Nor does this arise from any wish to depreciate the results of English speculation in general. On the contrary, we find that Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume are treated with great respect. They occupy well-marked positions in the progress of philosophic thought. Their names are written in large letters on the chief stations through which the train of human reasoning passed before it arrived at Kant and Hegel. Locke’s philosophy took for a time complete possession of the German mind, and called forth some of the most important and decisive writings of Leibnitz; and Kant himself owed his commanding position to the battle which he fought and won against Hume. Bacon alone has never been either attacked or praised, nor have his works, as it seems, ever been studied very closely by Germans. As far as we can gather, their view of Bacon and of English philosophy is something as follows. Philosophy, they say, should account for experience; but Bacon took experience for granted. He constructed a cyclopædia of knowledge, but he never explained what knowledge itself was. Hence philosophy, far from being brought to a close by his “Novum Organon,” had to learn again to make her first steps immediately after his time. Bacon had built a magnificent palace, but it was soon found that there was no staircase in it. The very first question of all philosophy, “How do we know?” or, “How can we know?” had never been asked by him. Locke, who came after him, was the first to ask it, and he endeavored to answer it in his “Essay concerning Human Understanding.” The result of his speculations was, that the mind is a _tabula rasa_, that this _tabula rasa_ becomes gradually filled with sensuous perceptions, and that these sensuous perceptions arrange themselves into classes, and thus give rise to more general ideas or conceptions. This was a step in advance; but there was again one thing taken for granted by Locke,—the perceptions. This led to the next step in English philosophy, which was made by Berkeley. He asked the question, “What are perceptions?” and he answered it boldly: “Perceptions are the things themselves, and the only cause of these perceptions is God.” But this bold step was in reality but a bold retreat. Hume accepted the results both of Locke and Berkeley. He admitted with Locke that the impressions of the senses are the source of all knowledge; he admitted with Berkeley that we know nothing beyond the impressions of our senses. But when Berkeley speaks of the cause of these impressions, Hume points out that we have no right to speak of anything like cause and effect, and that the idea of causality, of necessary sequence, on which the whole fabric of our reasoning rests, is an assumption; inevitable, it may be, yet an assumption. Thus English philosophy, which seemed to be so settled and positive in Bacon, ended in the most unsettled and negative skepticism in Hume; and it was only through Kant that, according to the Germans, the great problem was solved