204 PHILOSOPHY 



have founded. To speak of these influences even in outline would be 

 to write a manual of the history of philosophy during that hundred of 

 years, which has been of all others by far the most fruitful in material 

 results, whatever estimate may be put upon the separate or combined 

 values of the individual thinkers and their so-called schools. No 

 fewer than seven or eight relatively independent or partially antag- 

 onistic movements, which may be traced back either directly or 

 more indirectly to the critical philosophy, and to the form in which 

 the problems of philosophy were left by Kant, sprung up during the 

 century. In Germany chiefly, there arose the Faith-philosophy, the 

 Romantic School, and Rational Idealism; in France, Eclecticism and 

 Positivism (if, indeed, the latter can be called a philosophy) ; in Scot- 

 land, a nai've and crude form of Realism, which served well for the 

 time as an antagonist of a skeptical idealism, but which itself con- 

 tributed to an improved form of Idealism; and in the United States, 

 or rather in New England, a peculiar kind of Transcendentalism of 

 the sentimental type. But all these movements of thought, and 

 others lying somewhere midway between, in a pair composed of any 

 two, together with a steadfast remainder of almost every sort of 

 Dogmatism, and all degrees and kinds of Skepticism, have been inter- 

 mixed and contending with one another, in all these countries. Such 

 has been the varied, undefinable, and yet intensely stimulating and 

 interesting character of the development of systematic and scholastic 

 philosophy, during the nineteenth century. 



The early opposition to Kant in Germany was, in the main, two- 

 fold : both to his peculiar extreme analysis with its philosophical 

 conclusions, and also to all systematic as distinguished from a more 

 popular and literary form of philosophizing. Toward the close of the 

 eighteenth century a group of men had been writing upon philo- 

 sophical questions in a spirit and method quite foreign to that held 

 in respect by the critical philosophy. It is not wholly without signi- 

 ficance that Lessing, whose aim had been to use common sense and 

 literary skill in clearing up obscure ideas and improving and illumin- 

 ing the life of man, died in the very year of the appearance of Kant's 

 Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Of this class of men an historian dealing 

 with this period has said, " There is hardly one who does not quote 

 somewhere or other Pope's saying, 'The proper study of mankind 

 is man.''' To this class belong Hamann (1730-1788), the inspirer 

 of Herder and Jacobi. The former, who was essentially a poet and 

 a friend of Goethe, controverted Kant with regard to his doctrine of 

 reason, his antithesis between the individual and the race, and his 

 schism between things as empirically known and the known unity in 

 the Ground of their being and becoming. Herder's path to truth was 

 highly colored with flowers of rhetoric; but the promise was that he 

 would lead men back to the heavenly city. Jacobi, too, with due 



