Solger, visiting Hegel at the beginning of his Berlin career, writes to Tieck: “I was curious to see what impression the good Hegel would make here. No one talks of him, for he is quiet and busy” (3: p. 78). Yes, “quiet and busy”--this characterizes his mental as well as public life. Nothing like revelation, inspiration, sudden intuition, but only a long, painstaking, methodical reasoning brought him truths. Not only each of his thoughts, but also each of his phrases and words he determined by laborious weighing and balancing. He despised the mere expression of immediate feelings as a pseudo-philosophy, smacking of the Romantic school. For him, “philosophy was to express ‘with colorless words’ (_mit dürren Worten_) the clear, crystalline outlines of thought--the cool judgment of the spirit” (3: p. 39). Thus, according to his own characterization of the four traditional classifications of temperament, he belongs preëminently to the phlegmatic. His mind is objective, with little subjectivity; more historical than prophetic, more discursive than intuitive, more inclined to systematization than reformation, more conservative than destructive. This is Hegel. And in him Germany found a great counteracting agency against the sweeping movement of educational reform, engendered by the romantic and revolutionary spirit of the age. In this regard Hegel reminds us of Herbart. The dawn of the new Germany needed such prophetic men as Pestalozzi and Fichte, but her pacification and solidarity required a more constructive genius. Pestalozzi and Fichte stood as the champions of National Education. Hegel, “the official philosopher,” as he is often called, would become the advocate of “State Pedagogy.” Hegel’s philosophy has been called the Objective Absolute Idealism as opposed to the Subjective Absolute Idealism of Fichte, and the Logical Pantheism as opposed to the Alogical Pantheism of Schopenhauer. The logically minded Hegel saw methodical progressions of thought going on everywhere in the life of nature and humanity. The universal Essence or the Absolute was to him the mind, the intellect, or the reason. Every existence or phenomenon is the manifestation of the eternal unfolding of the Divine Reason. Everything in the world is “becoming,” is in the process of evolution; this “becoming” is the only actuality and life. This eternally progressive world-process is the education of universal beings by and through the _Logos_ or the self-education of God. Man takes part in the world-process of education, and realizes in himself the end of this evolution by becoming a free, self-conscious spirit--God attaining in him the consciousness of Himself.