crudely enveloped in religion and custom to that of civilized times, something whose nature none can tell precisely, owing to lack of documents and the elements of research, to what is evidently art and philosophy. Such enquirers adopt precisely an opposite course to that followed by the sciences of observation, which have made telescopes and microscopes to enlarge the little and bring the distant near. They seek for instruments which shall diminish the great and make the near remote. Theirs is a strange empirical caricature of philosophy, which substitutes the chronologically remote for the fundamentally conceptual, and for the logically simple, the materially small, which is not, on that account, simple and is far less transparent. For our part (and we say it in passing), we believe that to furnish examples of where to fix the attention in logical enquiry, the minds of an Aristotle or of a Kant afford all we require, without there being any necessity to have recourse to the psychology of sucklings and idiots. But to study Aristotle and Kant does not suffice for knowledge of the truth of the concept. We must find in all beings of whatever grade and importance, the universal Spirit and its eternal forms. And since we have studied the first and most ingenuous form of knowledge, Art, in a special volume, we shall here begin our examination of the second of its forms, Philosophy; and first of all, of Philosophy _in the strict sense._ II PHILOSOPHY [Sidenote: _Philosophy as pure concept and the various definitions of philosophy. Those which deny philosophy._]