dominating small bourgeois class in Germany whereby, in addition, the necessity to us of the existence of the nobility is shown in a speculative fashion. The essential usefulness of the system is sufficient to explain the manufacture of a very tame political conclusion by means of a thoroughly revolutionary method of reasoning. The special form of this conclusion springs from this, as a matter of fact, that Hegel was a German, and, as in the case of his contemporary Goethe, he was somewhat of a philistine. Goethe and Hegel, each of them was an Olympian Zeus in his own sphere, but they were neither of them quite free from German philistinism. But all this does not hinder the Hegelian system from playing an incomparably greater role than any earlier system and by virtue of this role developing riches of thought which are astounding even to-day. Phenomenology of the mind (which one may parallel with embryology and palaeontology of the mind), an evolution of the individual consciousness, through its different steps, expressed as a brief reproduction of the steps through which the consciousness of man has historically passed, logic, natural philosophy, mental philosophy, and the latter worked out separately in its detailed historical subdivisions, philosophy of history, of jurisprudence, of religion, history of philosophy, esthetics, etc. Hegel labored in all these different historical fields to discover and prove the thread of evolution, and as he was not only a creative genius, but also a man of encyclopedic learning, he was thus, from every point of view, the maker of an epoch. It is self-evident that by virtue of the necessities of the "System" he must very often take refuge in certain forced constructions, about which his pigmy opponents make such an ado even at the present time. But these constructions are only the frames and scaffoldings of his work; if one does not stop unnecessarily at these but presses on further into the building one will find uncounted treasures which hold their full value to-day. As regards all philosophers, their system is doomed to perish and for this reason, because it emanates from an imperishable desire of the human soul, the desire to abolish all contradictions. But if all contradictions are once and for all disposed of, we have arrived at the so-called absolute truth, history is at an end, and yet it will continue to go on, although there is nothing further left for it to do--thus a newer and more insoluble contradiction. So soon as we have once perceived--and to this perception no one has helped us more than Hegel himself--that the task thus imposed upon philosophy signifies nothing different than the task that a single philosopher shall accomplish what it is only possible for the entire human race to accomplish, in the course of its progressive development--as soon as we understand that, it is all over with philosophy in the present sense of the word. In this way one discards