OF THE SPIRIT. 399 



sopher in Germany, prevented also the important argu- 

 ments contained in the earlier writings of de Lamennais 

 from receiving due recognition. Theology was considered, 

 in France as in Germany, to disqualify a thinker for the 

 pursuit of genuine speculation. We know, however, as 

 has already been stated,^ that there existed, at least in 

 Germany, for a considerable time a similar prejudice 

 against those who cultivated exclusively the exact and 

 empirical sciences. In the latter respect France was 

 the first country which emancipated itself from this 

 spirit of extreme rationalism ; it was the first country 

 which attempted to raise an edifice of philosophical 

 thought upon the principles of exact research : and it was 

 also there that some of the leading ideas of recent 

 religious speculation were first introduced or suggested. 

 As I have remarked before, the separation of exact 

 science on the one side and of theology on the other 

 from philosophical thought has never existed in the 

 same extreme way in this country. 



Though French philosophical thought does not exhibit 

 that close and consecutive development on definite lines 

 which is characteristic of German thought, and to a 

 lesser extent of the thought of this country, it contains 

 a few prominent examples in which definite and recur- 

 ring aspects of thought have found, as it were, classical 

 expression. Not to speak of Descartes, we have, in 

 some of the writings of the encycloptedists, a typical 

 eimnciation of the tenets of materialism, to which the 

 later writings of Blichner in Germany, or even of 

 Haeckel in our days, have hardly added anything which 



' See ante, p. 267 n. 



