l 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 from Locke to Berkeley is not a matter of
chance, but it can hardly be described as an alternation of opposites or
figured to the mind by the vibrations of a pendulum. Even in Aristotle
and Plato, rightly understood, we cannot trace this law of action and
reaction. They are both idealists, although to the one the idea is
actual and immanent,--to the other only potential and transcendent, as
Hegel himself has pointed out (Wallace's Hegel). The true meaning of
Aristotle has been disguised from us by his own appeal to fact and the
opinions of mankind in his more popular works, and by the use made of
his writings in the Midd