HKB
begins to descend, and we cannot expect the Hegelian philosophy to meddle with a subject which at that time science had not yet placed upon the order of the day.
What must, indeed, be said is this, that the Hegelian development does not, according to Hegel, show itself so clearly. It is a necessary consequence of his method which he himself has never drawn with this explicitness. And for this simple reason, because he was compelled to make a system, and a system of philosophy must, in accordance with all its understood pretensions, close somewhere with a definition of absolute truth. So Hegel, therefore, in his logic, urged that this eternal truth is nothing else but the logical, that is, the historical process itself; yet in spite of this he finds himself compelled to place an end to this process, since he must come to an end with his system somewhere or other. He can make this end a beginning again in logic, since here the point of conclusion--the absolute idea, which is only absolute in so far as he has nothing clear to say about it--divests itself in nature, that is, becomes transformed, and later on, in spirit, that is, in thought and in history, comes to itself again. But in the last philosophical analysis, a return to the beginning is only possible in one way, namely, if one place the end of history in this fact, that mankind comes to a knowledge of the absolute idea, and explain that this knowledge of the absolute idea is obtained in the Hegelian philosophy. But in this way the whole dogmatic content of the Hegelian philosophy in the matter of absolute truth is explained in contradiction to his dialectic, the cutting loose from all dogmatic methods, and thereby the revolutionary side becomes smothered under the dominating conservative. And what can be said of philosophical knowledge can also be said of historical practice. Mankind, that is, in the person of Hegel, has arrived at the point of working out the absolute idea, and must also practically have arrived so far as to make the absolute idea a reality. The practical political demands of the abstract idea upon his contemporaries cannot, therefore, be stretched too far. And so we find as the conclusion of the philosophy of Rights that the absolute idea shall realize itself in that limited monarchy which William III. so persistently, vainly promised to his subjects; therefore, in a limited, moderate, indirect control of the possessing classes, suitable to the dominating small bourgeois class in Germany whereby, in addition, the necessity to us of the existence of the nobility is shown in a speculative fashion.
The essential usefulness of the system is sufficient to explain the manufacture of a very tame political conclusion by means of a thoroughly revolutionary method of reasoning. The special form of this conclusion springs from this, as a matter of fact, that Hegel was a German, and, as in the case of his contemporary Goethe, he was somewhat of a philistine. Goethe and Hegel, each of them was an Olympian Zeus in his own sphere, but they were neither of them quite free from German philistinism.