OF THE SPIRIT. 371 



Caird prepared the way to an understanding of Hegel's 

 Philosophy by his original expositions of Kant's Cri- 

 tiques. Around these important and original contribu- 

 tions to the history and Criticism of modern German 

 idealism there sprang up a large literature ^ which has 

 been variously termed Neo-Kantian and Neo-Hegelian. 

 It contains all the more important contributions towards 

 a philosophy which stands in distinct opposition to the 

 purely empirical, naturalistic, and agnostic school of 

 thought, of which Herbert Spencer is the centre and 

 main representative, and which is frequently called 

 Positivism. 



The main thesis of the idealistic school in this country 59. 

 may be stated to be the Eeality of Spirit, but the word idealistic 



school. 



Spirit is not taken to denote an exclusively intellectual 

 principle or process, which constituted the danger of the 

 Hegelian statement of this conception in Germany, In 

 fact, the Hegelian principle or Geist is to the English school 

 not Mind or Eeason only, but Spirit as including also the 

 regions of Will, Feeling, and Emotion. These specula- 

 tions start, therefore, from a broader basis than that upon 

 which Hegel stood in the beginning of the century — a 

 basis prepared not only by a reconsideration of the 

 fundamental problem as stated by Hume, but assimilat- 

 ing also what had been independently done by psychol- 

 ogists and moral philosophers in this country. Green 

 himself correctly defined the task which stood before 

 him, and fixed the programme of his school, when he 

 said that Hegel's work would have to be undertaken and 

 done over again. 



^ On this literature see supra, vol. iii. p. 532. 



