[Footnote 5: Hegel's _Leben_ (Rosenkranz), p. 553.]
'But,' it is urged, 'though it be well to let the stream of foreign thought irrigate some of our philosophical pastures, though we should not for ever entrench ourselves in our insularity--why try to introduce Hegel, of all philosophers confessedly the most obscure? Why not be content with the study and the "exploitation" of Kant, whom Germans themselves still think so important as to expound him with endless comment and criticism, and who has at length found, after some skirmishes, a recognised place in the English philosophical curriculum? Why seek for more Teutonic thinking that can be found in Schopenhauer, and found there in a clear and noble style, luminous in the highest degree, and touching with no merely academic abstruseness the problems of life and death? Or--as that song is sweetest to men which is the newest to ring in their ears--why not render accessible to English readers the numerous and suggestive works of Eduard von Hartmann, and of Friedrich Nietzsche--not to mention Robert Hamerling[1]? Or, finally, why not give us more and ever more translations of the works in logic, ethics, psychology, or metaphysics, of those many admirable teachers in the German universities, whom it would be invidious to try to single out by name? As for Hegel, his system, in the native land of the philosopher, is utterly discredited; its influence is extinct; it is dead as a door-nail. It is a pity to waste labour and distract attention, and that in English lands, where there are plenty of problems of our own to solve, by an attempt, which must perforce be futile, to resuscitate these defunctitudes?'
That Hegelianism has been utterly discredited, in certain quarters, is no discovery reserved for these later days. But on this matter perhaps we may borrow an analogy. If the reader will be at the trouble to take up two English newspapers of opposite partisanship and compare the reports from their foreign correspondents on some question of home politics, he may, if a novice, be surprised to learn that according to one, the opinion e. g. of Vienna is wholly adverse to the measure, while, according to the other, that opinion entirely approves.