INTEODUCTORY. 67 



formnlfe of Comte and Spencer, no less than those of 

 Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, have been tried and 

 found wanting. Not indeed without leaving lasting 

 marks of their originality and power in special direc- 

 tions, affording many fresh glimpses which had escaped 

 the glance of earlier thinkers. To show to what extent 

 they have done this will form the main task of the 

 following pages. During the last quarter of the cen- 

 tury, systems of philosophy have been rare, if one can 

 say that they have been produced at all. The largely 

 increased number of students and writers on philosophy 

 are content to devote themselves to the examination of 

 special questions, to write preliminary and preparatory 

 treatises,^ to content themselves at best with a kind of 

 eclecticism, following the course begun b}^ Victor Cousin 

 in France, and adopting the maxim of Lotze, " that after 

 such a lengthy development of philosophy, during which 

 every point of view has been set up, abandoned, and 

 tried again, there no longer exists any merit in 

 originality but only in accuracy." ^ Others have put 

 forward their attempts towards a Unification of Know- 

 ledge as subjective endeavours, in the same way as 



' The first among the leading ': quite the order of the day. 



philosojihers of the earlier part of 

 tlie century who adopted this posi- 

 tion was Herbart, whose ' Lehr- 

 buch zur Einleitung in die Phll- 

 osophie' was published iu 1813, 

 and went through several editions. 

 It is also characteristic of Herbart 

 that he never attempted a system- 



Amoug these, those of Wundt, 

 Paulsen, and Klilpe, have a large 

 circulation. Prof. Wundt lias 

 crowned the large array of his 

 separate philosophical Treatises by 

 publishing iu 1889 his ' System of 

 Philosoiihy.' He is almost the 

 only thinker of the last general iun 



atic exposition of his philosophical with whom we shall have to deal 



ideas, and left some of the highest : at length in the last chapter of this 



problems, notablj- that of Religion, section, which will bear the title 



undiscussed. Since his time the ' "Of Systems of Philosophy." 



wiiting of Introductions to Phil- ^ See Lotze, ' Streitschriften * 



osophy has been, in Germany, t (1857), p. 5. 



