It was in the inner world of the self that truth and the meaning of the human condition was to be found, not the external world of the physical sciences.

God is not the engineer-designer of the world machine, as the Enlightenment Deists claim. God is the indwelling soul of the universe.

They were disillusioned with the promises of progress and the perfectibility of the human race made by the age of optimism.

this totality constitutes absolute mind or absolute spirit or God. The real, says Hegel, is the rational, and the rational is the real.

1. The Inward Path.

Hegel has found a way to bring the vast reaches of the human spirit into unification in a theory.

as a philosophy confined to and dominated by reason—by mathematics, logic, mathematically formulated scientific laws, and by abstract natural rights.

rational element,

absolute idealism.