Philosophy proper only thrives under conditions of at-homeness in the world and such conditions obtained in neither the Roman nor medieval world. Hegel then sees both periods of philosophy as effectively marking time, and it is only in the modern world that once more develops. What modern philosophy will reflect is the universalization of the type of subjectivity we have seen represented by Socrates in the Greek polis and Jesus in the Christian religious community. Strangely, Hegel nominates two very antithetic figures as marking the onset of modern philosophy, Francis Bacon and the German Christian mystic, Jacob Böhme (LHP III: 170–216).  In the 1825–6 lectures, from there Hegel traces the path of modern philosophy through three phases: a first period of metaphysics comprising Descartes, Spinoza and Malebranche; a second treating Locke, Leibniz and others; and the recent philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Jacobi and Schelling. Of course the perspective from which this narrative has been written is the absent final stage within this sequence—that represented by Hegel himself.  Hegel concludes the lectures with the claim that he has