ot
everything which exists is, without exception, real. The attribute of
reality belongs only to that which is at the same time necessary.
Reality proves itself in the course of its development as necessity. Any
governmental act--Hegel himself instances the example of a certain "tax
law"--by no means strikes him as real in the absence of other qualities.
But what is necessary proves itself in the last instance as reasonable
also, and applied to the Prussian government, the Hegel doctrine,
therefore, only means, this state is reasonable, corresponding with
reason, as long as it is necessary, and if it appear to us an evil, but
in spite of the evil still continues to exist, the evil of the
government finds its justification and its explanation in the
corresponding evil of the subjects. The Prussians of that day had the
government which they deserved.

But reality, according to Hegel, is by no means an attribute which
belongs to a given social or political condition, under all
circumstances and at all times. Quite the contrary. The Roman Republic
was real, but the Roman Empire which replaced it was also real. The
French Monarchy had become unreal in 1789, that is, it had lost all the
quality of necessity, and was so contrary to reason that it had to be
destroyed by the Great Revolution, of which Hegel always speaks with the
greatest enthusiasm. Here, therefore, the monarchy was the unreal, the
revolution the real. So in the course of progress all earlier reality
becomes unreality, loses its necessity, its right of existence, its
rationality; in place of the dying reality comes a new vital reality,
peaceable when the old is sufficiently sensible to go to its death
without a struggle, forcible when it strives against this necessity. And
so the Hegelian statement through the Hegelian dialectic turns to its
opposite--all that is real in the course of human history becomes in the
process of time irrational and is, therefore, according to its destiny,
irrational, and has from the beginning inherited want of rationality,
and everything which is reasonable in the minds of men is destined to
become real, however much it may contradict the apparent reality of
existing conditions. The statement of the rationality of everything real
dissolves itself, according to the Hegelian mode of thought, in the
other, "All that stands has ultimately only so much worth that it must
fall."

But just there lay the true significance and the revolut