Mrs. Eddy Mentioned Them February 27, 1960 Issue

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770-1831

[Mentioned in No and Yes, p. 22]

Hegel, the noted German philosopher, was descended from a Protestant refugee family that fled Austria during the Counter Reformation and settled in Württemberg. After a preliminary classical education in Stuttgart, his birthplace, he entered the University of Tübingen as a theological student. Here he did not win any special distinction as a scholar, since he was slow in coming to intellectual maturity.

Upon obtaining his degree, Hegel was a tutor for several years. During this time he wrote a life of Jesus, eliminating from it all that to him savored of the miraculous. His philosophic interests were now developing rapidly, and in 1801 he went to Jena to pursue his studies in philosophy.

Soon he was teaching at the university. In a few years he finished the first of his speculative works, the "Phenomenology of Spirit," which he described as his "voyage of discovery." Except for a period of disruption caused by the Napoleonic Wars, he taught for the rest of his life. The recognition that came with the publication of his great "Logic" brought him in 1816 the professorship of philosophy first at Heidelberg and two years later in Berlin, where he occupied the chair formerly held by Fichte. Here, according to one writer, Hegel held a place in philosophy "almost analogous to that which Goethe held in the world of letters."

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