84 INTRODUCTION. 



To it are due the great changes in every department of 

 science, of life, and probably also of literature and art, 

 the great inventions and the great conflicts of our age. 

 Science has not only very largely influenced our ideas, 

 it has also by its applications altered the external face 

 of the world we live in. It is therefore simply a tribute 

 to the popular view, and a desire to start from some 

 striking and generally conceded position, if I select the 

 39. scientific movement of ideas as the first with which 



Scientific 



progress to I have to deal. How has it spread in the course of 



be consid- 

 ered first. ne cen tury ? From what beginnings and through what 



influences ? What are its principles and methods ? How 

 have they themselves changed and developed ? What 

 has it led to ? These are some of the questions which 



1803 ' Life and Writings of Thomas Reid ' represent the predominant 



Scottish philosophy, and 



1804 Thomas Brown, ' Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect,' 



the beginnings of the later associationalist school. At the same 

 period Jeremy Bentham's influence, which cannot be reduced to 

 special dates, had already acquired European if not world-wide 

 importance. His long life (1748-1832) was contemporary with 

 Goethe's (1749-1832), whose 'Faust' was given to the world in 

 successive stages between the years 1790 and 1832. 



1794. Thomas Paine's 'Age of Reason.' 



1798. Malthus's 'Principles of Population.' 



Literary criticism, started on a new era and extended its influence in 



1802 through the 'Edinburgh Review,' and 



1808 the ' Quarterly Review ' ; in Germany somewhat earlier in 



1794 Schiller's 'Horen.' 



1797. Schiller and Goethe's "Xenien" in the ' Musenalmauach.' 



1798. Schlegel's ' Atheiiscum.' 



1802. A. W. v. Schlegel's Berlin lectures. 



The Romantic school of fiction dates in Germany from 1798, when 

 Frederick Schlegel uses the term for the first time as characteristic of 

 a new departure in his review of Goethe's ' Wilhelm-Meister ' (' Athenaeum," 

 vol. i.) A literary movement with frequently similar aims and charac- 

 teristics is represented in this country by Walter Scott (" Lay of the Last 

 Minstrel," 1805), Southey (" Thalaba," 1802), and Coleridge (" Christabel," 

 1806), and spreads later into France. As the great source of the new 

 and original poetic inspiration of nineteenth-century poetry we have the 

 " Lyrical Ballads," 1798, and besides ' Faust,' the other principal works of 

 Goethe and Schiller (died 1805). 



