[Footnote 1:  Cf.  Hoeffding, Die Philosophie in Schweden in the Philosophische Monatshefte, vol. xv. 1879, p. 193 seq.]

Boestrom’s philosophy is a system of self-activity and personalism which recalls Leibnitz and Krause.  The absolute or being is characterized as a concrete, systematically articulated, self-conscious unity, which dwells with its entire content in each of its moments, and whose members both bear the character of the whole and are immanent in one another, standing in relations of organic inter-determination.  The antithesis between unity and plurality is only apparent, present only for the divisive view of finite consciousness.  God is infinite, fully determinate personality (for determination is not limitation), a system of self-dependent living beings, differing in degree, in which we, as to our true being, are eternally and unchangeably contained.  Every being is a definite, eternal, and living thought of God; thinking beings with their states and activities alone exist; all that is real is spiritual, personal.  Besides this true, suprasensible world of Ideas, which is elevated above space, time, motion, change, and development, and which has not arisen by creation or a process of production, there exists for man, but only for him—­man is formally perfect, it is true, but materially imperfect (since he represents the real from a limited standpoint)—­a sensuous world of phenomena as the sphere of his activity.  To this he himself belongs, and in it he is spontaneously to develop the suprasensible content which is eternally given him (i.e., his true nature), namely, to raise it from the merely potential condition of obscure presentiment to clear, conscious actuality.  Freedom is the power to overcome our imperfection by means of our true nature, to realize our suprasensible capacities, to become for ourselves what we are in ourselves (in God).  The ethics of Boestrom is distinguished from the Kantian ethics, to which it is related, chiefly by the fact that it seeks to bring sensibility into a more than merely negative relation to reason.  Society is an eternal, and also a personal, Idea in God.  The most perfect form of government is constitutional monarchy; the ideal goal of history, the establishment of a system of states embracing all mankind.

J. Borelius of Lund is an Hegelian, but differs from the master in regard to the doctrine of the contradiction.  The Hegelian philosophy has adherents in Norway also, as G.V.  Lyng (died 1884; System of Fundamental Ideas), M.J.  Monrad (Tendencies of Modern Thought, 1874, German translation, 1879), both professors in Christiania, and Monrad’s pupil G. Kent (Hegel’s Doctrine of the Nature of Experience, 1891).