§ 199. Now it would never occur to a sophisticated philosopher of the present, to one who has thought out to the end the whole tradition of philosophy, and felt the gravity of the great historical issues, to suffer either of these motives to dominate him to the exclusion of the other. Absolutism has long since ceased to speak slightingly of physical science, and of the world of perception. It is conceded that motions must be known in the mechanical way, and matters of fact in the matter-of-fact way. Furthermore, the prestige which science enjoyed in the nineteenth century, and the prestige which the empirical and secular world of action has enjoyed to a degree that has steadily increased since the Renaissance, have convinced the absolutist of the intrinsic significance of these parts of experience. They are no longer reduced, but are permitted to flourish in their own right. From the very councils of absolute idealism there has issued a distinction which is fast becoming current, between the World of Appreciation, or the realm of moral and logical principles, and the World of Description, or the realm of empirical generalizations and mechanical causes.[402:1] It is indeed maintained that the former of these is metaphysically superior; but the latter is ranked without the disparagement of its own proper categories. With the Fichteans this distinction corresponds to the distinction in the system of Fichte between the active moral ego, and the nature which it posits to act upon. But the _neo-Fichteans_ are concerned to show that the nature so posited, or the World of Description, is the _realm of mechanical science_, and that the entire system of mathematical and physical truth is therefore morally necessary.[403:2] [Sidenote: The Neo-Kantians.] § 200. A more pronounced tendency in the same direction marks the work of the _neo-Kantians_. These philosophers repudiate the spiritualistic metaphysics of Schopenhauer, Fichte, and Hegel, believing the real significance of Kant to lie in his critical method, in his examination of the first principles of the different systems of knowledge, and especially in his analysis of the foundations of mathematics and physics.[403:3] In approaching mathematics and physics from a general logical stand-point, these neo-Kantians become scarcely distinguishable in interest and temper from those scientists who approach logic from the mathematical and physical stand-point. [Sidenote: Recognition of the Individual. Personal Idealism.]