Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/214



Hegel, who forms our special topic in this lecture, it is extraordinarily difficult to get or to give any general impressions that will not be seriously misleading. I undertake my task, therefore, with a very strong impression of its importance and its difficulty. The outcome of what we have thus far discussed in these lectures is briefly this: Modern thought began with an endeavor to find a true and rational doctrine about the real outer universe, and to state this doctrine in clear and even mathematical form. The rediscovery of the importance of the inner life led, however, during the eighteenth century, to a skeptical scrutiny of the powers of the human reason itself, and the magnificent systems of earlier thinkers appeared, when examined in the light of such scrutiny, dogmatic and uncertain. Thought endeavored, nevertheless, to re-win its great assurances in a new form. Truth, said Idealism, is essentially an affair of the inner life. The world of truth is the world as it would appear to a complete and fully self-conscious self. The outer universe is only a show world. Its reality is only practical. It is essentially a mirage of the inner life. The real universe is the universe of the spirit. Our deepest relation is not to the natural order at all, but to the one true self, namely, God’s own life.

Such, as we found, was the position reached alike by Fichte and the romanticists. But in their further thought they diverged. For Fichte, the centre of the universe, as