its future growth. On this point we confess to a very imperfect apprehension of the meaning of our philosopher; and, to speak the truth, can not deny that we look on the mysteries into which he so fearlessly plunges, as far too deep to be fathomed by the line of any human intellect. So far, however, as we can gather his idea from his subsequent exposition and application of it, we infer that it must amount to this-that in the earliest germ of existence the implicit principle of its future development was contained; a potential law of Right and Truth, the condensed essence of a universal logic, which has an inherent tendency to unfold and realize itself, and, bursting with ever-increasing force the bonds within which it was at first confined, seeks continually for more and more liberty, till the idea which it involves has attained to its complete expression. The world's law is a sovereign logic; and the phases of its history may be translated into a series of syllogisms extremes mediated by a common term, antithesis and solution, distracting tendencies and final reconcilement, then new distractions and a new reconcilement, and so on ad infinitum, with some accession to freedom and to the power of right and truth at each successive crisis. In the lower grades of creation, inorganic, organic, animal, this divine idea, this sovereign logic, expresses itself unconsciously; it is fulfilled, but without any sense or response in the subject of it. In man first a dim consciousness of the idea is kindled; but for a long time it is faint and dull, just sufficient to distinguish him from the brute, though as yet almost choked and stifled by the weight of its physical incumbrances. In the successive stages of this social advancement, men attain to a distincter apprehension of this eternal Reason, discern more clearly what Right and Justice, Wisdom and Goodness mean, and make renewed efforts to liberate themselves from the thraldom which hinders them from realizing it, and to give it such an objective existence in their social condition as shall bring their actual and their ideal life into harmony. When men shall have attained to a full recognition of the Divine Idea, as it is involved in the sovereign logic of the universe, and have reduced it completely to practice in all the external relations of their existence when the world shall be governed by Right and Truth, and men, recognizing them as such, shall freely accept and obey them as the glory and blessedness of their being the great antithesis of the world's history, the strife between right and wrong, between justice and oppression, between truth and falsehood, will be harmonized, and the problem of man's destiny on earth be solved. The goal, therefore, of man's aims and endeavors, of which history is the record, is the attainment of this spiritual freedom, the appropriation and fulfillment of the eternal reason, oneness with the absolute Power, which is no other than the law of Truth and Right. The recog nition of this great aim and striving of human nature after freedom, more and more developed into clear consciousness through the successive stages of social development, unlocks the secret of history, and furnishes the principle of its philosophy. The idea of this freeeom, and the right and truth of which it is the condition, may exist either subjectively, that is, simply in the mind itself as a conception, or objectively, as realized in an outward constitution of things-in the State. For long periods there is an inconsistency and antagonism between man's sense of what ought to be and what actually is; and herein lie the great antitheses of history, out of which all progress is evolved. Then, after repeated efforts, comes a partial synthesis, when the subjective and the objective for the time are harmonized; and this forms the culminating point of a nation's history, the age of its highest greatness and prosperity. As the indwelling or subjective idea does not become clear to man till it passes into some objective form, Hegel regards the State, which is its concrete embodiment in law, government, religion, science, and art, as the great means of social development; for it not only affords men a present fruition of their highest aspirations in act and reality, but it reäcts on the idea itself, rendering it more distinct and vivid, and stimulating it, if not checked by a counter-influence, to a further growth. Former civilizations invariably exhibit to us one of two resultseither a torpid acquiescence in the form of society that had been once stereotyped by some great authoritative force in the proximate synthesis by which an earlier antithesis had been only too effectually sealed up-in which case the mind ultimately decays and rots in its own stagnation; or else the synthesis, in which a foregoing antagonism had found tempora ry reconcilement, is itself broken up by | fitting type of this state of society. China, the unabated activity of the idea giving India, and ancient Egypt, exhibit remarkbirth to a new antithesis, which has again able phenomena of this description. The to work out its issue in a remoter bar- two former have transmitted the characmony. Such is the law of human pro- teristic features of their primitive life algress; and whether we look at the nega- most unaltered to the present day, and tive or the positive result-at the result of after the lapse of thousands of years are stationary or the efforts of progressive only just beginning to experience the recivilization-we draw the same inference flected action of our Western civilization. from each, that activity, change, develop- When the light of history first dawns on ment, aspiration, are the end of man's be- it, we find China already a completely oring on earth, and that apart from them ganized state-all classes equally submitted his destiny is frustrated. to the authority of law, the obligations and services attached to every social relation distinctly defined and prescribed, with no room left for the exercise of individual choice and judgment. Uniform and universal education moulds all the citizens into one type of character, and trains them to unquestioning obedience. The officers of government, eligible from every rank, receive their appointments as the result of competitive examination. As for religion, its only recognized form is a reverence for ancestors, and the worship of the emperor as the representative of Deity on earth. But in this primitive solution of the social problem, the state has overdone its work. The objective embodiment has not only expressed, but drained and exhausted, the subjective element, and left no power of free reflection in the mind itself. The life of the Chinese is altogether external. The synthesis is complete at the expense of the possibility of a higher antithesis; and the consequence is, a hard, dry, prosaic form of civilization, working mechanically within itself, and incapable of change except by impulse from without. As the State, in Hegel's view, is the great instrument of social progress, he begins his historical survey with the earliest existence of States. For researches into pre-historic times, when we have only tradition and mythology for our guide, and there are no concrete monuments to appeal to, he does not attempt to conceal his aversion, and even his contempt. It is evident that the researches of Niebuhr and his school found no favor in his eyes. He is one-sided and unjust in this respect. He has all the impatience of a theorist, who can not wait for the slow results and precarious combinations of a tentative and conjectural criticism, but must have facts forthwith to lay the foundations of the splendid superstructure which he has planned. Our present object, however, is not to criticise, but to expound, as best we may, the historical theory of Hegel. Before the origin of the State, he looks upon man as partaking more of a physical than of a moral nature, emerging out of simple naturalism, almost confounding himself and his operations with surrounding objects, with little or no apprehension of any thing beyond the native instincts and affections under whose immediate impulse and guidance he lives. His being is immersed in nature. As yet he is scarcely a disengaged consciousness; and this assimilation with the physical endures in humanity even after the commencement of a State. Nothing is more characteristic of the earliest forms of civilization, when the mental effort which originally reared them has passed, when the first great human synthesis has been achieved, than the rapidity with which they crystallize, as it were, into a permanence and immobility of aspect hardly distinguishable from the deep-rooted hills and the eternal streams and the changeless deserts out of which, like a new organic development, they have recently emerged. The pyramids are a In striking contrast to China stands out the old life of India. The Indian mind sees God in all things; but its religion evaporates in a dreamy pantheism, which centers in no clear conceptions of right and truth, and prompts no effort to realize them objectively. Instead of a stereotyped equality under the law, as in China, the nascent development of society has been arrested in India in the form of caste, and future growth rendered impossible by the benumbing despotism of the Brahmins. It is a sacerdotal synthesis in India, under which no political life, no social progress, can take place. Yet there are mental elements of great richness and exquisite beauty in the Indian character, were they not confined by this outward pressure to a purely subjective expression-did they not waste themselves in a wild and unfruitful idealism. "There is a beauty," says Hegel, in an eloquent passage, which Mr. Sibree has spiritedly rendered, (p. 146,) “ of a peculiar kind in women, in which their countenance presents a transparency of skin, a light and lovely roscate hue, which is unlike the complexion of mere health and vital vigor a more refined bloom, breathed, as it were, by the soul within, and in which the features, the light of the eye, the position of the mouth, appear soft, yielding, and relaxed. This almost unearthly beauty is perceived in women in those days which immediately succeed childbirth; when freedom from the burden of pregnancy and the pains of travail is added to the joy of soul that welcome the gift of a beloved infant. A similar tone of beauty is seen also in women during the magical somnambulic sleep, connecting them with a world of super-terrestrial beauty. A great artist (Schoreel) has moreover given this tone to the dying Mary, whose spirit is already rising to the regions of the blessed, but once more, as it were, lights up her dying countenance for a farewell kiss. Such a beauty we find also in its loveliest form in the Indian world; a beauty of enervation, in which all that is rough, rigid, and contradictory is dissolved, and we have only the soul in a state of emotion—a soul, however, in which the death of free self-reliant spirit is perceptible. For should we approach the charm of this flower-life -a charm rich in imagination and genius, in which its whole environment, and all its relations, are permeated by the rose-breath of the soul, and the world is transformed into a garden of love-should we look at it more closely, and examine it in the light of human dignity and freedom, the more attractive the first sight of it had been, so much the more unworthy shall we ultimately find it in every respect." China and India were shut out by mountains and deserts from the rest of the world, and in early ages had not much contact even with each other. We perceive a change in the character of the civilization, when we approach nations that lay more contiguous to each other and to the awakening life of the West. For instance, in the wide regions that were under the influence of the religion of Zoroaster, stretching to the south of the Caspian, from the Oxus and Jaxartes to the Tigris, we discern already an awakening of the human spirit to a half-consciousness of its freedom and its ultimate destiny. Its ideal world, its subjective element, found expression in the kingdom of Ormuzd; and to embody that idea, and give it an objective reality in the subdual of Ahriman, the Dark Spirit, was the object of man's existence on earth. The antagonism of the two principles typified the struggles of human life; while the final triumph of Ormuzd symbolized the recompense, the grand consummating synthesis, with which they were destined to be closed. The precepts of the Zendavesta inculcated something higher than unquestioning compliance with an ancient law, and blind submission to a despotic priesthood; they enjoined useful labors, and a resolute encounter of evil in all its forms, as the condition of happiness in this and in a future world. They awakened, therefore, an incipient sense of personal independence, and deposited in the nation's heart the principle of progress. In Egypt, notwithstanding the massiveIn these two earliest types of civiliza- ness and fixity of its ancient civilization, tion, the synthesis was affected not by the principle of growth was not entirely the equilibrium and harmony of the sub-inactive. The canon of its hermetic jective and objective elements of human Scripture was never entirely closed. It life, but by the predominance of the was not, like China and India, wholly shut subjective in India, and of the objective up within itself. It made conquests northin China. In China there was a State, but ward and eastward, and must have imbibno free mental action; in India much in- ed new elements of life from the Semitic tellectual and imaginative development, and Hellenic races, with which it was inbut though there were ancient codes of creasingly brought in contact. But we law, as that of Menu, scarcely the rudi- observe only an incipient movement toments of a State. Hegel has acutely wards mental emancipation; it was never remarked, that history and a State almost completed. The Egyptian civilization, imply each other, and are the reciprocal after all, resembled more a crystallized conditions of each other's existence. We product than a living growth. The spirit observe, accordingly, that China has had was still immersed in naturalism, though a full and exact history from a remote with a visible effort to liberate itself. In antiquity, but little literature and no the sphinxes and other strange mixtures speculative philosophy; whereas India, of the human and brutal form, Hegel though abounding in poetry and specula- finds an expressive type of the mental tion, is almost entirely without a history. state of Egypt-confined and deadened tion to accept the truth of which they on one side by a reverence for the old symbolism and animal worship, yet struggling forth into mental freedom and independence on the other.* How to accom plish this mental emancipation was the problem, according to Hegel, which Egypt propounded to posterity, and which it transmitted to another civilization-that of Greece to solve. In the chasm between Egypt and Greece two other national developments intervened-one of immediate, the other of remoter influence -the Phoenician and the Hebraic, which must not be overlooked. The inestimable service rendered by Phoenicia to the world, was its breaking asunder, and virtually flinging off, the yoke of sacerdotalism. Its rough, bold, seafaring habits of mind effected this great deliverance, though the old rites and the old symbols were still outwardly retained. The priests of Phoenicia were only the most eminent of its citizens, and the functions of religion were retained among the privileges of its great mercantile aristocracy. It was through the tempering medium of Phoenician freedom that the seeds of a sacerdotal civilization were conveyed from Egypt to Greece. Though not renowned for science and literature themselves, the Phoenicians, by their diffusion of the knowledge of alphabetical characters among the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean, did for nascent Greece what the invention of the printing-press has done for modern Europe-it furnished the human mind with its most powerful instrument of progress, and gave it a weapon by which it could ever henceforth effectually repel and subdue the encroachments of a priesthood. With the earliest dawn of Greek history, we find the power of the priesthood gone. In a pastoral land of hills and brooks, shut in between the Jordan valley and the Mediterranean, lived a peculiar and secluded people, allied in speech and blood to the Phoenicians, who in quite another direction made an advance so marked and so decisive to-weight off their souls as the ruling gods wards spiritual freedom, that the world for centuries to come was not in a condi * Revolting as animal worship is to the feelings of Christians, Hegel argues, and with some reason, that it has not been more degrading in its influence than sun and planet worship; for in the wonderful instincts and mysterious movements of the brute creation, the Egyptians beheld with awe the working of a hidden and incomprehensible principle.-P. 258; Engl. Tr. p. 220. The moment we touch the coasts of Greece, we perceive that a change has come over the spirit of civilization. The hideous symbolism of Asia and Egypt disappears from the temples, and gives place to human forms of matchless grace and majesty. The old priesthoods are succeeded by high-spirited and independent chieftains, who take the offices of religion into their own hands, and keep its ministers in check. For the monotonous and crushing despotisms of the East are substituted the strife, the impulse, the restlessness of free monarchies or rising republics. Caste and privilege and degradation are replaced by the equality of all freemen under the law. The very heaven of the Greeks breathes the spirit of liberty. Their gods are all independent deities, yielding a free and unconstrained homage to the confessed superiority of Zeus. The Greeks looked on nature with a fresh wonder and delight, without being subdued and oppressed by it. They felt themselves its masters, and rolled its had overpowered the Titans. Their spirit was no longer steeped in mere physical impressions and influences. Conscious of freedom and strength, they turned their thoughts inward on themselves; yet not, like the Indians, to be absorbed in a dreamy subjectiveness. Their outward life was too bright and too joyous for that. They threw the light of their own minds on every object around them, and burnish ed the face of universal nature with their objective, delighting in beauty of form own intellectual brilliancy. They clothed and hue and movement, making the divine their gods with their own human feelings and the aesthetic all one; so that of the and attributes; and instead of leaving Romans was as decidedly subjective, deity, like the Hebrews, invisible and in- grave, serious, and practical, identifying accessible in a distant world of glory, they the moral with the divine. We speak, of infused it daily into their own redundant course, of the Romans as they were oriand tumultuous tide of life. Wherever ginally, before they fell under the influence they turned their eye in their own beau- of Greece. At an early period they ditiful land, in wood and glen and moun-rected their attention to questions of govtain stream, in the sacred plain or the ernment and law, and occupied themtemple-crowned promontory, or in the fair selves with defining men's social and poliisles that studded the blue Egean, a tical relations with each other. Some of genial presence welcomed them, which to the deities peculiar to them partook of them was living and real, and inspired the same abstract and ethical character: their poets and artists with the most ex- they were an embodiment of the personal quisite conceptions of outward and sen- conditions and subjective affections of the suous beauty. Such was the transforma- human mind-Peace, Health, Fortune, tion which the elements of Oriental civil- Victory-even such as were odious and ization underwent in the mind of Greece. negative - Fever, Ill-luck, Childlessness, While the old faith endured, and there was (Orbona.)* When their history comes harmony between the indwelling idea and into connection with that of the Greeks, its outward realization in their polity, their we find their most eminent men devoted religion and their art-their national life to the studies of politics and jurispru was in its bloom, and wore a beauty to dence; and this circumstance was not which no succeeding age has furnished a without effect on the next phase in the parallel. But the principle which animat- world's history, which was represented ed and held together the elements of this by Christianity. It helped to awaken the beautiful combination gave way to the mind to a distincter consciousness of perdissolving influence of the speculative in-sonal independence and personal respontellect. The idea proved too strong for the synthesis in which it had temporarily found an objective realization; and a new antithesis ensued, which worked the ruin of the old civilization of Greece. The conquests of Alexander prepared the way for the dominion of the next historical people-the Romans. Alexander is one of those world-historical personages whose career and conduct obtain a complete justification at the hands of Hegel. Alexander understood the purpose of his age, and endeavored to fulfill it. A great idea possessed his mind, and was the inspiration of his life. In reference to this leading object, his character must be judged. From first to last, a marvelous spirit of beauty invests the history of Greece. Two beautiful youths introduce and conclude it; its earliest articulate voice sang the grief and rage of one, and its last great reprisal on Asia was avenged. by the death of the other. These are mere it. were, by giving them an objective form, and deifyaccidents, according to the ordinary view;ing them. These deities were the objects of a free but Hegel has noticed their significance, and personal worship, quite distinct from the ancient aud they lend a sort of poetic charm to and national religion, and were honored, for the the most wonderful and fascinating narra- Their character is well described by C. G. Zumpt, most part, not with templa, but with simple sacella. tive in the great epic of human progress. Die Religion der Römer, read before the Verein für As the Greek genius was preeminently Wissenschaftliche Vorträge; Berlin. sibility. The distinction between res and persona was first clearly defined by the Roman jurists, as a basis for decisions in their courts of law. It is true, all this tended, in its immediate working under the Empire, to produce a selfish and isolated individualism, with no higher consciousness than that of holding property under certain conditions, and of being bound to the performance of cer tain duties under an all-embracing despotism. Hegel compares it to a body in a state of decay, resolving itself into innumerable worms. Still, the distincter perception of individual personality, with the rights, duties, and responsibilities attached to it, was an indispensable preparation for Thèse deities are a striking exemplification of the deep subjectiveness of the genius of the Romans. Particular feelings and ideas took such a hold of could not contain them there, but relieved itself, as their mind, and became so intensely real, that it |