Volume 1

The secret of Hegel : being the Hegelian system in origin, principle, form, and matter / by James Hutchison Stirling.

Date:
1865
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The secret of Hegel : being the Hegelian system in origin, principle, form, and matter / by James Hutchison Stirling. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    of Hegc], which may be taken to have commenced, though at first feebly, with the appearance of the Phaenomenologie in 1807, ScheUing had preserved an ahnost unbroken and very remarkable silence. (Could he have been trying to miderstand Hegel ?) No sooner was Hegel dead, however, than Schelhng let hints escape him—this was as early as 1832—of the speedy appearance on his part of yet another Philosophy, and, this time, of transcendent and unimagined import. No pubhcation followed these hmts, nevertheless, till 1834, when, in reference to a certain translation of Cousin, he gave vent to 'a very sharp and depreciatory estimate of the Hegehan Philosophy,' and on grounds that were equally hostile to his own, from which that of Hegel was supposed to have sprung. Lastly, at Berlin in 1841, he pubhcly declared his previous Philosophy—and, of course, the Philosophy of Hegel seemed no less involved—to have been a poem, ' a mere poem,' and he now offered in its place his ' Philosophy of Eevelation.' Now, with these facts before it, at the same time that all Germany united to reject this last Philosophy as certainly for its part a poem whatever its predecessor might have been, how could the general pubhc be expected to feel ? Worn out with the two generations of fever that had followed the Ki'itik of Kant, would not the natural impulse be to take the re- maining philosopher of the series at his word, and beheve with him that the whole. matter had been in truth a poem, a futile striving of mere imagination in the empty air of an unreal and false abstraction ? This same pubhc, moreover, found itself on trial compelled to forego the hope of judging Hegel for itself, and,