SOURCE: Doull, James A. “Hegel's Philosophy of Nature.” Dialogue 11, no. 3 (1972): 379-99.

In the following essay, Doull reviews two translations of The Philosophy of Nature that were published in 1970.

I

Two translations into English of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature^1,2 have appeared in the same year a century after the other parts of the Encyclopaedia—the Logic and the Philosophy of Mind—had been translated. The Victorian translator passed by the Philosophy of Nature, unconscious that to omit the middle part of a systematic work must certainly conceal the sense of the whole. He finds it a sufficient explanation that “for nearly half a century the study of nature has passed almost completely out of the hands of the philosophers into the care of the specialists of science.” Revived for a few years by Schelling and then Hegel, Philosophy of Nature only recalled “a time of hasty enthusiasms and over-grasping...