This is a study of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the philosopher who belongs to the period of German idealism in the decades following Kant. As a theology student Hegel formed friendships fellow students, the future great romantic poet Friedrich Holderlin and Friedrich W. J. von Schelling, who, like Hegel, would become one of the major figures of the German philosophical scene in the first half of the nineteenth century. These friendships clearly had a major influence on Hegel’s philosophical development, and for a while the intellectual lives of the three were closely intertwined. The most systematic of the post-Kantian idealists, Hegel attempted, throughout his published writings as well as in his lectures, to elaborate a comprehensive and systematic ontology from a logical starting point.