Bob Wallace, I am humbled by your analysis.

And I am glad that your bring up Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy.  It is this work which should, in my opinion, be the first work of Hegel that a student begins with.  My post was an attempt to highlight just how inaccessible Hegel’s world is.  Hegel was many things and a raving mystic is one of them.  Let’s just get that out of the way.  And reading through this work will not only make that clear based on the weight that Hegel gives Cusa, Boehme, Bruno and other mystics, but it will open up the world so foreign to the modern Anglophone of German mysticism for which idealism is its public face. The Hegel's Hist. of Philosophy will give the student an alternative perspective to the one most commonly taught:

I think Spengler summed it all up it best and put this all in context in a footnote on page 365 of The Decline of the West (The tan Knopf 2003 English Edition of Volume I) when he says: “Here we are only considering the scholastic side.  The mystic side, from which Pythagoras and Leibniz were not very far, reached its culminations in Plato and Goethe, and in our own case it has been extended beyond Goethe by the Romantics, Hegel and Nietzsche, where Scholasticism exhausted itself with Kant – and Aristotle – and degenerated thereafter into a routine profession.”  I could not agree with Spengler more…

-Gary Geck
www.garygeck.com