Hegel's writings, particularly his more abstract and systematic works, confront the translator with numerous problems. The principles which I have followed in translating the more abstract texts in this collection – especially On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, but also The Relationship of Religion to the State and parts of the extract from the Lectures on the Philosophy of History – are identical with those which I followed in my translation of Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge, 1991; published in the same series as the present volume) and which I described in detail in my preface to that translation (pp. xxxv–xliv). The most important of these principles is the need to adopt consistent renderings of key expressions in Hegel's system and to avoid confusion between similar or related terms with different nuances of meaning; the English equivalents for all such terms are listed, with explanatory comments where necessary, in the glossary towards the end of this volume.

One of the main difficulties in translating the present collection was due to the fact that the texts included in it vary considerably in form and subject matter and were written at widely separated stages of Hegel's career, from his earliest phase as a writer to the last year of his life.