, its revolutionary character is absolute, the only absolute
which it allows to exist.

We do not, at this point, need to go into the question whether this
philosophy is consistent throughout with the present position of natural
science which predicts for the earth a possible end and for its
inhabitability, a fairly certain one; which, therefore, also recognizes
that in human history there is not only an upshooting but also a
down-growing branch. We find ourselves, at any rate, still a
considerable distance from the turning point, where the history of
society begins to descend, and we cannot expect the Hegelian philosophy
to meddle with a subject which at that time science had not yet placed
upon the order of the day.

What must, indeed, be said is this, that the Hegelian development does
not, according to Hegel, show itself so clearly. It is a necessary
consequence of his method which he himself has never drawn with this
explicitness. And for this simple reason, because he was compelled to
make a system, and a system of philosophy must, in accordance with all
its understood pretensions, close somewhere with a definition of
absolute truth. So Hegel, therefore, in his logic, urged that this
eternal truth is nothing else but the logical, that is, the historical
process itself; yet in spite of this he finds himself compelled to place
an end to this process, since he must come to an end with his system
somewhere or other. He can make this end a beginning again in logic,
since here the point of conclusion--the absolute idea, which is only
absolute in so far as he has nothing clear to say about it--divests
itself in nature, that is, becomes transformed, and later on, in
spirit, that is, in thought and in history, comes to itself again. But
in the last philosophical analysis, a return to the beginning is only
possible in one way, namely, if one place the end of history in this
fact, that mankind comes to a knowledge of the absolute idea, and
explain that this knowledge of the absolute idea is obtained in the
Hegelian philosophy. But in this way the whole dogmatic content of the
Hegelian philosophy in the matter of absolute truth is explained in
contradiction to his dialectic, the cutting loose from all dogmatic
methods, and thereby the revolutionary side becomes smothered under the
dominating conservative. And what can be said of philosophical knowledge
can also be said of historical practice. Mankind, that is, in the person