472 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



considered at all, did not occupy in the realm of philo- 

 sophy the first place, with the important exception 

 perhaps of education, which, as I have had repeated 

 occasion to point out, received great attention from two 

 sides, in the direction of popular education and eleva- 

 tion of the masses and in the direction of academic and 

 higher culture. Economic problems, in the narrower 

 sense of the word, as studied methodically in England 

 and in a summary and radical manner in France, 

 were hardly treated at all by leading German thinkers, 

 or if they were, only as corollaries and in the way 

 of the application of abstract metaphysical principles. 

 These were laid down and elaborated in the general 

 systems of philosophic creeds. Neither did there exist 

 in Germany any great practical need, any pronounced 

 demand on the part of the existing governments and 

 societies to deal with these more definite and circum- 

 scribed problems. 



II. 



Jules Michelet begins his ' History of the Nineteenth 

 Century ' by introducing three great Socialists, Babeuf 

 (1760-1795), Saint-Simon, Fourier (1772-1835), who, 

 with the end of Jacobinism, " emerge about the same 

 time from the prisons of the Terror. Their ideas, to 

 begin with, are in no wise discordant; they have the 

 same point of departure : humanity, pity, the outlook on 

 extreme misery. The burning centre was Lyons, on the 

 one side, where Fourier lived; Picardy, on the other, 

 the home of Babeuf ; and the deep centre of the world, 



