From "To The Finland Station", Edmund Wilson
(From Hegel came the idea that)"...the great revolutionary figures of history were not simply remarkable individuals, who moved mountains by their single wills, but the agents through which the forces of the societies behind them accomplished their unconscious purposes. Julius Caesar, says Hegel, for example, did of course fight and conquer his rivals, and destroy the constitution of Rome in order to win his own position of supremacy, but what gave him his importance for the world was the fact that he was performing the necessary feat--only possible through autocratic control--of unifying the Roman Empire."
"'It was not then merely his private gain, but an unconscious impulse,' writes Hegel, 'that occasioned the accomplishment for which the time was ripe. Such are all great historical men--whose own particular aims involve those large issues which are the will of the World-Spirit."'
"They may be called Heroes, inasmuch as they have derived their purposes and their vocation, not from the calm course of things, sanctioned by the existing order; but from a concealed fount -- one which has not obtained to a phenomenal, present existence. -- From that inner Spirit, still hidden which, impinging on the outer world as on a shell, bursts it in pieces, because it is another kernel than that which belonged to the shell in question. They present themselves, therefore, as men who appear to draw the impulse of their life from themselves; and whose deeds have produced a condition of things and a complex of historical relations which appear to be only their interest,, and their work."
"Such individuals have had no consciousness of the general Idea they were unfolding, while prosecuting those aims of theirs; on the contrary, they were practical, political men. But at the same time they were thinking men,
"This was the very Truth for their age, for their world; the species next in order, so to speak, and which was already formed in the womb of the time. It was theirs to know this nascent principle; the necessary, directly sequent step in progress, which their world was to take; to make this their aim, and to expend their energy in promoting it."
"...For that Spirit which had taken this fresh step in history is the inmost soul of all individuals; but abides in a state of unconsciousness from which the great men in question aroused it."
"Their fellows, therefore, follow these soul-leaders; for they feel the irrestible power of their own inner spirit thus embodied.
