solution), aimed at this harmony between faith and science. It understood both indeed in the very limited sense of a mere faith of reason and science of reason, influenced as it was by the Rationalism then so generally diffused, not only in Protestant but even in Catholic countries, and notably in Catholic Germany. But at the same time other profound thinkers sought another and higher foundation for philosophy in the idea of revelation; a revelation which some understood in a mere general and speculative, though not irreligious, sense--and others in the Christian sense of positive faith and pious feeling. The capital vice of German philosophy is the absolute--the philosophic reflection of the general vice of the spirit of the age, which exerts an absolute influence on life itself--whether this vice of German philosophy assume the form of the absolute ego,[27] or that of the Pantheistic naturalism,[28] or that of absolute reason.[29] It is this which originally gave to the natural philosophy of the Germans a false Pantheistic direction, for the real materialism which has found so many advocates among the French Naturalists, has from the very ideal tendency of the German mind, experienced little favour in Germany. Yet this foreign influence was not of long continuance--German physics became deeply imbued with a religious spirit, and the German natural philosophy is now in the hands of its first representatives decidedly Christian. And this progress in the great work of the religious regeneration of science, I must consider as the noblest triumph of genius, for it is precisely in the department of physics the problem was the most difficult; and all that rich and boundless treasure of new discoveries in nature, which are ever better understood when viewed in connection with the high truths of religion, must be looked upon as the property of Christian science. The various systems of philosophic Rationalism, mutually subversive, as they are, of each other, will fall to the ground, and the vulgar Rationalism which is but an emanation of the higher, and which still prevails in some particular schools, and in many of the lower walks of German literature, will finally disappear; in proportion as German philosophy becomes imbued with the spirit of religion, and German science becomes thoroughly Christian, or Catholic. In the firm hope that this will certainly happen, I have given publicity to these first essays of a philosophy I had long in secret prepared; and of which the first part, "the Philosophy of Life," treats of consciousness, or of the inward man: the second, "this Philosophy of History," which I now have here brought to a close, considers the outward man, or the progress of states and nations through all ages of the world.