For a period Hegelian thought was almost supreme in Germany. Then its rule passed away almost as rapidly as it had been achieved. After various shiftings, the trend of philosophic thought was definitely "Back to Kant." Kant's greater sobriety, the sharp distinction he drew between the realm of phenomena and science and the ideal noumenal world, commended him after the unbridled pretensions of Hegelian absolutism. For more than a generation Hegel was spoken of with almost universal contempt. Nevertheless his ideas, loosed from the technical apparatus with which he surrounded them, persisted. Upon the historical disciplines his influence was peculiarly deep and abiding. He fixed the ideas of Fichte and fastened them together with the pin of evolution. Since his day, histories of philosophy, or religion, or institutions have all been treated as developments through necessary stages of an inner implicit idea or purpose according to an indwelling law. And the idea of a peculiar mission and destiny of German history has lost nothing in the operation. Expressions which a bewildered world has sought since the beginning of the war to explain through the influence of a Darwinian struggle for existence and survival of the fittest, or through the influence of a Nietzschean philosophy of power, have their roots in the classic idealistic philosophy culminating in Hegel. Kant still remains the philosopher of Germany. The division of life between the world of sense and of mechanism and the world of the supersensible and purpose, the world of necessity and the world of freedom, is more congenial than a complete monism. The attempts of his successors to bridge the gap and set up a wholly unified philosophy failed, historically speaking. But, nevertheless, they contributed an indispensable ingredient to the contemporary German spirit; they helped people the Kantian void of the supersensible with the substantial figures of the State and its Historical Evolution and Mission. Kant bequeathed to the world an intellect devoted to the congenial task of discovering causal law in external nature, and an inner intuition which, in spite of its sublimity, had nothing to look at except the bare form of an empty law of duty. Kant was kept busy in proving the existence of this supernal but empty region. Consequently he was not troubled by being obliged to engage in the unremunerative task of spending his time gazing into a blank void. His successors were not so fortunate. The existence of this ideal realm in which reason, purpose and freedom are one was axiomatic to them; they could no longer busy themselves with proving its existence. Some of them, called the Romanticists, filled it with visions, more or less poetic, which frankly drew their substance from an imagination inflamed by emotional aspiration in revolt at the limitations of outward action. Others, called the idealistic philosophers, filled in the void, dark because of excess of light, with