does not stop unnecessarily at these but presses on
further into the building one will find uncounted treasures which hold
their full value to-day. As regards all philosophers, their system is
doomed to perish and for this reason, because it emanates from an
imperishable desire of the human soul, the desire to abolish all
contradictions. But if all contradictions are once and for all disposed
of, we have arrived at the so-called absolute truth, history is at an
end, and yet it will continue to go on, although there is nothing
further left for it to do--thus a newer and more insoluble
contradiction. So soon as we have once perceived--and to this perception
no one has helped us more than Hegel himself--that the task thus imposed
upon philosophy signifies nothing different than the task that a single
philosopher shall accomplish what it is only possible for the entire
human race to accomplish, in the course of its progressive
development--as soon as we understand that, it is all over with
philosophy in the present sense of the word. In this way one discards
the absolute truth, unattainable for the individual, and follows instead
the relative truths attainable by way of the positive sciences, and the
collection of their results by means of the dialectic mode of thought.
With Hegel universal philosophy comes to an end, on the one hand,
because he comprehended in his system its entire development on the
greatest possible scale; on the other hand, because he showed us the
way, even if he did not know it himself, out of this labyrinth of
systems, to a real positive knowledge of the world.

One may imagine what an immense effect the Hegelian philosophy produced
in the philosophy-dyed atmosphere of Germany. The triumph lasted for ten
years and by no means subsided with the death of Hegel. On the contrary,
from 1830 to 1840 Hegelianism was exclusively supreme and had fastened
itself upon its opponents to a greater or less degree. During this
period Hegel's views, consciously or unconsciously, penetrated the
different sciences, and saturated popular literature and the daily press
from which the ordinary so-called cultured classes derive their mental
pabulum. But this victory down the whole line was only preliminary to a
conflict within its own ranks.

The entire doctrine of Hegel left, as we have seen, plenty of room for
the bringing under it the most diverse practical opinions, and the
practical, in the then theoretic Germany, co