212 SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



school, there were certain more tangible characteristics 

 of German research, which were carried over from the 

 older to the modern type of thought. It will be useful 

 to define these more clearly. 



In the course of the second half of the eighteenth 

 century German literature and German philosophy had 

 started from the beginnings laid by other nations, and 

 after mastering and appropriating their achievements, 

 had set out for a new course and a higher flight. Milton 

 and Shakespeare l in epic and dramatic poetry ; Ossian, 

 the Percy Ballads, and Burns in song and lyric ; Gibbon 

 in history ; Joseph Scaliger and Bentley in philology ; 

 Locke, Hume, and Spinoza in philosophy; Eousseau in 

 prose, all these great names of a later or earlier past 

 had become familiar watchwords to German poets or 

 students to Lessing, Herder, and Goethe, to Schlegel, 

 F. A. Wolf, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, to Bockh, Her- 

 mann, and Niebuhr, to Kant, Fichte, and Jacobi, before 

 they came forward with their own creations. The same 

 cosmopolitan spirit of looking elsewhere and everywhere 

 for beginnings, and for co-operation in the united work 

 of learning ; the same historical taste, the same desire to 

 glean from all quarters, characterised the early decades 

 of the revival of German science. Hence the many 

 periodicals and annual reports; hence the fact that the 



1 These names are not given as 

 they follow in time, but as they 

 followed in their influence on Ger- 

 man thought and literature. Thus 

 the early representatives of the 

 German revival were influenced by 

 Milton and Pope more than by the 

 greater Shakespeare : epic and di- 

 dactic preceded dramatic poetry : 

 Shakespeare was made familiar to 



German readers only through 

 Goethe and Schlegel. Similarly 

 the reaction against the school of 

 Leibniz and Wolff in philosophy 

 began with Kant's reply to Hume's 

 sceptical philosophy, whereas the 

 study of Spinoza influenced Kant's 

 followers and opponents, Jacobi, 

 Fichte, and Schelling. 



