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Assumption and Method in Hegel’s Description of History Byung tai Yoon (Yonsei University) The essence of Hegel’s thinking lies in the spirit. If reason is the subject of the spirit, life might be regarded as its object in his thinking. The spirit should be understood as the spirit only if it acts and moves. To act means to draw the trajectory of life which is nothing other than the historical. Thus the spirit must be historical. Hegel was always concerned with the historical, and separated freedom from the objective law of nature and history. That is why he parted company with Kant or Fichte. Reason must be the principle of history in Hegel’s account in so far as there is nothing that is able to determine the reasonable within history except for reason. The main thrust of Hegel's philosophical history and historical philosophy is that the spiritual and the rational are historical, and historical is and has to be rational. This paper does not aim to propose a new interpretation of Hegel's philosophy of history. Rather I wish to comment on his main ideas in detail in order to indirectly warn readers that the more secondary literatures on Hegel’s philosophy of history have attempted to reveal his originality, the more they have distorted and hidden his main ideas. To do so, I plan to raise and answer two questions which, I believe, play a role as a preliminary to leading Hegel’s philosophy of history: What is his assumption in describing the philosophical history?; What is his method in doing so? These two questions might be resolved not in consecutive order but in mutually circular order in Hegel since the method is determined by the assumption, and vice versa.