igin of ideas. Its
execution by his successors shows not only a lateral extension in the
most various directions (the dualistic view of the world held by the
occasionalists, the monistic or pantheistic view of Spinoza, the
pluralistic or individualistic view of Leibnitz; similarly the antithesis
between the sensationalism of Locke and Condillac and the rationalism
of Spinoza and Leibnitz), but also a progressive deepening of problems,
mediated by party strife which puts every energy to the strain. What a
tremendous step from the empiricism of Bacon to the skepticism of Hume,
from the innate ideas of Descartes to the potential _a priori_ of Leibnitz!
From the moment when the negative and positive culminations of the
pre-Kantian movement in thought--Hume and Leibnitz--came together in
one mind, the conditions of the Kantian reform were given, just as the
preparation for the Socratic reform had been given in the skepticism of the
Sophists and the [Greek: nous] principle of Anaxagoras.

[Footnote 1: Even for Leibnitz the mind is a machine (_automaton
spirituale_), and psychical action a movement of ideas.]

Kant, who dominates the second period of modern philosophy down to the
present time, is related to his predecessors in a twofold way. In his
criticism he completes the noetical tendency, and at the same time
overcomes naturalism, by limiting the mechanical explanation (and with
it certain knowledge, it is true) to phenomena and opposing moralism to
intellectualism. Nature must be conceived from the standpoint of the spirit
(as its product, for all conformity to law takes its origin in the spirit),
the spirit from the standpoint of the will. Metaphysics, as the theory of
the _a priori_ conditions of experience, is raised to the rank of a
science, while the suprasensible is removed from the region of proof and
refutation and based upon the rock of moral will. In the positive side of
the Kantian philosophy--the spirit the law-giver of nature, the will the
essence of spirit and the key to true reality--we find its kernel, that
in it which is forever valid. The conclusions on the absolute worth of
the moral disposition, on the ultimate moral aim of the world, on the
intelligible character, and on radical evil, reveal the energy with which
Kant took up the mission of furnishing the life-forces opened up by
Christianity--which the Middle Ages had hidden rather than conserved under
the crust of Aristotelian conceptions entirely