enough, just because He is Himself out of time; because He is eternal."

The appearance of unity is thus gained by pressing the philosophical or Aristotelian view of evolution, which implies the presence of the End in the beginning. The Idea, Hegel would seem to say, is the eternal, which possesses itself equally in each of its forms-to which, therefore, the time-evolution is in a sense indifferent. But, in point of fact, this application of the philosophical notion of development does not give a true rendering of the doctrine. Hegel's view practically identifies the different stages; to be implicit and to be explicit makes no real difference to what may be called the developing subject. In the real world, however, this does constitute a difference to the developing subject, and without this real difference the notion of development would disappear altogether. The oak-subject is different when it is an acorn from what it is when it is a full-grown oak; the human subject is different as a child from the same subject as the full-grown philosopher. And what is more, only one stage is real at a time.1 The subject of these trans

1 This is quite consistent with saying that nothing of the past is lost. As Hegel puts it, "The grades which spirit seems to

formations does not exist as the perfect form while it is still struggling towards it; it does not exist as the évépyeia, while it is still in the δύναμις, and when it has attained the ἐνέργεια, it exists no longer as the Súvaμis. The acorn does not exist as the oak-tree while it is still the acorn, but only afterwards when it has grown into the oak; and then it no longer exists as the acorn. If we apply the same idea. to the process of the universe, and treat it as the evolution of a single subject or Universal Self, we must, if the process is to be a real one and to correspond to the notion of development, have a self which grows from less to more—a self, at least, which is somehow different at A from what it is at B, and still more different from what it is at its culmination in Z. We must either admit a growing Absolute of this description, or say that the Absolute exists only in eternal perfection at Z, and that A, B, C, D, and the rest are the result of something very like subjective illusion. Passages might be quoted from Hegel which apparently make

have left behind, it still possesses in the depth of its present." But they do not exist now in the same sense in which they existed then; their present existence is only in the form of memory, conscious or organic.

...

for the latter view. Perhaps the strongest of these is in the 'Encyclopædia,' where he says: "Objectivity is, as it were, only a hull or wrapping under which the Notion lies concealed. The consummation of the infinite End or Aim consists, therefore, merely in removing the illusion which makes it seem yet unaccomplished. . . . This illusion it is under which we live, and it alone supplies the actualising force on which our interest in the world depends. In the course of its process the Idea makes itself that illusion by setting up an antithesis to confront itself, and its action consists in getting rid of the illusion which it has created."1 But such a passage does not fairly represent the general tenor of his thought: this morally paralysing view of existence represents rather a rebound on Hegel's part from the opposite extreme of a growing God. For, as he insists himself so strongly in his criticisms of Fichte, it is absurd to place the reality of the universe in an End which is nowhere as yet realised. On precisely the same grounds, it is a perversion of the notion of immanent development to argue as if a development could be explained by a principle which, at the outset of the de

1 Wallace, 304.

velopment, existed, as the saying is, only potentially. If the completed self-consciousness is to be in truth the actuality - the moving and directing power-of the whole process, then it must exist as such throughout the process. But in that case it cannot be identified, as Hegel identifies it, with the subject which undergoes development, and which distinctly does not exist in completeness except at the end of the process, if, indeed, then. In other words, we have not one subject, but two. To fall back upon our simple instance—which, of course, is only an analogue-the full-grown pak gives rise to the fresh acorn, but the oak-subject is not therefore to be identified with the acornsubject which passes from stage to stage, and eventually becomes an oak itself. Similarly, although we may assume a divine Subject as in some, to us incomprehensible, way, the author and inspirer of the time-development which is for us the immediately real, it nowise follows that the divine Subject is to be identified with the Subject which undergoes this development— or rather, we should say, with the innumerable subjects of this development, for there is no one Subject of history, and to speak of the World-spirit as such is at most a pardonable figure of speech.

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LECTURE VI.

HEGELIANISM AS AN ABSOLUTE SYSTEM.

I ENDEAVOURED in the preceding Lecture to point out two lines of thought in Hegel. The one starts from the idea of God, which is NeoPlatonically constructed as Trinity in unity, but which is simply the idea of knowledge as such, treated as a real being. There is no pasconception to the

sage from this hypostatised

facts of the finite world. The second line of thought starts with these facts, and treats the historical development of humanity as the process in which the Absolute comes to itself. These two lines of thought, I argued, are not successfully brought together by Hegel, and the attempt to bring them together involves a violation of the true notion of development. One of these views was bound to give way to