Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)/Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

HEGEL (hā'gl), GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH, a German metaphysician; born in Stuttgart, in 1770. He studied at the theological institute of Tübingen from 1788-1793, and was next a private tutor at Berne (1793-1796), and subsequently at Frankfort-on-the-Main (1797-1800). Having removed to Jena, and contracted an intimacy with Schelling, he devoted himself to metaphysical study. After the battle of Jena, Hegel was employed on a newspaper at Bamberg till 1808.

He was professor successively at Jena, Heidelberg, and Berlin. He was at first the disciple of Schelling, with whom he was associated in the conduct of a philosophical journal in 1802-1803. But his opinions gradually took a different turn. He rejected Schelling's intellectual intuition as an unwarrantable assumption, though he continued to maintain its leading idea — the unity of the subjective or ideal, and the objective or real; and in this idea endeavored to establish that absolute cognition and absolute truth, which alone, according to this school, can satisfy the demands of the philosophical spirit. Hegel seems not to have perfected his system; and as he had no power of exposition, or of lucid expression of his thoughts, it is impossible to give a clear view of his philosophy. His most important works are his “Phenomenology of the Mind”; “Logic”; and “Encyclopædia of Philosophical Sciences.” He died in Berlin, in 1831.