It was formerly a matter of some surprise to me that there should be so many Hegelians in England, and in such places of influence. I could imagine how the system might have taken root in circles where the classic tradition was absent or enfeebled--in America, in Scotland, among the Dissenters or Jews in England itself; but how could Oxford and Cambridge fail to see in that system the trail of the serpent? How could they mistake it for a Christian or for a spiritual philosophy? It is indeed, in form, an encyclopaedic system, and in that sense suitable to universities; and it deifies knowledge such as an encyclopaedia can give, turning it into the sum total of reality, so that it flatters the self-sufficiency of pedants, or that of any reflective mind. But in Oxford and Cambridge knowledge is not everything; they are more and less than universities; the learning they cultivate is selective and pursued in the service of aristocratic liberty. I should not expect them to care much for a philosophy that was not poetic and devout. I sometimes fancy how the genuine Oxonians must have smiled to hear T. H. Green, in the early days of transcendentalism, talking about his spiritual principle in nature. By spiritual he meant mind-made; he thought the world, remaining just as it is, could suddenly be proved to be spiritual if you could show that a mental synthesis was requisite to hold it together. But what possible advantage is it to the world to be held together by a mental synthesis, rather than by space or time or the truth of its constitution? A synthesis of worthless facts does not render them severally better, nor itself a good. A spirit whose essential function was to create relations would be merely a generative principle, as the spider is to its web; it would be no better than its work, unless perhaps it was spiritual enough to grow weary of that vain labour. Spiritual, for those who retain the language of Christendom, signifies free from the world and from the flesh, and addressed to the eternal and to the beautiful.