, joins in that great
stream of culture, the Renaissance and humanism, which, starting from
Italy, poured forth over the whole civilized world. Plato and Neoplatonism,
Epicurus and the Stoa are opposed to Scholasticism, the real Aristotle to
the transformed Aristotle of the Church and the distorted Aristotle of the
schools. Back to the sources, is the cry. With the revival of the ancient
languages and ancient books, the spirit of antiquity is also revived. The
dust of the schools and the tyranny of the Church are thrown off, and the
classical ideal of a free and noble humanity gains enthusiastic adherents.
The man is not to be forgotten in the Christian, nor art and science, the
rights and the riches of individuality in the interest of piety; work for
the future must not blind us to the demands of the present nor lead us to
neglect the comprehensive cultivation of the natural capacities of the
spirit. The world and man are no longer viewed through Christian eyes, the
one as a realm of darkness and the other as a vessel of weakness and wrath,
but nature and life gleam before the new generation in joyous, hopeful
light. Humanism and optimism have always been allied.

This change in the spirit of thought is accompanied by a corresponding
change in the object of thought: theology must yield its supremacy to the
knowledge of nature. Weary of Christological and soteriological questions,
weary of disputes concerning the angels, the thinking spirit longs to
make himself at home in the world it has learned to love, demands real
knowledge,--knowledge which is of practical utility,--and no longer seeks
God outside the world, but in it and above it. Nature becomes the home, the
body of God. Transcendence gives place to immanence, not only in theology,
but elsewhere. Modern philosophy is naturalistic in spirit, not only
because it takes nature for its favorite object, but also because it
carries into other branches of knowledge the mathematical method so
successful in natural science, because it considers everything _sub ratione
naturae_ and insists on the "natural" explanation of all phenomena, even
those of ethics and politics.

In a word, the tendency of modern philosophy is anti-Scholastic,
humanistic, and naturalistic. This summary must suffice for preliminary
orientation, while the detailed division, particularization, modification,
and limitation of these general points must be left for later treatment.

Two further facts, h