It is generally thought that analytic philosophy has very little in common with the philosophical approach of Hegel. After all, doesn’t Hegel’s 'absolute idealism’ proclaim the universe to be ultimately some kind of mind, and is this not simply a reflection of a pre-modern religious consciousness rather than an approach in line with a modern, scientific view of the world? From the point of view of many contemporary interpreters of Hegel, such a view may be little more than a caricature, but it is still a widely held one, and can be traced back to the earliest days of analytic philosophy.