According
to his doctrine, the individual as individual is meaningless. The
particular--independent and unrelated--is an abstraction. The isolation
of anything results in contradiction. It is only the whole that animates
and gives meaning to the individual and the particular. This idea of
subordinating the individual to universal ends, as embodied particularly
in Hegel's theory of the State, has left its impress upon political,
social, and economic theories of his century. Not less significant is
the glorification of reason of which Hegel's complete philosophy is an
expression. Reason never spoke with so much self-confidence and
authority as it did in Hegel. To the clear vision of reason the universe
presents no dark or mysterious corners, nay, the very negations and
contradictions in it are marks of its inherent rationality. But Hegel's
rationalism is not of the ordinary shallow kind. Reason he himself
distinguishes from understanding. The latter is analytical, its function
is to abstract, to define, to compile, to classify. Reason, on the other
hand, is synthetic, constructive, inventive. Apart from Hegel's special
use of the term, it is this synthetic and creative and imaginative
quality pervading his whole philosophy which has deepened men's insight
into history, religion, and art, and which has wielded its general
influence on the philosophic and literary constellation of the
nineteenth century.

* * * * *

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL

INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY[1] (1837)

TRANSLATED BY J. SIBREE, M.A.

The subject of this course of lectures is the Philosophical History of
the World. And by this must be understood, not a collection of general
observations respecting it, suggested by the study of its records and
proposed to be illustrated by its facts, but universal history itself.
To gain a clear idea, at the outset, of the nature of our task, it seems
necessary to begin with an examination of the other methods of treating
history. The various methods may be ranged under three heads:

I. Original History.
II. Reflective History.
III. Philosophical History.

I. Of the first kind, the mention of one or two distinguished names will
furnish a definite type. To this category belong Herodotus, Thucydides,
and other historians of the same order, whose descriptions are for the
most part limited to deeds, events, and states of society, which they
had befo