Hegel

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-1831), a German idealist philosopher, was born at Stuttgardt. While studying at Tubingen be saw much of Schelling, by whom he was greatly influenced. After having been some years tutor in a family, he, in 1801, came to Jena, where he was privat-doccnt and professor-extraordinary. During these years be conducted with Schelling a philosophical journed, but his Phdnomenologie des Ge'istes, published in 1807, showed a divergence from the views of that thinker, as well as from those of Kant and Fichte. When the university was broken up in consequence of the French invasion, Hegel was for a short time a newspaper editor at Bamberg, and then passed nine years as director of the Nuremberg Gymnasium. In 1816, after the publication of his Logik, he was made professor at Heidelberg, which he left two years later for Berlin, where for the rest of his life he held the chair of philosophy. He was married in 1811, and died of cholera twenty years later. As an example of his power of concentration, the story may be mentioned that he was in Jena on the night of the great battle completing one of his works, and knew nothing of what had occurred till the next morning. His chief works were his Wissenschoft der Logik (1812-16), his Encyklopddie der Philosophischen Wissenschaften (1817-27), and the Philosophic des Recltts (1821). Besides these, in the collected edition, published by his pupils after his death, were contained his lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Art, and History.

Hegel's philosophy may roughly be described eis a very elaborate form of Pemtheism or Monism. Its leading characteristic is perhaps its insistence on the idea of continuous progressive development in thought and things (a progress which perpetually involves the passage of a thing into its opposite and the subsumption of the two under a higher unity, including both), on the essential oneness of thought and things, and on the doctrine that the progress of each individual repeats that of the race and the world. AH these notions have been independently developed by evolutionist thinkers, especially in biological science. "The real is rational and the rational is real," was his main doctrine. Hegel's lectures exercised an enormous influence upon the German thought of his day, and an order of the Prussiem Government gave his doctrines official recognition as the authorised philosophy of the universities. But after his death his disciples began to be divided in their interpretation of his system.