498 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



48. 



Attitude of 

 Mill to 

 German 

 thought. 



leaders of thought towards that country and giving 

 added importance to the literary movement which had 

 originated in Coleridge and was carried on by Carlyle. 

 In fact, Mill himself clearly recognised in English 

 thought two distinct movements which he identified 

 with the names of Bentham and Coleridge, and 

 emphasised also in his appreciative Eeview of Carlyle's 

 ' French Revolution.' It cannot be maintained that 

 Mill himself was ever a sympathetic student of German 

 transcendentalism. 1 A taste for this sprang up in 

 Oxford after Mill's great influence was there on the 

 decline, but it is interesting to note that among 

 the few leaders of German thought singled out by 

 Mill for special notice there stand Pestalozzi, the 

 father of the education of the People ; Wilhelm von 

 Humboldt, the leader of academic education and culture ; 

 Fichte, the independent exponent of Kant's ethics; and 

 lastly, Goethe, who has been termed the apostle of 

 inner freedom. 



The need of a general system of popular education 

 and uplifting of the Masses, and various attempts in the 

 direction of a reasoned creed, have both increasingly 

 occupied the attention of British legislators and thinkers 

 since the time of Mill. Continental schools hare been 

 visited and reported on, and philosophical creeds have 

 been formulated both in the direction suggested by 

 Comte and in that suggested by Kant and Hegel. But 

 what was done on the Continent, notably in Germany, 

 cannot be imitated in this country. The work of 



1 Even his knowledge of Kant 

 seems to belong to the late period 



when he wrote his ' Examination of 

 Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' 



