612 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, and Nietzsche. This 

 direction of thought was likewise assisted by the dis- 

 appointment which, in Germany, succeeded the failure 

 of the political movement of the year 1848. The latter 

 had been largely led by theorists and supported by 

 scholars and students from the German universities. 

 Political as well as philosophical aspirations had failed. 

 To this must be added the renewed influence of the 

 critical writings of Kant and the sceptical writings of 

 Hume, to which Neo-Kantians in Germany and Neo- 

 Hegelians in England drew marked attention. The 

 word Agnosticism was coined to denote the hopeless 

 attitude in which the human mind found itself 

 with regard to what Carlyle termed the "Eternal 

 Verities." This term was destined to acquire a much 

 larger meaning than either Huxley or Spencer probably 

 realised, when the criticism of the principles of scientific 

 thought revealed not only their formal precision and 

 practical usefulness but quite as much their essential 

 instability and uncertainty, their purely provisional 

 nature. 

 i6. To the brilliantly expressed pessimism of Schopenhauer 



the 1 three * n Germany an ^ the widespread agnosticism proceeding 

 countries, from Spencer in England, France added the probabilism 

 of Eenan. Thus, all three countries contributed, in their 

 own way, to expose the general inconclusiveness of modern 

 lines of reasoning: Germany of speculative, England of 

 scientific, France of historical and critical research. An 

 attempt has been made to admit in general this incon- 

 clusiveness of modern European thought, and at the same 

 time to answer and counteract it. And it is significant 



