In the treatment of German philosophic romanticism the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ is curiously prejudiced. The particular philosophers of this school—especially the ones with speculative systems—who had a deep and wide influence on English thought, are treated with adequate liberality. But the later idealistic thinkers, who substituted criticism for speculation, receive scant attention, and in several instances are omitted entirely. For English readers such a disproportioned and purely national attitude may be adequate, since England’s intellectualism is, in the main, insular. But, it must be remembered, the _Britannica_ has assumed the character of an American institution; and, to date, this country has not quite reached that state of British complacency where it chooses to ignore _all_ information save that which is narrowly relative to English culture. Some of us are still un-British enough to want an encyclopædia of universal information. The _Britannica_ is not such a reference work, and the manner in which it deals with the romantic philosophers furnishes ample substantiation of this fact. Fichte, for instance, whose philosophy embodies a moral idealism eminently acceptable to “English ways of thinking,” receives seven columns of biography. Schelling, whose ideas were tainted with mythical mysticism, but who was not an evolutionist in the modern sense of the word, receives five columns. Hegel, who was, in a sense, the great English philosophical idol and whose doctrines had a greater influence in Great Britain than those of any other thinker, is given no less than fifteen columns, twice the space that is given to Rousseau, and five-sixths of the space that is given to Kant! Even Schleiermacher is given almost equal space with Rousseau, and his philosophy is interpreted as an effort “to reconcile science and philosophy with religion and theology, and the modern world with the Christian church.” Also, the focus of his thought, culture and life, we are told, “was religion and theology.” Schopenhauer is one of the few foreign philosophers who receive adequate treatment in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_. But Boström, in whose works the romantic school attained its systematic culmination, receives just twenty-four lines, less space than is devoted to Abraham Tucker, the English moralist, or to Garth Wilkinson, the English Swedenborgian; and about the same amount of space as is given to John Morell, the English Congregationalist minister who turned philosopher. And Frederick Christian Sibbern receives no biography whatever!