Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/15

x also he has of course a decided debt to acknowledge.

There are in recent philosophical history two Hegels: one the uncompromising idealist, with his general and fruitful insistence upon the great fundamental truths of idealism; the other the technical Hegel of the “Logik,” whose dialectic method seems destined to remain, not a philosophy, but the idea of a philosophy. With this latter Hegel the author feels a great deal of discontent; to the other Hegel, whose insight, as we know, was by no means independent of that of Fichte and other contemporaries, but who was certainly the most many-sided and critical of the leaders of the one great common idealistic movement of the early part of the century, — to him we all owe a great debt indeed. It is, however, a mistake to neglect the other idealists just for the sake of glorifying him. And it is an intolerable blunder to go on repeating what we may have learned from him in the awkward and whimsical speech of the wondrous and crabbed master. If Hegel taught anything, then what he taught can be conveyed in an utterly non-Hegelian vocabulary, or else Hegel is but a king of the rags and tatters of a flimsy terminology, and no king of thought at all. It is therefore absolutely the duty of a man who nowadays supposes that he has any truth from