Whatever is, nature and spirit, is within the Absolute. It embraces all reality. It is the meeting point, — the neutrum, the ' indifference point,' — of subject and object, preserving the opposite alongside the negation for each per se. Moreover, it is living, concrete, being by ceaseless self-birth a mobile, willing, creative unity, and on that very ground necessarily a growth or historical process (Werden). In history the Absolute realizes itself. It could not become manifest in itself ; to manifest itself it submits to limitations. The manifestation is not in anyone form of finite limitation, but in the whole field of history. The finite or the historical is that in which the Absolute has its life : the form in which the Absolute reveals itself. It is thus not merely finite, it contains the Infinite within it ; the human holds the Divine. The domain of history is the birthplace of spirit ; history itself is the incarnation of God. Everything is explain- able by this idea ; God in His growth (Werden) or the Son of God. Nature points to Him, and has in Him its final causes ; history unfolds the aspects of His life ; religion experiences Him as personal freedom from personal evil.
The same idea is the essence of the Christian religion. Christ, in His historical individuality, is not the Son of God : the eternal Son of God is collective humanity, and what is true of collective humanity is not to be limited to Him. The Incarnation is falsely received when received as an isolated fact in time — it was frorii all eternity, and is not to be interpreted in an empirical way. Christ, however, is in a sense the beginning of this incarnation ; since without Him it could not have come to be or be known. In Him God first becomes truly objective. As such He is the archetypal Man, the universal ideal Man. None before Him revealed God in such a manner, and from Him all men since have learned. But He is not the God-man. Of peculiar signifi- cance is the description Schelling gives of the manner in which Christ objectifies the ideal or Divine princijile innuanent in history. At one period he teaches that the Divine can mani- fest itself only in an endless series of finite forms, in the totality of which its inner essence is to be known. Here there are two points which reveal how far short of the truth of the ancient Creeds such theories fall. In the first jjlace, the finite forms are a mere series of fugitive appearances of the Infinite, into no one of which the Divine veritably enters to abide : they can only signify the Divine. And secondly, so long as it is so the finite forms are essentially equal to each other: they represent a uniform series. On this line of thought the difficulty of ap- preciating Christ aright is insuperable. In the last and highest form of his philosophy, Schelling set forth a more fruitful estimate of the finite forms whic^h reveal the Divine. He gives them more substance and concrete content. He arranges and organizes them, not in a monotonous series, but in ascending scale according to the measure in which the Divine spirit rises victorious in each. He is thus enabled to point to the unique-
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ness of Christ, and to place Him at the head of the series. From another direction deepening experience led him to a richer ap- preciation of Christ's Person. The power of evil, he came to see, was too vast to be overcome by man alone ; the redemp- tion of the personal spirit is necessarily the work of God, and can be effected only by the immediate presence of God in human consciousness and knowledge. The more mightily evil had come forth in personal form, the more necessary was it that spirit should appear in human form as mediator — for ' only the personal can heal the personal.' God must become man. In Christ He did thus become man. In the Personality of Christ the Divine spirit is not simply signified, it is actualized. In Him the single personality is regarded as capable of taking up the perfect will of God into itself, and thereby of attaining absolute worth and becoming a true representative instead of a transitory husk of the Divine life. The infinite significance of personality is declared.
In Hegel (1770-1831) speculation reaches its culmination. Po.ssessed of an imperial intellect, he succeeds in constructing a system (Absolute Ideal- ism), with extraordinary skill and infinite detail, which co-ordinates and harmonizes into organic unity the various principles of his predecessors. His indebtedness to Kant and Schelling is real, and to the latter special. In the working out of the Hegelian scheme, logical considerations are determining. The process of human knowledge, with its alternate analysis and syntliesis, is the type of the larger process of the universe. All progress is through distinction, and moves through the three steps of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. A simjile truth, once discovered, is affirmed as if it were the whole. Presently a larger experience forces man to the recognition of its apjjarent opposite, only to be succeeded later by the recon- ciliation of both in a higher unity. Given this simple formula, Hegel will build you the universe.