HEGEL had all the qualities necessary to make him one of the greatest philosophers since Plato. The one quality in which he was most deficient as a writer every essayist must have if he is not to lose the essay in the treatise. This is the power of self-limitation which enables him to separate his subject from the universal whole and treat it in its own completeness. This quality, Bacon, as great in another way as Hegel, had in an eminent degree. But Hegel’s mind was differently constituted. He does not amplify by diffusing his ideas, but by vast generalizations supported by continuity of details which accumulate until the reader is in danger of being so overwhelmed by them that he will lose sight of the governing thought. If technically Hegel is hardly to be classed among essayists, he had a vision of truth so clear that he cannot be passed over because of a mere matter of form. The idea that the spiritual or supernatural object of human society in all its forms, and of all the forces of; the visible universe, is to develop individuality and to multiply to the utmost possible extent individuals of the highest possible fitness,—this thought, which if it be not wholly Hegel’s as it is here expressed, is yet his by the implication of his system, and it unifies with itself the highest truths both of religion and of science.

  Hegel was born at Stuttgart, August 27th, 1770. He studied theology at Tübingen; and in 1793, when he received his certificate, he was described as “of good abilities, but of middling industry and knowledge, and especially deficient in philosophy.” Most great men have been misunderstood by their teachers, but at that time Hegel may have deserved something of this faint praise. His first great intellectual awakening seems to have been largely due to his association with Schelling, to whom as a fellow-student of philosophy he wrote in 1795: “Let reason and freedom remain our watchword and our point of union the Church invisible.” With this watchword during the excitement of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, Hegel devoted himself to the search for truth. His achievements are too great for cursory review, but without attempting to discuss the metaphysical part of his work as it concerns the operations of mind in and upon itself, we may accept without risk the judgment of those who declare that at his death, November 14th, 1831, he left behind him at least four of the greatest intellectual creations of the nineteenth century,—“Philosophy of History,” “Æsthetics,” “Philosophy of Religion,” and “History of Philosophy.”