In this modern period the attention of man has been riveted upon his environment. If at any time the man of the nineteenth century has seemed to be interested in man, the interest has really been in man’s relation to his environment. The nineteenth century has championed the necessary laws and mechanical structure of the outer world against man himself. The universe has been enthroned; man has become its serf. Human effort has become slave to its own progress. Work has been apotheosized――work in the outer world, work with the hands. Inventions in material things have multiplied. The nineteenth century has been the period of steam, of electricity, of machinery, of factories, of the enormous increase in the number and size of cities, of the minute division of labor. Social and economic rather than metaphysical problems have commanded attention. Not another and ideal world, but _this present world_, is the one in which the modern man has lived. The sciences have been specialized and man has become practical. Hegel would have said of our time that the cosmic Reason had been so engaged in concrete and external realities, that it had had no time to turn within and scrutinize itself. If one wishes to turn back the leaves of history for centuries similar to the nineteenth in their spirit, one will find them in the third and second centuries B. C. and the fourteenth and fifteenth of the present era. Nevertheless, there is this to be said about modern Realism in comparison with the Realism of preceding periods――the preceding Realism had been critical, negative in its practical results, and usually an opposition to tradition or a reaction from it; modern Realism has been distinguished by its positive practical results, its ambition for supremacy, and its shaping of the whole direction of the life of man. It has assumed control of religion, art, and social morality, to the end of the well-being of the whole. =Modern Philosophy and German Idealism.= The nineteenth century has been remarkable in the extent of its historical, literary, and scientific productions. It has been poor in its philosophical ideas, when we compare it with the preceding romantic movement of the German Idealists. To be sure, there has been much philosophical literature with a great variety of doctrine, but the many personally impressive structures have on the whole been only the re-shaping of former thought. It has sometimes seemed as if some of the philosophic doctrines of this time were about to take original shape; but none have ever reached it, with the possible exception of the doctrine of historical evolution.