For the freedom of conscience which the King placed at the head of his maxims of government, dissolved like a spell the compulsion which the church had hitherto laid on the learned. The strong antipathy which the King had for priestly rule, and every kind of restraint of the mind, worked in many spheres. The most daring teaching, the most determined attacks on existing opinions, were now allowed; the struggle was carried on with equal weapons, and science obtained for the first time a feeling of supremacy over the soul. It was by no accident that Kant rose to eminence in Prussia; for the whole stringent power of his teaching, the high elevation of the feeling of duty, even the quiet resignation with which the individual had to submit himself to the "categorical imperative," is nothing more than the ideal counterpart of the devotion to duty which the King practised himself and demanded of his Prussians. No one has more nobly expressed than the great philosopher himself, how much the State system of Frederic II. had been the basis of his teaching. Historical science was not the least gainer by him. Great political deeds were so intimately blended with the imaginations and the hearts of Germans, that every individual participated in them; manly doings and sufferings appeared so worthy of reverence, that the feeling for what was significant and characteristic animated in a new way the German historical inquirer, and his precepts for the nation attained a higher meaning. It was not, indeed, immediately that the Germans gained the sure judgment and political culture which are necessary to every historian who undertakes to represent life of his nation. It was remarkable that the historical mind of Germany deviated so much from that of England and France, but it developed itself in a way that led the greatest intellectual acquisitions.