philosophic in the south. But peoples, like individuals, are changeable and can be educated: so much so that in our days, the traditional Anglo-Saxon empiricism begins little by little to lose ground before the speculative education of the English people, due to classical German thought; France that was abstractionist becomes intuitionist and mystic. Germany leaves the vast dominion of the skies assigned to her by Heine for that of industry and commerce, and philosophizes somewhat unworthily; Italy, which in greater part was a country of artists, poets and politicians, is traversed in every direction by religious and philosophic currents. Were it not for this capacity for education of individuals and peoples, History would not be a free development, but determinism and mechanism, and each of us would possess less of that courage for social activity which each one exhibits with great ardour according to his own convictions. II ÆSTHETICISM, EMPIRICISM AND MATHEMATICISM [Sidenote: _Definition of these forms._] Æstheticism is the philosophic error which consists in substituting the form of intuition for the form of the concept, and of attributing to the former the office and value of the latter. Empiricism is the analogous substitution of the empirical concept, by means of which philosophic function and value is attributed to the empirical and natural sciences. Finally, mathematicism is the presentation of the abstract concept as concrete concept and of mathematics as philosophy. [Sidenote: _Æstheticism._] We have met with æstheticism and with empiricism at the beginning of our exposition, and again here and there throughout its course; and we have sufficiently determined the nature of both and demonstrated the contradictions in which they become involved. In every one of their movements they presuppose the pure concept and the philosophy of which they mean to take the place. At the same time, they do not develop the philosophy which they have presupposed, because they suffocate it in the vapour of the intuitions and in the chilly waters of naturalistic concepts. They are not therefore effective thought, but an adulteration of thought with heterogeneous elements, which by a misuse of words are said to be furnished with theoretic and logical value. Æstheticism has few representatives, because complete abstention from reflection and reason is too obviously contradictory. Even when art was considered to be a true _instrument_ of philosophy, in the Romantic period, this affirmation was put forward in a confused manner, intuition being finally distinguished from intuition, art from art. This amounted at bottom to a radical change and an abandonment of the original thesis. We have seen æstheticism reappear in our times under the name of _intuitionism,_ or again as _pure experience:_ an experience which is taken to be not posterior, but anterior to every intellectual category, and should therefore be called nothing but pure intuition.