raptures. “The spectacle of these eternally dead masses gave
me nothing but the monotonous and at last tedious idea, ‘ Es
ist so.’ ”
Towards the close of his engagement at Bern, Hegel had received hopes from Schelling of a post at Jena. Fortunately his friend Hölderlin, now tutor in Frankfort, secured a similar situation there for Hegel in the family of Herr Gogol, a merchant (January 1797). The new post gave him more leisure and the society he needed.
About this time he turned to questions of economics and government. He had studied Gibbon, Hume and Montesquieu in Switzerland. We now find him making extracts from the English newspapers on the Poor-Law Bill of 1796; criticising the Prussian land laws, promulgated about the same time; and writing a commentary on Sir James Steuart’s Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy. Here, as in contemporaneous criticisms of Kant’s ethical writings, Hegel aims at correcting the abstract discussion of a topic by treating it in its systematic interconnexions. Church and state, law and morality, commerce and art are reduced to factors in the totality of human life, from which the specialists had isolated them.
But the best evidence of Hegel’s attention to contemporary politics is two unpublished essays—one of them written in 1798, “On the Internal Condition of Württemberg in Recent Times, particularly on the Defects in the Magistracy,” the other a criticism on the constitution of Germany, written, probably, not long after the peace of Lunéville (1801). Both essays are critical rather than constructive. In the first Hegel showed how the supineness of the committee of estates in Württemberg had favoured the usurpations of the superior officials in whom the court had found compliant servants. And though he perceived the advantages of change in the constitution of the estates, he still doubted if an improved system could work in the actual conditions of his native province. The main feature in the pamphlet is the recognition that a spirit of reform is abroad. If Württemberg suffered from a bureaucracy tempered by despotism, the Fatherland in general suffered no less. “Germany,” so begins the second of these unpublished papers, “is no longer a state.” Referring the collapse of the empire to the retention of feudal forms and to the action of religious animosities, Hegel looked forward to reorganization by a central power (Austria) wielding the imperial army, and by a representative body elected by the geographical districts of the empire. But such an issue, he saw well, could only be the outcome of violence—of “blood and iron.” The philosopher did not pose as a practical statesman. He described the German empire in its nullity as a conception without existence in fact. In such a state of things it was the business of the philosopher to set forth the outlines of the coming epoch, as they were already moulding themselves into shape, amidst what the ordinary eye saw only as the disintegration of the old forms of social life.
His old interest in the religious question reappears, but in a more philosophical form. Starting with the contrast between a natural and a positive religion, he regards a positive religion as one imposed upon the mind from without, not a natural growth crowning the round of human life. A natural religion, on the other hand, was not, he thought, the one universal religion of every clime and age, but rather the spontaneous development of the national conscience varying in varying circumstances. A people’s religion completes and consecrates their whole activity: in it the people rises above its finite life in limited spheres to an infinite life where it feels itself all at one. Even philosophy with Hegel at this epoch was subordinate to religion; for philosophy must never abandon the finite in the search for the infinite. Soon, however, Hegel adopted a view according to which philosophy is a higher mode of apprehending the infinite than even religion.
At Frankfort, meanwhile, the philosophic ideas of Hegel first assumed the proper philosophic form. In a MS. of 102 quarto sheets, of which the first three and the seventh are wanting, there is preserved the original sketch of the Hegelian system, so far as the logic and metaphysics and part of the philosophy of nature are concerned. The third part of the system—the ethical theory—seems to have been composed afterwards; it is contained in its first draft in another MS. of 30 sheets. Even these had been preceded by earlier Pythagorean constructions envisaging the divine life in divine triangles.
Circumstances soon put Hegel in the way to complete these outlines. His father died in January 1799; and the slender sum which Hegel received as his inheritance, 3154 gulden (about £260), enabled him to think once more of a studious life. At the close of 1800 we find him asking Schelling for letters of introduction to Bamberg, where with cheap living and good beer he hoped to prepare himself for the intellectual excitement of Jena. The upshot was that Hegel arrived at Jena in January 1801. An end had already come to the brilliant epoch at Jena, when the romantic poets, Tieck, Novalis and the Schlegels made it the headquarters of their fantastic mysticism, and Fichte turned the results of Kant into the banner of revolutionary ideas. Schelling was the main philosophical lion of the time; and in some quarters Hegel was spoken of as a new champion summoned to help him in his struggle with the more prosaic continuators of Kant. Hegel’s first performance seemed to justify the rumour. It was an essay on the difference between the philosophic systems of Fichte and Schelling, tending in the main to support the latter. Still more striking was the agreement shown in the Critical Journal of Philosophy, which Schelling and Hegel wrote conjointly during the years 1802–1803. So latent was the difference between them at this epoch that in one or two cases it is not possible to determine by whom the essay was written. Even at a later period foreign critics like Cousin saw much that was alike in the two doctrines, and did not hesitate to regard Hegel as a disciple of Schelling. The dissertation by which Hegel qualified for the position of Privatdozent (De orbitis planetarum) was probably chosen under the influence of Schelling’s philosophy of nature. It was an unfortunate subject. For while Hegel, depending on a numerical proportion suggested by Plato, hinted in a single sentence that it might be a mistake to look for a planet between Mars and Jupiter, Giuseppe Piazzi (q.v.) had already discovered the first of the asteroids (Ceres) on the 1st of January 1801. Apparently in August, when Hegel qualified, the news of the discovery had not yet reached him, but critics have made this luckless suggestion the ground of attack on a priori philosophy.
Hegel’s lectures, in the winter of 1801–1802, on logic and metaphysics were attended by about eleven students. Later, in 1804, we find him with a class of about thirty, lecturing on his whole system; but his average attendance was rather less. Besides philosophy, he once at least lectured on mathematics. As he taught, he was led to modify his original system, and notice after notice of his lectures promised a text-book of philosophy—which, however, failed to appear. Meanwhile, after the departure of Schelling from Jena in the middle of 1803, Hegel was left to work out his own views. Besides philosophical studies, where he now added Aristotle to Plato, he read Homer and the Greek tragedians, made extracts from books, attended lectures on physiology, and dabbled in other sciences. On his own representation at Weimar, he was in February 1805 made a professor extraordinarius, and in July 1806 drew his first and only stipend—100 thalers. At Jena, though some of his hearers became attached to him, Hegel was not a popular lecturer any more than K. C. F. Krause (q.v.). The ordinary student found J. F. Fries (q.v.) more intelligible.
Of the lectures of that period there still remain considerable notes. The language often had a theological tinge (never entirely absent), as when the “idea” was spoken of, or “the night of the divine mystery,” or the dialectic of the absolute called the “course of the divine life.” Still his view was growing clearer, and his difference from Schelling more palpable. Both Schelling and Hegel stand in a relation to art, but while the aesthetic model of Schelling was found in the contemporary world, where art was a special sphere and the artist a separate profession in no intimate connexion with the age and nation, the model of Hegel was found rather in those works of national
