being conscious of the full significance of what they do,[1] since the units with which the world-spirit deals are not individuals but nations. In fact, the dialectical movement at the basis of world-history is the self-caused movement of reason, making its way into universal and true existence gradually, and mirroring itself during the process more or less feebly in the thought and will of the most significant world-agents. The goal of the process is, as we have said, universal existence, which Hegel has otherwise defined as spirit in its completeness or essential being.[2] This completed spirit is self-consciousness, now at last wholly realized, and this realized self-consciousness is, and here again is our problem, "freedom."[3] History is nothing else than the development of the conception of freedom, and human beings are free if their insight corresponds to the reason realized in the world.[4]
Before asking a second time how far Hegel repels by anticipation the charge of Schwegler and v. Hartmann, we may observe that Hegel in his Philosophy of History seems definitely committed to the view that the realization of spirit is a process in time. What I called a lapse from grace, where Hegel was professedly dealing with abstractions, is here a confirmed mood. And it is surely a higher standpoint, because it is an attempt to show that truth and reality are one, that reason is in some way or other at the basis of everything that has occurred in the history of mankind. The historical method of investigation, a method which has been pushed almost to an extreme, takes its departure from Hegel's determination to prove that the time- materials are realities.
But for us the real points of interest are the special character or quality of truth or freedom assigned to any bygone period of history by Hegel's principle of development, and more particularly the nature of that freedom which is the upshot of the whole procedure. First, as to the process itself, it may be
