hauer inveighed is no longer content with historical retrospects; it has once more begun to think. It was precisely materialism and positivism that gave life to the type of thought which succeeded German classical philosophy, and which now in turn cannot rest content with the narrow biological conception of the universe held by the new Vitalists. It has once more un- furled the old Kantian banner, with the legend: God, freedom, immortality. Paul Natorp, the head of the Marburg school, no longer confined himself to pure theory but devoted himself with ideal enthusiasm to questions of education, proving a powerful antagonist to the " profoundly uncultured dogmatism and absolutism " of the mere empiricists. Ernst Cassirer, a pupil of Hermann Cohen, the founder of this school, has written a biography of Kant which takes an equally high place as a scientific treatise and as a narrative. His excellent essay, Freiheit und Form, is born of the spirit of Kant, Fichte and Schiller. In Idee und Gestalt he succeeds, like Dilthey, in once more bringing what is essential in literary phenomena under broader philosophic points of view. Besides the school of Marburg, the Baden school manifested considerable produc- tivity; it was founded on the traditions of Kant, Fichte and Hegel, by Wilhelm Windelband, who besides his great achieve- ments in the sphere of history, once more displayed the Willen zum System (the will to frame a philosophic system). His successor, Heinrich Rickert, who was in 1921 the most powerful German philosopher in the proper sense of the term, defends the universality of his science with great success against the Vitalists who followed Nietzsche and were now allied with Bergson and with the American William James. Only the first volume of his chief work, System der Philosophic, had appeared up to 1921; his brilliant polemical work against the Philosophic des Lebens is of general interest. In opposition to the Vitalists, who conceive of thought as producing itself without concepts (unbegrcifflicli) as a pure fact from the elemental event of life, Rickert insists on the necessity of seeking a system. Without mastery of the contents of thought by means of concepts there is a theoretical chaos; life does not think; it is we who think about life, which is neither the only nor the final value but only the prior condition.
While Rickert combats the absence of reflection in the Vitalists and the Intuitionists, Rudolf Eucken attacks the mechanization involved in positivism and pure psychology. Eucken's popularity was founded upon his earlier writings, Die Grundbegri/e der Gegenwart and Die Lebensanschauungcn der grossen Denker. The mild humanity of his nature and the suave emotion which characterizes his method of presentation spread the devoted community of his disciples as far as America and Japan. In Germany his lead was taken up by Ernst Troltsch, who began by being a theological writer (Der Protestantismus; Die Sociallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen). Troltsch demands of the inner motive power of the Christian idea that it should put itself in gear with the actual situation of the world. Christian ethics can only persist as social ethics. The idea of the Kingdom of God does not render the world valueless; what is beyond is the power of what is here.
Philosophy has once more leavened all the mental sciences; and, especially after Rickert's constructive criticism, the his- torical materialism of Lamprecht's German History is no longer conceivable. Political economists, too, like Werner Sombart, and the two Heidelberg brothers, Max and Alfred Weber, are governed no longer by mere technical or commercial points of view. The Webers, especially Max, a courageous and warm- hearted ethical leader of democracy, tried to impart ideal im- pulses to German policy during the war and the revolution.
It is a significant fact that one of the greatest German in- dustrialists, Walther Rathenau, who in 1921 became Minister of Reconstruction, protested against the mechanization of life under capitalism and imperialism. In his eloquent writings he calls upon the educated youth of Germany so to act as to renounce and abandon materialism, and to be masters who serve (Zur Kritik der Zeit; Zur M echanik des Geistes; Von Kommenden Dingeri).
II. Poetry. The literature of the years 1910-21 followed the same path as philosophy, although it was not always con-
scious of having had the same spiritual origin. Literature, by adopting the label of Expressionism, brought itself into line with the general tendency of an international development from which it, no doubt, received impulses, but on which, in view of the plen- tiful crop of new and talented writers, it was not dependent. Expressionism, like philosophy, was awaiting in 1921 a final battle against Naturalism and its legacy, Impressionism and Symbolism; the movement signified a declaration of independence by the creative mind, regarded as subject, against the power of reality, the insurrection of the intelligence against nature. The Expressionist poet does not want to detach his work of art, as an organic creation with an individual character, from life, but, like the Vitalist philosopher, wishes to continue to influence life by it. A poem is a free act of the mind, an independent manifesta- tion of the will. The ego of the poet is the only world possible for him. The Expressionist rejects all traditions, all constraint of the past; he looks solely to the future and works at evolving a new race of men as part of the mystical-religious mission.
In 1910 German lyric poetry could show three poets of a representative character, Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke and Richard Dehmel. Stefan George, the strictest representative of the principle of " art for art's sake " art raised above life to the position of eternal form founded in profane literature a kind of cult in which the sanctity of form alone is worshipped and is handed down like ancient hierophantic rites. With his own chief work, Der siebente Ring, however, he had apparently exhausted the possibilities of this school of the sublime. Those of his disciples who did not completely surrender themselves to an esoteric service under the dictatorship of their master were the best able to survive. Among those with most individuality and robustness, Rudolph Alexander Schroder, whose productivity is small, published a fine volume of poems, Elysium, in which, by the frequent employment of ancient classical metres, he aspired to the calmness and clearness of Goethe. His German Odes, which sing the land of Diirer, Beethoven and Bach, the suffering heart of Europe, revive the Hellenism of Holderlin, which is characteristically German in sentiment.
Rudolph Borchardt, who never entirely belonged to George's circle and who chivalrously gave the master notice in order to conduct a more spirited campaign against his disciples, attained as a lyrist, in spite of his marvellous tricks of style, no greater reputation than that of being an eclectic of taste. His essays, however, in his collected works show him to be the master of a prose which promises to endure by virtue of its monumental power of expression. Like the romantic school at the beginning of the igth century, and indeed like every movement which is solely governed by aesthetics, this movement culminates in a very exquisite critical treatment of literature, in the semi-productive activities of literary transmission and translation.
Friedrich Gundolf, whose lyric vein was soon exhausted, wrote a book on Goethe in which he sets up his own conception of that poet as an alternative to that of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and, after having revised the old translation by Tieck and Schlegel, published his Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist. The lyric fountain of the gifted Hugo von Hofmannsthal seemed to have run dry; he was content to be the librettist of Richard Strauss. Yet in the melodious tenderness of his Prosaische Schriften there is still an echo of the lyric temperament which is his essential endowment. The special " Viennese note " which was said to characterize his youth is now discovered in Peter Altenberg, who is far more detached as regards environment or tradition, who has never, like some of his contemporaries, written a line of poetry, and has never worn the garb of a past which was the creation of his own enthusiasm. Was der Tag mir zutrdgt; Wie ich es sehe these titles of his first books convey the charac- teristics of all he has produced. This creator of numberless lyric sketches in prose is altogether identified with the present; he is the poet of the street and of the Vienna cafe, of all the little, unremembered meetings with anybody whomsoever, above all with himself; in short a self-revealer of a naivete which is ready to face inspection at every moment; and in this surrender to the moment it is he who perfects Impressionism.
