An atheist, he replaced the concept of God with the idea of the ‘World-Spirit’ of rationality, which he believed was working out its purposes through history in a process he called ‘dialectical’, in which one historical condition would be replaced by its antithesis, and then the two would combine to create a final synthesis. As he became more conservative, Hegel began to regard the state of Prussia after 1815 as a ‘synthesis’ requiring no further alteration.
