every cost it must open for itself outlets for its industrial products
in order to buy foodstuffs which it does not produce sufficiently. If
not, famine.

Let us see now how the complicated play of all these social forces and
the effect of this economic situation have been embodied in formulas,
what has been its intellectual expression.

This is no idle question, for men have always claimed to be guided by
ideas, and generally they are, but they rarely know where their ideas
come from or in what they consist. Without intellectual expression
imperialism would not have extended to all the classes of society. The
passion of economic conquest did not prevail throughout the whole of
Germany. The bourgeois in the Liberal provinces, the corps of officers,
the corps of teachers, the clergy were refractory to it. This direct
form of imperialism does not seduce them. Not everybody can see his
country and the universe through the eyes of an oligarch of high
finance. A doctrine works with power when it appeals to instincts, when
it awakens collective emotions, diverse enough in themselves, and joins
them to each other with an appearance of logical deduction. It is not
indispensable, but it is useful that it should borrow the language of
the day. In the mediaeval epoch this language was religious. Beginning
with the seventeenth century it was metaphysical. In our own time it is
a scientific language set off by Greek words.

If the German philosophies of the second half of the nineteenth century
are considered, there are not many of them that pass beyond the limit of
the school. They are honest, scholarly productions elaborated by men who
have read much, of whom some, like Wundt, are eminent specialists, but
who have not conquered either their subjects or their readers. One feels
that they are not of their century.

It is not from them, it is not from Eucken, the pleasant popularizer, it
is not from Windelbund or Ostwald that the cultivated public sought the
direction for its thought. To satisfy the need of general ideas which
was everywhere felt, associations were formed, churches with or without
God, of which a very important one was the "Monistenbund," in which
Haeckel exploited his materialism transformed into a sort of biological
pantheism.

But it was outside of the associations and outside of the school that
the flame of creative genius burned brightly. The man of the last
generation was Nietzsche. That his thought has be