124 PROF. D. S. MARGOLIOUTH, D.LTTT. ; ON THE INFLUENCE OF 



and ending with Hegel, followed by a reaction, commencing 

 with Schopenhauer and culminating in Xietzsche. Mr. Smith, 

 on the other hand, traces the whole movement in its various 

 phases to the first German philosopher of note — Immanuel 

 Kant. The whole trend of his system, he says, is the freeing of 

 the human mind, or ego, from the trammels of tradition and 

 custom ; and it may be certainly noted that Strauss, famous or 

 notorious for the mythical theory of the Gospel history, compares 

 the work which he had achieved with that of the founder of the 

 so-called critical school. It had been the task of the one as of 

 the other to convince the world that a certain number of 

 •supposed assets were worthless. 



What rather appears from the history of thought in Germany 

 as told by able expounders is on the one hand that great 

 intellectual movements are international, and on the other that 

 the practice and conduct of nations are affected by historical 

 events and circumstances more than they are by speculative 

 works. The development of industry, commerce, and the study 

 of the physical sciences in Germany in the nineteenth century 

 was parallel to the same in England and other countries, and had 

 similar effects. That development, if it has not turned all 

 mankind into materialists, has at least rendered the division 

 between the physical and the metaphysical obscure, and the 

 treatment which was possible in the days of Kant became out 

 of date half-a-century later than his time. Kant's four 

 metaphysical questions — the infinity of space and time, the 

 ultimate divisibility of matter, the freedom of the will, and 

 the existence of a first cause — even if they cannot be settled by 

 experimental science, at any rate can no longer be discussed on 

 purely a priori grounds when such sciences as palaeontology, 

 geology, anthropology, and statistics have been introduced, but 

 the development of these studies has been international, and 

 the histories of modern philosophy are forced to take account of 

 the works and systems which simultaneously arose in many 

 lands. Mr. Muirhead naturally and rightly assigns to the work 

 of Darwin great influence on German thought ; and the same 

 is likely to be true of Herbert Spencer, who was perhaps more 

 appreciated outside his own country than in it. Nietzsche 

 himself goes so far as to state that these two, Darwin and 

 Herbert Spencer, with a third English writer also in his 

 opinion of moderate ability, John Stuart Mill, had come to 

 dominate in the middle region of European taste. He also held 

 that the domination of men of such moderate capacity had 

 occasionally its utility. A genius of the first order (like 



