This is the ultimate result which the process of history is intended to accomplish ... Yet length of time is something entirely relative, and the element of spirit is eternity. Duration, properly speaking, cannot be said to belong to it."[1] Spirit has performed its arduous progress from the City of Destruction, or the natural man, to the Celestial City of perfect and enduring freedom. Hence time is not a feature of things, as they really are, and only seems to be such a category of reality, because the world-spirit has revealed itself gradually.
Once more, then, comes the question, Is the individual's freedom threatened by Hegel's thought? Can Hegel rightly be accused of propounding a system, which implies indifference to the individual's weal or woe? And certainly the problem has been changed. It is in accordance with the preceding analysis of Hegel's theory that whoever is excluded from participating in the realization of the universal spirit, so far as to be unable to have before him that realization as an end, is not free. Free he may imagine himself to be, because he can wriggle around at will within the confines of his ordinary wants and hopes ; but he is no more really free than the prisoner who strolls about in a jail-yard under the eye of a watchman. "Death," says Tourguéneff, "is a fisherman. He captures us in his net, but lets us remain a little while in the water. We swim here and there, but are always in the net; and the fisherman will take us when it pleases him."[2] If the individual cannot in any sense become one with objective reason, he is a fish swimming in the water in the net of Death. Thus, in the first place, the peoples of past ages, as has been said, could not have been really free, since spirit in its completeness, as defined by Hegel, lay beyond their thought and will. Secondly, when the completion of freedom was initiated, this step was not taken by any free agent. The hidden impulse of spirit was at the proper time revealed. But, to omit the historical difficulties, what can, in the third place, be said about us, upon whom the completed spirit is now shining? If, let us
