III.
There is hardly a type of Romantic philosophy clamoring for recognition today that has not its counterpart in the anti-intellectualistic movements of the period inaugurated by Kant. Indeed, it would not be difficult to trace the descent of the contemporary leaders of the new thought through the long line of 'new' thinkers which runs unbroken through the nineteenth century. The names are familiar to every student of the history of philosophy; Jacobi, Herder, Fries, Schleiermacher, Schopen- hauer, Nietzsche, Joseph de Maistre, Maine de Biran, Royer-Collard, Victor Cousin, Th. Jouffroy, Ravaisson, Renouvier, Boutroux, Sir William Hamilton, Mansel, and even Bradley, can all be appealed to in support of doctrines which are engaging philosophers of the present day. These romantic teachings are symptoms of dissatisfaction with the methods and results of our rationalistic science and philosophy, expressions of the same spirit of impatient discontent which is manifesting itself everywhere in modern life. We are dissatisfied; economically, politically, socially, morally, religiously, and intellectually dissatisfied; and our philosophies are mirroring the turmoil of our souls. For one thing, we are tired of the old systems, idealistic and materialistic, rationalistic and empiristic, the old arguments, the old methods, the old categories, the old logic, the old terminologies,—sick and tired of them all. Familiarity breeds contempt in the world of ideas no less than in the world of things; repetition of the old truths and the old labels deadens the intellect,—we want new names for old ways of thinking. We long for change and are inclined to welcome every effort to begin the whole work of philosophy over again. But the chief ground of discontent with the traditional science and philosophy is to be sought in their theoretical results, or rather, in their supposed results. The yearnings of the heart are chilled by the contemplation of the vast machinery of a universe of which the individual forms an insignificant and vanishing part. Whether with Huxley we accept the mechanism of natural science with its claim that "the entire world, animate and inanimate, is the result of the mutual interaction, according to definite laws, of forces possessed by the
