What Hegel was offering was a spiritualized version of evolution. (Nietzsche even said that “without Hegel, there would have been no Darwin.”) The difference is that Hegel applied the concept of evolution not to biology but to the world of ideas. His claim was that all our ideas—law, morality, religion, art, political ideals—result from the gradual “actualization of the Universal Mind” over the course of history.
