and a psychological
element. The successor often commences his support, his development, or his
refutation at a point quite unwelcome to the constructive historian. At all
events, if we may judge from the experience of the past, too much caution
cannot be exercised in setting up formal laws for the development of
thought. According to the law of contradiction and reconciliation, a
Schopenhauer must have followed directly after Leibnitz, to oppose his
pessimistic ethelism to the optimistic intellectualism of the latter; when,
in turn, a Schleiermacher, to give an harmonic resolution of the antithesis
into a concrete doctrine of feeling, would have made a fine third. But it
turned out otherwise, and we must be content.

* * * * *

The estimate of the value of the history of philosophy in general, given at
the start, is the more true of the history of modern philosophy, since the
movement introduced by the latter still goes on unfinished. We are still at
work on the problems which were brought forward by Descartes, Locke, and
Leibnitz, and which Kant gathered up into the critical or transcendental
question. The present continues to be governed by the ideal of culture
which Bacon proposed and Fichte exalted to a higher level; we all live
under the unweakened spell of that view of the world which was developed in
hostile opposition to Scholasticism, and through the enduring influence of
those mighty geographical and scientific discoveries and religious reforms
which marked the entrance of the modern period. It is true, indeed, that
the transition brought about by Kant's noetical and ethical revolution was
of great significance,--more significant even than the Socratic period,
with which we are fond of comparing it; much that was new was woven on,
much of the old, weakened, broken, destroyed. And yet, if we take into
account the historical after-influence of Cartesianism, we shall find that
the thread was only knotted and twisted by Kantianism, not cut through. The
continued power of the pre-Kantian modes of thought is shown by the fact
that Spinoza has been revived in Fichte and Schelling, Leibnitz in Herbart
and Hegel, the sensationalism of the French Illuminati in Feuerbach; and
that even materialism, which had been struck down by the criticism of the
reason (one would have thought forever), has again raised its head. Even
that most narrow tendency of the early philosophy of the modern peri