236 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



influence which more than any other, and largely through 



Cousin himself, made itself felt in the development of 



30. philosophical thought in France. I refer to the influence 



Influence of t o /-a • i i • 



Kant and of of Kant and of German idealism. 



German 



idealism. Bcforc Considering this new influence which spread, in 



the course of the century, over the whole of European 

 thought, it is well to remark that the French psychology 

 of the earlier part of the century, though much influenced 

 by the purely psychological interest of the Scottish 

 school, nevertheless assumed quite a different character. 

 Whereas at the Scottish universities empirical psychology 

 was for the first time cultivated in a broad spirit and 

 by introspective methods, psychology in France showed 

 a tendency to become metaphysical, aiming at the solu- 

 tion of problems which in the terminology of Wolff's 

 school belonged to rational, not to empirical psychology. 

 This was no doubt one of the reasons which made Comte 

 doubt its value and discard it as useless. We have seen 

 how French thinkers criticised the psychologists of the 

 Scottish school as dealing merely with the phenomena of 

 mental life and not with the main problems, such as the 

 nature of the soul and its destiny. That Scottish 

 psychology was in much of its teaching and original 

 research able to move in narrower and defined limits has 

 been to its advantage. It was enabled to do so through 

 its more or less intimate alliance with Scottish theology 

 as taught at the same universities. This has been 

 pointed out by M'Cosh, the historian of Scottish philo- 

 sophy. The fundamental questions of the nature, the 

 origin, and the future of the human soul were dealt with 

 in the theological, not in the philosophical lecture-room. 



