It is no new thing to find Hegelianism in general obloquy. Even in 1830 the Catholic philosopher and theologian Günther[2]--an admirer, but by no means a follower of Hegel--wrote that, 'for some years it had been the fashion in learned Germany to look upon philosophy, and above all Hegelian philosophy, as a door-mat on which everybody cleaned his muddy boots before entering the sanctuary of politics and religion.' What is true as regards the alleged surcease of Hegelianism is that in the reaction which from various causes turned itself against philosophy in the two decennia after 1848, that system, as the most deeply committed part of the 'metaphysical' host, suffered most severely. History and science seemed to triumph along the whole line. But it may be perhaps permissible to remark that Hegelianism had predicted for itself the fate that it proved had fallen on all other philosophies. After the age of Idealism comes the turn of Realism. The Idea had to die--had to sink as a germ in the fields of nature and history before it could bear its fruit. Above all it is not to be expected that such a system, so ambitious in aim and concentrated in expression, could find immediate response and at once disclose all its meaning. His first disciples are not the--truest interpreters of any great teacher. What he saw in the one comprehensive glance of genius, his successors must often be content to gather by the slow accumulation of years, and perhaps centuries, of experience. It is not to Theophrastus that we go for the truest and fullest conception of Aristotelianism; nor is Plato to be measured by what his immediate successors in the Academy managed to make out of him. It is now more than a century since Kant gave his lesson to the public, and we are still trying to get him focussed in a single view: it may be even longer till Hegel comes fully within the range of our historians of thought. Aristotelianism too had to wait centuries till it fully entered the consciousness even of the thinking world.
It is to be said too that without Hegel it would be difficult to imagine what even teachers, like Lotze, who were very unlike him, would have had to say. It does not need a very wide soul, nor need one be a mere dilettantist eclectic, to find much of Schopenhauer's work far from incompatible with his great, and as some have said, complementary opposite. It is not indeed prudent as yet for a writer in Germany who wishes to catch the general ear to affix too openly a profession of Hegelian principles, and he will do well to ward off suspicion by some disparaging remarks on the fantastic methods, the overfondness for system, the contempt for common sense and scientific results which, as he declares, vitiate all the speculations of the period from 1794 to 1830. But under the names of Spinoza and of Leibniz the leaven of Hegelian principles has been at work: and if the Philistines solve the riddle of the intellectual Samson, it is because they have ploughed with his heifer,--because his ideas are part of the modern stock of thought,--not from what they literally read in the great thinkers at the close of the seventeenth century. Last year saw appear in Germany two excellent treatises describable as popular introductions to philosophy[3], one by a thinker who has never disguised his obligations to Hegel, the other by a teacher in the University of Berlin who may in many ways be considered as essentially kindred with our general English style of thought. But both treatises are more allied in character to the spirit of the Hegelian attempts to comprehend man and God than to the formalistic and philological disquisitions which have for some years formed the staple of German professorial activity. And, lastly, the vigorous thinker, who a quarter of a century ago startled the reading public by the portent of a new metaphysic which should be the synthesis of Schelling and Schopenhauer, has lately informed us[4] that his affinity to Hegel is, taken all in all, greater than his affinity to any other philosopher'; and that that affinity extends to all that in Hegel has essential and permanent value.