The poet George MacDonald would have intuitively understood Hegel’s “othering.” Even though these two men never knew each other, there is a strange likeness between Hegel and MacDonald, a shared tendency to start small and increase. Hegel never stopped expanding. By the time of his death, Hegel’s philosophy included everything; he was the last of the great systematisers – he even claimed that his philosophy was the culmination of logic, nature and spirit! Though MacDonald’s creativity is not as unbounded (or egoistic) as that of Hegel, MacDonald has a similar expansive creativity…