o review in some detail the actual phenomena. He
conceived the final cause of the world as Spirit's consciousness of its
own freedom. The ambiguous term "freedom" is virtually equivalent
to self-consciousness, and Hegel defines Universal History as the
description of the process by which Spirit or God comes to the
consciousness of its own meaning. This freedom does not mean that Spirit
could choose at any moment to develop in a different way; its actual
development is necessary and is the embodiment of reason. Freedom
consists in fully recognising the fact.

Of the particular features which distinguish Hegel's treatment, the
first is that he identifies "history" with political history, the
development of the state. Art, religion, philosophy, the creations
of social man, belong to a different and higher stage of Spirit's
self-revelation. [Footnote: The three phases of Spirit are (1)
subjective; (2) objective; (3) absolute. Psychology, e.g., is included
in (1), law and history in (2), religion in (3).] In the second place,
Hegel ignores the primitive prehistoric ages of man, and sets the
beginning of his development in the fully-grown civilisation of China.
He conceives the Spirit as continually moving from one nation to another
in order to realise the successive stages of its self-consciousness:
from China to India, from India to the kingdoms of Western Asia; then
from the Orient to Greece, then to Rome, and finally to the Germanic
world. In the East men knew only that ONE is free, the political
characteristic was despotism; in Greece and Rome they knew that SOME
are free, and the political forms were aristocracy and democracy; in
the modern world they know that ALL are free, and the political form
is monarchy. The first period, he compared to childhood, the second to
youth (Greece) and manhood (Rome), the third to old age, old but not
feeble. The third, which includes the medieval and modern history of
Europe, designated by Hegel as the Germanic world--for "the German
spirit is the spirit of the modern world"--is also the final period. In
it God realises his freedom completely in history, just as in Hegel's
own absolute philosophy, which is final, God has completely understood
his own nature.

And here is the most striking difference between the theories of Fichte
and Hegel. Both saw the goal of human development in the realisation of
"freedom," but, while with Fichte the development never ends as the goal
is unattain