136 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



extremer forms of materialism and scepticism with their 

 virulent attacks, their uncontrolled animosity towards 

 traditional beliefs, for which Germany has gained an 

 unfortunate reputation in the course of the nineteenth 

 century, did not then exist in the best literature of the 

 country. It was, so far as it was imported through 

 French literature, distinctly distasteful ^ to the human- 

 istic spirit of such leaders of popular thought in Ger- 

 many as Lessing, Mendelssohn, Herder, and Goethe. 



Thus, looking at European thought as a whole, in so far 

 as it occupied itself at the beginning of the nineteenth 

 century with ethical questions, or with the problem 

 of the Good, we find that the three countries contributed 

 independent aspects : the conception of an existing 

 moral order in this country, the overthrow of all existing 

 order in France, and the spirit of free and unfettered 

 inquiry in Germany. There followed from these different 

 aspects a hasty reconstruction in France disregarding 

 the fundamental questions altogether, an extreme love 



^ On this point also see what 

 Goethe says in the eleventh book of 

 ' Dichtung und Wahrheit,' writing 

 then of his Strassburg days and 

 under the influence of Herder, who 

 had introduced him to Goldsmith, 

 and was then already occupied with 

 his studies in folk-lore and folk- 

 song. Criticising French literature, 

 in particular the flippancy and bad 

 faith of Voltaire, but recognising a 

 cognate spirit in Diderot — of whom 

 he, inter alia, says that he was " in 

 all that the French blame in him, 

 a true German "■ — he turns, with 

 a contemptuous estimate of the 

 ' Syst^me de la Nature ' as a 

 •' quintessence of senility," away 

 from French literature in the 

 following words : "Thus, living on 



the confines of France we at once 

 got free and clear of all French 

 ways. We found their manner of 

 life too precise and too elegant, 

 their poetry frigid, their criticism 

 destructive, their philosophj' ab- 

 struse and yet insufficient, so that 

 we were on the point of abandoning 

 ourselves, at least tentatively, to 

 crude nature, were it not that 

 another influence had for some time 

 already prepared us for higher and 

 freer views and enjoyments equally 

 true and jwetical ; secretly at first 

 and moderately, it dominated us 

 ever more distinctly and powerfully. 

 I need hardly say that I mean 

 Shakespeare, and, after having said 

 this, a further explanation is not 

 necessary " {loc. cit., vol. 28, p. 70). 



