torical and spiritual universe was regarded as a
process, that is, as in constant progress, change, transformation and
development, and the attempt was made to show the more subtle
relations of this process and development. From this historical point
of view the history of mankind no longer appeared as a barren
confusion of mindless forces, all alike subject to rejection before
the judgment seat of the most recently ripened philosophy, and which,
at the very best, man puts out of his mind as soon as possible, but as
the development-process of humanity itself, to follow the process of
which, little by little, through all its ramifications, and to
establish the essential laws of which, in spite of all apparent
accidents, is now the task of philosophic thought.

It is immaterial at this place that Hegel did not solve this problem.
His epoch-making service was to have proposed it. It is a problem,
moreover, which no individual can solve. Though Hegel, next to Saint
Simon, was the most universal intellect of his time he was still
limited, in the first place, through the necessarily narrow grasp of
his own knowledge and in addition through the limitations of the
contemporary conditions of knowledge. There was a third reason, too.
Hegel was an idealist, that is he regarded thought not as a mere
abstract representation of real phenomena, but, on the contrary,
phenomena and their development appeared to him as the representations
of the Idea which existed before the world. The result was an
inversion of everything, the actual interrelations of the universe
were turned completely upside down, and though of these
interrelations, many single ones were set out justly and correctly by
Hegel, much of the detail is patched, labored, made up, in short,
incorrect. The Hegelian system was, to speak briefly, a colossal
miscarriage, and the last of its kind. It rested on an incurable
contradiction; on the other hand, it actually proclaimed the
historical conception according to which human history is a process of
development, which, in its very nature, cannot find its intellectual
conclusion in the discovery of a so-called absolute truth, on the
other hand it declared itself to be the central idea of just such an
absolute truth. An all embracing and determined knowledge of nature
and history is in absolute contradiction with the foundations of
dialectic thought, but it is not denied, on the contrary, it is
strongly affirmed, that the syste