200 PHILOSOPHY 



reasoning, and witty and epigrammatic writing on scientific or 

 other allied subjects, cannot indeed be called philosophy in the 

 stricter meaning of the word. But this so-called "popular philo- 

 sophy " has greatly helped in a way to free thought from its too close 

 bondage to scholastic tradition. And even the despite of philosophy, 

 and sneering references to its "barrenness," which formerly charac- 

 terized the meetings and the writings of this class of its critics, but 

 which now are happily much less frequent, have been on the whole 

 both a valuable check and a stimulus to her devotees. He would be 

 too narrow and sour a disciple of scholastic metaphysics and sys- 

 tematic philosophy, who, because of the levity or scorning of "out- 

 siders," should refuse them all credit. Indeed, the lesson of the close 

 of the nineteenth century may well enough be the motto for the 

 beginning of the twentieth century : In philosophy since to philo- 

 sophize is natural and inevitable for all rational beings there really 

 are no outsiders. 



In this connection it is most interesting to notice how men of the 

 type just referred to, were at the end of the eighteenth century 

 found grouped around such thinkers as Mendelssohn, Lessing, 

 F. Nicolai, representing a somewhat decided reaction from the 

 French realism to the German idealism. The work of the Academ- 

 icians in the criticism of Kant was carried forward by Jacobi, 

 who, at the time of his death, was the pensioned president of the 

 Academy at Munich. Some of these same critics of the Kantian 

 philosophy showed a rather decided preference for the "common- 

 sense" philosophy of the Scottish School. 



But both inside and outside of the Universities and Academies 

 the scientific spirit and acquisitions of the nineteenth century have 

 most profoundly, and on the whole favorably, affected the develop- 

 ment of its philosophy. In the wider meaning of the word, " science, " 

 -the meaning, namely, in which science = Wissenschaft, philo- 

 sophy aims to be scientific; and science can never be indifferent 

 to philosophy. In their common aim at a rational and unitary sys- 

 tem of principles, which shall explain and give its due significance to 

 the totality of human experience, science and philosophy can never 

 remain long in antagonism; they ought never even temporarily to 

 be divided in interests, or in the spirit which leads each generously 

 to recognize the importance of the other. The early part of the last 

 century was, indeed, too much under the influence of that almost 

 exclusively speculative Natur-philosophie, of which Schelling and 

 Hegel were the most prominent exponents. On the other hand, the 

 conception of nature as a vast interconnected and unitary system 

 of a rational order, unfolding itself in accordance with teleological 

 principles, however manifold and obscure, is a noble concep- 

 tion and not destined to pass away. 



