ightly doubted whether this alleged independence was genuine. We may
question whether any of them would have produced the same sequence of
periods of history, if the actual facts of history had been to them a
sealed book. Indeed we may be sure that they were surreptitiously and
subconsciously using experience as a guide, while they imagined that
abstract principles were entirely responsible for their conclusions. And
this is equivalent to saying that their ideas of progressive movement
were really derived from that idea of Progress which the French thinkers
of the eighteenth century had attempted to base on experience.

The influence, direct and indirect, of these German philosophers reached
far beyond the narrow circle of the bacchants or even the wandbearers
of idealism. They did much to establish the notion of progressive
development as a category of thought, almost as familiar and
indispensable as that of cause and effect. They helped to diffuse the
idea of "an increasing purpose" in history. Augustine or Bossuet might
indeed have spoken of an increasing purpose, but the "purpose" of their
speculations was subsidiary to a future life. The purpose of the German
idealists could be fulfilled in earthly conditions and required no
theory of personal immortality.

This atmosphere of thought affected even intelligent reactionaries who
wrote in the interest of orthodox Christianity and the Catholic Church.
Progressive development is admitted in the lectures on the Philosophy of
History of Friedrich von Schlegel. [Footnote: Translated into English
in 2 vols., 1835.] He denounced Condorcet, and opposed to perfectibility
the corruptible nature of man. But he asserted that the philosophy
of history is to be found in "the principles of social progress."
[Footnote: Op. cit. ii, p. 194, sqq.] These principles are three: the
hidden ways of Providence emancipating the human race; the freewill of
man; and the power which God permits to the agents of evil,--principles
which Bossuet could endorse, but the novelty is that here they are
arrayed as forces of Progress. In fact, the point of von Schlegel's
pretentious, unilluminating book is to rehabilitate Christianity by
making it the key to that new conception of life which had taken shape
among the enemies of the Church.

7.

As biological development was one of the constant preoccupations of
Goethe, whose doctrine of metamorphosis and "types" helped to prepare
the way for the evolu