In asking me to talk about Hegel in your series on synoptic philosophies, I take it that you were anxious to discover whether there are any positive merits in Hegel's ideas. I need hardly remind you that such an approach to this particular philosopher is not a very common one in this country to-day. Indeed, of all those who have been thought, at one time or another, to have produced ideas of lasting philosophical importance, Hegel is at present easily the least in repute. Nor is it the case with him as with certain other writers (Spinoza, for instance, or some of the Scholastics) that his ideas are uninteresting or unintelligible to the present generation but are thought all the same to be likely to have an appeal and an importance at some future date when the general intellectual climate has changed; the common verdict on him is far less friendly than that. If opinions on the subject were canvassed among students of philosophy in Great Pritain to-day, there can be little doubt that the majority would write Hegel off as the supreme example of a philosopher who tried to construct an elaborate metaphysical system in the most blatantly a priori manner, and who succeeded in getting himself taken seriously only because of his adroitness in verbal tricks.