318 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



Humboldt's championship of the natural sciences — 

 entirely changed. The expectancy which up to that 

 time had characterised the attitude of all younger and 

 ardent spirits, the waiting for the new light, after having 

 suffered a first shock through Strauss and Feuerbach, 

 was, for the last time, roused into prominence when 

 Schelling delivered his inaugural lecture (loth Nov. 

 1841) before a crowded audience. Only for a short 

 time did this eager expectancy last. His brilliant 

 audience included many of the intellectual leaders of 

 the age. There they sat : " one more learned than the 

 other and they understood — nothing." ^ 



To this has to be added the second or personal 

 circumstance that Schleiermacher was by profession a 

 religious teacher,^ and that it was generally understood 

 that he had no sympathy with the metaphysical treat- 

 ment of the religious problem as it had found expression 

 in Hegel's system, and that even less sympathy existed 

 on the part of Hegel and his followers with Schleier- 



^ Ernst Curtius in a Letter dated , some of the leading teachers came 

 Jan. 1842 (see his ' Letters ' to philosophy out of the Church, 

 published by Friedrich Curtius, | the English Unitarian, Martineau, 

 Berlin, 1903, p. 283). On the | was debarred from filling the im- 

 whole dramatic interest (equalled j portant position of a philosophical 

 in modern times probably oulj' by i teacher at Universitj- College, which 

 M. Bergson's Lectures at the Sor- I had been promoted as a non-sec- 

 bonne and elsewhere) see Kuno : tarian centre of higher teaching 

 Fischer, loc. cit., p. 343, sqq. ; and scholarship mainly by repre- 

 further, K. A. Varnhagen von I sen tatives of that school of emanci- 

 Eiise, ' Tagebiicher,' vols. i. and I pated thought which centred in 



ii., 1861, in which also the gradual 

 waning of this interest and the 

 growing disillusion and reaction are 

 reported by a critical onlooker. 

 - A somewhat similar fate has 



Bentham and James Mill. There 

 is no doubt that Martineau's philo- 

 sophy, with such an opportunity 

 of leading younger minds, would 

 have occupied, much earlier, the 



befallen the philosophical writ- prominent place in British thought 

 ings of James Martiueau in this which it intrinsically merits, 

 country. Whereas in Scotland 



