be as noble; but the strength of a Delian diver is needed to swim through
it'--expresses the feeling with which the reader rises from the perusal of
Hegel. We may truly apply to him the words in which Plato describes the
Pre-Socratic philosophers: 'He went on his way rather regardless of
whether we understood him or not'; or, as he is reported himself to have
said of his own pupils: 'There is only one of you who understands me, and
he does NOT understand me.'

Nevertheless the consideration of a few general aspects of the Hegelian
philosophy may help to dispel some errors and to awaken an interest about
it. (i) It is an ideal philosophy which, in popular phraseology, maintains
not matter but mind to be the truth of things, and this not by a mere crude
substitution of one word for another, but by showing either of them to be
the complement of the other. Both are creations of thought, and the
difference in kind which seems to divide them may also be regarded as a
difference of degree. One is to the other as the real to the ideal, and
both may be conceived together under the higher form of the notion. (ii)
Under another aspect it views all the forms of sense and knowledge as
stages of thought which have always existed implicitly and unconsciously,
and to which the mind of the world, gradually disengaged from sense, has
become awakened. The present has been the past. The succession in time of
human ideas is also the eternal 'now'; it is historical and also a divine
ideal. The history of philosophy stripped of personality and of the other
accidents of time and place is gathered up into philosophy, and again
philosophy clothed in circumstance expands into history. (iii) Whether
regarded as present or past, under the form of time or of eternity, the
spirit of dialectic is always moving onwards from one determination of
thought to another, receiving each successive system of philosophy and
subordinating it to that which follows--impelled by an irresistible
necessity from one idea to another until the cycle of human thought and