In other countries during the earlier decades of the century a similar movement of thought is discernible, though it was not carried out anywhere with the same philosophical thoroughness as in Germany. In France the organic idea did not find any very powerful representative till the time of Comte, and even in his expression of it there is a certain ambiguity. In his well-known law of development, indeed, he seems to reproduce the individualistic doctrine of the eighteenth century, and to deny the reality of the _universal_, both in its theological and its philosophical form. But already in the last volume of his _Positive Philosophy_, when he begins to deal with human society, he maintains that “the individual man is an abstraction, and that there is nothing real but humanity”; and in his _Positive Politics_ he treats this unity of mankind as not only real, but divine. In that work, moreover, he makes another step. Rejecting at once the obstructions of the individualists and those of the socialists, he rises to the conception of a social organism, which gives play to the competitive energy of individuals, and yet binds them together in its own more comprehensive life. In England, before the close of the eighteenth century, the same spirit had found a representative in Burke, who rejected entirely the idea of a social contract, and maintained that the State is based on an unconscious reason of society, which is far wiser than the conscious reason of even the wisest individuals. In general, however, the spiritualistic movement of the earlier part of the century took, among the English-speaking people, rather a poetic and literary than a philosophical form. And the imperfect attempts of Coleridge to transplant German ideas into England—attempts followed up with signal energy by Frederic Denison Maurice—hardly constitute an exception to this rule. In this connection, also, as one who partly grasped the organic idea of social life and its development, but who gave it a somewhat imperfect and even contradictory expression, I may mention a later writer, Thomas Carlyle, whose imaginative genius and moral enthusiasm did much to breathe a new life into history. Though not a philosopher in any technical sense, he was, like his friend Emerson, a vehicle of philosophical ideas, and he contributed greatly to scatter the seed of idealism upon British soil. His Calvinistic pessimism, indeed, makes a curious contrast with the fearless optimism of the new country which is characteristic of Emerson; but whether great men are to be regarded as “heroes to be worshipped,” according to the teaching of the one, or as “representative men,” who are to be followed because they express what all are thinking, according to the ideas of the other, we are led, in both cases, to a deeper view of the solidarity of human society and of its spiritual basis. IV