When we contemplate the fate that virtue, the ethical, even religion have suffered in history, we must not fall into the litany of lamentation, about how the good and pious often (or even for the most part) fare ill in the world, while the evil and wicked prosper. By the term ‘prosperity’ one may understand a wide variety of things, including wealth, external honors, and the like. But when we speak of such things as though they were intrinsic goals, we still cannot make the so-called prosperity or misfortune of this or that single individual into an element of the rational world-order. To this world-goal there often goes the demand…that good, ethical and righteous goals should find their realization and security in that world-goal, and under its auspices. What makes people morally dissatisfied (and this is a dissatisfaction upon which they pride themselves) is that they do not see the present as measuring up to the goals they hold as right and good. This applies especially to contemporary ideal models of political institutions – thus contrasting the way things are with the way they ought to be. [1]

As was said, nothing is more common today than the complaint that the ideals raised by fantasy are not being realized, that these glorious dreams are being destroyed by cold actuality. On their life-voyage, these ideals smash up on the rock of hard reality. They can only be subjective, after all; they belong to that individuality of the solitary subject which takes itself for the highest and wisest. Ideals of that sort do not belong here – for, what the individual spins out for himself in his isolation cannot serve as law for the universal reality, just as the world’s law is not for the single individual alone (who may come off much the worse for it).

It is easier to discern the shortcomings in individuals, in states, in providence, than to see their true significance. For in negative fault-finding one stands above the thing, nobly and with a superior air, without being drawn into it, i.e., without having grasped the thing itself in its positive aspect. Generally, the critic mellows with age; youth is always dissatisfied. That mellowness of age is a ripeness of judgment – which not only accepts the bad, through disinterestedness, but is also led to what is substantial and solid in the matter in question by having been instructed more deeply by the seriousness of life.

The insight to which philosophy ought to lead, therefore…is that the real world is as it ought to be, that the truly good, the universal divine Reason is also the power capable of actualizing itself. This good, this Reason – in its most concrete representation – is God. God governs the world; the content of His governance, the fulfillment of His plan, is world history.

When we are discussing egotism need we speak of Hegel? The tone of this philosopher, especially in his later writings, was full of contempt for everything subjective: the point of view of the individual, his opinions and wishes, were treated as of no account unless they had been brought into line with the providential march of events and ideas in the great world. This realism, pronounced and even acrid as it was, was still idealistic in the sense that the substance of the world was conceived not to be material but conceptual – a law or logic which animated phenomena and was the secret of their movement. The world was like a riddle or confused oracle; and the solution to the puzzle lay in the romantic instability or self-contradiction inherent in every finite form of being, which compelled it to pass into something different. The direction of this movement we might understand sympathetically in virtue of a sort of vital dialectic or dramatic necessity in our own reflection. [2]

For Hegel, however, the life of the state was the moral substance, and the souls of men but the accidents; and as to the judgment of God he asserted that it was none other than the course of history. This is a characteristic saying, in which he seems to proclaim the moral government of the world, when in truth he is sanctifying a brutal law of success and succession. The best government, of course, succumbs in time like the worst, and sooner; the dark ages followed upon the Roman Empire and lasted twice as long. But Hegel’s God was simply the world, or a formula supposed to describe the world. He despised every ideal not destined to be realized on earth, he respected legality more than justice, and extant institutions more than moral ideals; and he wished to flatter a government in whose policy war and even crime were recognized weapons.