world,” as we may call it, has shown its mediating and reconciling influence. Nor can I do more than refer to the counter current of pessimism, which has found its most distinguished representatives in Hartmann and Nietzsche; the former a man of great wealth of thought and dialectical power, whose philosophy is idealistic in all but its ultimate principle, and is indeed pessimistic only by an exaggeration of the opposition between the conscious and the unconscious working of reason; the latter, hardly a philosopher at all but rather a writer of pungent and suggestive aphorisms, winged with indignant passion against prevalent opinions—aphorisms which always contradict some one, and often contradict each other. From Nietzsche at his best we may receive a useful warning against too easily satisfying ourselves with the commonplaces of idealistic optimism; from Hartmann we may derive very considerable help in estimating the difficulties that have to be met by those who would seek to work out idealistic principles into a systematic view of the world. But, without attempting to enter upon any more detailed criticism of these or other important writers of recent years, I shall devote the space that remains to one general thought as to the present state of controversy, in relation to the fundamental principles of philosophy. VI Ever since the revival of the study of Kant, the main conflict in philosophy has ceased to lie between materialism and idealism. It has rather become a conflict between those who take up some position analogous to that of Kant and those who seek to carry out the idealistic principle to all its consequences. For the essential characteristic of Kant’s position lay in his sharp division between the spheres of knowledge and of faith—between a knowledge which was confined to phenomena and their connection in experience, and a faith of practical reason, which reached beyond experience to apprehend that which is noumenally real. Even the agnosticism of Mr. Spencer might be regarded as a modification of the Kantian point of view, in so far as his denial of the possibility of knowing the absolute is based on Mansel’s version of the Kantian antinomies; while his description of the “vague consciousness” of the absolute which he bids us worship may be regarded as representing that faith which, in Kant’s view, enables us to pierce the veil of the phenomena and grasp the ultimate reality of things. And in the latter part of the century there has been a continual germination of similar theories, theories agreeing with the Kantian philosophy at least in making some kind of dualistic division between the sphere of clearly defined knowledge and the sphere of ideal or spiritual faith, and also in confining the former to phenomena while the latter is held to be capable of rising in some way from the phenomenal to the real. One of the earliest fruits of the Neo-Kantian movement in Germany was Lange’s _History of Materialism_, which