me,' he writes to
Jacobi, 'that I, an old heathen, should see the cross planted in my own
garden, and hear Christ's blood preached without its offending me.'

Goethe's quarrel with Christianity was due to two causes. In the first
place, it was due to his viewing Christianity as mainly, if not
exclusively, a religion of the other world, as it has been called, a
religion whose God is not the principle of all life and nature and for
which nature and life are not divine. In the second place, it was due to
the prominence of the negative or ascetic element in Christianity as
commonly presented, to the fact that in that presentation the law of
self-sacrifice bore no relation to the law of self-realisation. In both
of these respects he would have found himself much more at home with the
apprehension of Christianity which we have inherited from the nineteenth
century. The programme of charity which he outlines in the _Wanderjahre_
as a substitute for religion would be taken to-day, so far as it goes,
as a rather moderate expression of the very spirit of the Christian
religion.

CHAPTER II

IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY

The causes which we have named, religious and aesthetic, as well as
purely speculative, led to such a revision of philosophical principles
in Germany as took place in no other land. The new idealistic
philosophy, as it took shape primarily at the hands of Kant, completed
the dissolution of the old rationalism. It laid the foundation for the
speculative thought of the western world for the century which was to
come. The answers which aestheticism and pietism gave to rationalism were
incomplete. They consisted largely in calling attention to that which
rationalism had overlooked. Kant's idealism, however, met the
intellectual movement on its own grounds. It triumphed over it with its
own weapons. The others set feeling over against thought. He taught men
a new method in thinking. The others put emotion over against reason. He
criticised in drastic fashion the use which had been made of reason. He
inquired into the nature of reason. He vindicated the reasonableness of
some truths which men had indeed felt to be indefeasibly true, but which
they had not been able to establish by reasoning.

KANT

Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Koenigsberg, possibly of remoter
Scottish ancestry. His father was a saddler, as Melanchthon's had been
an armourer and Wolff's a tanner. His native city with its university
was