Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/650

Rh 616 HEGEL offer expressed a doubt that his long absence from university teaching might have made him rusty, so he accepted the post at Heidelberg, whence Fries had just gone to Jena. He cama to Heidelberg in October 1816. Though charmed with the neighbourhood, and pleased with the people, he was a little disappointed when only four hearers turned up for one of his courses. Others, however, on the encyclopaedia of philosophy and the history of philosophy drew classes of twenty to thirty. While he was there, Cousin first made his acquaintance, but a more intimate relation dates from Berlin. Among his pupils was Hinrichs, who, originally a law student, became a philosophical disciple and wrote several works, to one of which, Religion in its Imvard Relation to Science, Hegel wrote a rather important preface in 1822. The strangest of his hearers was an Esthoniau baron, Boris d : Yrkull, who after serving in the Russian army came to Heidelberg to hear the wisdom of Hegel. But his books and his lectures were alike obscure to the baron, who betook himself by Hegel s advice to some simpler fare, in the shape of rudimentary knowledge, before he returned to the Hegelian system. The logic of his master, with whom he became intimate, was afterwards his constant companion in his travels. At Heidelberg Hegel was also active in a literary way. In 1817 he brought out the Encyclopaedia of the Philo sophical Sciences, in outline, for use at his lectures. In its first form it was a small treatise of about 300 octavo pages ; bat in the second of 1827, and the third of 1830, it rapidly grew to twice the original bulk. It is the only exposition of the Hegelian system as a whole which we have direct from Hegel s own hand. Besides this work he wrote two reviews for the Heidelberg Jahrliiclier the first onJacobi, the other a political pamphlet which called forth violent criticism. It was entitled a Criticism on the Transactions of the Estates of Wiirtemberg in 1815-10. On the 15th March 1815 King Frederick of Wiirtemberg, at a meeting of the estates of his kingdom, laid before them the draft of a new constitution, in accordance with the resolutions of the congress of Vienna. Though an improvement on the old constitution, it was unacceptable to the estates, jealous of their old privileges and suspicious of the king s intentions. A decided majority demanded the restitution of their old laws, though the kingdom now included a large population to which the old rights were strange. Hegel in his essay, which was republished at Stuttgart, strongly supported the royal proposals, and severely animadverted on the back wardness of the bureaucracy and the landed interests. In the main he was right ; but he forgot too much the provo cation they had received, the usurpations and selfishness of the governing family, and the unpatriotic character of the king. After two years at Heidelberg Hegel accepted the re newed offer of the chair of philosophy at Berlin, which had been kept vacant since the death of Fichte. The hopes which this offer raised of a position less precarious than that of a university teacher of philosophy were in one sense disappointed ; for more than a professor Hegel never became. But his influence upon his pupils, and his solid arity with the Prussian Government, gave him a position such as few professors have held. On the 22d October 1818 Hegel began his lectures at Berlin. &quot; Our business and vocation,&quot; he said to his young hearers, &quot; is to cherish the philosophical development of the substantial foundation (i.e., the state) which has renewed its youth and increased its strength.&quot; But Prussia had already proved false to the spirit of freedom which had armed the peoples against Napoleon. The enthusiasm which in the hands of Stein, Humboldt, and Scharnhorst had reformed the social, intellectual, and military organi zation of Prussia still smouldered ; but hot-headed youth ful politicians made it burst into fitful flames. Sober men were disgusted by the absurdities perpetrated at the Wartburg to celebrate the tricentenary of the Reformation. And though professors like Fries and Oken shared the behaviour of the students in this demonstration, and the assassination of Kotzebue in 1819 found admirers such as the theological professor De Wette, who spoke of it as a &quot; beautiful sign of the time &quot;Stein spoke of the two professors as a pair of fools, and Niebuhr grew sad over the extravagances of the younger generation. Secret societies were formed or believed to be forming ; and the Govern ments grew alarmed. In Prussia the reaction triumphed by the withdrawal of Humboldt in the last days of 1819 ; and the death of Hardenberg in 1822 was followed by a period of bureaucracy and conservatism. It was in such an atmosphere that Hegel published the &quot; Philosophy of Right &quot; (Grundlinien der Philosophic des Rechts) in 1821. It is a combined system of moral and political philosophy, or a sociology dominated by the idea of the state. It turns away contemptuously and fiercely from the sentimental aspirations of reformers possessed by the democratic doctrine of the rights of the omnipotent nation. Fries is stigmatized as one of the &quot;ringleaders of shallowness &quot; who were bent on substituting a fancied tie of enthusiasm and friendship for the established order of the state. The disciplined philosopher, who had devoted himself to the task of comprehending the organism of the state, had no patience with feebler or more mercurial minds who recklessly laid hands on established ordinances, and set them aside where they contravened humanitarian senti ments. With the principle that whatever is real is rational, and whatever is rational is real, Hegel fancied that he had stopped the mouths of political critics and constitution- mongers. His theory was not a mere formulation of the Prussian state. Much that he construed as necessary to a state was wanting in Prussia ; and some of the reforms already introduced did not find their place in his system. Yet, on the whole, he had taken his side with the Govern ment. Altenstein even expressed his satisfaction with the book. In his disgust at the crude conceptions of the enthusiasts, who had hoped that the war of liberation might end in a realm of internal liberty, Hegel had forgotten his own youthful vows recorded in verse to Holderlin, &quot; never, never to live in peace with the ordinance which regulates feeling and opinion.&quot; And yet if we look deeper we see that this is no worship of existing powers. It is rather due to an overpowering sense of the value of organization, a sense that liberty can never be dissevered from order, that a vital interconnexion between all the parts of the body politic is the source of all good, so that while he can find nothing but brute weight in an organized public, he can compare the royal person in his ideal form of constitutional monarchy to the dot upon the letter i. A keen sense of how much is at stake in any alteration breeds suspicion of every reform. During his thirteen years at Berlin Hegel s whole soul seems to have been in his lectures. Between 1823 and 1827 his activity reached its maximum His notes were subjected to perpetual revisions and additions. We can form an idea of them from the shape in which they appear in his published writings. Those on ^Esthetics, on the Philosophy of Religion, on the Philosophy of History, arid on the History of Philosophy, have been published by his editors, mainly from the notes of his students, under their separate heads ; while those on logic, psychology, and the philosophy of nature are appended in the form of illustra tive and explanatory notes to the sections of his Encyclo- padie. During these years hundreds of hearers from all parts of Germany, and from beyond the Fatherland, came under his influence. His fame was carried abroad by eager