The assertion that Hegel represents a synthesis of Fichte and Schelling is therefore justified.  This is true, further, for the character of Hegel’s thought as a whole, in so far as it follows a middle course between the world-estranged, rigid abstractness of Fichte’s thinking and Schelling’s artistico-fanciful intuition, sharing with the former its logical stringency as well as its dominant interest in the philosophy of spirit, and with the latter its wide outlook and its sense for the worth and the richness of that which is individual.

We have characterized Hegel’s system, thirdly, as a philosophy of development.  The point of distinction here is that Hegel carries out with logical consecutiveness and up to the point of obstinacy the principle of development which Fichte had discovered, and which Schelling also had occasionally employed,—­the threefold rhythm thesis, antithesis, synthesis.  Here we come to Hegel’s dialectic method.  He reached this as the true method of speculation through a comparison of the two forms of philosophy which he found dominant at the beginning of his career—­the Illumination culminating in Kant, on the one hand, and, on the other, the doctrine of identity defended by Schelling and his circle—­neither of which entirely satisfied him.

In regard to the main question he feels himself one with Schelling:  philosophy is to be metaphysics, the science of the absolute and its immanence in the world, the doctrine of the identity of opposites, of the, per se of things, not merely of their phenomenon.  But the form which Schelling had given it seems to him unscientific, unsystematic, for Schelling had based philosophical knowledge on the intuition of genius—­and science from intuition is impossible.  The philosophy of the Illumination impresses him, on the other hand, by the formal strictness of its inquiry; he agrees with it that philosophy must be science from concepts.  Only not from abstract concepts.  Kant and the Illumination stand on the platform of reflection, for which the antithesis of thought and being, finite and infinite remains insoluble, and, consequently, the absolute transcendent, and the true essence of things unknowable.  Hegel wishes to combine the advantages of both sides, the depth of content of the one, and the scientific form of the other.

The intuition with which Schelling works is immediate cognition, directed to the concrete and particular.  The concept of the philosophy of reflection is mediate cognition, moving in the sphere of the abstract and universal.  Is it not feasible to do away with the (unscientific) immediateness of the one, and the (non-intuitive, content-lacking) abstractness of the other, to combine the concrete with the mediate or conceptual, and in this way to realize the Kantian ideal of an intuitive understanding? A concrete concept would be one which sought the universal not without the particular, but in it; which should