f the world, 'in the superfluity
of their wits,' were likely to make upon him. Men are annoyed at what
puzzles them; they think what they cannot easily understand to be full
of danger. Many a sceptic has stood, as he supposed, firmly rooted in
the categories of the understanding which Hegel resolves into their
original nothingness. For, like Plato, he 'leaves no stone unturned'
in the intellectual world. Nor can we deny that he is unnecessarily
difficult, or that his own mind, like that of all metaphysicians, was
too much under the dominion of his system and unable to see beyond:
or that the study of philosophy, if made a serious business (compare
Republic), involves grave results to the mind and life of the student.
For it may encumber him without enlightening his path; and it may weaken
his natural faculties of thought and expression without increasing
his philosophical power. The mind easily becomes entangled among
abstractions, and loses hold of facts. The glass which is adapted to
distant objects takes away the vision of what is near and present to us.

To Hegel, as to the ancient Greek thinkers, philosophy was a religion, a
principle of life as well as of knowledge, like the idea of good in the
Sixth Book of the Republic, a cause as well as an effect, the source of
growth as well as of light. In forms of thought which by most of us are
regarded as mere categories, he saw or thought that he saw a gradual
revelation of the Divine Being. He would have been said by his opponents
to have confused God with the history of philosophy, and to have been
incapable of distinguishing ideas from facts. And certainly we can
scarcely understand how a deep thinker like Hegel could have hoped
to revive or supplant the old traditional faith by an unintelligible
abstraction: or how he could have imagined that philosophy consisted
only or chiefly in the categories of logic. For abstractions, though
combined by him in the notion, seem to be never really concrete; they
are a metaphysical anatomy, not a living and thinking substance. Though
we are reminded by him again and again that we are gathering up the
world in ideas, we feel after all that we have not really spanned the
gulf which separates phainomena from onta.

Having in view some of these difficulties, he seeks--and we may follow
his example--to make the understanding of his system easier (a)
by illustrations, and (b) by pointing out the coincidence of the
speculative idea and