638 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



attained, in Art and Poetry. With this conception 

 he, with some of the foremost representatives of the 

 Eomantic school, abandoned the purely ethical con- 

 ception of the world-order, which, under the influence 

 of Kant, dominated the contemporary philosophy of 

 Fichte ; who, on his part, was not slow to warn his 

 hearers and readers against the danger of this new 

 departure of his former disciple. 



If we now pause for a moment to consider the great 

 change which had come over philosophical thought in 

 Germany at the beginning of the century, we realise 

 that this consisted as much in a widening of the 

 philosophical horizon and a deepening of philosophical 

 insight as in a dangerous unsettlement of the philo- 

 sophical mind. The unity of doctrine and of pur- 

 pose which characterised the philosophy of the schools 

 for a short time after the appearance of Kant's first 

 ' Critique/ had in the course of twenty years been 

 gradually lost. There was now a great abundance of 

 philosophies, each professing to have found or to be 

 in the way of finding the true Foundation. They 

 were all governed by the formal aim of philosophical 

 speculation, that of the unification of thought. They 

 were all more or less guided by a desire to solve the 

 highest problem of the age, the reconciliation of the 

 truths of science and the truths of faith ; science being 

 conceived in the larger sense of the word peculiar to 

 the German mind, faith still meaning the essential 

 truths of the Christian religion. The scientific did 

 not then mean the opposite of the religious spirit, but 

 desired rather to include and incorporate it. 



