OF SOCIETY. 



475 



first and most powerful impetus to a discussion of 

 the social problem by German thinkers. They realised 

 quite as fully as did those of other countries that 

 the age had great problems to solve, nor did they 

 approach them in a less hopeful spirit, though it was 

 a spirit at once less radical and subversive than that 

 which ruled in France, less practical and common- 

 sense than that which spread in England. 



With French contemporary thought German thinkers 

 had indeed in common that they believed in abstract 

 constructions, in logical formulae. But whereas in 

 France abstraction meant the methods of the exact 

 sciences, the logical ideal being that of the mathe- 

 matician, in Germany abstraction meant the lifting up 

 out of the lower region of the ordinary interests of life 

 into the higher realms of Poetry, Art, and Speculation, 

 and logic meant a higher intellectual process which 

 dealt not with the mechanical connection of things but 

 with their meaning, interpretation, and value. It was 

 in fact a great scheme of intellectualising and spiritual- 

 ising, of looking at things from a higher point of view. 



The first systematic attempt to carry out this ideal, 

 which engrossed German thought for fully half a century, 

 was, as we know, the philosophy of Kant ; and in it the 

 supreme position assigned by him to the moral law 

 which he conceived to be, when thought of as com- 

 mand, the highest kind of Eevelation. It was the task 



38.. 

 Kant. 



of the working classes in that 

 country, but because they were 

 more enlightened, because the hard 

 rule of the landed proprietors was 

 much relaxed in France as com- 



pared with the state of serfdom 

 and bondage in which the peasant 

 population still lived in the more 

 eastern countries of Central 

 Europe. 



