in the faithful, unrepaying service of the hard dry fact, the
Germans have set a standard to the world. It may be that their very
merit is due in part to a lack of certain qualities as well as to a
superabundance of others. There is a want of proportion in some of these
vast Teutonic treatises that takes the heart out of the English student.
Some witty person has said that German science consists in demonstrating
over again with enormously elaborate apparatus what an Englishman has
already made plain enough to any sensible person with the aid of a
gingerbeer bottle and an old sardine tin. But I suspect there is another
side to the question. The German has probably worked out his figures to
the twentieth decimal where the Englishman was content with the second,
and it may always turn out that the twentieth decimal has its value. Be
that as it may, the co-operation of both types of mind is necessary, and
patient endeavour in the elaboration of detail is the peculiar function
which the German academic tradition has developed in the service of the
general cause of the advancement of learning.

In more speculative thought the equipoise of international co-operation
reveals itself in the changes which national thought has undergone under
foreign influence. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
English and Scottish metaphysics developed in the main on lines of their
own. It was the heyday of the so-called English school of experience.
This school was influential in France, and in Germany acted as the
ferment which dissolved the older academic tradition and stimulated the
growth of the new idealism. German idealism first became an influence in
England through the medium of Coleridge and later of Carlyle. But it had
little effect on the national philosophy except in shaking the younger
Mill out of the narrow rut in which he had been educated and
contributing to his thought that stream of influence which throughout
life he tried in vain to merge harmoniously with the paternal teaching.
But in the last third of the nineteenth century new channels of
influence were opened. The authority of Green at Oxford and of Caird in
the Scottish universities brought the tide of Hegelian influence, on the
ebb in Germany, in full flood over the intellectual world of Great
Britain and America. English empiricism was rapidly swept out of
existence. Mill and Spencer, the dominating figures of the sixties and
seventies were reduced to the