302 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



12. 



Influence 

 of social 

 questions. 



is. 



Influence of 



matics in 



France. 



tion which economic and social questions had attracted 

 through the growing wealth, industry, and population 

 of the country. It was with the distinct intention of 

 contributing something towards the development of a 

 political science that John Stuart Mill and many of 

 his contemporaries and followers attacked the problem 

 of human knowledge. 



The influences which general literature and scientific 

 thought exerted upon philosophy in France were quite 

 different from those which existed in Germany or in 

 England. Indeed, the most prominent characteristic, 

 which existed in the scientific thought of that country 

 was almost entirely wanting both in Germany and Eng- 

 land in the beginning of the century ; although these 

 countries had furnished in former centuries two brilliant 

 examples in Newton and Leibniz. I refer to the mathe- 



. . . 



matical spirit, the analytical as distinguished from the 

 experimental method, which pervades the speculations of 

 the greatest French philosophers such as Descartes, 

 Pascal, and Malebranche, nay, even of Buffon and Vol- 

 taire. The analytical method had at the beginning of 

 the century risen supreme, revealing its great power in 

 the highly abstract, but also in the more popular works 

 of Laplace and some of his contemporaries. Against 

 this we find it, after the age of Newton and Leibniz, 

 almost absent both in English and German philosophical 

 thought. 1 In Germany the great genius who probably 



1 This generalisation might be 

 objected to, considering that Ger- 

 many had Euler and Gauss. But, 

 to disregard the fact that Euler 



was not a German but a Swiss, it 

 must be noted that he only in- 

 directly influenced German thought 

 as represented by the High Schools 



