Hegel withdraws. It is the duty of philosophy to labour to make the perception--the fleeting, uncertain, trembling perception--of faith, a clear, sure, inwardly consistent knowledge: to show, and not merely to assert, that 'the path of (this world's) duty is the way to (that world's) glory.' There is, Hegel himself has said more than once, something opposed to ordinary ways of thinking in the procedure of the philosopher. To the outsider, it seems like standing on your head. It involves something like what, in religious language, is termed conversion--a new birth--becoming a new man. But though such a change always seems to culminate in a moment of sudden transformation,--as if the continuity of old and new were disrupted, the process has a history and a preparation. Of that pilgrim's progress of the world-distracted soul to its discovery of its true being in God, philosophy is the record: a record which Hegel has written both in the _Phenomenology of Mind_, and, more methodically, in his _Encyclopaedia._ The passage from nature to God--or from man's limitations to the divine fullness--must be made, he urged, in the open day and not in the secret vision when sleep falls upon men. When the aged Jacobi read these requirements of Hegel, he wrote to a friend: 'He may be right, and I should like once again to experiment with him all that the power of thinking can do alone, were not the old man's head too weak for it[11].' 'For a philosophy like this,' says Hegel[12], 'individual man and humanity are the ultimate standpoint:--as a fixed invincible finitude of reason, not as a reflection of the eternal beauty, or as a spiritual focus of the universe, but as an ultimate sense-nature, which however with the power of faith can daub itself over here and there with an alien supersensible. Let us suppose an artist restricted to portrait-painting; he might so far idealise as to introduce in the eye of a commonplace countenance a yearning look, and on its lips a melancholy smile, but he would be utterly debarred from depicting the Gods, sublime over yearning and melancholy--as if the delineation of eternal pictures were only possible at the cost of humanity. So too Philosophy--on this view--must not portray the Idea of man, but the abstraction of a humanity empirical and mingled with short-comings, and must bear a body impaled on the stake of the absolute antithesis; and when it clearly feels its limitation to the sensible, it must at the same time bedeck itself with the surface colour of a supersensible, and point the finger of faith to a something Higher.