His philosophy, like Froebel's,
marks in one direction an indispensable contribution to a valid
conception of the process of life. The weaknesses of an abstract
individualistic philosophy were evident to him; he saw the
impossibility of making a clean sweep of historical institutions,
of treating them as despotisms begot in artifice and nurtured in
fraud. In his philosophy of history and society culminated the
efforts of a whole series of German writers -- Lessing, Herder,
Kant, Schiller, Goethe -- to appreciate the nurturing influence
of the great collective institutional products of humanity. For
those who learned the lesson of this movement, it was henceforth
impossible to conceive of institutions or of culture as
artificial. It destroyed completely -- in idea, not in fact --
the psychology that regarded "mind" as a ready-made possession of
a naked individual by showing the significance of "objective
mind" -- language, government, art, religion -- in the formation
of individual minds. But since Hegel was haunted by the
conception of an absolute goal, he was obliged to arrange
institutions as they concretely exist, on a stepladder of
ascending approximations. Each in its time and place is
absolutely necessary, because a stage in the self-realizing
process of the absolute mind. Taken as such a step or stage, its
existence is proof of its complete rationality, for it is an
integral element in the total, which is Reason.
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