His first concern is to show that the State, correctly conceived, is not merely a legal, but a legal-ethical body. Fichte had made it the ethical educator of the individual. For Hegel it is the essential element in all moral happenings, [pg 145] “the self-conscious moral substance,” as he expresses it. What is most valuable in the moral comes to actuality in it and through it. This overvaluing of the State is a natural consequence of his low valuation of the spiritual significance of individuality as such. Hegel’s supra-ethical world-view. His belief in progress With Fichte’s idea, which he found it impossible to work out completely, of giving ethics a cosmic foundation in such a way that its content might be the bringing of the world under the sovereignty of reason, Hegel can have nothing to do. His feeling for the real debars him from anything so fantastic. But that he altogether gives up the cosmic notion of ethics is fatal. Instead of allowing ethics and nature-philosophy to come to an understanding together in his speculative thought, he makes a sacrifice of ethics from the start. He refuses them the liberty (which they enjoyed with Spinoza, Fichte, and Schleiermacher), of trying to get themselves conceived as the relation of the individual to the universe. They are forbidden, further, to try (as they can do with the Chinese monists), to get accepted as a relation which forms part of the meaning of the universe. They are restricted to being a standard for the regulation of the relations between individuals and society. They may not be active as a formative idea in the creation of a world-view upon a foundation of nature-philosophy. They are simply built into the edifice as an already shaped and dressed stone. In consequence of Hegel’s allowing ethics no significance beyond that of a preparatory motive to realizing the spiritual meaning of the world, his teaching becomes remarkably analogous to the Brahmanic. Hegel and the Brahmans are akin because, as consistent thinkers, they venture to admit that thought about the world and the Absolute which lies behind it can reach only an intellectual, never an ethical meaning in the union of the finite spirit [pg 146] with the infinite, and therefore value ethics only as a preparatory motive thereto. With the Brahmans ethics prepare the individual for the intellectual act in which he experiences the Absolute in himself and himself dies in it. With Hegel they help in the formation of society, in the communal spirit of which the Absolute first becomes capable of experiencing itself.