Hegel the future aroused no interest; witness his dismissal of the New World with the remark that it belonged to the future. He meant that the Americas could not be said to have yet entered the full stream of the world, and had to wait their development. Doubtless the future would be of momentous interest to peoples who were now merely embryonic, but only because they were at a point over which fully developed peoples had already passed. Accordingly one of the few prophecies, in which Hegel permitted himself to indulge, is that a race-war was likely to occur between North and South America. But such a war was, so Hegel said, in the future, since the peoples of America engaged in conquering and tilling the soil were self-conscious only in germ, as compared with the mature nations of Europe.
Thus we are shut up to the view that now at last, after a wide compass round has been fetched, the course of development is finished, the completion of freedom has been gained, and is portrayed at full length in the Philosophy of Right. Thus freedom stands fully revealed, not as the union of the individual with any social system, but only with that social order said by Hegel to be the realization of spirit. For freedom is in the end " nothing but the recognition and adoption of such universal substantial objects as Right and Law, and the production of a reality that is accordant with them—the State."[1] Deepened, undoubtedly, has this conception of the state become by Hegel's proof that it not only answers the claims of abstract logical deduction, but also is the heir of time, and time, too, viewed as the vehicle for the revelation of spirit. But time is after all only the husk of spirit and may, when spirit has matured, be discarded. Time was never really a phase of the inner nature of spirit, but in some sense an accident, since, as Hegel says, all the phases of spirit were present in spirit from the outset. Hence when the great day's work of spirit is over, time is no more, and the spirit in complete consciousness of itself enters upon the enjoyments of its endless Sabbath. "Freedom has found the means of realizing its ideal,—its true existence.
- ↑ Philosophy of History, Introduction, p. 62.
