There speaks, of course, the prophet of the new age which was to transcend the old rationalist movement. Men had come to harp in complacency upon reason. They had never inquired into the nature and laws of action of the reason itself. Kant, though in fullest sympathy with its fundamental principles, was yet aware of the excesses and weaknesses in which the rationalist movement was running out. No man was ever more truly a child of rationalism. No man has ever written, to whom the human reason was more divine and inviolable. Yet no man ever had greater reserves within himself which rationalism, as it had been, had never touched. It was he, therefore, who could lay the foundations for a new and nobler philosophy for the future. The word _Aufklärung_, which the speech of the Fatherland furnished him, is a better word than ours. It is a better word than the French _l'Illuminisme_, the Enlightenment. Still we are apparently committed to the term Rationalism, although it is not an altogether fortunate designation which the English-speaking race has given to a tendency practically universal in the thinking of Europe, from about 1650 to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Historically, the rationalistic movement was the necessary preliminary for the modern period of European civilization as distinguished from the ecclesiastically and theologically determined culture which had prevailed up to that time. It marks the great cleft between the ancient and mediæval world of culture on the one hand and the modern world on the other. The Reformation had but pushed ajar the door to the modern world and then seemed in surprise and fear about to close it again. The thread of the Renaissance was taken up again only in the Enlightenment. The stream flowed underground which was yet to fertilise the modern world.