Page:The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism (1911).djvu/201



What after all, we have now to ask, was Hegel’s actual unity? It was entirely geocentric and anthropocentric. The earth, he says, is the truth of the solar system, just as animal nature is the truth of vegetable, and this the truth of the mineral. The earth is the planet : the sun has neither produced it nor thrown it off; but sun, moon, comets, and stars are only conditions for the earth (Bedingungen der Erde) which they serve. Among the continents of the earth, Europe, in virtue of its physical characteristics, forms its consciousness, its rational part, and the centre of Europe is Germany. With his own philosophy, he had the sublime assurance to think, the history of philosophy closes; and in the restoration of Prussia under Stein he thought the culmination of the world’s history was attained. It is however not so much this unique anticlimax that now concerns us; but rather the general position that there are not ‘more worlds than ours,’ which Hegel shared with the fifteenth century ecclesiastics. They, it will be remembered, had burned Giordano Bruno alive, who was one of the first in modern times to proclaim this doctrine; and