INTRODUCTION. 75 



most striking intellectual feature of the century, it would 24. 



French 



be the equally great and remarkable array of scientific ^""^t^ 

 names of the first magnitude. In France during the , ? ng e ?he tint 

 early part of the century the foundation of nearly all the century. e 

 modern sciences was laid ; many of them were brought 

 under the rule of a strict mathematical treatment. It 

 was there that scientific subjects were made so popular, 

 and clothed with a garment of such elegant diction, that 

 they have since that time greatly entered into general 

 consciousness, and have promoted in literature and art 

 an independent school the naturalistic. Compared 

 with this mathematical and naturalistic spirit, philo- 

 sophy proper has found but a meagre development and 

 culture in France : the constructive tendency of ideal- 

 ism has found nourishment for the most part only in 

 leanings to the older systems of Descartes, Plato, and 

 Aristotle, or to the foreign ones of Hegel and other 

 German metaphysicians. Compared with Germany in 

 philosophy, and with France in science, England during 

 the early part of the century appears remarkably unpro- 

 ductive. English science and English philosophy had 

 flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 

 and leavened the whole of European thought, but in the 

 beginning of our period we find neither represented by 

 any great schools. The great discoveries in science be- 

 longed to individual names, who frequently stood iso- 

 lated ; the organisation and protection which science could 

 boast of in France was then unknown in England ; into State 25 j 

 popular thought it hardly entered as an element at all. f n h tl? e 

 Metaphysics had not recovered from the blow which nfn 

 David Hume had struck, and speculation was confined 



