260 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



in his ' Physiology of the Soul ' not only retained this 

 latter term as denoting a definite substantial existence, 

 but he thought it necessary to introduce the study of 

 " medical psychology " by a lengthy discussion on the 

 essence, and even the location, of the soul in the body. 

 Through these writings the problem was brought under 

 the immediate attention of naturalists. 



The second influence which forced the central psycho- 

 logical problem into the foreground was the searching 

 analysis to which the arguments and conceptions of the 

 Hegelian philosophy — that final consummation of the 

 idealistic course of thought — were subjected by Ludwig 

 44. Feuerbach. This analysis was very much provoked by 

 on Hegel, the attempts of the disciples of Hegel to show that 

 Hegel's philosophy of religion supported the orthodox 

 conceptions regarding the soul, immortality, and the 

 Deity, and still more when the whole doctrine became, 

 as it were, an instrument of a reactionary and illiberal 

 movement in Prussian ecclesiastical and political circles. 

 The champions of freedom of thought, with which the 

 systems of the ideal philosophy from Kant onward 

 had hitherto allied themselves, were not slow or unsuc- 

 cessful in showing that the philosophy of Hegel lent 

 itself to an entirely different interpretation ; that, in 

 fact, the conceptions of individuality, personality, and 

 immortality, harmonised very awkwardly with that 

 general process of absorbing all individual life and 

 thought in a general panpsychism, panlogism, and pan- 

 theism, which left no room for separate existences. 

 Feuerbach, in drawing the ultimate consequences of the 

 idealistic speculation, worked into the hands of many 



