pupils of Cousin were delving into history only, and
Renouvier alone had an original system. In Germany, the hegelian
impetus had spent itself, and, apart from historical scholarship,
nothing but the materialistic controversy remained, with such men as
Buechner and Ulrici as its champions. Lotze and Fechner were the sole
original thinkers, and Fechner was not a professional philosopher at
all.

The general impression made was of crude issues and oppositions, of
small subtlety and of a widely spread ignorance. Amateurishness was
rampant. Samuel Bailey's 'letters on the philosophy of the human
mind,' published in 1855, are one of the ablest expressions of english
associationism, and a book of real power. Yet hear how he writes of
Kant: 'No one, after reading the extracts, etc., can be surprised to
hear of a declaration by men of eminent abilities, that, after years
of study, they had not succeeded in gathering one clear idea from the
speculations of Kant. I should have been almost surprised if they had.
In or about 1818, Lord Grenville, when visiting the Lakes of England,
observed to Professor Wilson that, after five years' study of Kant's
philosophy, he had not gathered from it one clear idea. Wilberforce,
about the same time, made the same confession to another friend of
my own. "I am endeavoring," exclaims Sir James Mackintosh, in the
irritation, evidently, of baffled efforts, "to understand this
accursed german philosophy."[1]

What Oxford thinker would dare to print such _naif_ and
provincial-sounding citations of authority to-day?

The torch of learning passes from land to land as the spirit bloweth
the flame. The deepening of philosophic consciousness came to us
english folk from Germany, as it will probably pass back ere long.
Ferrier, J.H. Stirling, and, most of all, T.H. Green are to be
thanked. If asked to tell in broad strokes what the main doctrinal
change has been, I should call it a change from the crudity of the
older english thinking, its ultra-simplicity of mind, both when it was
religious and when it was anti-religious, toward a rationalism
derived in the first instance from Germany, but relieved from german
technicality and shrillness, and content to suggest, and to remain
vague, and to be, in, the english fashion, devout.

By the time T.H. Green began at Oxford, the generation seemed to
feel as if it had fed on the chopped straw of psychology and of
associationism long enough, and as if a little