472 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



partments of knowledge. It further participated in, and 

 to a large extent directed, the historical interest, being 

 nursed and brought up in the same school, that of 

 classical literature and learning, in which so many of 

 the leading minds of the nation have been trained. 

 And lastly, it took as the highest subject of philo- 

 sophic thought the religious problem, the attempt to put 

 something better in the place of the narrow orthodoxy 

 or the prosaic rationalism of the eighteenth century. 

 All this was to be done by ascending to, and getting 

 hold of, the living spirit that pervaded everything; by 

 rising beyond mere forms and categories, but through 

 them, to the truly Eeal which manifests itself in all 

 actual facts and processes in nature, mind, and history, 

 giving to them their deeper meaning and value. This 

 philosophy must have appeared to its disciples to be the 

 very Eationale, the abstract exposition, of the various 

 aims and endeavours which then formed the programme 

 of many an eminent academic teacher. Notably in two 

 directions and on two independent fields of research, the 

 thought of the age had at that time put forward definite 

 problems. Foremost stood the task which F. A. Wolf had 

 defined as that of the new science of Philology : the recon- 

 struction of classical antiquity, the task of finding again, 

 through patient study of the remains of Greek art and 

 literature, the spirit that lived in that greatest era of 

 bygone human culture. The other and independent move- 

 ment I refer to was the birth of modern German theology, 1 



1 It is well to remember that 

 nearly all the leading thinkers of 

 that age in Germany, beginning 

 with Lessing, onward through Kant, 



Herder, Fichte, Schleiermacher to 

 Schelling and Hegel, came originally 

 through theology to philosophy, and 

 that they all preserved a genuine 



