experimentalist ; a little also because he was a fine
writer, and our time happens to be in a somewhat
suspicious disposition of mind towards fine lan-
guage. It is only just, however, to remember
that Bacon's whole education still belonged to the
ENGLAND IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 10
rlietorical period ; that his very nature was of an
artistic turn ; and, above all, that, if he did not
do much to further science by his discoveries,
he advanced it immensely by the impulse which
he gave to it by establishing- the new method.
One might say that from that time only, the
ground was won on which methodical empiricism
could move freely. Not only did Hobbes take his
start from Bacon ; but all that England dis-
covered in natural philosophy from Harvey to
Newton, all that it produced in psychological
philosophy from Locke to Hume, would have been
impossible, if the Novum Org anon had not laid
down the laws of the exact method.
It would have been equally impossible if the
Protestant faith had not been maintained in
England during that time. The melancholy lot
of Kepler, G. Bruno, and G-alileo, would have been
reserved for these daring hunters for truth, if they
had not lived on Protestant ground. The three
o-reatest continental thinkers of the mathematical
age — Descartes, Spinosa, Leibnitz^ — could perform
their work only because they passed the greater
part of their lives in Protestant countries. One
of them carried even there the invisible fetters
imposed upon him by his first education. Nay,
c 2
20 INTRODUCTION.
Bayle himself, who forms the link between the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, between
English and French thought, was obliged to in-
voke the protection of the Protestant governments
of the Hague and London.
If English Empiricism ^ was a reaction against
Spanish Dogmatism ; if Spanish Dogmatism had
been a reaction against Italian Humanism,
France, Erench Eationalism, which ruled su-
' " â– preme during the following century,
was a continuation of, not an opposition to,
the intellectual current in England. It was a sort
of contagion, indeed, which affected France, whose
most distinguished geniuses, from Saint-Evremond
to Montesquieu, from Yoltaire to Bufibn, and even
down to Rousseau, came in turn to England, and
even before crossing the Channel had put them-
selves to the school of Newton and Locke. No
sooner had France taken the lead than she gave
to the movement that particular logical character
of her own, which goes straight to the mark and
never shrinks from the last conclusions. The
great English thinkers of the preceding age con-
' By Empiricism I mean the spirit of the seventeenth cen-
tury, i.e. the mechanical and mathematical explanation of
Nature, as it was undertaken and to a great extent carried out.
FEENCH RATIONALISM. 21
tented themselves with studying things and facts
without trying to draw from them inferences which
might be too dangerous, or applying them to
religion and politics. Locke himself paused in
deep reverence before revelation and the throne.
Not so the French. Their rationalistic turn of
mind and impatient temperament carried them
at once to the extreme of submitting church
and state to the same method of inquiry which
had been so successfully applied to nature and
mind. But logic and passion soon drove them
further than they first intended, and made them
often forget that patient observation and careful
comparison of facts, which had yielded such
extraordinary results in England. Already Des-
cartes — a true Frenchman in that respect — had at
once committed himself to the mechanical ex-
planation of things, by making the animal a
machine, and as he remained a spiritualist at
heart, never could quite manage to reconcile the
two worlds of matter and mind. The French of
Bayle's school — I do not say Bayle himself — knew
of no such impediments. They recognised no
authority whatever. Their aim was simply abso-
lute emancipation from all conventionality and
authority. Without being aware of it, they fell
22
INTRODUCTION.
again into the authoritative spirit, against which
the English reaction was directed. Only it was
no longer revelation, nor tradition which was the
authority, but the senses and human reason, —
human reason independent, if not of natural, at
least of historical facts. They dreamed either of
political constitutions (which were to be the result
not of history, i.e. of conflicting interests, but
of a general, abstract, preconceived idea of state
and society) ; or of a natural law, which was to
replace the codes of traditional laws and customs,
just as they dreamed of a natural, or rather a
rational, religion, which began with being a timid
deism, very similar to that of Toland and Clarke,
and ended with the enthronement of the goddess
of reason, or with the complete denial of that
spiritual world, from which Descartes had
been unable to throw a bridge to the world
of matter.
Whatever may have been the fatal conse-
quences of this method for France herself, though
they are largely balanced by its salutary results,
the method itself effected the liberation of Europe,
nay of mankind. There existed an accumula-
tion of traditional forms, prejudices, impediments
of all sorts which disturbed the development of
FRENCH RATION ALISM. 23
liumanity. It seems to have been the historical
mission of France, it certainly was her merit, a
merit which never can be sufficiently acknowledged,
to have laid the axe unsparingly to this thicket of
intellectual conventionalities, and levelled the road
for us. Of course she could not remove all — it
was not desirable that she should remove all ;
and much of the brushwood which she re-
moved, has grown up again. Still it was the
first time in history that men dared to look at
things and to order them by the light of reason
alone. Many national qualities had singled
France out for this task, many circumstances
helped her to fulfil her mission with immediate
success. The clearness of the French mind, as it
reveals itself in the French language ; the geo-
graphical position of the country between England,
Spain, and Germany ; the political hegemony over
Europe which she had won under Louis XTV. ; the
vast influence gained already by her poetical litera-
ture ; last, not least, the simplicity of the new
creed, based upon the most general characteristics
of humanity and common-sense, and carried out
by the most seductive of instruments, logic — all
contributed to facilitate her task.
This explains also the instantaneousness with
24 INTRODUCTIO:^
which the French idea made its way in Europe.
Generally, the- intellectual influence of a nation
only begins to spread abroad when its work is nearly
completed, Italy had already done her best, when
towards the beginning of the sixteenth century
her thoughts and works began to act upon the
rest of Europe. For more than a century Europe
still continued to go to Rome, Bologna, and Naples,
although Velasquez and Murillo, Poussin and
Claude, Rubens and Van Dyck, were capable of
teaching- their teachers. It was the same with
Spain and England. It is the same with Ger-
many, whose original and creative work was done
and well-nigh finished as early as 1850, although
the world is looking upon her still as the great
laboratory of thought for Europe. France is,
perhaps, the only country which began to export
her intellectual wares at once, even before the
whole store was gathered and ready. The time of
Voltaire and the Encyclopsedists was also the time
of Hume and Gibbon.
It was reserved for Germany to react against
the too absolute thought of France, and to begin
Germany, ^^^ work of restoration on a sounder
1.60-1825. ijg^gjg than that which Spain had tried to
lay two centuries before. It would be interesting
INFLUENCE OF GERMANY. 25
to show, at some length, how she prepared herself
for her task, how she fulfilled it, and what were the
results obtained from it. To do this properly,
however, it would be necessary to prove how she
owed part, at least, of her intellectual freedom to
England and France, how from them she certainly
received the impulse to her own work, how she
renovated philosophy as well as history, how she
created several new sciences which have since taken
their place amongst the greatest achievements of
the human mind. Suffice it to state that she in-
troduced once for all the idea of Organism into
European thought, just as French Rationalism,
English Empiricism, Spanish Dogmatism, and
Italian Humanism, have long become integral
parts of the mental constitution of Europe. Is
it not in fact as impossible now for us to read
Homer in the same spirit in which our grand-
fathers read him before Wolf had written his
' Prolegomena,' as it is for us to look at Nature
as we might have done before Newton had
published his ' Principia,' or at the State as we
might have done before Montesquieu wrote his
' Esprit des Lois ' ?
There is, indeed, a common stock of ideas on
which we all live, in which we all move, often
26 INTEODUCTION.
witliouL being quite conscious of it. Let even
the most convinced of Roman Catholics ask him-
self whether he could still look on the history of
mankind as St. Thomas or St. Dominic looked on
it before the Italian Renaissance had restored, as
it were, the continuity of history, and filled up the
abyss which cut humanity in two. Could any
man consider public and private life with the
unprincipledtiatue/e with which the contemporaries
of Machiavelli considered them, before the prin-
ciple of authority had been restored by Spain ?
Again, who of us could ever forget, for a moment
only, the physical discoveries of the seventeenth
century, and think of the earth, like Dante, as
the centre of creation ? And is it not the same
with our political and philosophical views ? Has
not the application of the French rationalistic
method of the past century moulded our mind
anew ? Could we still, if we wished, look on the
divine right of monarchy or on revelation as
Bossuet and Fenelon did ? Now something
analogous has taken place since the death of Vol-
taire and Rousseau. Another new thought has
become an integral part of the European mind.
It would be as impossible for Hume to write
his essay on ' National Character ' to-day as
INFLUENCE OF GERMANY. 27
it would have been for Augustin Thierry to
write his 'Conquete d'Angleterre ' in the past
centurj, or for anyone to compose Voltaire's
' Pucelle ' in ours. Why so ? Because not only
have there been discoveries in philology and eth-
nography which render it materially impossible
to explain historical facts as a Hume or Gibbon
explained them, but also because a new idea has
been thrown into the world, which has profoundly
modified our whole course of thought. Now this
idea has been elaborated in Germany, and it is
the history of this elaboration which is still to
be written, and of which I venture to ofier
something like a general programme, the outlines
of a plan, which it would require volumes to
fill in.
In speaking of the intellectual movement of
Germany, from the second half of the past century
to the middle of the present, it will be in-
Definition
dispensable also to touch upon her poeti- pf the Sub-
cal literature and her philosophy proj)er.
This seems to be a sort of truism. Yet it is not
so in my mind. What I am investigating now
is neither the literary spirit, nor the meta-
physical speculations, nor the scientific work of
the nation, but the whole Weltanschauung, that is
28 JNTEODUCTION.
to say, tlie general course of thought (or rather
the general standing-point), which the German
nation made for itself, and opened or added to
European culture during those seventy or eighty
years ; and such a general standing-point is but
indirectly influenced by poetry and science proper.
Poetry is an art, and as such it is not subject to
the law of progress ; consequently it is, properly
speaking, outside history, a thing absolute and
eternal. The ' Iliad ' is as true to-day as it was
three thousand years ago, the main object of poetry
being the unchangeable part of man's nature. It
is not so with science, with thought, with politics.
These are subject to the law of development.
When we read in Dante's poem of Francesca's love
and Pia's death we are moved as Dante's contem-
poraries may have been moved ; when he explains
his cosmography to us, we smile, and perhaps
shut il suo volume. Here, then, we speak of two
different activities of the human mind, which
sometimes are at work in a different, sometimes
in the same, generation and country. Eng-
land's philosophical labour began only after
Shakespeare, that of France only after Pacine
and Moliere ; whereas in Spain Calderon and Cer-
vantes were the contemporaries of Suarez and
DEFINITION OF THE SUBJECT. 29
Molina, while in Germany Goethe and Schiller
lived at the same time with Kant and Wolf, Hum-
boldt and Niebuhr. This apparently accidental
fact has an important consequence. Poetry and
philosophy penetrate each other, when they are
simultaneous, to their mutual advantage in some
respects, to their great disadvantage in others.
The spirit of Calderon's poetry is also the spirit of
Ignatius Loyola ; in Schiller you hear the echo of
Kant's moral philosophy. The great literature of
the French, on the contrary — the eloquence of a
Bossuet and the enthusiasm of a Corneille —
expresses a state of thought in some points
directly opposed to that spirit of the eighteenth
century which the world calls properly the French
spirit. I might speak of Shakespeare, for whose
clear, deep eye there is no yesterday nor to-morrow,
no here nor there, without even mentioning that
he was a contemporary of Bacon ; I could not
speak of Goethe without reminding you that he
was a friend of Herder, and a reader of W. von
Humboldt.
There is another fact of great importance
which I could not pass over in silence if I had
space to enter fully into the subject ; and this is
the political state of Germany during the elabora-
30 INTRODUCTION.
tion of her Thought {Weltanscliauung), and the
effect which this thought has had on the ulterior
transformation of the German State. This great
period during which the intellectual culture of
Germany was built up or at least accomplished,
was the time when her old society was dissolved,
and her political life was in complete decay. Is
it possible to be at the same time great and fertile
in public life, and in scientific and speculative
activity ? When we think of Plato and Aristotle
laying the foundation of all true and high philo-
sophy in the period of decay which had followed
the epoch of what might be called the civil war of
Greece; when we contemplate the political dis-
union and misery of Italy at the time of the
Renaissance ; when we see England contribute
most actively to the intellectual wealth of Europe
during the not very glorious reigns of James I. and
Charles II. ; when we observe France ruling the
world by the pen of Voltaire and Rousseau, sending
the missionaries of her thought to St. Petersburg
and Naples, to Copenhagen and Lisbon, and at the
same time defeated at Rossbach, obliged to sign the
peace of Aix-la-Chapelle and that of Versailles, and
driven out from India and her colonies ; when we
think of Germany producing her Kant and Herder,
DEFINITION OF THE SUBJECT. 31
â– while the Fatherland was utterly impotent and
helpless, or even under foreign domination, we
may be tempted to think that perhaps the two
activities are incompatible, or at least oidy excep-
tionally compatible.
And why should it be otherwise ? Must not
the different faculties of the human mind have
their rest from time to time and relieve each
other, if the sources are not to be exhausted before
the time ? There have been religious ages, like
the first centuries of our era and the sixteenth
century, entirely bent upon the creation and
definition of religious dogmas, passionate only
for religious questions and interests ; and these
have been followed by periods of comparative
silence, when humanity, weary of theological dis-
cussions, uninterested in religious subjects,
quietly accepted the existing forms of religion and
rested in them. There had been a great artistic
age four centuries before Christ, slowly prepared
during hundreds of years, slowly dying out during
hundreds of years, after a short and brilliant
blossom. Then the capacity of artistic intu-
ition lay dormant for a long, long time, till
it slowly awakened towards the end of the
Middle Ages, and came to a short but splendid
32 INTEODUCTION.
efflorescence in the fifteenth century only again
to die a long death, which, I am afraid, is now well
nigh consummated. But here again I must warn
my hearers against taking my words too literally.
There have been eminent statesmen like Richelieu
in scientific ages, religious apostles like Savonarola
in artistic centuries ; so there may be eminent
artists in our time — but they act as isolated indi-
viduals. The main efibrt of the human mind is
bent in another direction, and there are but few
eyes open to take in what is still left of artistic
creation.
Why should not the capacity for political and
scientific life sometimes lie fallow, when the reli-
gious and artistic faculties require such temporary
repose? Why should they not have their rest
in turn? Why, above all, should we discuss
which grandeur is the better, that of Voltaire or
that of Napoleon, that of Newton or that of
Cromwell ? Men will never agree on that question,
because it is not a difference of opinion, but a
difference of temperament and character. Let us
only admit this one point. When a nation, in-
stinctively or consciously, feels that one day's work
is done and sets herself to do the work of the next,
leave her alone ; do not let us try to be wiser than
DEFINITION OF THE SUBJECT. , 38
history and nature. If for a time a nation gives
herself up to building, laboriously and awkwardly
perhaps, a new house in which she may live un-
molested and in conformity with her own history
and nature, let her do so, and do not ask of man-
hood the down of youth, nor of summer the
mellow tints and ripe fruits of autumn. All these
are at the bottom idle questions, which are much
like reproaching the apple-tree for not bearing
oranges. If the nation which has yielded the in-
tellectual leadership of Europe to another nation,
because it had more pressing work on hand — per-
haps also because it was tired and wanted change —
excludes itself from the intellectual life of Europe,
as Spain did during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, it will pay a penalty heavy enough. If,
on the contrary, it continues to participate in the
spiritual movement of Europe, as this countr}^ has
done during the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, then it may be sure that one day or
another the leadership will come back to it, and
that sooner or later, it will reoccupy, even if it be
only for a time, the first place in the intellectual
laboratory of Europe.
However this may be, the assigned limits of
time force me to resist the temptation of giving
D
34 INTRODUCTION.
even a sketch of German literature and philosophy
proper, still more of relating the history of state
and religion in Germany, and I must content
myself with simply tracing the outlines and the
general character of German culture, such as
it was shaped in the period I have mentioned.
Even thus I shall be obliged to have recourse to
somewhat superficial generalities in explaining the
growth and the nature of the German standing-
point in religion, literature, politics, and science.
I need scarcely add that my remarks have not
the slightest pretension to originality. I give
you the results neither of special investigation,
nor of j)ersonal thought ; but only what is the
common property of every cultivated German,
although I give it in the particular form which it
has taken by passing through my individual mind.
I speak only as an interpreter, not even as a
commentator, still less as a critic, and least of all
as a discoverer of new truth.
One word more and I have finished. A sub-
ject like the one which we propose to study,
the contribution of one European nation to the
common capital of European thought, can only
be successfully treated if we endeavour to divest
ourselves of all party spirit, national, political.
NEED OF FKEEDOM FROM PREJUDICE. 35
and religious. Party spirit has its right place in
practical life. When it is a question of defending
one's faith, or one's country, of obtaining certain
positive ends only to be obtained by collective and
disciplined' forces, let us be of a party and stand
by it usque ad mortem. But when we try to
understand the history of mankind and to pene-
trate its mysterious ways, nay, whenever we meet
on a ground where those practical interests are
not endangered or threatened, where there is no
war and strife, where we are simply to live with
each other, to know each other, at the utmost to
judge each other — let us forget such unpleasant
distinctions, and treat each other as if we were
all of one nation, one party, one faith. Let us not
approach peoples, or facts, or ideas with a precon-
ceived judgment, nor ask them suspiciously for
their passport, instead of trying to ascertain their
intrinsic value. Let us not condemn or canonize
people, facts or ideas, because they may be of
Russian or Italian origin, bear a Catholic or Pro-
testant label, come from the Conservative or
Liberal camp. This would be true barbarism, — bar-
barism, I am afraid, which will invade humanity
more and more, in proportion as political
democracy advances with superficial enlightenment
I) 2
36 INTRODUCTION.
and scientific lialf-culture. As tlie number of
those who take part in public life increases, the
more will passion — political, religious, national —
overrule justice and equity and goodwill. Tor
the man who puts himself under the thraldom of
party bonds must needs sacrifice part of the truth
which he knows, part of his moral and intellectual
freedom, part of himself. On the other side, in
proportion to the scantiness of their numbers will
be the intensity of the love of truth in those who
emancipate themselves from such passions in order
to look at things and judge them by themselves.
Let us all strive at least to be of those few ; for
they are not only the lovers of truth, they are not
only the sole free minds, they alone are also the
really just. And whatever our effeminate age
may say to the contrary, justice is still and will
always be what Plato and Aristotle proclaimed it
to be, the highest and manliest of virtues.
37
LECTUEE II.
THE STARTING-POINT AND FIRST STAGES OP
MODERN GERMANY.
1648-1760.
Nobody can form a true estimate of the present
state of Germany, social and political, religious
and intellectual, who does not realise what was
her starting-point. All European nations can
boast of a continuous development from the Middle
Ages to the nineteenth century. Even the great
catastrophe which delivered Italy up to foreign rule
towards the middle of the sixteenth century, even
the Great Eebellion and the Glorious Revolution
which gave birth to new England, nay, even the
revolution of 1789 which destroyed the ancien
regime in France, had not the power entirely to
break the thread of national history in these three
great civilised nations. From Dante and Giotto to
38 THE STAETING-POINT.
Filijacaand Dominichino there is one uninterrupted
line of growth and decay. The memory of Queen
Bess was still living in the time of William III., and
a Lamartine and a Victor Hugo have been lulled
with the verse of Lafontaine and Racine, and
reared on the ideas of Bossuet and Voltaire. Not
so in German}^ The Thirty Tears' War which
raged from 1618 to 1648 made a gap in her
national development, such as we find nowhere
else in history. It threw her back full two
hundred years, materially and intellectually, and
extinguished all remembrance of the past.
If you walk through the cities of Augsburg a.nd
Nuremberg, Liibeck and Eatisbon, you meet at
Germany ©Very step vestigcs of a high civilisation.
^^Jith'^' Those churches, those town-halls, those
centurj'. palaccs— Only think of the Heidelberg-
Schloss — were mostlv built at the end of the six-
teenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century ;
and a hundred and fifty years before, ^neas
Sylvius (Pope Pius TI.) had been so struck with