In the environment of reason, therefore, which encompasses the consciousness of our age, are contained under a generalised form and with elimination of all the particular circumstances, the results won in the development of mind and morals. These results now constitute the familiar joints and supports in the framework of ordinary thought: around and upon them cluster our beliefs and imaginations. During each epoch of history, the consciousness of the world, at first by the mouth of its great men, its illustrious statesmen, artists, and philosophers, has explicitly recognised, and translated into terms of thought,--into logical language,--that synthesis of the world which the period had practically secured by the action of its children. That activity went on, as is the way of natural activities, spontaneously, through the pressure of need, by an immanent adaptation of means to ends, not in conscious straining after a result. For the conscious or reflective effort of large bodies of men is often in a direction contrary to the Spirit of the Time. This Spirit of the Time, the absolute mind, which is neither religious nor irreligious, but infinite and absolute in its season, is the real motive principle of the world. But that Spirit of the Time is not always the voice that is most effective at the poll, or rings loudest in public rhetoric. It is often a still small voice, which only the wise, the self-restrained, the unselfish hear. And he who hears it and obeys it, not he who follows the blatant crowd, is the hero. It is only to a mistaken or an exaggerated hero-worship, therefore, that Hegel can be said to be a foe. Great men are great: but the Spirit of the Time is greater: their greatness lies in understanding it and bringing it to consciousness. The man, who would act independently of his time and in antagonism to it, is only the exponent of its latent tendencies. Nor need the synthesis be always formulated by a philosopher in order to leaven the minds of the next generation. The whole system of thought,--the theory of the time,--its world, in short, influences minds, although it is not explicitly formulated and stated: it becomes the nursery of future thought and speculation. Philosophy in its articulate utterances only gives expression to the silent and half-conscious grasp of reason over its objects. But when the adaptation is not merely reached but seen and felt, when the synthesis or world of that time is made an object of self-consciousness, the exposition has made an advance upon the period which preceded. For that period started in its growth from the last exposition, the preceding system of philosophy, after it had become the common property of the age, and taken its place in their mental equipment.