318 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



Humboldt's championship of the natural sciences 

 entirely changed. The expectancy which up to that 

 time had characterised the attitude of all younger and 

 ardent spirits, the waiting for the new light, after having 

 suffered a first shock through Strauss and Feuerbach, 

 was, for the last time, roused into prominence when 

 Schelling delivered his inaugural lecture (loth Nov. 

 1841) before a crowded audience. Only for a short 

 time did this eager expectancy last. His brilliant 

 audience included many of the intellectual leaders of 

 the age. There they sat : " one more learned than the 

 other and they understood nothing." l 



To this has to be added the second or personal 

 circumstance that Schleiermacher was by profession a 

 religious teacher, 2 and that it was generally understood 

 that he had no sympathy with the metaphysical treat- 

 ment of the religious problem as it had found expression 

 in Hegel's system, and that even less sympathy existed 

 on the part of Hegel and his followers with Schleier- 



1 Ernst Curtius in a Letter dated 

 Jan. 1842 (see his ' Letters ' 

 published by Friedrich Curtius, 

 Berlin, 1903, p. 283). On the 

 whole dramatic interest (equalled 

 in modern times probably only by 

 M. Bergson's Lectures at the Sor- 

 bonne and elsewhere) see Kuno 

 Fischer, loc. cit., p. 343, sqq. ; 

 further, K. A. Varnhagen von 

 Ense, ' Tagebiicher,' vols. i. and 

 ii., 1861, in which also the gradual 

 waning of this interest and the 

 growing disillusion and reaction are 

 reported by a critical onlooker. 



2 A somewhat similar fate has 

 befallen the philosophical writ- 

 ings of James Martineau in this 

 country. Whereas in Scotland 



some of the leading teachers came 

 to philosophy out of the Church, 

 the English Unitarian, Martineau, 

 was debarred from filling the im- 

 portant position of a philosophical 

 teacher at University College, which 

 had been promoted as a non-sec- 

 tarian centre of higher teaching 

 and scholarship mainly by repre- 

 sentatives of that school of emanci- 

 pated thought which centred in 

 Bentham and James Mill. There 

 is no doubt that Martineau's philo- 

 sophy, with such an opportunity 

 of leading younger minds, would 

 have occupied, much earlier, the 

 prominent place in British thought 

 which it intrinsically merits. 



