nd years?

Again, we have a difficulty in understanding how ideas can be causes,
which to us seems to be as much a figure of speech as the old notion
of a creator artist, 'who makes the world by the help of the demigods'
(Plato, Tim.), or with 'a golden pair of compasses' measures out the
circumference of the universe (Milton, P.L.). We can understand how
the idea in the mind of an inventor is the cause of the work which is
produced by it; and we can dimly imagine how this universal frame may
be animated by a divine intelligence. But we cannot conceive how all the
thoughts of men that ever were, which are themselves subject to so many
external conditions of climate, country, and the like, even if regarded
as the single thought of a Divine Being, can be supposed to have
made the world. We appear to be only wrapping up ourselves in our own
conceits--to be confusing cause and effect--to be losing the distinction
between reflection and action, between the human and divine.

These are some of the doubts and suspicions which arise in the mind of
a student of Hegel, when, after living for a time within the charmed
circle, he removes to a little distance and looks back upon what he
has learnt, from the vantage-ground of history and experience. The
enthusiasm of his youth has passed away, the authority of the master no
longer retains a hold upon him. But he does not regret the time spent
in the study of him. He finds that he has received from him a real
enlargement of mind, and much of the true spirit of philosophy, even
when he has ceased to believe in him. He returns again and again to his
writings as to the recollections of a first love, not undeserving of
his admiration still. Perhaps if he were asked how he can admire
without believing, or what value he can attribute to what he knows to be
erroneous, he might answer in some such manner as the following:--

1. That in Hegel he finds glimpses of the genius of the poet and of the
common sense of the man of the world. His system is not cast in a poetic
form, but neither has all this load of logic extinguished in him the
feeling of poetry. He is the true countryman of his contemporaries
Goethe and Schiller. Many fine expressions are scattered up and down
in his writings, as when he tells us that 'the Crusaders went to the
Sepulchre but found it empty.' He delights to find vestiges of his own
philosophy in the older German mystics. And though he can be scarcely
said to have mix