acquired some special aptitude by which they render the general shapes of the nation their own work, one in one point, another in another. What they produce is not their invention, but the invention of the whole nation ; or rather, what they find is that the whole nation has found its true nature. Each, as it were, piles up his stone. So too does the artist. Somehow he has the good fortune to come last, and when he places his stone the arch stands self -supported.&quot; Hegel, as we have already seen, was fully aware of the change that was coming over the world. &quot; A new epoch,&quot; he says, &quot; has arisen. It seems as if the world-spirit had now succeeded in freeing itself from all foreign objective existence, and finally apprehending itself as absolute mind.&quot;