... "Nothing," adds he, "is bad in itself. Good and evil indicate nothing positive in things considered in themselves, and are nothing but manners of thinking. Not only has every man the right to seek his good, his pleasure, but he cannot do otherwise. ... The measure of each man's right is his power. ... He who does not yet know reason, or who, having not as yet contracted the habit of virtue, lives according to the laws only of his appetites, is as much in his right as he who regulates his life according to the laws of reason. {324} In other words, just as the sage has an absolute right to do all that his reason dictates to him, or to live according to the laws of his reason, in the same manner has the ignorant man and the madman a right to everything that his appetite impels him to take; in other words, the right to live according to the laws of appetite. ... And he is no more obliged to live according to the laws of good sense than a cat is obliged to live under the laws that govern the nature of a lion. ... Hence we conclude that a compact has only a value proportioned to its utility; where the utility disappears the compact disappears too with it, and loses all its authority. There is, then, folly in pretending to bind a man forever to his word; unless, at least, man so contrive that the breach of the compact shall entail for him that violates it more danger than profit." [Footnote 67] [Footnote 67: Œuvres de Spinoza, vol. i, pp. clix, clx.] {325} Hegel is less absolute and less blind. Of a mind large, and from its greatness naturally just, he escaped at moments the yoke of his system. Struck by the particular truths, moral, historical, æsthetic, that offered themselves to his view in the theater of the universe, he admitted them without very well knowing what place he should assign to them. "He was," said one of his most intelligent disciples, "a conciliator in his philosophy. His philosophy stands midway between Theism and Pantheism; between historical right, as the expression of actual reason, and the absolute right to liberty and equality, as the end of universal history. His system seems to sanction the most profound piety, and to regard Christianity as the true and absolute religion, at the very time when it appears also as its negation; just as in politics it presents itself as at one and the same moment conservative and progressive, favorable to existing rights and yet revolutionary." [Footnote 68] [Footnote 68: Histoires de la philosophie allemande depuis Kant jusqu'a Hegel, by S. Willm: a work crowned by the Institute: vol. iv, p. 337.] {326}