Hegel, without more ado, called his theory of the universe and of all things "Die Idee," and in this of course all thought that they had something to lay hold of. Still, if we inquire into the nature of these ideas for which Reason is pronounced to be the faculty, without letting ourselves be put out of countenance, the explanation usually given is an empty, high-flown, confused verbiage, in set periods of such length, that if the reader does not fall asleep before he has half read it, he will find himself bewildered rather than enlightened at the end ; nay, he may even have a suspicion that these ideas are very like chimaeras. Meanwhile, should anyone show a desire to know more about this sort of ideas, he will have all kinds of things served up to him. Now it will be the chief subjects of the theses of Scholasticism—I allude here to the representations of God, of an immortal Soul, of a real, objectively existent World and its laws which Kant himself has unfortunately called Ideas of Reason, erroneously and unjustifiably, as I have shown in my Critique of his philosophy, yet merely with a view to proving the utter impossibility of demonstrating them and their want of all theoretical authority. Then again it will be, as a variation, only God, Freedom, and Immortality ; at other times it will be the Absolute, whose acquaintance we have already made in § 20, as the Cosmological Proof, forced to travel incognito ; or the Infinite as opposed to the Finite ; for, on the whole, the German reader is disposed to content himself with such empty talk as this, without perceiving that the only clear thought he can get out of it is, that which has an end and that which has none. The Good, the True, and the Beautiful, moreover, stand high in favour with the sentimental and tender-hearted as pretended ideas, though they are really only three very wide and abstract conceptions, because they are extracted from a multitude of things and relations ; wherefore, like many other such abstracta, they are exceedingly empty. As regards
