=Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.= This group of disciples of Kant can be understood sympathetically only in the light of their age. They were not philosophical adventurers, otherwise the great representative of the age, Goethe, would not have associated with Schelling and Hegel on equal terms. They stood for the revulsion of the period against all external systems, and for the realization of a spiritual realm of free spirits. They sought not a factitious and imaginary condition, but tried rather to discover the essentials of the spiritual life. They would reclaim reality spiritually, and their only defect was in their haste in carrying out their principles. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel are sharers in one common movement. They tried systematically to present the evolution of the world as an unbroken evolution of thought. They went back to Kant, but they were bolder than he. They sought to transcend the limitations of thought which he had laid down. They would set thought free, and, gazing in upon their own spirits, they would find there the whole infinite universe. The spiritual realm seemed to them to be wider than any one had supposed. It was a self-governing realm, quite different from the world of matter. History to them is cosmic and develops under one law of progression. It is an upward movement of assertions, negations, and syntheses. Life is cosmic spirituality. For Fichte the spirit is a cosmic battle for moral ends; for Schelling the spirit is a cosmic artistic construction, which transforms the external and internal worlds into a work of living art; for Hegel the cosmic spirit unfolds in a strict and rigorous logic, whose consummation is thought of thought. But while Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel look at the world each in his own way, they are members of one common movement toward spiritual freedom, and toward the reëstablishment of metaphysics.