Goethe and Schiller in their early writings. Of the three factors that saved Germany from a political revolution, perhaps the most potent was the new, fresh, literary ideas of Lessing. If Frederick is the originator of the German Enlightenment, Lessing is the savior of it. The Enlightenment in England stopped with the phenomenalism of Hume, in France with the Revolution, but in Germany it has in a sense continued even to the present day. The classic period of Goethe and Schiller, the modern scientific achievements of the Germans, have their perpetual source in Lessing. He not only gave the death-blow to the pedantic absolutism of the intellectual past, but he set the movement upon a permanent intellectual basis, upon which it has stood against the assaults of sentimentalism for a hundred and fifty years. =Lessing.= G. E. Lessing (1729–1781) was not only a sound scholar, but a polished man of the social world. He was a writer of epigrams, fables, and comedies, a dramatic and literary critic, a translator and essayist, a student of philosophy and ecclesiastical history, and a writer upon art. His _Nathan the Wise_ is, after Goethe’s _Faust_, the greatest literary production of German thought. With him German literature begins. He rejected the French models accepted by Gottsched; he introduced Shakespeare to the Germans; and he surpassed all his contemporaries in literary and artistic reform, social enlightenment, and religious emancipation. Lessing and Winckelmann were the first to spread a love for the past by a critical study of it. Lessing was not a violent iconoclast like Voltaire, but a discriminating critic. He said that if Leibnitz had wished for an interpreter, he would not have chosen Wolff. The new literary writers, Lessing and Herder, in their insistence upon subjectivity and intuition, rather than Wolff, were the true interpreters of Leibnitz. Lessing differed from the Enlightenment in his conception of the present in its continuity with the past. Herder, too, was interested in development. Lessing pointed to the perfect models in the past; Herder to the origins of things. Both believed in an immanent God and the harmony of the universe. At this time the problems in æsthetics came to light, and with them the creation of “world literature,” which drew from all historical thought――from antiquity, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. The Pietists, the Wolffians, and the literary writers agreed in taking the subjective point for their view of life. Thus Leibnitz appears through Lessing as a motive power in the German Enlightenment. Lessing’s doctrine of individuality so transcended that of the Storm and Stress Period that he was not understood by it. His enlightened individual suppresses his individuality. But his principles were so fundamental that the Storm and Stress Period proved to be only an interruption, and the German Enlightenment was perpetuated. He thus projected himself