Everything, however, has its explanation, and in the matter of English Hegelism I think I begin to see it. In the first place, I was rashly identifying England with a figment of my dreams, with which I was in love: I saw in my mind's eye a manly and single-minded England, free, candid, poetical, akin to feudal France, beauty-loving like old Italy, the Benjamin of the Roman family of nations, adding to the dignity and disinterestedness of the Castilian character only a certain blond charm, a certain infusion of northern purity, and of sympathy with the wild and rural voices of nature. In this England, in which there was something Spartan and archaically Greek, the men were like Hippolytus and the women like Antigone. Naturally it was unintelligible to me that the system of Hegel should take root in such a nation. Persons with a ripe moral tradition are not attracted by sophistry. No argument, however specious, will convince them that the experience of man on earth makes up the whole universe, or the chief part of it; much less will they allow fortune, under the pompous name of evolution, to dictate to them their moral allegiance. The chief force of the Hegelian system for those who are not metaphysicians lies in the criterion of progress which it imposes. This criterion is not beauty in art, nor truth in philosophy, nor justice in society, nor happiness in the individual life: the criterion is simply the direction which the actual movement happens to be taking. Hegel endeavours to show in what way forms are inevitably passing into one another. Thus his ethics begs defence of history, and his history calls for aid on metaphysics. And what metaphysics? A logic of moral fashions. Now it seemed to me axiomatic that eager co-operation with whatever is going on, or is bound to win, would be repulsive to a man of honour. Nor could I conceive a true Englishman taking kindly even to the grand side of this system, which to me personally is rather attractive, I mean to its satirical elevation. The English mind is tender and temperate: it deprecates scorn. But Hegel, in his scathing moods, is comparable to Heraclitus; he mocks every opinion with an opinion which refutes it, and every life with another life which kills it. He has the wisdom of the serpent; but unlike Heraclitus, whose fabled tears were warm, he has the heart of the serpent too. He despises finitude because it is weak, as if an infinity of pervasive weakness were strong, or a perpetual flux a victory for anything. Laughing, I can't help thinking, up his sleeve, he suggests that this flux itself is a victory for the spirit, meaning by spirit the law by which he supposes that this flux is controlled. But this is sheer mockery: the only moral victory is that achieved, under favourable conditions, by some living spirit, glad to be expressed or to have been expressed in some perfect form. The finite only is good: the infinite tides are worth exactly what they cast up.