Mme. de Staël had always looked upon enthusiasm as a saving power. She had said in _Corinne_ that she only recognised two really distinct classes of men--those who are capable of enthusiasm and those who despise enthusiasts. It seemed to her that in the Germany of that day she had found the native land of enthusiasm, the country in which it was a religion, where it was more highly honoured than anywhere else on earth. Hence it is that she ends her book with a dissertation on enthusiasm. But this belief in enthusiasm, in the power of imagination and the purely spiritual faculties, led her to many rash and narrow conclusions. In her delight in the philosophic idealism of Germany, she treats experimental natural science with the most naïve superiority--is of opinion that it leads to nothing but a mechanical accumulation of facts. Naturphilosophie, on the other hand, which has made the discovery that the human mind can derive all knowledge from itself by the conclusions of reason--which, in other words, regards all things as formed after the pattern of the human mind--seems to her the wisdom of Solomon. "It is a beautiful conception," she says, "that which finds a resemblance between the laws of the human mind and the laws of nature, and which looks upon the material world as an image of the spiritual." In her pleasure in the beauty of this idea she fails to perceive how untruthful it is, to foresee how barren of all result it is soon to prove. She extols Franz Baader and Steffens at the expense of the great English scientists, and, following the example of her Romantic friends, has a good word to say for clairvoyance and astrology--for every phenomenon, in short, which seems to prove the prevailing power of the spirit.