Since the re-establishment of the empire, some of the forms of philosophy which have been described have almost disappeared. The socialist philosophy has become extinct as a direct movement; the eclectic school has gradually passed from philosophy to literature; and the chief tendencies, so far as mere materialism does not, as in most reactions, extinguish thought, are toward a modification of eclecticism on the one hand, and to ultramontism on the other.(888) The difference of this new eclecticism from the former kind seen in Cousin, lies in the fact that while that was chiefly derived from Schelling’s philosophy, this is an offshoot from Hegel. The one considered that the mind, by its intuitions, can find absolute truth, and by the light of these absolute ideas can criticise history, and prejudge the end toward which society is moving. This denies the possibility of attaining absolute truth. All being is a state of flux: all knowledge is relative to its age. Philosophy expires in historical criticism; in the history of the soul of man under its various manifestations. It rests in what is; it judges only from fact. The absolute is displaced by the relative; being by becoming.(889) Though not positivism in its aspects, this system is so in its scientific results.(890) The unbelief is critical, not aggressive. The grand idea of an historical progress, of tracing especially the historic growth of ideas, of culture, of the great unfolding of humanity, presides over religious speculations, and lends its fascinating power and its danger. The necessity is recognised for solving the nature of the religious consciousness, and satisfying its wants; but the remedy is sought in other means than in Christianity. While this is the condition of the philosophy just described, positivism, so far as it prevails, is wholly antichristian, and regards religion as the product of an unscientific age, for which a belief in nature’s laws and science is a sufficient substitute. Christianity, though the ripest of religious forms, is only symbolical of a higher truth towards which humanity is tending.