It seems as if there were in Hegel two distinct habits of mind which the world--the outside observer--rarely sees except in separation. On one hand there is a sympathy with mystical and intuitional minds, with the upholders of immediate knowledge and of innate ideas, with those who find that science and demonstration rather tend to distract from the one thing needful--who would 'lie in Abraham's bosom all the year,'--those who would fain lay their grasp upon the whole before they have gone through the drudgery of details. On the other hand, there is within him a strongly 'rationalising' and non-visionary intellect, with a practical and realistic bent, and the full scientific spirit. Schelling, in an angry mood, could describe him as 'the quintessence of all that is prosaic, both outside and in[1].' Yet, seen from other points of view, Hegel has been accused of dreaminess, pietism, and mystical theology. His merging of the ordinary contrasts of thought in a completer truth, and what would popularly be described as his mixing up of religious with logical questions, and the general unfathomableness of his doctrine,--all seem to support such a charge. Yet all this is not inconsistent with a rough and incisive vigour of understanding, a plainness of reason, and a certain hardness of temperament. This philosopher is in many ways not distinguishable from the ordinary citizen, and there are not unfrequent moments when his wife hears him groan over the providence that condemned him to be a philosopher[2]. He is contemptuous towards all weakly sentimentalism, and almost brutal in his emphasis on the reasonableness of the actual and on the folly of dreaming the might-have-been; and keeps his household accounts as carefully as the average head of a family. And, perhaps, this convergence of two tendencies of thought may be noticed in the gradual maturing of his ideas. In the period of his 'Lehrjahre,' or apprenticeship, from 1793 to 1800, we can see the study of religion in the earlier part of that time at Bern succeeded by the study of politics and philosophy at Frankfort-on-the-Main.
His purpose on the whole may be termed an attempt to combine breadth with depth, the intensity of the mystic who craves for union with Truth, with the extended range and explicitness of those who multiply knowledge. 'The depth of the mind is only so deep as its courage to expand and lose itself in its explication[3]. It must prove its profundity by the ordered fullness of the knowledge which it has realised. The position and the work of Hegel will not be intelligible unless we keep in view both of these antagonistic points.