Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/681

665 observed that the limited explanation of the universe furnished by the more abstract categories of the Logic is paralleled in the Philosophy of History by the limited consciousness and correspondingly limited sense of freedom attained by nations in the past. The formula that in the East one was free, in Greece and Rome some were free, and in the modern state all are free, is not adequate, since it tacitly assumes that freedom has the same meaning at each successive epoch. But when only one was free, his freedom was merely caprice, which may be indifferently ferocity or mildness; when some were free, this freedom was consistent with a rigorous thraldom of our common human nature; only in the final stage, when all are free, have we reached, says Hegel, an adequate understanding of the idea. Of course, the world-spirit always contained within itself what was to be unfolded, yet, as Hegel remarks, the time in the past was not ripe. Hence no one living in Eastern lands, no one in Greece or Rome was really free, since no one had any conception of real or rational freedom. Liberty of action, in the common acceptation of the phrase, the Eastern despot or the aristocracy of Greece undoubtedly possessed, much as we may be said to possess it now; further, both freemen and slaves had also the higher liberty of identifying themselves with the institutions of their respective peoples, and thus of maintaining what seemed to them, both slaves and free, a reasonable social existence. But absolute liberty was a star which had not as yet come within their ken. It lay in the unexplored and undeveloped background of the world-spirit, a stratum which, ponderously large and thick in past ages, but passing since then out of the region of the unconscious into that of the conscious, has been becoming thinner and thinner, until at the stage of complete self-consciousness and complete freedom, if such a stage has arrived or should ever arrive, the unconscious or merely potential will have vanished altogether. Yet inadequate the thought and liberty of man would always have remained, had it not been for the latent impulse of the world-consciousness, the inward guiding soul, a 'hidden, most profoundly hidden,