ghest--a kind of Jacob's ladder on which the categories, like
angels of God, ascend and descend from heaven to earth. We must
remember that the true Hegelian regarded the Ideas as the thoughts of
God. Hegel looked upon this evolution of thought as at the same time
the evolution of Being, the Idea being the only thing that could be
said to be truly real. In order to understand this, we must remember
that the historical key to Hegel's Idea was really the Neo-Platonic
or Alexandrian Logos. But of this Logos we ignorant undergraduates,
sitting at the feet of Prof. Weisse, knew absolutely nothing, and even
if the Idea was sometimes placed before us as the Absolute, the
Infinite, or the Divine, it was to us, at least to most of us, myself
included, _vox et praeterea nihil_. We watched the wonderful
evolutions and convolutions of the Idea in its Dialectic development,
but of the Idea itself or himself we had no idea whatever. It was all
darkness, a vast abyss, and we sat patiently and wrote down what we
could catch and comprehend of the Professor's explanations, but the
Idea itself we never could lay hold of. It would not have been so
difficult if the Professor had spoken out more boldly. But whenever he
came to the relation of the Idea to what we mean by God, there was
always even with him, who was a very honest man, a certain theological
hesitation. Hegel himself seems to shrink occasionally from the
consequence that the Idea really stands in the place of God, and that
it is in the self-conscious spirit of humanity that the ideal God
becomes first conscious of himself. Still, that is the last word of
Hegel's philosophy, though others maintain that the Idea with Hegel
was the thought of God, and that human thought was but a repetition of
that divine thought. With Hegel there is first the evolution of the
Idea in the pure ether of logic from the simplest to the highest
category. Then follows Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, that is, the
evolution of the Idea in nature, the Idea having by the usual
dialectic process negatived itself and entered into its opposite
(_Anderssein_), passing through a new process of space and time, and
ending in the self-conscious human soul. Thus nature and spirit were
represented as dominated by the Idea in its logical development.
Nature was one manifestation of the Idea, History the other, and it
became the task of the philosopher to discover its traces both in the
progress of nature and in the histo