Author: Friedrich Albert Lange

Publisher: Theclassics.Us

Published: 2013-09

Total Pages: 138

ISBN-13: 9781230368580

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1880 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IL PHILOSOPHICAL MATERIALISM SINCE KANT. England, France, and the Netherlands, the true homes of modern philosophy, retired towards the end of the last century from the theatre of metaphysical war. Since Hume England has produced no great philosopher, unless we concede this rank to the acute and energetic Mill. A similar interval lies in France between Diderot and Comte. In both countries we find meanwhile in other spheres progress and revolutions on the most splendid scale. Here the most unexampled movement of industry and commerce with general consolidation; there the Revolution that shook Europe, and the development of a tremendous military power. These were two very different, indeed quite opposite, turns of national development, that nevertheless agreed in this, that the 'Western Powers' devoted themselves entirely to the tasks of real life. Meanwhile metaphysics were left to us in Germany. And yet it were the greatest ingratitude, if we were to look back upon those great epochs of purely intellectual effort with depreciation or even with lack of sympathy. It is true that we, like Schiller's Poet, came off empty at the partition of the world. It is true that the intoxication of Idealism with us--perhaps we may say, and its afterpangs also--is now over, and that we are no longer content with a spiritual sojourn in the heaven of Zeus. We are reaching manhood later than other nations, but we have also experienced a more beautiful, richer, if almost too enthusiastic a youth; and it must be proved whether our people has been enervated by these intellectual delights, or whether in its ideal past it possesses an inexhaustible spring of force and freshness, that needs only to be diverted into the channels of a new productiveness to...