The stiffly constrained character of an _a priori_ Reason manifests itself in another way. A category of pure reason is suspiciously like a pigeonhole. An American writer, speaking before the present war, remarked with witty exaggeration that "Germany is a monstrous set of pigeonholes, and every mother's son of a German is pigeoned in his respective hole--tagged, labeled and ticketed. Germany is a huge human check-room, and the government carries the checks in its pocket." John Locke's deepest objection to the older form of the _a priori_ philosophy, the doctrine of innate ideas, was the readiness with which such ideas become strongholds behind which authority shelters itself from questioning. And John Morley pointed out long ago the undoubted historic fact that the whole modern liberal social and political movement has allied itself with philosophic empiricism. It is hard here, as everywhere, to disentangle cause and effect. But one can at least say with considerable assurance that a hierarchically ordered and subordered State will feel an affinity for a philosophy of fixed categories, while a flexible democratic society will, in its crude empiricism, exhibit loose ends. There is a story to the effect that the good townspeople of Koenigsberg were accustomed to their watches by the time at which Kant passed upon his walks--so uniform was he. Yielding to the Teutonic temptation to find an inner meaning in the outer event, one may wonder whether German thought has not since Kant's time set its intellectual and spiritual clocks by the Kantian standard: the separation of the inner and the outer, with its lesson of freedom and idealism in one realm, and of mechanism, efficiency and organization in the other. A German professor of philosophy has said that while the Latins live in the present moment, the Germans live in the infinite and ineffable. His accusation (though I am not sure he meant it as such) is not completely justified. But it does seem to be true that the Germans, more readily than other peoples, can withdraw themselves from the exigencies and contingencies of life into a region of _Innerlichkeit_ which at least _seems_ boundless; and which can rarely be successfully uttered save through music, and a frail and tender poetry, sometimes domestic, sometimes lyric, but always full of mysterious charm. But technical ideas, ideas about means and instruments, can readily be externalized because the outer world is in truth their abiding home. II GERMAN MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY