. 19 note, 331, 536), _Studien und Kritiken_, 1870.

%4. Retrospect.%

In order to avoid the appearance of arbitrary construction we have been
sparing with references of a philosophico-historical character. In
conclusion, looking back at the period passed over, we may give expression
to some convictions concerning the guiding threads in the development of
modern philosophy, though these here claim only the rights of subjective
opinion.

A mirror of modern culture, and conscious of its sharp antithesis to
Scholasticism, modern philosophy in its pre-Kantian period is pre-eminently
characterized by naturalism. Nature, as a system of masses moved according
to law, forms not only the favorite object of investigation, but also
the standard by which psychical reality is judged and explained. The two
directions in which this naturalism expresses itself, the mechanical
view of the world, which endeavors to understand the universe from the
standpoint of nature and all becoming from the standpoint of motion,[1] and
the intellectualistic view, which seeks to understand the mind from the
standpoint of knowledge, are most intimately connected. Where the general
view of the All takes form and color from nature, a content and a mission
can come to the mind from no other source than the external world; whether
we (empirically) make it take up the material of representation from
without or (rationalistically) make it create an ideal reproduction of
the content of external reality from within, it is always the function of
knowledge, conceived as the reproduction of a completed reality, which,
since it brings us into contact with nature, advances into the foreground
and determines the nature of psychical activity. As is conceivable, along
with dogmatic faith in the power of the reason to possess itself of the
reality before it and to reconstrue it in the system of science, and with
triumphant references to the mathematical method as a guaranty for the
absolute certainty of philosophical knowledge, the noetical question
emerges as to the means by which, and the limits within which, human
knowledge is able to do justice to this great problem. Descartes gave out
the programme for all these various tendencies--the mechanical explanation
of nature, the absolute separation of body and soul (despiritualization of
matter), thought the essence of the mind, the demand for certain knowledge,
armed against every doubt, and the question as to the or