These are some of the doubts and suspicions which arise in the mind of a
student of Hegel, when, after living for a time within the charmed circle,
he removes to a little distance and looks back upon what he has learnt,
from the vantage-ground of history and experience. The enthusiasm of his
youth has passed away, the authority of the master no longer retains a hold
upon him. But he does not regret the time spent in the study of him. He
finds that he has received from him a real enlargement of mind, and much of
the true spirit of philosophy, even when he has ceased to believe in him.
He returns again and again to his writings as to the recollections of a
first love, not undeserving of his admiration still. Perhaps if he were
asked how he can admire without believing, or what value he can attribute
to what he knows to be erroneous, he might answer in some such manner as
the following:--

1. That in Hegel he finds glimpses of the genius of the poet and of the
common sense of the man of the world. His system is not cast in a poetic
form, but neither has all this load of logic extinguished in him the
feeling of poetry. He is the true countryman of his contemporaries Goethe
and Schiller. Many fine expressions are scattered up and down in his
writings, as when he tells us that 'the Crusaders went to the Sepulchre but
found it empty.' He delights to find vestiges of his own philosophy in the
older German mystics. And though he can be scarcely said to have mixed
much in the affairs of men, for, as his biographer tells us, 'he lived for
thirty years in a single room,' yet he is far from being ignorant of the
world. No one can read his writings without acquiring an insight into
life. He loves to touch with the spear of logic the follies and self-
deceptions of mankind, and make them appear in their natural form, stripped
of the disguises of language and custom. He will not allow men to defend
themselves by an appeal to one-sided or abstract principles. In this age