understand one another from afar, notwithstanding the interval which
separates them. They are 'the spectators of all time and of all
existence;' their works live for ever; and there is nothing to prevent the
force of their individuality breaking through the uniformity which
surrounds them. But such disturbers of the order of thought Hegel is
reluctant to acknowledge.

The doctrine of Hegel will to many seem the expression of an indolent
conservatism, and will at any rate be made an excuse for it. The mind of
the patriot rebels when he is told that the worst tyranny and oppression
has a natural fitness: he cannot be persuaded, for example, that the
conquest of Prussia by Napoleon I. was either natural or necessary, or that
any similar calamity befalling a nation should be a matter of indifference
to the poet or philosopher. We may need such a philosophy or religion to
console us under evils which are irremediable, but we see that it is fatal
to the higher life of man. It seems to say to us, 'The world is a vast
system or machine which can be conceived under the forms of logic, but in
which no single man can do any great good or any great harm. Even if it
were a thousand times worse than it is, it could be arranged in categories
and explained by philosophers. And what more do we want?'

The philosophy of Hegel appeals to an historical criterion: the ideas of
men have a succession in time as well as an order of thought. But the
assumption that there is a correspondence between the succession of ideas
in history and the natural order of philosophy is hardly true even of the
beginnings of thought. And in later systems forms of thought are too
numerous and complex to admit of our tracing in them a regular succession.
They seem also to be in part reflections of the past, and it is difficult
to separate in them what is original and what is borrowed. Doubtless they
have a relation to one another--the transition from Descartes to Spinoza or