In the autumn of 1788 he entered at Tübingen as a student of theology; but though an exhibitioner and on the foundation, if we may so call the “Stift,” he showed no interest in the theology or philosophy of the place: his sermons were a failure; and, instead of seeking after academical distinction, he found more congenial reading in the classics, on the advantages of studying which his first essay was written. After two years he took the customary degree of Ph.D., and in the autumn of 1793 received his theological certificate, stating him to be of good abilities, but of middling industry and knowledge, and especially deficient in philosophy.

His university career, unlike that of Schelling, who, five years younger, came to Tübingen in 1790, was not brilliant. Hegel was quietly making himself at home in the Greek and Roman world, and gathering stores of miscellaneous information. Amongst his comrades he went by the title of “old man,” such, it is said, being his withered aspect. He took part, however, in the usual walks and beer-drinking, and even it seems love-making, of the student. But he gained most from intellectual intercourse with his contemporaries. Several of these are mentioned, but the two best known to fame were Hölderlin and Schelling. The former, who was of the same age as Hegel, left for Jena about the time that Schelling arrived. With him Hegel learned to feel for the old Greeks a love which grew stronger as the semi-Kantianized theology of his teachers more and more failed to interest him. With Schelling like sympathies bound him. They both protested against the political and ecclesiastical inertia of their native state, and adopted with fervour the revolutionary doctrines of freedom and reason. The myth which tells how the two went out one morning to dance round a tree of liberty in a meadow is antedated, as the incident happened after they had left: still it is in keeping with their opinions, if unsuited to their character.

Like many a German student, Hegel was glad of a tutorship, in 1793, when his university course ended. Fol three years he taught the children of a M. Steiger of Tschugg. Tschugg was the summer residence of the family, near Erlach on the lake of Biel; in winter they lived in Bern. Little happened in these years. Hegel had a few acquaintances in Bern; but, on the whole, intellectually he lived in isolation. He was, however, far from inactive. Local influences may explain a systematic account of the fiscal system of the canton Bern which he made for himself. But the main factor in Hegel’s mental growth came from his study of Christianity. Under the impulse given by Lessing and Kant he turned to the original records of Christianity, and attempted to construe for himself the real significance of Christ. He wrote a life of Jesus, in which Jesus was simply the son of Joseph and Mary. He did not stop to criticize as a philologist, and simply ignored the miraculous. He asked for the secret contained in the conduct and sayings of this man which made him the hope of the human race. To Hegel Jesus appeared as revealing the unity with God in which the Greeks in their best days unwittingly rejoiced, and as lifting the eyes of the Jews from a lawgiver who metes out punishment on the transgressor, to the destiny which in the Greek conception falls on the just no less than on the unjust.

The interest of these lucubrations is in general twofold. In Jesus Hegel finds the expression for something higher than mere morality: he finds a noble spirit which rises above the contrasts of virtue and vice into the concrete life, seeing the infinite always embracing our finitude, and proclaiming the divine which is in man and cannot be overcome by error and evil, unless the man close his eyes and ears to the godlike presence within him. In religious life, in short, he finds the principle which reconciles the oppositions of the temporal and ordinary mind. But, secondly, the general source of the doctrine that life is higher than all its incidents and codes is of interest. He does not free himself from the current theology either by rational moralizing like Kant, or by bold speculative synthesis like Fichte &nd Schelling. He finds his panacea in the concrete life of humanity: he turns to history, and not to abstract speculation. But although he goes to the Scriptures, and tastes the mystical spirit of the mediaeval saints, the Christ of his conception has traits that seem borrowed from Socrates and from the her0e3 of Attic tragedy, who suffer much and yet smile gently on a destiny to which they were reconciled. Instead of the Hebraic doctrine of a Jesus punished for our sins, we have the Hellenic idea of a man who is calmly tranquil in the consciousness of his unity with God.

During these years of arduous wrestling with the problems of religion, Hegel kept up a slack correspondence with Schelling and Hölderlin. Schelling was already on the way to fame. He was trying (to quote his own words) to find the premises to the results of Kant. Meanwhile he kept Hegel abreast with German speculation. Both of them were intent on forcing the theologians from their holes into the daylight, and grudged them any aid they might expect from Kant’s postulation of God and immortality ta crown the edifice of ethics. After lamenting his want of books, Hegel concludes a letter of 1795 with the words, “Let reason and freedom remain our watchword, and our point of union the church invisible.” Great is their animus against the pietistic hypocrisy of Wiirtemberg. Meanwhile Hölderlin in Jena had been following Fichte’s career with an enthusiasm with which he infected Hegel.

After these vehement struggles of thought, it is pleasing to turn to a short tour which Hegel in company with three other tutors made through the Bernese Oberland in July and August 1796. Of this tour he has left a minute diary. It embraced Lauterbrunnen, Grindelwald, the Grimsel, and the valley of the Reuss to the lake of Lucerne. The popular passion for natural scenery had scarcely begun, and the days of hotels and tourists were distant. Our four tutors carried little luggage, save a pack of cards to while away the hours of rest. Hegel was particularly delighted with the varied play of the waterfalls. Still no glamour blinds him to the squalor of Swiss peasant life. The glaciers and the rocks call forth no raptures. “The spectacle of these eternally dead masses gave me nothing but the monotonous and at last tedious idea, ‘ Es ist so.’” Again, speaking of the upper parts of the Hasli-thal: “I doubt if the most orthodox theologian would be bold enough in these regions to credit nature with the purpose of being useful to man, who with difficulty must wrest from her the scanty pittance of which he can make use,—who is uncertain whether rocks or avalanches may not crush him to pieces even as he steals a poor handful of grass, and destroy his miserable hut and cow-stall, the wretched work of his hands.”

Towards the close of his engagement at Bern, Hegel had received hopes from Schelling of a post at Jena. Tired of isolation, he was anxious to get away from Bern. Fortunately his friend Hölderlin, who was now tutor in Frankfort, secured a similar situation there for Hegel in the family of a Herr Gogol, a merchant. Hegel entered upon his new post in January 1797. It was apparently more agreeable, and left more time for study. At the same time he was nearer the centre of public interest. But above all it renewed the much-missed intellectual society. Hölderlin was still, as formerly, enamoured of the ideal of ancient Greece. And another friend called Sinclair, a Fichtean, the author of several forgotten philosophical works, helped to animate Hegel’s interest in philosophy.

It may have been the political position of Frankfort that made Hegel about this time turn to questions of economics and government. He had studied Gibbon, Hume, and Montesquieu in Switzerland. We now find him making copious extracts from the English newspapers on the Poor-Law Bill of 1796; criticizing the Prussian land laws, promulgated about the same time; and writing a commentary on Sir James Steuart’s Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, as a means of defining his own views on economics. Here, as in contemporaneous criticisms of Kant’s ethical writings, Hegel aims at correcting the abstract discussion of a topic by treating it in its systematic interconnexions. Church and state, law and morality, commerce and art, are reduced to factors in the totality of human life, from which the specialists had isolated them.

But the best evidence of Hegel’s attention to contemporary politics is two unpublished essays—one of them written in 1798, “On the Internal Condition of Wiirtemberg in Recent Times, particularly on the Defects in the Magistracy,” the other a criticism on the constitution of Germany, written, it is probable, not long after the peace of Lunéville (1801). Both essays show more vigour in pointing out the inadequacies of the present than in suggesting a remedy. Criticism, not construction, is their forte. In the first Hegel showed how the supineness of the committee of estates in Wiirtemberg had favoured the usurpations of the superior officials in whom the court had found compliant servants. And though he perceived the advantages of change in the constitution of the estates, he still doubted if an improved system could work in the actual conditions of his native province. The main feature in the pamphlet is the recognition that a spirit of reform is abroad. If Wiirtemberg suffered from a bureaucracy tempered by despotism, the Fatherland in general suffered no less. “Germany,” so begins the second of these unpublished papers, “is no longer a state.” Referring the collapse of the empire to the retention of feudal forms and to the action of religiou3 animosities, Hegel looked forward to reorganization by a central power (Austria) wielding the imperial army, and by a representative body elected by the geographical districts of the empire. But such an issue, he saw well, could only be the outcome of violence—of “blood and iron.” The philosopher did not pose as a practical statesman. He only described the German empire in its nullity as a conception without existence in fact. In such a state of things it was the business of the philosopher to set forth the outlines of the coming epoch, as they were already moulding themselves into shape, amidst what the ordinary eye saw only as the disintegration of the old forms of social life.

His old interest in the religious question reappears, but in a more philosophical form. Starting with the contrast between a natural and a positive religion, he regards a positive religion as one imposed upon the mind from without, not a natural growth crowning the round of human life. A natural religion, on the other hand, was not, he thought, the one universal religion of every clime and age, but rather the spontaneous development of the national conscience varying in varying circumstances. A people’s religion completes and consecrates their whole activity: in it the people rises above its finite life in limited spheres to an infinite life where it feels itself all at one. Even philosophy with Hegel at this epoch was subordinate to religion; for philosophy must never abandon the finite in the search for the infiuite. Soon, however, Hegel adopted a view according to which philosophy is a higher mode of apprehending the infinite than even religion.

At Frankfort, meanwhile, the philosophic ideas of Hegel first assumed the proper philosophic form. “In my scientific training,” he says (in a letter to Schelling of November 2, 1800), “which started from more subordinate wants of man, I could not but be forced onwards to science, and at the same time the ideal of youth had to transform itself into the reflective form of a system.” In a MS. of 102 quarto sheets, of which the three first and the seventh are wanting, there is preserved the original sketch of the Hegelian system, so far at least · as the logic and metaphysics and part of the philosophy of nature are concerned. The third part of the system—the ethical theory—seems to have been composed afterwards; it is contained in its first draught in another MS. of thirty sheets. Even these had been preceded by earlier Pythagorean constructions envisaging the divine life in divine triangles.

Circumstances soon put Hegel in the way to complete these outlines. His father died in January 1799; and the slender sum which Hegel received as his inheritance, 3154 gulden (about £260), enabled him to think once more of a studious life. At the close of 1800 we find him asking Schelling for letters of introduction to Bamberg, where with cheap living and good beer he hoped to prepare himself for the intellectual excitement of Jena. The upshot was that Hegel arrived at Jena in January 1801. An end had already come to the brilliant epoch at Jena, when the romantic poets, Tieck, Novalis, and the Schlegels made it the headquarters of their fantastic mysticism, and Fichte turned the results of Kant into thé banner of revolutionary ideas. Schelling was the main philosophical lion of the time; and in some quarters Hegel was spoken of as a new champion summoned from Swabia by Schelling to help him in his struggle with the more prosaic continuators of Kant. Hegel’s first performance seemed to justify the rumour. It was an essay on the difference between the philosophic systems of Fichte and Schelling, tending in the main to support the latter. Still more striking was the agreement shown in the Critical Journal of Philosophy, which Schelling and Hegel wrote conjointly during the years 1802-3. So latent was the difference between them at this epoch that it, in one or two cases, is not with certainty possible to determine by whom the essay was written. Even at a later period foreign critics like Cousin saw much that was alike in the two doctrines, and did not hesitate to regard Hegel as a disciple of Schelling. The dissertation by which Hegel qualified for the position of privatdocent—an essay, De orbitis —was probably chosen under the influence of Schelling’s philosophy of nature. It was an unfortunate subject. For while Hegel, depending on a numerical proportion suggested by Plato, hinted in a single sentence that it might be a mistake to look for a planet in the interval between Mars and Jupiter, Professor Piazzi had already discovered the first of the asteroids on 1st January 1801. Apparently in August, when Hegel qualified, the news of the discovery had not yet reached him, but critics have made this luckless suggestion the ground of attack on a priori philosophy. The theses attached to this dissertation contained some characteristic paradoxes, e.g., that the syllogism is the principle of idealism, that a square is the law of nature, and a triangle of mind, &c.

Hegel’s earliest lectures, in the winter of 1801-2, on logic and metaphysics were attended by about eleven students. At a later period, in 1804, we find him with a class of about thirty, lecturing on his whole system; but his average attendance was rather less. Besides philosophy, he once at least lectured on mathematics. As he taught, he was led to modify his original system, and notice after notice of his lectures promised a text-book of philosophy— which, however, failed to appear. Meanwhile, after the departure of Schelling from Jena in the middle of 1803, Hegel was left to work out his own views. Besides philosophical studies, where he now added Aristotle to Plato, he read Homer and the Greek tragedians, made extracts from books, attended lectures on physiology, and dabbled in other sciences. On his own representation at Weimar, he was in February 1805 made a professor extraordinarius, and in July 1806 drew his first and only stipend—100 thalers. At Jena, though some of his hearers became devotedly attached to him, Hegel was not a popular lecturer any more than Krause. The ordinary student found Fries more intelligible.

Of the lectures of that period there still remain considerable notes. The language often had a theological tinge (never entirely absent), as when the “idea” was spoken of, or “the night of the divine mystery,” or the dialectic of the absolute called the “course of the divine life.” Still his view was growing clearer, and his difference from Schelling more palpable. Both Schelling and Hegel stand in a relation to art, but while the aesthetic model of Schelling was found in the contemporary world, where art was a special sphere and the artist a separate profession in no intimate connexion with the age and nation, the model of Hegel was found rather in those works of national art in which art is not a part of the common life but an aspect of it, and the artist is not a mere individual but a concentration of the passion and power of beauty in the whole community. “Such art,” says Hegel, “is the common good and the work of all. Each generation hands it on beautified to the next; each has done something to give utterance to the universal thought. Those who are said to have genius have acquired some special aptitude by which they render the general shapes of the nation their own work, one in one point, another in another. What they produce is not their invention, but the invention of the whole nation; or rather, what they find is that the whole nation has found its true nature. Each, as it were, piles up his stone. So too does the artist. Somehow he has the good fortune to come last, and when he places his stone the arch stands self-supported.” Hegel, as we have already seen, was fully aware of the change that was coming over the world. “A new epoch,” he says, “has arisen. It seems as if the world-spirit had now succeeded in freeing itself from all foreign objective existence, and finally apprehending itself as absolute mind.” These words come from lectures on the history of philosophy, which laid the foundation for his “Phenomenology of the Mind.” The printing of this work (Phänomenologie des Geistes) began in 1806 at Bamberg, and the sheets were distributed, as they appeared, to a class where he treated the phenomenology as an introduction to logic. That course he closed on the 18th September 1806, as follows: —“This, gentlemen, is speculative philosophy, so far as I have worked it out. We stand in a momentous time,—a seething mass, in which the mind has made a sudden bound, left its old shape behind, and is gaining a new. The whole bulk of our old ideas, the very bands of the world, are rent asunder, and collapse like a dream. Mind is preparing a new start. Philosophy, above all things, has to own and welcome such a start. While some in powerless resistance cling to the past, and the majority help, but unconsciously, to swell the numbers of its cortege, philosophy, recognizing it as the eternal,...