78 INTRODUCTION. 



the latter all those endeavours which, clinging to his- 

 torical institutions and beliefs, aim at finding the truth 

 and value which are in them, and the peculiar importance 

 which they may have for the present day. The work of 

 destruction is indeed still going on ; in the midst of this 

 constructive or reconstructive work we still witness the 

 si. workings of the revolutionary spirit. The healthy new 

 of Burns, Hf e which Burns, Wordsworth, and Coleridge infused into 

 coieri'd^ d English poetry at the beginning of our period was dis- 

 the t B r yraiic' turbed in its quiet growth by the revolutionary spirit of 

 the Byronic school. The new thought, which grew up in 

 Kant's philosophy and the idealistic school, degenerated in 

 its further development into a shallow materialism and 

 a hopeless scepticism. But none of these destructive in- 

 fluences, however passingly interesting they may have 

 been, seem to have struck out any new line of thought. 

 32. Whoever wishes to study the arguments by which social 



Destructive 



spirit in order was svibverted and cherished beliefs destroyed will 



writings of 



find them brilliantly and consistently expounded in the 

 writers of the eighteenth century, from which many 

 nihilists of our age have drawn their inspiration. This 

 is not the task which I have in view. It has been per- 

 formed in our time by many writers of great eminence. 

 Nor do I intend to describe the courses which governments 

 and politicians have taken in dealing with the legitimate 

 demands of the people, such as a hundred years ago found 

 a memorable expression in the American Declaration of 

 Independence, and an exaggerated one in the cry of the 

 French Revolution. Only to a small extent has the ideal 

 of that great movement, as it lives in the mind of many 

 a democratic leader, been realised in our century. In 



