ABSTRACT
Hegel was born in 1770, and his name had been before the public in Germany since 1801, when he published his essay on The Difference between Fichte and Schelling. Up to the middle of the ‘fifties it may be said that no intelligible word had been spoken by British writers as to the place and significance of Hegel’s work. James Hutchison Stirling has the merit of being the first clearly to perceive that there was nothing really constructive to be looked for from British philosophy, until it had put itself to school in the German idealist movement. Stirling returned to England in 1857, convinced that a thorough first-hand study of Kant and Hegel and of the relation between them was the clue to the whole philosophical situation, and determined to place that clue in the hands of his fellow-countrymen so far as was in his power.
