For sheer intellectual fire-power, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was probably the most brilliant thinker of the nineteenth century. He was a philosopher who could think about the entire world with an Aristotelian comprehensiveness, if not an Aristotelian lucidity. He is best known for his idealist positing of an Absolute, a kind of non-religious, Neo-Platonic, post-Enlightenment “One,” which was observed only through its workings in the ordinary reality experienced by mere mortals, but deduced (divined?) through the logic of Hegel himself.