OF SOCIETY. 445 



Divine order and command by the endeavour to cast its 

 anchor into the ground of a social order and command. 

 The transition from the earlier to the later position 19. 



Absence in 



took place in this country, and still earlier in France, both alike of 



metaphysi- 



without passing through the intermediate stage which I calsta g e - 

 referred to above. Following a terminology introduced 

 by Comte we may term the latter the metaphysical 

 stage. 1 It is represented in Germany by the successive 

 phases of idealism. As I have stated on a former 

 occasion, these aimed at supporting or replacing the 

 traditional and historical religious beliefs by a philo- 

 sophical or reasoned creed. It may be said that for the 

 greater part of a whole century the majority of serious- 

 minded persons in Germany believed that such a philo- 

 sophical or reasoned creed was a feasible achievement of 

 the human intellect, and expected its realisation. In 

 the same degree as this expectation was destroyed the 

 transition to the positive stage has become more and 

 more accentuated. With it, German thought has taken 

 up the sociological point of view. The problem of society 

 and humanity has been pushed into the foreground and 

 is there studied with quite as much ardour as it was 

 studied in England and France fifty or a hundred 

 years earlier : and this in the clearly established in- 

 terest of morality, of the solution of the ethical problem. 

 Not only have societies and periodicals been founded to 

 serve the purposes of " ethical culture," but sociology, in 

 the largest sense of the word, as the study of humanity, 

 is represented by an enormous and still increasing litera- 

 ture. German thought has in this instance as in so 



1 See infra, p. 483. 



