244 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



ality. This pure intellectualism, which in the British 

 schools of philosophy was overcome by studying from 

 various points of view, not so much the human intellect 

 as the human mind, human nature, man and mankind, 

 became a pronounced feature in the German idealistic 

 systems, and ended in what has been termed the Panlogism 

 of Hegel. This tendency of the idealistic schools was 

 to a great extent inherited from ancient philosophy, 

 notably from Plato and the Neoplatonists. Plato had 

 already looked upon concepts as independent realities, 

 not merely as phenomena of the human mind ; and in 

 the neoplatonic system the sum of concepts was in a 

 manner personalised as the universal " Nous " or Mind 

 that comprehends in itself the intellectual essence of 

 all things. 



This tendency to personify what to the ordinary 

 observer were only processes, phenomena, or manifestations 

 in the human mind — i.e., of the inner life of the human 

 being — runs through the whole school of thought I am 

 now referring to. It was there taken in real earnest, 

 whereas in general literature similar expressions were 

 used only in a figurative sense. If we add to this in- 

 herited tendency, which on the Continent was vigorously 

 opposed only in the monadology of Leibniz and by 

 thinkers inliuenced by him, the other vicious tendency 

 common to all the earlier psychological schools of looking 

 upon the human mind or the soul as compounded of 

 distinct faculties or powers, we understand at once the 

 origin of that extraordinary phraseology with which Kant 

 heralded his critical investigations ; how it came that 

 instead of speaking of the human inind or the soul he 



