The theory of the mind as objectified in the institutions of law, the
family and the state is discussed in the "Philosophy of Right."
Beginning with the antithesis of a legal system and morality, Hegel,
carrying out the work of Kant, presents the synthesis of these
elements in the ethical life (_Sittlichkeit_) of the family and the
state. Treating the family as an instinctive realization of the moral
life, and not as the result of contract, he shows how by the means of
wider associations due to private interests the state issues as the
full home of the moral spirit, where intimacy of interdependence is
combined with freedom of independent growth. The state is the
consummation of man as finite; it is the necessary starting-point
whence the spirit rises to an absolute existence in the spheres of
art, religion and philosophy. In the finite world or temporal state,
religion, as the finite organization of a church, is, like other
societies, subordinate to the state. But on another side, as absolute
spirit, religion, like art and philosophy, is not subject to the
state, but belongs to a higher region.
The political state is always an individual, and the relations of
these states with each other and the "world-spirit" of which they are
the manifestations constitute the material of history. The _Lectures
on the Philosophy of History_, edited by Gans and subsequently by Karl
Hegel, is the most popular of Hegel's works. The history of the world
is a scene of judgment where one people and one alone holds for awhile
the sceptre, as the unconscious instrument of the universal spirit,
till another rises in its place, with a fuller measure of liberty--a
larger superiority to the bonds of natural and artificial
circumstance. Three main periods--the Oriental, the Classical and the
Germanic--in which respectively the single despot, the dominant order,
and the man as man possess freedom--constitute the history of the
world. Inaccuracy in detail and artifice in the arrangement of
isolated peoples are inevitable in such a scheme. A graver mistake,
according to some critics, is that Hegel, far from giving a law of
progress, seems to suggest that the history of the world is nearing an
end, and has merely reduced the past to a logical formula. The answer
to this charge is partly that such a law seems unattainable, and
partly that the idealistic content of the present which philosophy
extracts is always an advance upon actual fact, and so does throw a
light into the future. And at any rate the method is greater than
Hegel's employment of it.