Specific references to the war are rare and, which one exception, markedly restrained and general. Yet the effects of this untoward experience on German philosophy are unmistakable. A deepened tone, a greater seriousnesss, a turning from technicalities to the traditional problems of philosophy and in some cases to the traditional solutions of these problems, in short a preoccupation with what Sir Thomas Browne called the "magnalities"—all this is observable on every page. More specifically, one notes an intensification of ethical and social interest, a general movement towards metaphysics as such, an almost universal recognition of the centrality of the 'value problem,' and an increased impetus to the reaction to idealism already under way before the war. Doubtless an enterprise such as this has made possible the expression of general attitudes long maturing and hitherto kept in the background, but surely there can be no mistake in seeing in the war and its aftermath an agent which has precipitated tendencies long held in solution.
To the general reader the papers of Driesch, Troeltsch and Vaihinger will probably prove the most interesting. The famous biologist, since 1912 wholly given to philosophy, and now lecturing on logic and metaphysics at Bonn, furnishes a fascinating account of his philosophical system and its development. Ernst Troeltsch's account of his pilgrim's progress from mere historicity and psychologism, in matters of religion, to metaphysics, is not only one of the most interesting personal documents of our time, but is surely typical of the inherent logic of the philosophy of religion since Ritschl. Vaihinger's restatement of his positivistic idealism is not only interesting in itself, but also aids in the understanding of other contributors to the two volumes, such as Cornelius and Groos who are collaborating with him on the journal, founded in 1919, to further the "Philosophie des Als Ob." To the present writer, however, the most interesting papers are those of Troeltsch and Jonas Cohn, which, perhaps more than any others, represent what is distinctive in the development of recent German philosophy under the influence of Windelband and Rickert. In different ways both have passed through the psychological and epistemological stages of value theory into metaphysics. Nor is it wholly a matter of coincidence that for Cohn the great desideratum of his later years is a theory of dialectic as an organ of value theory, and that with this problem has come a renewed interest in Hegel; while for Troeltsch the solution of his problem of the validity of religious values "lies in the direction of Malebranche, Leibnitz and Hegel."
