LECTURE IX.
THE LIMITS OF PLURALISM.
What after all, we have now to ask, was Hegel’s
actual unity? It was entirely geocentric and
anthropocentric. The earth, he says, is the truth of the
solar system, just as animal nature is the truth of
vegetable, and this the truth of the mineral. The
earth is the planet : the sun has neither produced it
nor thrown it off; but sun, moon, comets, and stars are
only conditions for the earth (Bedingungen der Erde)
which they serve. Among the continents of the earth,
Europe, in virtue of its physical characteristics, forms
its consciousness, its rational part, and the centre of
Europe is Germany.[1] With his own philosophy, he
had the sublime assurance to think, the history of
philosophy closes; and in the restoration of Prussia
under Stein he thought the culmination of the world’s
history was attained. It is however not so much this
unique anticlimax that now concerns us; but rather
the general position that there are not ‘more worlds
than ours,’ which Hegel shared with the fifteenth
century ecclesiastics. They, it will be remembered,
had burned Giordano Bruno alive, who was one of the
first in modern times to proclaim this doctrine; and
- ↑ Encyclopaedie, §§249, 280, 339.
