388 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



... a chapter of German philosophy would have come 

 out differently, larger, more lasting, and more fruitful. 

 So important is it to march with history and to follow 

 the historic development of the great ideas in mankind." l 

 Gradually almost the whole philosophical interest in 

 Germany with two or three brilliant exceptions 

 threw itself into historical studies, bent upon tracing 

 everywhere the movement of ideas, and thus elaborating 

 on a larger and more accurate scale the programme 

 of Hegel's philosophy. But as the lofty ideas of the 

 classical period of German literature, where philosophy 

 itself had found its inspiration, receded into the past, 

 and what Hegel had done and Schelling attempted ap- 

 peared to the critical eye to be untenable or shadowy, 

 the flood of historical literature descended more and 

 more to lower levels, spreading out in the study of 

 mere detail. A loss of grasp, a disintegration of phil- 

 osophical thought as a whole, was the inevitable con- 

 sequence. Not unnaturally, therefore, a generation 

 succeeded for whom the earlier leading ideals had lost 

 their meaning, and who would accordingly seize with 

 eagerness any new suggestion which afforded the pros- 

 pect of arriving at that unification of thought which 

 had been temporarily lost, but without which no fruit- 

 ful progress could be made in any large department of 

 knowledge. 



Through the working of the scientific spirit as well as 

 through that of the critical spirit, with both of which my 

 readers have become acquainted in earlier chapters of 



1 See the preface to the second edition of ' Logische Untersuch- 

 ungen.' 



