Not all the philosophy of the last century, however, was born and developed in academical centres and under academical influences. In Germany, Great Britain, and France, the various so-called "Academies" or other unacademical associations of men of scientific interests and attainments--notably, the Berlin Academy, which has been called "the seat of an anti-scholastic popular philosophy"--were during the first half of the nineteenth century contributing by their conspicuous failures as well as by their less conspicuous successes, important factors to the constructive new thought of the latter half of the nineteenth century. In general, although these men decried system and were themselves inadequately prepared to treat the problems of philosophy, whether from the historical or the speculative and critical point of view, they cannot be wholly neglected in estimating its development. Clever reasoning, and witty and epigrammatic writing on scientific or other allied subjects, cannot indeed be called _philosophy_ in the stricter meaning of the word. But this so-called "popular philosophy" has greatly helped in a way to free thought from its too close bondage to scholastic tradition. And even the despite of philosophy, and sneering references to its "barrenness," which formerly characterized the meetings and the writings of this class of its critics, but which now are happily much less frequent, have been on the whole both a valuable check and a stimulus to her devotees. He would be too narrow and sour a disciple of scholastic metaphysics and systematic philosophy, who, because of the levity or scorning of "outsiders," should refuse them all credit. Indeed, the lesson of the close of the nineteenth century may well enough be the motto for the beginning of the twentieth century: _In philosophy--since to philosophize is natural and inevitable for all rational beings--there really are no outsiders._ In this connection it is most interesting to notice how men of the type just referred to, were at the end of the eighteenth century found grouped around such thinkers as Mendelssohn, Lessing, F. Nicolai,--representing a somewhat decided reaction from the French realism to the German idealism. The work of the Academicians in the criticism of Kant was carried forward by Jacobi, who, at the time of his death, was the pensioned president of the Academy at Munich. Some of these same critics of the Kantian philosophy showed a rather decided preference for the "commonsense" philosophy of the Scottish School.