nses. But when Berkeley speaks of the cause of these
impressions, Hume points out that we have no right to speak of anything
like cause and effect, and that the idea of causality, of necessary
sequence, on which the whole fabric of our reasoning rests, is an
assumption; inevitable, it may be, yet an assumption. Thus English
philosophy, which seemed to be so settled and positive in Bacon, ended in
the most unsettled and negative skepticism in Hume; and it was only
through Kant that, according to the Germans, the great problem was solved
at last, and men again knew _how_ they knew.

From this point of view, which we believe to be that generally taken by
German writers of the historical progress of modern philosophy, we may
well understand why the star of Bacon should disappear almost below their
horizon. And if those only are to be called philosophers who inquire into
the causes of our knowledge, or into the possibility of knowing and being,
a new name must be invented for men like him, who are concerned alone with
the realities of knowledge. The two are antipodes,--they inhabit two
distinct hemispheres of thought. But German Idealism, as M. Kuno Fischer
says, would have done well if it had become more thoroughly acquainted
with its opponent:--

"And if it be objected," he says, "that the points of contact
between German and English philosophy, between Idealism and
Realism, are less to be found in Bacon than in other philosophers
of his kind; that it was not Bacon, but Hume, who influenced Kant;
that it was not Bacon, but Locke, who influenced Leibnitz; that
Spinoza, if he received any impulse at all from those quarters,
received it from Hobbes, and not from Bacon, of whom he speaks in
several places very contemptuously,--I answer, that it was Bacon
whom Des Cartes, the acknowledged founder of dogmatic Idealism,
chose for his antagonist. And as to those realistic philosophers
who have influenced the opposite side of philosophy in Spinoza,
Leibnitz, and Kant, I shall be able to prove that Hobbes, Locke,
Hume, are all descendants of Bacon, that they have their roots in
Bacon, that without Bacon they cannot be truly explained and
understood, but only be taken up in a fragmentary form, and, as it
were, plucked off. Bacon is the creator of realistic philosophy.
Their age is but a development of the Baconian germs; every one of
their systems is a metamor