596 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



the conscious human mind, but also into nature, which 

 appears to him as an earlier stage in the self-development 

 of mind, not unlike that conception which inspired the 

 earlier writings of Schelling. With Wundt, however, 

 as with many modern philosophers, this idea of develop- 

 ment of the conscious out of the unconscious, of the 

 organic out of the inorganic, has gained greater definite- 

 ness through the assimilation of Darwinian ideas. As 

 this conception gained the ascendancy in Wundt's specu- 

 lations, he has devoted himself more and more to those 

 regions of philosophical thought which, in this country, 

 are comprised under the name of mental and moral, as 

 opposed to natural, philosophy. He has therefore, less 

 than Schopenhauer, Lotze, and Hartmann, developed a 

 philosophy of nature. His thought is, moreover, governed 

 by what may be termed a monistic tendency : it aims at 

 finding a universal principle, which pervades and unites 

 the different regions of existence. 



This tendency he has in common with many other 

 recent thinkers, some of whom occupy fundamentally 

 different positions, according to the central principle or 

 conception which they adopt. But however varying the 

 latter may be in different systems, it leads essentially to 

 one characteristic, viz., to the attempt to bridge over 

 the great gulf which, to the common -sense view a 

 view termed appropriately by Wundt " Naive Eealism," 

 exists between the outer and the inner world, between 

 matter and mind. Alongside of those various attempts 

 to arrive at a monistic conception of things there will 

 always run another and equally powerful current of 

 thought, which emphasises not only this fundamental 



