Rationalism is an ethical belief in progress combined with an ethical will-to-progress. It was as such that Kant and Fichte had undertaken to deepen it. After passing through Hegel’s mind it is only a belief in progress . . . belief in a progress which is immanent in things. It is this alone that this powerful speculative thinker believes himself able to place upon a cosmic foundation, and in this he is in contact with Schleiermacher. On the whole, and reduced to the simplest possible expression, his world-view and Schleiermacher’s lie not very far apart. The secret feud in which the two thinkers lived with one another had in reality no objective justification. The extent of the strategical retreat on which Hegel enters remains hidden from his contemporaries. They rejoice unreservedly at the magnificent energy which his system displays, and with the less reservation because he himself only once, viz. in the Preface to his _Philosophy of Law_, expresses himself freely about the final results of his thinking. The fact that with him the moon of ethics is obscured does not evoke the excitement that might [pg 148] normally have been expected, because, in compensation, he allows the sun of the cosmically founded belief in progress to shine all the brighter. Being still under the influences of rationalism, the men of that time are so accustomed to regard ethics and belief in progress as organically connected that they look on the strengthening of optimism effected by Hegel as being also a strengthening of ethics. Hegel’s formal assumption that progress comes about through a succession of antitheses which are always finally reconciled in valuable syntheses has kept optimism alive through most critical times right on to the present day. Hegel is the creator of that confident feeling for reality with which Europe staggered into the second half of the nineteenth century without becoming aware that ethics have at some point or other been left behind. And that being so, he is able to hold his optimistic philosophy of history out of which his world-view grows, only because he lives in a period when a general temper which works with ethical energies of extraordinary strength is carrying Humanity forward in an extraordinary way. Whence the progress comes, which he experiences all around him, the great philosophic historian does not recognize. He explains as produced through natural forces what has originated from ethical ones.