The revival of interest in Hegel which this century has witnessed, in Germany and later in France, has many explanations. One is certainly to be found in the publication, in 1907, of the essays Hegel wrote in his youth, up to his departure for Jena in 1801.¹ These essays, together with the "Phenomenology of Spirit" which Hegel himself published in 1807, reveal an intense interest in concrete experience, its development and contradictions, and a relative freedom from traditional philosophical formulations. Those who had seen in Hegel nothing but an arid logician and ruthless systematizer now found in him an inspiration for their own concern about a return "to the thing itself".