There was a time when the Hegelian system ranked as a foremost intellectual phenomenon. It was, perhaps, the highest that philosophy ever had achieved; but its manifest fault consisted in its being a purely philosophical and _a priori_ system. A philosophy that existed in external opposition to the sciences remained only an empty abstraction, just as force when severed from the phenomenon, or Deity when opposed to the outside world. Hegel's philosophy ultimately recognised, that force only is or exists in the phenomenon; that the internal itself constitutes the external, the Deity is only present in the universe, the infinite in the finite. Any philosophy proclaiming all this must be said to have succumbed with a vengeance to its own dialectic process. A philosophy of this kind would seem to have signed its own death-warrant—or according to the popular German saying, "hat selbst den Stab über sich gebrochen!" And thus it really happened to Hegelianism—we mean to _genuine German_ Hegelianism. From that moment it forfeited its claim to be regarded as the highest truth. It was compelled to step forth out of its one-sided exclusiveness, out of its opposition to empirical science. Hegelianism was not expected to effect any kind of compromise or reconciliation with empirical science, because any yielding on its own part would have been illogical, and could only have brought about a momentary truce, but no lasting peace. On the contrary, Hegelianism had to suffer the infinitely bitter pang of self-immolation. It had deliberately to commit suicide, in order thereupon to be welded with empirical science into a much higher and more comprehensive _unity_. In other words,—in fact in _Hegel's own words_—"when the old principle thus reappears, it is no longer what it was before, for it is changed and purified by the higher element into which it is now taken up." The Hegelian system was thus compelled to acknowledge, that not only must philosophy agree with experience, but moreover, the creation of a philosophical science premises as an indispensable condition the hypothesis of an empirical science, which itself implies that the ideas of space, of time, of movement, and of matter cannot be obtained _a priori_,—that is before the experience of the things themselves,—or be purely evolved, according to the Hegelian method, from the logical idea. To attempt to reconcile reason with religion by finding reason in religion and religion in reason, is simply to evolve _a priori_ a philosophy of religion from the logical idea. This is believed to be possible by means of the mystic factors—"the Hegelian method" and the "Logos." The original contents of eternal reason itself—of the _logos_—are supposed to exist within our mind in a form that constitutes our inmost truth; our spontaneous logical thinking coincides with the innate eternal reason in form and contents, and thus attains to the full revelation of itself.