“solipsism,” to aristocratic individualism and to supermanishness based on force. From a scepticism born of his dislike of theology and metaphysics, Kant—like Hume before him—returned at last to ethics and worked out an essentially moral view of the Universe. But his followers held fast to his earlier subjectivism and, in the name of “Idealism,” gave themselves up to arbitrary constructions of the Universe, to a metaphysical Titanism, or cult of the gigantic, which necessarily led the German subjectivists into moral isolation. The fanciful imaginings of Fichte and Schelling brought forth the nihilism and pessimism of Schopenhauer. The Titans grew angry and ironical—though anger and irony in a Titan are a contradiction in terms—and finally fell into despair. Hegel and Feuerbach sought refuge in a sort of State police and in a materialism which helped them to escape from metaphysical cobweb-spinning. They subordinated themselves to the Prussian corporalism which had already found strong expression in Kant’s “categorical imperative”; and the German universities became the spiritual barracks of a philosophical absolutism that culminated in Hegel’s deification of the Prussian State and Monarchy.
For his State absolutism Hegel provided—under the title of dialectics and evolution—a Machiavellian doctrine based on denial of the incompatibility of violence and right; for he deduced his right from might and force. Both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer rejected this doctrine verbally. In reality, it was Nietzsche who became the philosophical product of the Hohenzollern parvenus and of pan-German absolutism. Nor did Hegel proclaim only the infallibility of the State. He preached the saving virtue of war and militarism as well. Then Lagarde and his disciples conceived the philosophy and policy of pan-Germanism—the policy which the war overthrew on the battlefields of France.
With the fall of the Prussian regiments fell also the philosophy which (in von Hartmann’s words) had preached the extermination of the Poles or (in those of Mommsen) the smashing of the hard Czech skulls, the suppression of the decadent French and of the haughty English. The war, which answered the question “Goethe or Bismarck?” “Weimar or Potsdam?” weighed Prussian pan-Germanism in the balance and found it wanting.
In repudiating the one-sidedness of German thought, from Kant onwards, I do not say that German philosophy or all German thought is dubious, nor do I say that it is feeble, super-
