of Hegel, has arrived at the point of working out the absolute idea, and
must also practically have arrived so far as to make the absolute idea a
reality. The practical political demands of the abstract idea upon his
contemporaries cannot, therefore, be stretched too far. And so we find
as the conclusion of the philosophy of Rights that the absolute idea
shall realize itself in that limited monarchy which William III. so
persistently, vainly promised to his subjects; therefore, in a limited,
moderate, indirect control of the possessing classes, suitable to the
dominating small bourgeois class in Germany whereby, in addition, the
necessity to us of the existence of the nobility is shown in a
speculative fashion.

The essential usefulness of the system is sufficient to explain the
manufacture of a very tame political conclusion by means of a thoroughly
revolutionary method of reasoning. The special form of this conclusion
springs from this, as a matter of fact, that Hegel was a German, and, as
in the case of his contemporary Goethe, he was somewhat of a philistine.
Goethe and Hegel, each of them was an Olympian Zeus in his own sphere,
but they were neither of them quite free from German philistinism.

But all this does not hinder the Hegelian system from playing an
incomparably greater role than any earlier system and by virtue of this
role developing riches of thought which are astounding even to-day.
Phenomenology of the mind (which one may parallel with embryology and
palaeontology of the mind), an evolution of the individual
consciousness, through its different steps, expressed as a brief
reproduction of the steps through which the consciousness of man has
historically passed, logic, natural philosophy, mental philosophy, and
the latter worked out separately in its detailed historical
subdivisions, philosophy of history, of jurisprudence, of religion,
history of philosophy, esthetics, etc. Hegel labored in all these
different historical fields to discover and prove the thread of
evolution, and as he was not only a creative genius, but also a man of
encyclopedic learning, he was thus, from every point of view, the maker
of an epoch. It is self-evident that by virtue of the necessities of the
"System" he must very often take refuge in certain forced constructions,
about which his pigmy opponents make such an ado even at the present
time. But these constructions are only the frames and scaffoldings of
his work; if one