It is quite otherwise with the comprehensive relations with which history has to do.  In this sphere are presented those momentous collisions between existing, acknowledged duties, laws, and rights, and those contingencies which are adverse to this fixed system, which assail and even destroy its foundations and existence, and whose tenor may nevertheless seem good—­on the large scale, advantageous—­yes, even indispensable and necessary.  These contingencies realize themselves in history; they involve a general principle of a different order from that on which depends the permanence of a people or a State.  This principle is an essential phase in the development of the creating Idea, of Truth striving and urging toward (consciousness of) itself.  Historical men—­world-famous individuals—­are those in whose aims such a general principle lies.

Caesar, in danger of losing a position—­not perhaps at that time of superiority, yet at least of equality with the others who were at the head of the State, and of succumbing to those who were just on the point of becoming his enemies—­belongs essentially to this category.  These enemies—­who were at the same time pursuing their own personal aims—­had on their side the form of the constitution, and the power conferred by an appearance of justice.  Caesar was contending for the maintenance of his position, honor, and safety; and, since the power of his opponents included the sovereignty over the provinces of the Roman Empire, his victory secured for him the conquest of that entire Empire; and he thus became—­though leaving the form of the constitution—­the autocrat of the State.  What secured for him the execution of a design, which in the first instance was of negative import—­the autocracy of Rome—­was, however, at the same time an independently necessary feature in the history of Rome and of the world.  It was not, then, his private gain merely, but an unconscious impulse that occasioned the accomplishment of that for which the time was ripe.  Such are all great historical men, whose own particular aims involve those large issues which are the will of the World-Spirit.  They may be called heroes, inasmuch as they have derived their purposes and their vocation, not from the calm, regular course of things, sanctioned by the existing order, but from a concealed fount—­one which has not attained to phenomenal, present existence—­from that inner Spirit, still hidden beneath the surface, which, impinging on the outer world as on a shell, bursts it in pieces, because it is another kernel than that which belonged to the shell in question.  They are men, therefore, who appear to draw the impulse of their life from themselves, and whose deeds have produced a condition of things and a complex of historical relations which appear to be only their own interest and their own work.