Hegel’s philosophy of history is better known than Fichte’s.  Like Fichte, he deduced the phases a priori from his metaphysical principles, but he condescended to review in some detail the actual phenomena.  He conceived the final cause of the world as Spirit’s consciousness of its own freedom.  The ambiguous term “freedom” is virtually equivalent to self-consciousness, and Hegel defines Universal History as the description of the process by which Spirit or God comes to the consciousness of its own meaning.  This freedom does not mean that Spirit could choose at any moment to develop in a different way; its actual development is necessary and is the embodiment of reason.  Freedom consists in fully recognising the fact.

Of the particular features which distinguish Hegel’s treatment, the first is that he identifies “history” with political history, the development of the state.  Art, religion, philosophy, the creations of social man, belong to a different and higher stage of Spirit’s self-revelation. [Footnote:  The three phases of Spirit are (1) subjective; (2) objective; (3) absolute.  Psychology, e.g., is included in (1), law and history in (2), religion in (3).] In the second place, Hegel ignores the primitive prehistoric ages of man, and sets the beginning of his development in the fully-grown civilisation of China.  He conceives the Spirit as continually moving from one nation to another in order to realise the successive stages of its self-consciousness:  from China to India, from India to the kingdoms of Western Asia; then from the Orient to Greece, then to Rome, and finally to the Germanic world.  In the East men knew only that one is free, the political characteristic was despotism; in Greece and Rome they knew that some are free, and the political forms were aristocracy and democracy; in the modern world they know that all are free, and the political form is monarchy.  The first period, he compared to childhood, the second to youth (Greece) and manhood (Rome), the third to old age, old but not feeble.  The third, which includes the medieval and modern history of Europe, designated by Hegel as the Germanic world—­for “the German spirit is the spirit of the modern world”—­is also the final period.  In it God realises his freedom completely in history, just as in Hegel’s own absolute philosophy, which is final, God has completely understood his own nature.

And here is the most striking difference between the theories of Fichte and Hegel.  Both saw the goal of human development in the realisation of “freedom,” but, while with Fichte the development never ends as the goal is unattainable, with Hegel the development is already complete, the goal is not only attainable but has now been attained.  Thus Hegel’s is what we may call a closed system.  History has been progressive, but no path is left open for further advance.  Hegel views this conclusion of development with perfect complacency.  To most minds that are not intoxicated with the Absolute it will seem that, if the present is the final state to which the evolution of Spirit has conducted, the result is singularly inadequate to the gigantic process.  But his system is eminently inhuman.  The happiness or misery of individuals is a matter of supreme indifference to the Absolute, which, in order to realise itself in time, ruthlessly sacrifices sentient beings.