302 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



disciple of Kant. In their writings an important point 

 is emphasised which has also been brought out with 

 increasing clearness in the course of the last century. 

 It refers to the part which language plays in our mental 

 development. For them language is the instrument 

 through which what would otherwise remain separated 

 in the human soul, the sensuous and the super-sensuous, 

 is brought together and unified. But this idea is little 

 more than an apergu, a fruitful suggestion which 

 even at the present day has hardly been sufficiently 

 followed up. 



None of these three opponents of Kant's systematic 

 philosophy were academic teachers who felt the call to 

 expound their philosophical theories in a methodical 

 form to younger minds. Their teaching was therefore 

 ragmentary and incomplete. It brought out certain 

 points with great clearness, and urged them with much 

 literary skill, but it resembled the greater part of the 

 philosophical writing in this country, inasmuch as it 

 lacked either method or completeness of thought or 

 both. Through this fragmentary but more elegant 

 treatment of important philosophical problems these 

 writers had great influence upon the popular thought 

 of their age, but they stood outside the systematic 

 and methodical development of the new ideas which 

 were contained in Kant's philosophy. Nevertheless, 



sensuous certainty of external and 

 temporal things, of our own exist- 

 ence and that of all things, is also 



called Belief. In this extension 

 the principle of belief has, as is 

 well known, been made the principle 

 of a philosophy, and we find in 

 Jacobi's sentences, almost ver- 



batim, those of Hamann. The 

 high demand which religious belief 

 makes only through its absolute 

 content is in this way extended to 

 the subjective belief which attaches 

 only to a particular, accidental, 

 relative, and finite content." 



