new moral, æsthetical, and metaphysical problems, laid claim almost exclusively to the interest of scientific culture. Hence it is clear why the Protestant nations, as well as that part of the Catholics which, wavering in its old faith, only remained outwardly in connection with its church, threw itself with such zeal on philosophy. Ethical and metaphysical problems were chiefly to be solved; the sources of knowledge had to be critically examined, and this was done with deeper earnestness than formerly. I need not enumerate the actual results which the last century gained by this work. It excited soaring hopes, and it cannot be denied that metaphysics has a dangerous attraction for the German mind; it could not again abandon it until all its hiding-places had been searched through and it had satisfied itself that for the present nothing more is to be found there. Then, in the second half of the last century, the rejuvenescent intellectual life of the nation began to cultivate its artistic flowers; the clumsy language transformed itself into one of the most expressive instruments of the human mind; out of what was still the hard, poor, and wearisome condition of civil and political life, the results of the religious war, in which the figure of the Prussian hero-king only now cast the first hope of a better future, to be again followed by the misery of the Napoleonic war,--out of this joyless existence, all sensitive minds gladly fled into the flowery land opened out by German poetry, rivalling as it did the best poetry of all times and of all peoples; or in the sublime aspects of philosophy they endeavoured to sink reality in oblivion. And the natural sciences were on the side of this real world, so willingly overlooked. Astronomy alone could at that time offer great and sublime prospects; in all other branches long and patient labour was still necessary before great principles could be attained; before these subjects could have a voice in the great questions of human life; or before they became the powerful means of the authority of man over the forces of nature which they have since become. The labour of the natural philosopher seems narrow, low, and insignificant compared with the great conceptions of the philosopher and of the poet; it was only those natural philosophers who, like Oken, rejoiced in poetical philosophical conceptions, who found willing auditors.