Hegel did good service, at least, by freeing philosophy from that aspect of an imported luxury, which it usually had,--as if it were an exotic plant removed from the bright air of Greece into the melancholy mists of Western Europe. 'We have still,' he says, 'to break down the partition between the language of philosophy, and that of ordinary consciousness: we have to overcome the reluctance against thinking what we are familiar with[5].' Philosophy must be brought face to face with ordinary life, so as to draw its strength from the actual and living present, and not from the memories or traditions of the past. It has to become the organised and completed thinking of what is contained blindly and vaguely in the various levels of popular intelligence, as these are more or less educated and ordered. It must grow naturally, as in ancient Greece, from the necessities of the social situation, and not be a product of artificial introduction and nurture: the revelation by the mind's own energy of an implicit truth, not the communication of a mystery sacramentally received. To suppose that a mere change of words can give this grace, would be absurd. Yet where the national life pulses strong, as that of Germany in those days did at first in letters and then in social reform, the dominant note will make itself felt even in the neutral regions of speculation. It was a step on the right road to banish a pompous and aristocratic dialect from philosophy, and to lead it back to those words and forms of speech, which are at least in silent harmony with the national feeling.
[Footnote 1: Hegel's _Leben_ (Rosenkranz), p. 555.]
[Footnote 2: 'Das Bekannte überhaupt ist darum, weil es bekannt ist, nicht erkannt.' _Phenomenologie des Geistes,_ p. 24.]
[Footnote 3: _Vermischte Schriften,_ vol. ii. p. 474.]
[Footnote 4: e. g. _Dasein_ and _Existenz: Wirklichkeit_ and _Realität_: _Wesen_ and _Substanz._ It is the same habit of curiously pondering over the tones and shades of language which leads him to something very like playing on words, and to etymologising, as one may call it, on unetymological principles: e. g. the play on _Mein_ and _Meinung_ (vol. ii. 32: cf. _Werke_, ii. 75): the literal rendering of _Erinnerung_ (_Encycl._ §§ 234 and 450); and the abrupt transitions, as it would seem, from literal to figurative use of such a term as _Grund._ At the same time it is well not to be prosaically certain that a free play of thought does not follow the apparently fortuitous assonance of words.]