Scepticism, born of Kant and Hegel, had come to its throne. With Hegel all things were only relative; with Kant objects are only phenomena, and the truth of things is merely subjective; religion itself was to him only subjective, and was, moreover, relegated to the things unknowable. In this he resembled Spencer with whom Religion held the first place in the category of the Unknowable, and that vast, dark, and bottomless pit into which he consigned everything which could not be known by experimentation. This glorification of ignorance, elevated into a system, became known as agnosticism. The vagaries of sophism in the English-speaking world were hardly less prolific than in Continental Europe. The great intellectual forces of the nineteenth century allied themselves to two movements, the transcendental and the empiric. The former sprang from the writings of Rousseau; created the French Revolution, developed into German rationalism, passed into England to the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, generated in France a whole tribe of soliloquists and dreamers, and was finally crystallized in the half-prophetic, half-delirious preachings of Carlyle. Crossing the Atlantic it inspired and originated New England Transcendentalism through the Concord School of Philosophy, of which Emerson, a pupil of Carlyle, was the chief exponent. It was a vague and abstract school. It took its very name from the fancy that this new knowledge transcended all experience and was quite independent of reason, authority, the testimony of the senses, or the testimony of mankind. It spoke freely of the Infinite, the Infinite Nothing, the Infinite Essence of Things. Carlyle spoke of Eternal Verities, the Immensities, the Eternal Silences. Emerson wrote of it as the Over-soul, the Spirit of the Universe. It permeated all literature, it directed the study of history, it inspired poetry, it became a religious creed; it hypnotized a large portion of the studious world.