hies
of Germany were attracting attention, and when Frenchmen, of the
ideological school, were seeking, like Vico himself, a synthetic
principle to explain social phenomena. Different though Vico was in
his point of departure as in his methods from the German idealists,
his speculations nevertheless had something in common with theirs.
Both alike explained history by the nature of mind which necessarily
determined the stages of the process; Vico as little as Fichte or Hegel
took eudaemonic considerations into account. The difference was that the
German thinkers sought their principle in logic and applied it a priori,
while Vico sought his in concrete psychology and engaged in laborious
research to establish it a posteriori by the actual data of history.
But both speculations suggested that the course of human development
corresponds to the fundamental character of mental processes and is not
diverted either by Providential intervention or by free acts of human
will.

5.

These foreign influences co-operated in determining the tendencies of
French speculation in the period of the restored monarchy, whereby the
idea of Progress was placed on new basements and became the headstone of
new "religions." Before we consider the founders of sects, we may glance
briefly at the views of some eminent savants who had gained the ear of
the public before the July Revolution--Jouffroy, Cousin, and Guizot.

Cousin, the chief luminary in the sphere of pure philosophy in France
in the first half of the nineteenth century, drew his inspiration from
Germany. He was professedly an eclectic, but in the main his philosophy
was Hegelian. He might endow God with consciousness and speak of
Providence, but he regarded the world-process as a necessary evolution
of thought, and he saw, not in religion but in philosophy, the highest
expression of civilisation. In 1828 he delivered a course of lectures on
the philosophy of history. He divided history into three periods, each
governed by a master idea: the first by the idea of the infinite (the
Orient); the second by that of the finite (classical antiquity); the
third by that of the relation of finite to infinite (the modern age). As
with Hegel, the future is ignored, progress is confined within a closed
system, the highest circle has already been reached. As an opponent of
the ideologists and the sensational philosophy on which they founded
their speculations, Cousin appealed to the orthodox and al