At the time that the philosophy of Kant became popular, the teaching of Spinoza was resurrected from its long sleep and introduced into Germany. Kant was the “all-crushing” critic; Spinoza was the dogmatic mystic. Their opposition did not amount to a contradiction, but was of the correlative sort. Kant and Spinoza became the two intellectual foci about which revolved the thought of the generation after Kant. All the succeeding philosophers show Kant’s influence upon them, for they all accept his epistemology. They show the influence of Spinoza in varying degrees. The philosophers whom we shall now meet may be divided into groups. The first group consists of Rheinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. These took the lead in destroying the Kantian conception of the thing-in-itself and in constructing a pure idealism. The second group consists of Herbart and Schopenhauer. These tried in different ways to develop a metaphysics of the thing-in-itself. A third group consisted of the old Wolffian rationalistic school, which was, however, unsuccessful in its opposition to the spread of the doctrines of Kant and Spinoza. A summary of the leaders of the German thought of this time would not be complete without mention, lastly, of the miscellaneous group of literary Romanticists, whose writings partook of the philosophical spirit. The influence of Spinoza is especially prominent in this group. Jean Paul Richter (1763–1825) was the forerunner of this movement, and it included the names of Tieck, Wackenroder, the two Schlegels, Novalis, the two Romantic women,――Dorothea and Caroline,――Schiller, and Goethe. The poet Schiller did much to popularize Kant’s æsthetic and moral doctrines. Illustration: MAP SHOWING THE UNIVERSITY TOWNS AND OTHER IMPORTANT PLACES CONNECTED WITH THE GERMAN IDEALISTS