In the case of the English reader of Hegel some peculiar hindrances spring from the foreign language. In strong contrast to most of the well-known German philosophers, he may be said to write in the popular and national dialect of his country. Of course there are tones and shades of meaning given to his words by the general context of his system. But upon the whole he did what he promised to J. H. Voss--the translator of Homer, and the poet of the _Luise,_ in a letter written from Jena in 1805. He there says of his projects: 'Luther has made the Bible, and you have made Homer speak German. No greater gift than this could be given to the nation. So long as a nation is not acquainted with a noble work in its own language, it is still barbarian, and does not regard the work as its own. Forget these two examples, and I may describe my own efforts as an attempt to teach philosophy to speak in German.[3] Yet, in this matter of nationalising or Germanising philosophy, he only carried a step further what Wolff and even Kant had begun; just as, on the other hand, he falls a long way short of what K. C. F. Krause, his contemporary, attempted in the same direction. Such an attempt, by its very nature, could never command a popular success. It runs directly counter to that tendency already noted, to escape the requirement to think and think for ourselves, by taking refuge under the shadow of a familiar term, which conceals in its apparent simplicity a great complex of ill-apprehended elements. The ordinary mind--and the more readily perhaps the more vulgar it is--flees for ease and safety to a cosmopolitan term, to the denationalised vocable of learned origin, to the language of general European culture. To such an ordinary mind--and up at least to a certain extent we all at times come under that heading--the effort to remain in the pellucid air of our unadulterated mother-tongue is too embarrassing to be long continued. Nor, after all, is it more than partially practicable. The well of German undefiled is apt to run dry. Hegel himself never shrinks when it is needful to appropriate non-Teutonic words, and is in the habit of employing the synonymous terms of native and of classical origin with a systematic difference of meaning [4]