position of dummies used for target
practice by beginners. Being intelligible they could be read by the
first-year student, and the exposition of their fallacies provided an
easy task for the lecturer's wit. There was none so poor to do them
reverence, or if any did he was relegated to a fourth class in the Final
Schools. It would be a very interesting study in our object to analyse
the Anglo-Scottish idealism in close relation to the German original,
and measure the changes which a philosophy undergoes in the process of
assimilation by a people of very different intellectual tradition. Lack
of sympathy with German and particularly with Hegelian idealism
disqualifies me from the task, but this much in spite of this lack I can
see. The German philosophers had a hold on those large and general ideas
which the English mind seems instinctively to distrust, and which
English philosophy had sought to resolve away into component parts. The
Englishman as a philosopher is by nature very much like the Englishman
as a mechanic or as a business man. He wants to touch and see, to test
and handle, before he is convinced of reality. 'I desire that it be
produced' is the frequent remark of Hume--Scotsman in some respects, but
very English in this--whenever he is dealing with some conception not
readily verifiable in experience. English philosophy left to itself was
not inclined to do justice to the subtler, more evasive notions that are
not readily defined. It did not allow enough for what we may call the
imponderable elements. German idealism has had just the opposite fault.
It has been too ready to take its thoughts for realities, too prone to
use large and perhaps vague conceptions as if they were solid coin and
not tokens that needed a good deal of scrutiny to determine their value.
We may see an example in a branch of political thought which has been a
good deal under discussion of late. To some German thinkers the
conception of the State presents itself in a manner which by no means
comes natural to the Englishman. To the German the State is an entity as
obvious, real, and apparent as the individual citizen. It is not just
the head of Germany, or the sixty-five millions of Germans, or the
Kaiser, or the army, or the Government. It is just itself, the State,
and it has attributes and powers, is the object of duties and possessor
of rights just like any Hamburg merchant or Prussian Junker. To the
natural Englishman all this seems hal