58 Transactions Texas Academy of Science. — 1908 - 1909 . 
We find two tendencies in modern philosophy which appear as 
competitors, viz., the metaphysical idealism and cold critism, or the 
doctrine of the knowable and the unknowable, sometimes called the 
theoretical recognition-criticism. The old, dogmatic philosophy which 
created of empty ideas a real metaphysics, a speculative knowledge 
of the intelligible world, is practically dead. Critical philosophy is 
the complement of knowledge limited to the field of phenomena by 
the ideals of reason. The idea of God, freedom, immortality, be- 
come practically significant for necessary and comprehensible ideas. 
That is, man must necessarily consider reality through ideas. 
The speculative tendency, or our first tendency, starts with Plato 
(sometimes called Platonic idealism) and is developed in the scholastic 
philosophy of earlier times. Leibnitz and Wolff retained it and it 
reached its highest development in Hegel. The second, or critical 
tendency, is the Kantian philosophy which maintains that all specu- 
lation is inadmissible in founding religious faith, making it inde- 
pendent of metaphyscs. Belief is of quite a different nature and 
origin than scientific knowledge, whether we may think we estab- 
lish it, or whether we may shake it to the very foundations. Faith 
depends upon the will and feelings (i. e., the emotional elements of 
our nature) and is not touched by any change in speculation about it. 
All practical idealism is in its nature religious, resting on faith in 
that which we do not see. Philosophy should reconcile knowledge 
and faith. 
The great cultural value of the age of enlightenment consisted ui 
the constant assurance with which a free and unprejudiced universal 
public opinion, arising from scientific lines of thought, gradually 
permeated all Europe with its convincing power and saturated all 
literature with these results of philosophy which considered life 
in all its aspects. The most intimate relations exist between thought 
and literary production, especially in Germany. This was a char- 
acteristic feature of the period. Therefore literature reflects the 
beliefs of the age, and shows a clear and understanding insight into- 
the emotional feelings, the index of the free and natural develop- 
ment of human life in poetry and philosophy. Rationalism, it is. 
true, had permeated the world and acknowledged nothing as true 
which it could not prove ; it restlessly reformed and remodeled life,, 
but admitted nothing into it that reason could not grasp. The feel- 
ings, the emotional part of man, revolted against rationalism with 
all the irrationality of individual reality. This contrast of ration- 
ality and irrationality reaches back to the leading spirits of the 
Englisth enlightenment, Locke and Shaftesbury. It speaks with 
trumpet blast in the two great writers of the French enlighten- 
