Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/127

 Weigand 12 l a prominent part of the discussion. It is certain beyond a doubt that Heine got to know Hegel's Philosophy of Right from the liberal, later known as the Young-Hegelian point of view. Already at this time Heine adopted the liberal interpretation of Hegel's famous dictum: "What is rational is real: and what is real is rational," on which he later remarked that Hegel pointed out "this might also be worded: 'What is rational must be real' " (IV, 149). What chiefly distinguished the doctrine of the Hegelian Cans from the theories of the leaders of the French Revolution was the manner in which he conceived the process of rationalization to take its course. Nothing could have been more foreign to the Hegelian point of view than the doctrine of the establishment of the empire of reason by means of violence and revolution. Only by a process of organic development, steady growth evolution- can the inherent rationality of the universe, according to Hegel, manifest itself. Progress is impossible by the unmediated juxta- position of two such antithetical concepts as the actual present, the product of historical necessity, and the abstractly rational. Only thru mediation, thru a gradual process of change, can the old develop into the new, the past into the future, the irrational into the rational. Such growth, however, requires calmness, patience and moderation. This attitude is the keynote of the Hegelian philosophy of life. It is a faith in the power of reason, in the ultimate triumph of the 'idea.' The Hegelian needs no revolutions of any kind; all that is to him wasted energy. Since anything other than the victory of reason is unthinkable, since especially the life of human society is inconceivable except as a steady progression a progression even thru error why all this restlessness and impatience? What does time matter anyway in the evolution of cosmic harmony? Surely Heine was justified, then, in styling the adherents of this philosophy as 'die Verniinftigen' par excellence! All the more insistently, then, we are bound to ask, what could have given Heine, the arch-revolutionary* by temperament, the right to number himself among the champions of steady growy and organic evolution? What could have justified him, just at the time he was writing 'Le Grand' in emphasizing so seriously his claim that he had gone over to the party of 'die Verniinftigen?'