To elevate philosophy from a love of wisdom into the possession of real wisdom, into a system and a science, is the aim which he distinctly set before himself from the beginning. In almost every work, and every course of lectures, whatever be their subject, he cannot let slip the chance of an attack upon the mode of philosophising which substituted the strength of belief or conviction for the intervention of reasoning and argument. There may have been a strong sympathy in him with the end which these German contemporaries and, in some ways, analogues to Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Byron had in view. No one who reads his criticism of Kant can miss perceiving his bent towards the Infinite. But he utterly rejects the vision of feeling, whether as longing faith or devout enjoyment, as an adequate exposition of the means to this end. Whereas these fantastic seers and sentimentalists either disparage science as a limitation to the spirit, in the calm trust of their life in God, or yearn throughout life for a peace which they never quite reach, Hegel is bent upon showing men that the Infinite is not unknowable, as Kant would have it, and yet that man can not, as Jacobi would have it, naturally and without an effort enjoy the things of God[14]. He will prove that the way of Truth is open, and prove it by describing in detail every step of the road. Philosophy for him must be reasoned truth. She does not visit favoured ones in visions of the night, but comes to all who win her by patient study.