places the religion of sorcery. The gradations which follow are
apportioned with some uncertainty amongst the religions of the
East. With the Persian religion of light and the Egyptian of
enigmas we pass to those faiths where Godhead takes the form of
a spiritual individuality, i.e. to the Hebrew religion (of sublimity),
the Greek (of beauty) and the Roman (of adaptation). Last comes
absolute religion, in which the mystery of the reconciliation between
God and man is an open doctrine. This is Christianity, in which
God is a Trinity, because He is a spirit. The revelation of this
truth is the subject of the Christian Scriptures. For the Son of
God, in the immediate aspect, is the finite world of nature and
man, which far from being at one with its Father is originally in
an attitude of estrangement. The history of Christ is the visible
reconciliation between man and the eternal. With the death of
Christ this union, ceasing to be a mere fact, becomes a vital idea—the
Spirit of God which dwells in the Christian community.
The lectures on the History of Philosophy deal disproportionately with the various epochs, and in some parts date from the beginning of Hegel’s career. In trying to subject history to the order of logic they sometimes misconceive the filiation of ideas. But they created the history of philosophy as a scientific study. They showed that a philosophical theory is not an accident or whim, but an exponent of its age determined by its antecedents and environments, and handing on its results to the future. (W. W.; X.)
Hegelianism in England.—On the continent of Europe the direct influence of Hegelianism was comparatively short-lived. This was due among other causes to the direction of attention to the rising science of psychology, partly to the reaction against the speculative method. In England and Scotland it had another fate. Both in theory and practice it here seemed to supply precisely the counteractive to prevailing tendencies towards empiricism and individualism that was required. In this respect it stood to philosophy in somewhat the same relation that the influence of Goethe stood to literature. This explains the hold which it had obtained upon both English and Scottish thought soon after the middle of the 19th century. The first impulse came from J. F. Ferrier and J. H. Stirling in Edinburgh, and B. Jowett in Oxford. Already in the seventies there was a powerful school of English thinkers under the lead of Edward Caird and T. H. Green devoted to the study and exposition of the Hegelian system. With the general acceptance of its main principle that the real is the rational, there came in the eighties a more critical examination of the precise meaning to be attached to it and its bearing on the problems of religion. The earlier Hegelians had interpreted it in the sense that the world in its ultimate essence was not only spiritual but self-conscious intelligence whose nature was reflected inadequately but truly in the finite mind. They thus seemed to come forward in the character of exponents rather than critics of the Western belief in God, freedom and immortality. As time went on it became obvious that without departure from the spirit of idealism Hegel’s principle was susceptible of a different interpretation. Granted that rationality taken in the sense of inner coherence and self-consistency is the ultimate standard of truth and reality, does self-consciousness itself answer to the demands of this criterion? If not, are we not forced to deny ultimate reality to personality whether human or divine? The question was definitely raised in F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality (1893; 2nd ed., 1897) and answered in the negative. The completeness and self-consistency which our ideal requires can be realized only in a form of being in which subject and object, will and desire, no longer stand as exclusive opposites, from which it seemed at once to follow that the finite self could not be a reality nor the infinite reality a self. On this basis Bradley developed a theory of the Absolute which, while not denying that it must be conceived of spiritually, insisted that its spirituality is of a kind that finds no analogy in our self-conscious experience. More recently J. M. E. McTaggart’s Studies in Hegelian Dialectic (1896), Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (1901) and Some Dogmas of Religion (1906) have opened a new chapter in the interpretation of Hegelianism. Truly perceiving that the ultimate metaphysical problem is, here as ever, the relation of the One and the Many, McTaggart starts with a definition of the ideal in which our thought upon it can come to rest. He finds it where (a) the unity is for each individual, (b) the whole nature of the individual is to be for the unity. It follows from such a conception of the relation that the whole cannot itself be an individual apart from the individuals in whom it is realized, in other words, the Absolute cannot be a Person. But for the same reason—viz. that in it first and in it alone this condition is realized—the individual soul must be held to be an ultimate reality reflecting in its inmost nature, like the monad of Leibniz, the complete fulness and harmony of the whole. In reply to Bradley’s argument for the unreality of the self, Hegel is interpreted as meaning that the opposition between self and not-self on which it is founded is one that is self-made and in being made is transcended. The fuller our knowledge of reality the more does the object stand out as an invulnerable system of ordered parts, but the process by which it is thus set in opposition to the subject is also the process by which we understand and transform it into the substance of our own thought. From this position further consequences followed. Seeing that the individual soul must thus be taken to stand in respect to its inmost essence in complete harmony with the whole, it must eternally be at one with itself: all change must be appearance. Seeing, moreover, that it is, and is maintained in being, by a fixed relation to the Absolute, it cannot fail of immortality. No pantheistic theory of an eternal substance continuously expressing itself in different individuals who fall back into its being like drops into the ocean will here be sufficient. The ocean is the drops. “The Absolute requires each self not to make up a sum or to maintain an average but in respect of the self’s special and unique nature.” Finally as it cannot cease, neither can the individual soul have had a beginning. Pre-existence is as necessary and certain as a future life. If memory is lacking as a link between the different lives, this only shows that memory is not of the substance of the soul.
In view of these differences (amounting almost to an antinomy of paradoxes) in interpretation, it is not surprising to find that recent years have witnessed a violent reaction in some quarters against Hegelian influence. This has taken the direction on the one hand of a revival of realism (see Metaphysics), on the other of a new form of subjective idealism (see Pragmatism). As yet neither of these movements has shown sufficient coherence or stability to establish itself as a rival to the main current of philosophy in England. But they have both been urged with sufficient ability to arrest its progress and to call for a reconsideration and restatement of the fundamental principle of idealist philosophy and its relation to the fundamental problems of religion. This will probably be the main work of the next generation of thinkers in England (see Idealism).
Among Italian Hegelians are A. Vera, Raffaele Mariano and B. Spaventa (1817–1883); see V. de Lucia, L’Hegel in Italia (1891). In Sweden, J. J. Borelius of Lund; in Norway, G. V. Lyng (d. 1884), M. J. Monrad (1816–1897) and G. Kent (d. 1892) have adopted Hegelianism; in France, P. Leroux and P. Prévost.
Bibliography.—Shortly after Hegel’s death his collected works were published by a number of his friends, who combined for the purpose. They appeared in eighteen volumes in 1832, and a second edition came out about twelve years later. Volumes i.-viii. contain the works published by himself; the remainder is made up of his lectures on the Philosophy of History, Aesthetic, the Philosophy of Religion and the History of Philosophy, besides some essays and reviews, with a few of his letters, and the Philosophical Propaedeutic.
For his life see K. Rosenkranz, Leben Hegels (Berlin, 1844); R. R. Haym, Hegel und seine Zeit (Berlin, 1857); K. Köstlin, Hegel in philosophischer, politischer und nationaler Beziehung (Tübingen, 1870); Rosenkranz, Hegel als deutscher National-Philosoph (Berlin, 1870), and his Neue Studien, vol. iv. (Berlin, 1878); Kuno Fischer, Hegels Leben und Werke.
For the philosophy see A. Ruge’s Aus früherer Zeit, vol. iv. (Berlin, 1867); Haym (as above); F. A. Trendelenburg (in Logische Untersuchungen); A. L. Kym (Metaphysische Untersuchungen) and C. Hermann (Hegel und die logische Frage and other works) are noticeable as modern critics. Georges Noël, La Logique de Hegel (Paris, 1897); Aloys Schmid, Die Entwickelungsgeschichte der Hegelschen Logik (Regensburg, 1858). Vera has translated the Encyklopädie into French, with notes; C. Bénard, the Ästhetik. In English J. Hutcheson Stirling’s Secret of Hegel (2 vols., London, 1865) contains a translation of the beginning of the Wissenschaft der Logik; the “Logic” from the Encyklopädie has been translated, with Prolegomena, by W. Wallace (Oxford, 1874). W. Wallace also translated the third part of the Encyklopädie in Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (1894); R. B. Haldane the History of Philosophy (1896); E. B. Speirs, lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1895); J. Sibree, lectures on The Philosophy of History (1852); B. Bosanquet, Philosophy of Fine Art, Introduction (1886); W. Hastie, The Philosophy of Art (1886); S. W. Dyde, The Philosophy of Right (1896). Other recent expositions and criticisms in addition to those mentioned above are W. T. Harris, Hegel’s Logic (1890); J. B. Baillie, Origin and Significance of Hegel’s Logic (1901), and Outline of the Idealistic Construction of Experience (1906); P. Barth, Die Geschichtsphilosophie Hegels (1890); J. A. Marrast, La Philosophie du droit de Hegel (1869); L. Miraglia, I Principii fondamentali e la dottrina eticogiuridica di Hegel (1873); Hegel’s Philosophy of the State and History (Germ. Phil. Classics, 1887); G. Bolland, Philosophie des Rechts (1902), and Hegels Philosophie der Religion (1901); E. Ott, Die Religionsphilosophie Hegels (1904); J. M. Sterrett, Studies in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion (1891); M. Ehrenhauss, Hegels Gottesbegriff (1880); E. Caird, Hegel (1880); A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, Hegelianism and Personality (1893); Millicent Mackenzie, Hegel’s Educational Theory and Practice (1909), with biographical sketch; J. M. E. McTaggart, Commentary on Hegel’s Logic (1910). (J. H. Mu.)
HEGEMON OF THASOS, Greek writer of the old comedy,
nicknamed Φακῆ from his fondness for lentils. Hardly anything
is known of him, except that he flourished during the Peloponnesian
War. According to Aristotle (Poetics, ii. 5) he was the
inventor of a kind of parody; by slightly altering the wording
in well-known poems he transformed the sublime into the
ridiculous. When the news of the disaster in Sicily reached
Athens, his parody of the Gigantomachia was being performed;
it is said that the audience were so amused by it that, instead of
leaving to show their grief, they remained in their seats. He
