ity, and showed that it was only an
object of the five senses; or of six, if we add that of "hunger." The
divine element was explained away, and the proper study of mankind was,
not man, as that age thought, but man reduced to his beggarly
elements--a being animated solely by the sensuous springs of pleasure
and pain, which should properly, as Carlyle thought, go on all fours,
and not lay claim to the dignity of being moral. All things were reduced
to what they seemed, robbed of their suggestiveness, changed into
definite, sharp-edged, mutually exclusive particulars. The world was an
aggregate of isolated facts, or, at the best, a mechanism into which
particulars were fitted by force; and society was a gathering of mere
individuals, repelling each other by their needs and greed, with a ring
of natural necessity to bind them together. It was a fit time for
political economy to supplant ethics. There was nowhere an ideal which
could lift man above his natural self, and teach him, by losing it, to
find a higher life. And, as a necessary consequence, religion gave way
to naturalism and poetry to prose.

After this age of prose came our own day. The new light first flushed
the modern world in the writings of the philosopher-poets of Germany:
Kant and Lessing, Fichte and Schiller, Goethe and Hegel. They brought
about the Copernican change. For them this world of the five senses, of
space and time and natural cause, instead of being the fixed centre
around which all things revolved, was explicable only in its relation to
a system which was spiritual; and man found his meaning in his
connection with society, the life of which stretched endlessly far back
into the past and forward into the future. Psychology gave way to
metaphysics. The universal element in the thought of man was revealed.
Instead of mechanism there was life. A new spirit of poetry and
philosophy brought God back into the world, revealed his incarnation in
the mind of man, and changed nature into a pellucid garment within which
throbbed the love divine. The antagonism of hard alternatives was at an
end; the universe was spirit-woven and every smallest object was "filled
full of magical music, as they freight a star with light." There were no
longer two worlds, but one; for "the other" world penetrated this, and
was revealed in it: thought and sense, spirit and nature, were
reconciled. These thinkers made room for man, as against the Puritans,
and for God, as aga