Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heisst,
Das ist im Grund der herren eigner Geist,,
In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln.
Cf. also Hegel, Werke, ix. 8. 'A second kind of reflectional history is the pragmatic. When we have to do with the past and are engaged with a distant world, the mind sees rising before it a present, which it has from its own action as a reward for its trouble. The events are different; but their central and universal fact, their structural plan is identical. This abolishes the past and makes the event present. Pragmatic reflections, however abstract they be, are thus in reality the present, and vivify the tales of the past with the life of to-day.—Here too a word should specially be given to the moralising and the moral instructions to be gained through history,—for which it was often studied.... Rulers, statesmen, nations, are especially bidden learn from the experience of history. But what experience and history teach is that nations and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted upon teaching which could have been drawn from it.'
Cf. Froude: Divorce of Catherine, p. 2. 'The student (of history) looks for an explanation (of political conduct) in elements which he thinks he understands—in pride, ambition, fear, avarice, jealousy, or sensuality.'
P. [257], § 141. Cf. Goethe, xxiii, 298. 'What is the outside of an organic nature but the ever-varied phenomenon of the inside? This outside, this surface is so exactly adapted to a varied, complex, delicate, inward structure that it thus itself becomes an inside: both aspects, the outside and the inside, standing in most direct correlation alike in the quietest existence and in the most violent movement.'
P. [260], § 143. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2nd ed. p. 266.
P. 269, § 147. Cf. Schelling, Werke, v. 290 (cf. iii. 603). 'There are three periods of history, that of nature, of destiny, and of providence. These three ideas express the same identity, but in a different way. Destiny too is providence, but recognised in the real, as providence, is also destiny, but beheld (angeschaut) in the ideal.'
P. [275], § 151. On the relation between Spinoza and Leibniz cf. Hegel, Werke, iv. 187-193. It would be a mistake, however, to represent Leibniz as mainly engaged in a work of conscious antagonism to Spinoza.
P. [277], § 153. Jacobi.—Jacobi (like Schopenhauer) insists specially on the distinction between grounds (Gründe)—which are formal, logical, and verbal, and causes (Ursachen)—which carry us into reality and life and nature. To transform the mere Because into the cause we must (he says) pass from logic and the analytical understanding to experience and the inner life. Instead of the timelessness of simultaneity which characterises the logical relation cf ground and consequent, the nexus of cause and effect introduces the element of time,—thereby acquiring reality (Jacobi, Werke, iii. 452). The conception of Cause—meaningless as a mere category of abstract thought—gets reality as a factor in experience, ein Erfahrungsbegriff, and is immediately given to us in the consciousness of our own causality (Jacobi, Werke, iv. 145-158). Cf. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vern. p. 116.
P. [283], § 158. The Amor intellectualis Dei (Spinoza, Eth. v. 32) is described as a consequence of the third grade of cognition, viz. the scientia intuitiva which 'proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate cognition of the essence of things (ii. 40, Schol. 2). From it arises (v. 27), the highest possible acquiescentia mentis, in which the mind contemplates all things sub specie aeternitatis (v. 29), knows itself to be in God and sees itself and all things in their divine essence. But this intellectual love of mind towards God is part of the infinite love wherewith God loves himself (v. 36) 'From these things we clearly understand in what our salvation or blessedness or liberty consists: to wit, in the constant and eternal love towards God, or in the love of God towards men' (Schol. to v. 36).