unconscious instinct,'[1] whose nature it was to strive towards completeness.
Hegel did not regard the process of evolution as dragging itself on ad infinitum. In his thought there could be no such subservience of spirit to the mere lapse of time. He was as firmly convinced as any of the apostles that it was rational to speak of these latter days, and of the inauguration of the kingdom of divine reason. Just so surely as in the Logic, after wading through the necessary swamps, bogs, and morasses of the lower categories, we reach the table-lands of self-consciousness, so in the Philosophy of History, after passing through the lower phases of spirit and freedom, we reach spirit and freedom in their completeness. To set up as an end something which by its very nature can never be attained is, as Hegel affirms, to deprive existence of its meaning; its bones would be marrowless, its blood would be cold.
So much for the process; now what is the culmination? Apart from the view that the completion of spirit is a mere ideal, in the sense that it serves to direct our efforts, but is hopelessly beyond realization, two other possible interpretations of Hegel's views confront us, (1) that absolute freedom is to be had at some definite time future, and (2) that it is had now. A third interpretation, conceivable though not probable, is that at a fixed time past freedom was attained, and that from that time forward the development is not towards freedom, but of freedom. The improbability of such a view lies in this that, as the course of evolution is admitted to be uninterrupted, inadequate conceptions would be a characteristic of every age, and the selection of any event or series of events as the introduction of complete freedom would be as arbitrary as, e.g., the selection of a particular day or week as the beginning of modern thought. Hence such a view leads to the nirvana of an endless succession quite as markedly as the view which Hegel himself has set aside.
As to the idea that spirit will at some definite future time come to perfect self-consciousness, a word will suffice. In
- ↑ Philosophy of History, Introduction, pp. 8, 26.
