Hegel treats youthful belief in an unfinished world as delusion corrected by aging

Evidence

In fact, for Hegel, isn’t it the case that everything that occurs has done so too late? Isn’t youth itself, in its very novelty, already belated? In the Philosophy of Spirit of The Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, at the moment where he analyses ‘the natural course of the ages of life’, Hegel makes it clear that the characteristic of youth is to believe in the future, to think that the world is not yet all it really is: ‘The exalted spirit of the youth does not recognize that the substantial universe, in its essence, has already achieved in this world its development and its actuality (Wirklichkeit).’ The youth must wait to grow old to understand that the world ‘possesses the absolute power to actualize itself and that it has done so in our time; that it is not so impotent that it needs first to await its effective realization.’ — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 199