time when our present distinctions of thought and language had no
existence.

Of the great dislike and childish impatience of his system which would be
aroused among his opponents, he was fully aware, and would often anticipate
the jests which the rest of the world, 'in the superfluity of their wits,'
were likely to make upon him. Men are annoyed at what puzzles them; they
think what they cannot easily understand to be full of danger. Many a
sceptic has stood, as he supposed, firmly rooted in the categories of the
understanding which Hegel resolves into their original nothingness. For,
like Plato, he 'leaves no stone unturned' in the intellectual world. Nor
can we deny that he is unnecessarily difficult, or that his own mind, like
that of all metaphysicians, was too much under the dominion of his system
and unable to see beyond: or that the study of philosophy, if made a
serious business (compare Republic), involves grave results to the mind and
life of the student. For it may encumber him without enlightening his
path; and it may weaken his natural faculties of thought and expression
without increasing his philosophical power. The mind easily becomes
entangled among abstractions, and loses hold of facts. The glass which is
adapted to distant objects takes away the vision of what is near and
present to us.

To Hegel, as to the ancient Greek thinkers, philosophy was a religion, a
principle of life as well as of knowledge, like the idea of good in the
Sixth Book of the Republic, a cause as well as an effect, the source of
growth as well as of light. In forms of thought which by most of us are
regarded as mere categories, he saw or thought that he saw a gradual
revelation of the Divine Being. He would have been said by his opponents
to have confused God with the history of philosophy, and to have been
incapable of distinguishing ideas from facts. And certainly we can