beyond the eighteenth century by the instruments of that century. CHAPTER X KANT[53] =The Convergence of Philosophical Influences in Germany.= The intellectual thoroughfare from the past into our modern times does not pass in the eighteenth century through England, nor yet through France, but by way of Germany. Traditional France ended with the French political revolution, while the English empirical movement proved its own inconsistency in the phenomenalism of Hume. In Germany alone, at the close of the eighteenth century, there was a renewed and brilliant intellectual life. In its creative productions it has been compared by the Germans to the Systematic Period of Greek thought (from the death of Socrates to that of Aristotle). Both periods appeared when the political fortunes of the respective countries were at their lowest ebb. There were six large influences that converged upon this epoch, some of which we have already noted as beginning even as far back as the period introductory to the Enlightenment (1648–1740) (see pp. 217 ff.). Some are later in their origin or come from a foreign source. Let us merely enumerate them here. (1) Pietism, the religious influence that began with Spener (1635) and swept Germany in the eighteenth century; (2) The sentimentalism of Rousseau; (3) The empirical psychology of Locke among the younger Germans; (4) The Rationalism of the Leibnitz-Wolffian philosophy, which was most powerful in academic circles; (5) The mathematical rigorism of the nature-philosophy of Newton; (6) The new literary writers in their insistence upon subjectivity and intuition.