746 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



This movement, however, belongs to a later period. 

 A whole generation intervened between the death of 

 Hegel and the beginning of Hegelian studies in this 

 country. During that period Hegel was forgotten and 

 neglected in his own country : it was the period during 

 which the scientific spirit gained the upper hand and 

 usurped the name of philosophy — moving about in the 

 new region of thought in the same uncritical manner in 

 which Metaphysics had deported themselves before the 

 time of Kant. The Critical Spirit was only then 

 beginning to examine the principles and methods of 

 Science in the same way as Kant had, two generations 

 earlier, examined the principles and methods of Meta- 

 13. physics. We may term this period that intervened 



The period of iii -it- tie 



transition, bctwccn the earlier and the later idealistic school or 

 thought, the " period of transition." 



The labours of this period, so far as scientific thought 

 is concerned, are marked by their growing international 

 character ; at the end of the period science had be- 

 come cosmopolitan. Not so philosophy. Each of the 

 three countries in which we are mainly interested 

 prepared in its own way that change of ideas which 

 marks the essential intellectual difference between the 

 beginning and the end of the century. We may 

 identify the work of each country respectively with 

 the names of Lotze in Germany, Comte in France, Mill 

 and the Utilitarians in England. 



Popularly, the best - known types of philosophical 

 thought in the three countries are Materialism and 

 Pessimism in Germany, Positivism and social philosophy 

 in Prance, Naturalism and Agnosticism in England. 



