ABSTRACT
Most nineteenth-century idealists were imbued with a belief that the world was rational and that there was an affinity between mind and the objects of knowledge. Platonism played a part in their theorizings, but they did not quite see reality as a manifestation of the form of the good or evil as its shadow. Thus evil was not just a continuous intellectual puzzle, it was a challenge. In Georg Wilhelm Hegel's story the idea of evil became interestingly tangled. Fichte laid the ground for the "social theory" of evil developed later by Schleiermacher. They concluded that evil is always a failure of free social interaction. Schelling preferred to think of evil as a perversion of human nature. Evils inflicted by nature helped to create the "higher consciousness" within which we can understand God. In a perceptive essay on Bernard Bosanquet and Royce on evil, Paul Ramsey insists that for both Bosanquet and Royce "isolation" is the essence of evil.
