Thus the controlling and central conception of life and actuality, which is the final explanation of all that man thinks and does, has a twofold aspect. There is, as it were, a double Absolute—for under this name philosophy has what in religion corresponds to God. It is true that in the final form of his system the Absolute Spirit has three phases—each as it were passing on into and incorporated with the next—Art working out its implications till it appears as Religion, and Religion calling for its perfection in Philosophy. But in the Phenomenology, his first work, the religion of Art only intervenes as a grade from 'natural' religion to religion manifest or revealed; and in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia what is subsequently called Art is entitled the Religion of Art. It is in entire accordance with these indications when in the Lectures on Aesthetics[3] it is said 'the true and original position of Art is to be the first-come immediate self-satisfaction of Absolute Spirit'; though in our days (it is added) 'its form has ceased to be the highest need of the spirit.' It is hardly too much then to say that, for Hegel, the Absolute has two phases, Religion and Philosophy.
The Hegelian view presents itself most decisively, though perhaps with a little lecture-like over-insistance, in the Philosophy of Religion[4]. 'The object of religion as of philosophy is the eternal truth in its very objectivity,—God and nothing but God,—and the "explication" of God. Philosophy is not a wisdom of the world, but cognition of the non-worldly: not a cognition of the external mass of empirical existence and life, but cognition of what is eternal, what is God, and what flows from His nature. For this nature must reveal and develop itself. Hence philosophy "explicates" itself only when it "explicates" religion; and in explicating itself it explicates religion.... Thus religion and philosophy coincide: in fact, philosophy is itself a divine service, is a religion: for it is the same renunciation of subjective fancies and opinions, and is engaged with God alone.'
Again, it may be asked in what sense philosophy has to deal with God and with Truth. These two terms are often synonyms in Hegel. All the objects of science, all the terms of thought, all the forms of reality, lead out of themselves, and seek for a centre and resting-point. They are severally inadequate and partial, and they crave adequacy and completeness. They tend to organise themselves; to call out more and more distinctly the fuller reality which they presuppose,—which must have been, otherwise they could not have been: they reduce their first appearance of completeness to its due grade of inadequacy and bring out their complementary side, so as to constitute a system or universe; and in this tendency to a self-correcting unity consists their progress to truth. Their untruth lies in isolation and pretended independence or finality. This completed unity, in which all things receive their entireness and become adequate, is their Truth: and that Truth, as known in religious language, is God. Rightly or wrongly, God is thus interpreted in the Logic of Hegel.
Such a position must seem very strange to one who is familiar only with the sober studies of English philosophy. In whatever else the leaders of the several schools in this country disagree, they are nearly all at one in banishing God and religion to a world beyond the present sublunary sphere, to an inscrutable region beyond the scope of scientific inquiry, where statements may be made at will, but where we have no power of verifying any statement whatever. This is the common doctrine of Spencer and Mansel, of Hamilton and Mill. Even those English thinkers, who show some anxiety to support what is at present called Theism, generally rest content with vindicating for the mind the vague perception of a Being beyond us, and differing from us incommensurably. God is to them a residual phenomenon, a marginal existence. Outside the realm of experience and knowledge there is not-nothing—a something—beyond definite circumscription: incalculable, and therefore an object, possibly of fear, possibly of hope: the reflection in the utter darkness of a great What-may-it-not-be? He is the Unknown Power, felt by what some of these writers call intuition, and others call experience. They do not however allow to knowledge any capacity of apprehending in detail the truths which belong to the kingdom of God. Now the whole teaching of Hegel is the overthrow of the limits thus set to religious thought. To him all thought, and all actuality when it is grasped by knowledge, is from man's side, an exaltation of the mind towards God: while, when regarded from the divine standing-point, it is the manifestation by God of His own nature in its infinite variety.
It is only when we fix our eyes clearly on these general features in his speculation, that we can understand why he places the maturity of ancient philosophy in the time of Plotinus and Proclus. Not that these Neo-Platonists are, as thinkers, of power equal to their master of Athens. But, in the realm of the blind the one-eyed may be king. The later thinkers set their vision more distinctly and persistently on the land that is eternal—'on the further side of being,' to quote Plato's phrase. It is for the same reason Hegel gives so much attention to the religious or semi-religious theories of Jacob Böhme and of Jacobi, though these men were in many ways so unlike himself.
[1] Hegel's Leben, p. 155. It was in his dissertation de Orbitis Planetarum, that the notorious contretemps occurred, whereby, whilst the philosopher, leaning to a Pythagorean proportion, hinted—in a line—that it was unnecessary to expect a planet between Mars and Jupiter, astronomers in the same year discovered Ceres, the first-detected of the Planetoids. A good deal has been made out of this trifle; but it has not yet been shown that the corroboration was anything but the luck of the other hypothesis.
[2] Vermischte Schriften, vol. ii. p. 520. Duboc was a retired hatter, of French origin, who had settled at Hamburg (Hegel's Briefe, ii. 76 seqq.).
[3] Werke, x. I, p. 131.
[4] Werke, xi. p. 21.