Part 32

About this time he turned to questions of economics and government. He had studied Gibbon, Hume and Montesquieu in Switzerland. We now find him making extracts from the English newspapers on the Poor-Law Bill of 1796; criticising the Prussian land laws, promulgated about the same time; and writing a commentary on Sir James Steuart's _Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy_. Here, as in contemporaneous criticisms of Kant's ethical writings, Hegel aims at correcting the abstract discussion of a topic by treating it in its systematic interconnexions. Church and state, law and morality, commerce and art are reduced to factors in the totality of human life, from which the specialists had isolated them.

But the best evidence of Hegel's attention to contemporary politics is two unpublished essays--one of them written in 1798, "On the Internal Condition of Wurttemberg in Recent Times, particularly on the Defects in the Magistracy," the other a criticism on the constitution of Germany, written, probably, not long after the peace of Luneville (1801). Both essays are critical rather than constructive. In the first Hegel showed how the supineness of the committee of estates in Wurttemberg had favoured the usurpations of the superior officials in whom the court had found compliant servants. And though he perceived the advantages of change in the constitution of the estates, he still doubted if an improved system could work in the actual conditions of his native province. The main feature in the pamphlet is the recognition that a spirit of reform is abroad. If Wurttemberg suffered from a bureaucracy tempered by despotism, the Fatherland in general suffered no less. "Germany," so begins the second of these unpublished papers, "is no longer a state." Referring the collapse of the empire to the retention of feudal forms and to the action of religious animosities, Hegel looked forward to reorganization by a central power (Austria) wielding the imperial army, and by a representative body elected by the geographical districts of the empire. But such an issue, he saw well, could only be the outcome of violence--of "blood and iron." The philosopher did not pose as a practical statesman. He described the German empire in its nullity as a conception without existence in fact. In such a state of things it was the business of the philosopher to set forth the outlines of the coming epoch, as they were already moulding themselves into shape, amidst what the ordinary eye saw only as the disintegration of the old forms of social life.

His old interest in the religious question reappears, but in a more philosophical form. Starting with the contrast between a natural and a positive religion, he regards a positive religion as one imposed upon the mind from without, not a natural growth crowning the round of human life. A natural religion, on the other hand, was not, he thought, the one universal religion of every clime and age, but rather the spontaneous development of the national conscience varying in varying circumstances. A people's religion completes and consecrates their whole

## activity: in it the people rises above its finite life in limited

spheres to an infinite life where it feels itself all at one. Even philosophy with Hegel at this epoch was subordinate to religion; for philosophy must never abandon the finite in the search for the infinite. Soon, however, Hegel adopted a view according to which philosophy is a higher mode of apprehending the infinite than even religion.

At Frankfort, meanwhile, the philosophic ideas of Hegel first assumed the proper philosophic form. In a MS. of 102 quarto sheets, of which the first three and the seventh are wanting, there is preserved the original sketch of the Hegelian system, so far as the logic and metaphysics and part of the philosophy of nature are concerned. The third part of the system--the ethical theory--seems to have been composed afterwards; it is contained in its first draft in another MS. of 30 sheets. Even these had been preceded by earlier Pythagorean constructions envisaging the divine life in divine triangles.

Circumstances soon put Hegel in the way to complete these outlines. His father died in January 1799; and the slender sum which Hegel received as his inheritance, 3154 gulden (about L260), enabled him to think once more of a studious life. At the close of 1800 we find him asking Schelling for letters of introduction to Bamberg, where with cheap living and good beer he hoped to prepare himself for the intellectual excitement of Jena. The upshot was that Hegel arrived at Jena in January 1801. An end had already come to the brilliant epoch at Jena, when the romantic poets, Tieck, Novalis and the Schlegels made it the headquarters of their fantastic mysticism, and Fichte turned the results of Kant into the banner of revolutionary ideas. Schelling was the main philosophical lion of the time; and in some quarters Hegel was spoken of as a new champion summoned to help him in his struggle with the more prosaic continuators of Kant. Hegel's first performance seemed to justify the rumour. It was an essay on the difference between the philosophic systems of Fichte and Schelling, tending in the main to support the latter. Still more striking was the agreement shown in the _Critical Journal of Philosophy_, which Schelling and Hegel wrote conjointly during the years 1802-1803. So latent was the difference between them at this epoch that in one or two cases it is not possible to determine by whom the essay was written. Even at a later period foreign critics like Cousin saw much that was alike in the two doctrines, and did not hesitate to regard Hegel as a disciple of Schelling. The dissertation by which Hegel qualified for the position of _Privatdozent_ (_De orbitis planetarum_) was probably chosen under the influence of Schelling's philosophy of nature. It was an unfortunate subject. For while Hegel, depending on a numerical proportion suggested by Plato, hinted in a single sentence that it might be a mistake to look for a planet between Mars and Jupiter, Giuseppe Piazzi (q.v.) had already discovered the first of the asteroids (Ceres) on the 1st of January 1801. Apparently in August, when Hegel qualified, the news of the discovery had not yet reached him, but critics have made this luckless suggestion the ground of attack on a priori philosophy.

Hegel's lectures, in the winter of 1801-1802, on logic and metaphysics were attended by about eleven students. Later, in 1804, we find him with a class of about thirty, lecturing on his whole system; but his average attendance was rather less. Besides philosophy, he once at least lectured on mathematics. As he taught, he was led to modify his original system, and notice after notice of his lectures promised a text-book of philosophy--which, however, failed to appear. Meanwhile, after the departure of Schelling from Jena in the middle of 1803, Hegel was left to work out his own views. Besides philosophical studies, where he now added Aristotle to Plato, he read Homer and the Greek tragedians, made extracts from books, attended lectures on physiology, and dabbled in other sciences. On his own representation at Weimar, he was in February 1805 made a professor extraordinarius, and in July 1806 drew his first and only stipend--100 thalers. At Jena, though some of his hearers became attached to him, Hegel was not a popular lecturer any more than K. C. F. Krause (q.v.). The ordinary student found J. F. Fries (q.v.) more intelligible.

Of the lectures of that period there still remain considerable notes. The language often had a theological tinge (never entirely absent), as when the "idea" was spoken of, or "the night of the divine mystery," or the dialectic of the absolute called the "course of the divine life." Still his view was growing clearer, and his difference from Schelling more palpable. Both Schelling and Hegel stand in a relation to art, but while the aesthetic model of Schelling was found in the contemporary world, where art was a special sphere and the artist a separate profession in no intimate connexion with the age and nation, the model of Hegel was found rather in those works of national art in which art is not a part but an aspect of the common life, and the artist is not a mere individual but a concentration of the passion and power of beauty in the whole community. "Such art," says Hegel, "is the common good and the work of all. Each generation hands it on beautified to the next; each has done something to give utterance to the universal thought. Those who are said to have genius have acquired some special aptitude by which they render the general shapes of the nation their own work, one in one point, another in another. What they produce is not their invention, but the invention of the whole nation; or rather, what they find is that the whole nation has found its true nature. Each, as it were, piles up his stone. So too does the artist. Somehow he has the good fortune to come last, and when he places his stone the arch stands self-supported." Hegel, as we have already seen, was fully aware of the change that was coming over the world. "A new epoch," he says, "has arisen. It seems as if the world-spirit had now succeeded in freeing itself from all foreign objective existence, and finally apprehending itself as absolute mind." These words come from lectures on the history of philosophy, which laid the foundation for his _Phanomenologie des Geistes_ (Bamberg, 1807).

On the 14th of October 1806 Napoleon was at Jena. Hegel, like Goethe, felt no patriotic shudder at the national disaster, and in Prussia he saw only a corrupt and conceited bureaucracy. Writing to his friend F. J. Niethammer (1766-1848) on the day before the battle, he speaks with admiration of the "world-soul," the emperor, and with satisfaction of the probable overthrow of the Prussians. The scholar's wish was to see the clouds of war pass away, and leave thinkers to their peaceful work. His manuscripts were his main care; and doubtful of the safety of his last despatch to Bamberg, and disturbed by the French soldiers in his lodgings, he hurried off, with the last pages of the _Phanomenologie_, to take refuge in the pro-rector's house. Hegel's fortunes were now at the lowest ebb. Without means, and obliged to borrow from Niethammer, he had no further hopes from the impoverished university. He had already tried to get away from Jena. In 1805, when several lecturers left in consequence of diminished classes, he had written to Johann Heinrich Voss (q.v.), suggesting that his philosophy might find more congenial soil in Heidelberg; but the application bore no fruit. He was, therefore, glad to become editor of the _Bamberger Zeitung_ (1807-1808). Of his editorial work there is little to tell; no leading articles appeared in his columns. It was not a suitable vocation, and he gladly accepted the rectorship of the Aegidien-gymnasium in Nuremberg, a post which he held from December 1808 to August 1816. Bavaria at this time was modernizing her institutions. The school system was reorganized by new regulations, in accordance with which Hegel wrote a series of lessons in the outlines of philosophy--ethical, logical and psychological. They were published in 1840 by Rosenkranz from Hegel's papers.

As a teacher and master Hegel inspired confidence in his pupils, and maintained discipline without pedantic interference in their associations and sports. On prize-days his addresses summing up the history of the school year discussed some topic of general interest. Five of these addresses are preserved. The first is an exposition of the advantages of a classical training, when it is not confined to mere grammar. "The perfection and grandeur of the master-works of Greek and Roman literature must be the intellectual bath, the secular baptism, which gives the first and unfading tone and tincture of taste and science." In another address, speaking of the introduction of military exercises at school, he says: "These exercises, while not intended to withdraw the students from their more immediate duty, so far as they have any calling to it, still remind them of the possibility that every one, whatever rank in society he may belong to, may one day have to defend his country and his king, or help to that end. This duty, which is natural to all, was formerly recognized by every citizen, though whole ranks in the state have become strangers to the very idea of it."

On the 16th of September 1811 Hegel married Marie von Tucher (twenty-two years his junior) of Nuremberg. She brought her husband no fortune, but the marriage was entirely happy. The husband kept a careful record of income and expenditure. His income amounted at Nuremberg to 1500 gulden (L130) and a house; at Heidelberg, as professor, he received about the same sum; at Berlin about 3000 thalers (L300). Two sons were born to them; the elder, Karl, became eminent as a historian. The younger, Immanuel, was born on the 24th of September 1816. Hegel's letters to his wife, written during his solitary holiday tours to Vienna, the Netherlands and Paris, breathe of kindly and happy affection. Hegel the tourist--recalling happy days spent together; confessing that, were it not because of his sense of duty as a traveller, he would rather be at home, dividing his time between his books and his wife; commenting on the shop windows at Vienna; describing the straw hats of the Parisian ladies--is a contrast to the professor of a profound philosophical system. But it shows that the enthusiasm which in his days of courtship moved him to verse had blossomed into a later age of domestic bliss.

In 1812 appeared the first two volumes of his _Wissenschaft der Logik_, and the work was completed by a third in 1816. This work, in which his system was for the first time presented in what, with a few minor alterations, was its ultimate shape, found some audience in the world. Towards the close of his eighth session three professorships were almost simultaneously put within his reach--at Erlangen, Berlin and Heidelberg. The Prussian offer expressed a doubt that his long absence from university teaching might have made him rusty, so he accepted the post at Heidelberg, whence Fries had just gone to Jena (October 1816). Only four hearers turned up for one of his courses. Others, however, on the encyclopaedia of philosophy and the history of philosophy drew classes of twenty to thirty. While he was there Cousin first made his acquaintance, but a more intimate relation dates from Berlin. Among his pupils was Hermann F. W. Hinrichs (q.v.), to whose _Religion in its Inward Relation to Science_ (1822) Hegel contributed an important preface. The strangest of his hearers was an Esthonian baron, Boris d'Yrkull, who after serving in the Russian army came to Heidelberg to hear the wisdom of Hegel. But his books and his lectures were alike obscure to the baron, who betook himself by Hegel's advice to simpler studies before he returned to the Hegelian system.

At Heidelberg Hegel was active in a literary way also. In 1817 he brought out the _Enzyklopadie d. philos. Wissenschaften im Grundrisse_ (4th ed., Berlin, 1817; new ed., 1870) for use at his lectures. It is the only exposition of the Hegelian system as a whole which we have direct from Hegel's own hand. Besides this work he wrote two reviews for the Heidelberg _Jahrbucher_--the first on F. H. Jacobi, the other a political pamphlet which called forth violent criticism. It was entitled a _Criticism on the Transactions of the Estates of Wurttemberg in 1815-1816_. On the 15th of March 1815 King Frederick of Wurttemberg, at a meeting of the estates of his kingdom, laid before them the draft of a new constitution, in accordance with the resolutions of the congress of Vienna. Though an improvement on the old constitution, it was unacceptable to the estates, jealous of their old privileges and suspicious of the king's intentions. A decided majority demanded the restitution of their old laws, though the kingdom now included a large population to which the old rights were strange. Hegel in his essay, which was republished at Stuttgart, supported the royal proposals, and animadverted on the backwardness of the bureaucracy and the landed interests. In the main he was right; but he forgot too much the provocation they had received, the usurpations and selfishness of the governing family, and the unpatriotic character of the king.

In 1818 Hegel accepted the renewed offer of the chair of philosophy at Berlin, vacant since the death of Fichte. The hopes which this offer raised of a position less precarious than that of a university teacher of philosophy were in one sense disappointed; for more than a professor Hegel never became. But his influence upon his pupils, and his solidarity with the Prussian government, gave him a position such as few professors have held.

In 1821 Hegel published the _Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts_ (2nd ed., 1840; ed. G. J. B. Bolland, 1901; Eng. trans., _Philosophy of Right_, by S. W. Dyde, 1896). It is a combined system of moral and political philosophy, or a sociology dominated by the idea of the state. It turns away contemptuously and fiercely from the sentimental aspirations of reformers possessed by the democratic doctrine of the rights of the omnipotent nation. Fries is stigmatized as one of the "ringleaders of shallowness" who were bent on substituting a fancied tie of enthusiasm and friendship for the established order of the state. The disciplined philosopher, who had devoted himself to the task of comprehending the organism of the state, had no patience with feebler or more mercurial minds who recklessly laid hands on established ordinances, and set them aside where they contravened humanitarian sentiments. With the principle that whatever is real is rational, and whatever is rational is real, Hegel fancied that he had stopped the mouths of political critics and constitution-mongers. His theory was not a mere formulation of the Prussian state. Much that he construed as necessary to a state was wanting in Prussia; and some of the reforms already introduced did not find their place in his system. Yet, on the whole, he had taken his side with the government. Altenstein even expressed his satisfaction with the book. In his disgust at the crude conceptions of the enthusiasts, who had hoped that the war of liberation might end in a realm of internal liberty, Hegel had forgotten his own youthful vows recorded in verse to Holderlin, "never, never to live in peace with the ordinance which regulates feeling and opinion." And yet if we look deeper we see that this is no worship of existing powers. It is rather due to an overpowering sense of the value of organization--a sense that liberty can never be dissevered from order, that a vital interconnexion between all the parts of the body politic is the source of all good, so that while he can find nothing but brute weight in an organized public, he can compare the royal person in his ideal form of constitutional monarchy to the dot upon the letter i. A keen sense of how much is at stake in any alteration breeds suspicion of every reform.

During his thirteen years at Berlin Hegel's whole soul seems to have been in his lectures. Between 1823 and 1827 his activity reached its maximum. His notes were subjected to perpetual revisions and additions. We can form an idea of them from the shape in which they appear in his published writings. Those on _Aesthetics_, on the _Philosophy of Religion_, on the _Philosophy of History_ and on the _History of Philosophy_, have been published by his editors, mainly from the notes of his students, under their separate heads; while those on logic, psychology and the philosophy of nature are appended in the form of illustrative and explanatory notes to the sections of his _Encyklopadie_. During these years hundreds of hearers from all parts of Germany, and beyond, came under his influence. His fame was carried abroad by eager or intelligent disciples. At Berlin Henning served to prepare the intending disciple for fuller initiation by the master himself. Edward Gans (q.v.) and Heinrich Gustav Hotho (q.v.) carried the method into special spheres of inquiry. At Halle Hinrichs maintained the standard of Hegelianism amid the opposition or indifference of his colleagues.

Three courses of lectures are especially the product of his Berlin period: those on aesthetics, the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of history. In the years preceding the revolution of 1830, public interest, excluded from political life, turned to theatres, concert-rooms and picture-galleries. At these Hegel became a frequent and appreciative visitor and made extracts from the art-notes in the newspapers. In his holiday excursions, the interest in the fine arts more than once took him out of his way to see some old painting. At Vienna in 1824 he spent every moment at the Italian opera, the ballet and the picture-galleries. In Paris, in 1827, he saw Charles Kemble and an English company play Shakespeare. This familiarity with the facts of art, though neither deep nor historical, gave a freshness to his lectures on aesthetics, which, as put together from the notes of 1820, 1823, 1826, are in many ways the most successful of his efforts.

The lectures on the philosophy of religion are another application of his method. Shortly before his death he had prepared for the press a course of lectures on the proofs for the existence of God. In his lectures on religion he dealt with Christianity, as in his philosophy of morals he had regarded the state. On the one hand he turned his weapons against the rationalistic school, who reduced religion to the modicum compatible with an ordinary worldly mind. On the other hand he criticized the school of Schleiermacher, who elevated feeling to a place in religion above systematic theology. His middle way attempts to show that the dogmatic creed is the rational development of what was implicit in religious feeling. To do so, of course, philosophy becomes the interpreter and the superior. To the new school of E. W. Hengstenberg, which regarded Revelation itself as supreme, such interpretation was an abomination.

A Hegelian school began to gather. The flock included intelligent pupils, empty-headed imitators, and romantic natures who turned philosophy into lyric measures. Opposition and criticism only served to define more precisely the adherents of the new doctrine. Hegel himself grew more and more into a belief in his own doctrine as the one truth for the world. He was in harmony with the government, and his followers were on the winning side. Though he had soon resigned all direct official connexion with the schools of Brandenburg, his real influence in Prussia was considerable, and as usual was largely exaggerated in popular estimate. In the narrower circle of his friends his birthdays were the signal for congratulatory verses. In 1826 a formal festival was got up by some of his admirers, one of whom, Herder, spoke of his categories as new gods; and he was presented with much poetry and a silver mug. In 1830 the students struck a medal in his honour, and in 1831 he was decorated by an order from Frederick William III. In 1830 he was rector of the university; and in his speech at the tricentenary of the Augsburg Confession in that year he charged the Catholic Church with regarding the virtues of the pagan world as brilliant vices, and giving the crown of perfection to poverty, continence and obedience.