that a richer growth is erelong to spring from all these barren-seeming seed-kernels of truth. But such metaphors apart, what I want to insist upon is the essential unity of recent philosophy amidst all its transformations. Properly viewed, the lesson of the most fantastic speculations of the later German metaphysic is precisely the lesson which the thought of to-day is trying to express and to utilize. To understand the meaning of contemporary thought, say concerning evolution, apart from a comprehension of the period from Kant to Hegel, is therefore, indeed, like trying to appreciate the mature and prosaic, but successful man, without some reference to the splendid dreams of his youth. We have never wholly broken with the romantic period. We have only grown older, and possibly a little more saddened; but those earlier ideals live still in our breasts, only I should be glad if we were better aware of the fact than sometimes we are.
Our immediate task in the coming lectures is thus twofold. We want first to show how the romantic school, far outdoing the waywardness of Fichte, supplemented his one-sided interpretation of things by other, equally idealistic and much more fantastic, interpretations of reality. And, secondly, we want to show how our own more realistic age expresses, after all, not so much an abandonment of the true spirit of this idealistic period, as a fixation and a maturing of some of its deepest interests. And now, as to the romantic school itself, what, first of all, is the meaning of the word?
II.
German literature, in its great modern outgrowth, began, as you know, with Lessing’s early works, just after the middle of the eighteenth century, and ended with the death of its last prominent representative, Heine, in 1856. But the principal productions of this century of literary activity belong to a very much briefer period.
