Hegel's collected works, published after his death, fill over twenty good-sized volumes. Besides the treatises already mentioned, they include his _Lectures on the History of Philosophy_, the _Philosophy of History_, the _Philosophy of Religion_, _Æsthetics_, etc., made up with much literary skill from the Professor's own notes and from the reports of his hearers. The most permanently valuable of these is the _Æsthetics_; but any student desirous of getting a notion of Hegelianism at first hand had better begin with the _Philosophy of History_, of which there is a good and cheap English translation in one of Bohn's Libraries. Some general points of view serving to connect the system with its predecessors are all that room can be found for here. As compared with Kant, Hegel is distinguished above all by his complete abjuration of the agnostic standpoint in epistemology. "The universe is penetrable to thought": an unknowable thing in itself does not exist. Indeed, the intelligible reality of things is just what we know best; the unaccountable residuum, if any, lurks in the details of their appearance. So also in Greek philosophy Hegel holds that the truth was not in the ideal world of Plato, but in the self-realising Forms of Aristotle. As against Fichte, Hegel will not allow that the reconciliation of the subjective with the objective is an infinitely "far-off divine event"; on the contrary, it is a process being continually realised by ourselves and all about us. In his homely expression, the very {114} animals as they eat turn their food into consciousness, in utter disregard of prejudice. But Fichte's condemnation of Schelling's Indifferentism is quite right. _The Absolute is Mind_. Nature exists only as the lower stage, whence Spirit emerges to contradict, to confront, and to explain her as the necessary preparation for his supreme self-assertion. And Fichte was right in working out his system by the dialectical method of contradiction and solution, as against the dogmatism that summarily decrees the Absolute, without taking the trouble to reason it out, in imitation of the plan pursued by the universe in becoming conscious of itself.