476 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



of the philosopher to define this highest law and to show 

 its application and working in the whole region of 

 practical morality, both individual and social. Whereas 

 the French philosophers put in the foreground the natural 

 rights of man and attached little or no importance to 

 the ideas of obligation and duty except as necessary 

 arrangements of convenience and expediency, the Kant- 

 ian philosophy put in the foreground the idea of duty, 

 of an obligation, and discussed the social order in the 

 light of facilities bestowed and limitations imposed upon 

 individual members of society so as to enable them to 

 follow the highest command, " to order all their relations 

 with freedom according to reason," as Fichte said ; but 

 the highest law of reason was the moral principle, the 

 call to Duty. 



During the various phases in which the philosophical 

 ideal of German thought, which we may define as a 

 spiritualised rationalism, found embodiment, we see how 

 it came into closer and closer contact with the higher 

 practical questions, notably those of society. This was 

 inevitable, and was brought about through the personal 

 positions which the several leading thinkers of the 

 nation successively occupied. 



Kant, who was the prime mover and gave the impetus 

 to this whole course of thought, lived secluded in a small 

 out-of-the-way university town in the north-east of 

 Germany. Fichte, originally destined to be a preacher, 

 went from Saxony to Switzerland, from there to the 

 classical centre of Germany, and finally settled in Berlin, 

 where he helped to lay the foundation of what became 

 in the course of the century the foremost German uni- 



