[Footnote 67: Œuvres de Spinoza, vol. i, pp. clix, clx.]
Hegel is less absolute and less blind. Of a mind large, and from its greatness naturally just, he escaped at moments the yoke of his system. Struck by the particular truths, moral, historical, æsthetic, that offered themselves to his view in the theater of the universe, he admitted them without very well knowing what place he should assign to them. "He was," said one of his most intelligent disciples, "a conciliator in his philosophy. His philosophy stands midway between Theism and Pantheism; between historical right, as the expression of actual reason, and the absolute right to liberty and equality, as the end of universal history. His system seems to sanction the most profound piety, and to regard Christianity as the true and absolute religion, at the very time when it appears also as its negation; just as in politics it presents itself as at one and the same moment conservative and progressive, favorable to existing rights and yet revolutionary." [Footnote 68]
[Footnote 68: Histoires de la philosophie allemande depuis Kant jusqu'a Hegel, by S. Willm: a work crowned by the Institute: vol. iv, p. 337.]
"It is impossible," says M. Edmond Scherer, "to read Hegel without asking ourselves if he, be serious. He falls incessantly into a style of images and personifications; and one would suppose one's self, in perusing his writings, to be present at the formation of a mythology, at the development of a world like that of the ancient Gnostics, in which notions assumed forms and marched on, passing through all kinds of adventures." [Footnote 69]
[Footnote 69: Melanges d'histoire religieuse, pp. 298, 838.]
M. Edmond Scherer's is a mind hard to please, which is ever struck and offended by incoherence of objects, futility of artificial combinations, and vain play upon words, even where he recognizes or admires the genius. The philosophical "rout" is not embarrassed for so slight a cause; it marches straight to the object toward which the dominant idea, once adopted, gives the impulse. In spite of its complexities and of its craving for the reconciliation of religion and of politics, the Pantheism of Hegel has borne its natural fruits. A school has resulted from it, which, in accordance with its proper and independent manifestations, a learned and moderate judge, M. Willm, characterizes in these words: "The new German philosophy, of which Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Arnold Rüge are the principal chiefs, comes, in its ultimate results, in contact with the Humanism of M. Pierre Leroux, the Positivism of M. Auguste Comte, and the Atheism of M. Proudhon. It tends to substitute for the ancient worship the worship of humanity, and to found a new worship dispensing with God, and with morality properly so called. … There is no such thing as theology but only anthropology; for the mind of humanity is the divine mind realized. There is no longer any other piety than devotedness to the objects of humanity; no longer any other prayer than the contemplation of the human mind. … Man accomplishes every reasonable object if he accomplishes his own peculiar object, and he cannot do better than employ all his faculties to realize his own objects. Man's will be done: such is the principle of the new law." [Footnote 70]
[Footnote 70: Histoire de la philosophie allemande, depuis Kant jusqu'a Hegel: by S. Willm: vol. iv, pp. 624, 626.]