OF SOCIETY. 



443 



represented by the philosophy of Kant in which the r 17. 

 practical reason, with its supreme command -the cate- position. 

 gorical imperative is elevated to the highest position 

 in the world of thought, theoretical reason having been 

 found incapable of affording the necessary foundation. 

 The position taken up by Kant proved, however, to be 

 unstable. Not only did Kant himself demonstrate how, 

 in its further elaboration, his fundamental ethical con- 

 ception necessarily implied the beliefs of the older theo- 

 logical system, but the term reason itself lost, in the 

 subsequent idealistic systems of German philosophy, its 

 individualistic and subjective meaning, becoming identi- 

 fied in Fichte with the Divine Order, in Schelling with 

 the Absolute, and in Hegel with the World-Spirit. 



Through the whole of this movement German philo- 

 sophy, down to Feuerbach, stands in distinct opposition 

 to French as well as to English philosophy. It was 

 essentially theological, whereas French and English 

 philosophy developed, in all their more original repre- 

 sentatives, a distinctly sociological interest. There is, is. 

 however, a marked difference between sociological specu- between 



English and 



lation in France and England in the earlier half of the 

 nineteenth century, as has been clearly pointed out by 

 J. S. Mill, the greatest figure in the sociological move- 

 ment of that period. As Mr Whittaker says, 1 " he and 

 Comte started equally clear of theology from boyhood. 

 Comte indeed was brought up as a Catholic ; but he 

 was thrown at school into the intellectual atmosphere of 

 post-revolutionary France ; and he himself relates that 



sociology. 



1 "Comte and Mill," by Thos. 

 Whittaker, in Constable's ' Philo- 



sophies Ancient and Modern ' (pp. 

 7, 8). 



