in fact dialectical. In this way, Hegel rescued humanism from the arbitrariness, and the eclecticism, of the eighteenth-century encyclopaedists (e.g. Diderot ), the romantics (e.g. Rousseau ), the empiricists (e.g. Hume ) and the so-called idealists such as Kant. We can argue about what Hegel meant by “Spirit” and “Idea” later,