20 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



ately, there lies another region equally important though 

 not equally accessible by one and the same approach. It is 

 also interesting to see that both roads have met in that 

 common region to which I referred above, and in which 

 language forms the central and dominating feature. The 

 same spirit which lives in the philosophical systems of 

 the great idealistic movement in Germany, and which 

 went hand in hand with the revival of German literature, 

 lived also in the minds of the founders of that great 

 movement to which we owe the sciences of philology, 

 comparative and classical, of jurisprudence, of biblical 

 theology, of history in its many branches. Many of 

 these were indeed pupils of Kant or his successors, 

 and notably the last and greatest exponent of this line 

 of thought, Hegel, can count among his followers a 

 great array of names of the leaders in the various 

 branches of historical research. On the other side, the 

 school which calls itself pre - eminently scientific, and 

 which is represented in Germany and France by the 

 psycho-physical, in England by the evolutionist schools 

 of thought, has found it not only necessary to study 



16. the phenomena of mind in their physical and physio- 

 Transition r * 

 to the social logical foundations, but also to attack and explore that 



point of 



region in which the human mind has become, as it were, 

 an external and tangible thing, viz., human society 

 with its primitive or more advanced institutions. It is 

 needless to say that here again language presents itself 

 as the central creation. In and through it in the 

 spoken and still more in the written word, as also 

 through the creations of the fine and useful arts and of 

 music, external material and lifeless things have become 



