Such a position must seem very strange to one who is familiar only with the sober studies of English philosophy. In whatever else the leaders of the several schools in this country disagree, they are nearly all at one in banishing God and religion to a world beyond the present sublunary sphere, to an inscrutable region beyond the scope of scientific inquiry, where statements may be made at will, but where we have no power of verifying any statement whatever. This is the common doctrine of Spencer and Mansel, of Hamilton and Mill. Even those English thinkers, who show some anxiety to support what is at present called Theism, generally rest content with vindicating for the mind the vague perception of a Being beyond us, and differing from us incommensurably. God is to them a residual phenomenon, a marginal existence. Outside the realm of experience and knowledge there is not-nothing--a something--beyond definite circumscription: incalculable, and therefore an object, possibly of fear, possibly of hope: the reflection in the utter darkness of a great What-may-it-not-be? He is the Unknown Power, felt by what some of these writers call intuition, and others call experience. They do not however allow to knowledge any capacity of apprehending in detail the truths which belong to the kingdom of God. Now the whole teaching of Hegel is the overthrow of the limits thus set to religious thought. To him all thought, and all actuality when it is grasped by knowledge, is from man's side, an exaltation of the mind towards God: while, when regarded from the divine standing-point, it is the manifestation by God of His own nature in its infinite variety.
It is only when we fix our eyes clearly on these general features in his speculation, that we can understand why _he_ places the maturity of ancient philosophy in the time of Plotinus and Proclus. Not that these Neo-Platonists are, as thinkers, of power equal to their master of Athens. But, in the realm of the blind the one-eyed may be king. The later thinkers set their vision more distinctly and persistently on the land that is eternal--'on the further side of being,' to quote Plato's phrase. It is for the same reason Hegel gives so much attention to the religious or semi-religious theories of Jacob Böhme and of Jacobi, though these men were in many ways so unlike himself.