a fall and degradation out of an earlier and relatively purer knowledge of God;" that even among the most abject and debased "there are reminiscences of an earlier worship of one invisible creator and ruler of the world." He also holds and maintains, that he has proved "the essential unity of the human race, and the unity of its primitive traditions, that is, the truth of its early history," as given in the Scriptures, and confirmed by the testimony of different races and nations. In their dispersion from the original centre of the race (the western part of Central Asia, in the Euphrates Valley), all the people and tribes "carried with them the memory of one God, who, in the beginning, revealed himself to man; of one sin of the first parents, in the eating of the forbidden fruit through the influence of the tempter upon the woman, and of the entrance of death as the consequence and punishment of sin; of the brother's murder, and of three brothers who invented the metallic arts, etc.; of a race of giants; of the flood; of the ark, and the mountain, and the birds sent from the ark; of the rainbow and the promise; of three sons from whom descended all the peoples; of a revolt against God, the building of the tower, the confusion of tongues, and the sundering of the nations."

But we must needs stop in our analysis and extracts from this very able, comprehensive, and timely work. It is a vigorous, learned, and high-toned contribution to our apologetic literature-well worthy of being reproduced in an English version. Before materialism and pantheism can win the day, they have got to disprove the positions and refute the arguments of such works as this. Their earth-born theory is of little avail against such an array of facts-facts of history, facts of nature, and facts of human consciousness.

In the concluding Book, headed "The Revelation of God," Dr. Ebrard sums up the results of all his investigations, and then treats, first, of the "Redeeming Acts of God," in his revelation under the old dispensation and in the incarnation; and, second, of the "Effects of Redemption" upon the individual, upon society, and upon races and nations. This is less fully treated than some other parts of his great theme, and leaves much to be supplemented. It might well be the subject of another volume.

The System of Christian Apologetics (1869), by Dr. F. Delitzsch, the eminent orientalist, of Leipsick, differs so much from that of Dr. Ebrard, and is handled in such an original method, that it may profitably be reviewed by itself at some future time.

Art. IX.- PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE IN GERMANY.

By J. P. K. BRYAN, A.M., Mental Science Fellow of Princeton College. VAST and imposing as has been the political consummation of the German empire, and high as is the present national exaltation of this great people, there is another spectacle in their history, past and present, that is far more impressive to the thinking mind. To the student of human thought and human history, this is only the natural consequence of their achievements in the sphere of thought. To him, more profound and significant than this present effect is its cause, the thought and intellectual activity of a race preeminently the thinking race of the world.

A century ago, after England and France had passed the golden age of their literatures, and their civilizations were the ruling influence of Europe, Germany still slumbered. But suddenly a mighty people started into life; and for the last hundred years Germany has been the thinking shop of Europe, the birthplace of the new ideas of this later. age. Though late in the field, her forces have swept its whole extentmarshaled as never a people have marshaled their intellectual hosts. In every realm of human thought and human activity these new factors in the world's great drama have been pushing onward with irresistible energy. No domain of human inquiry or speculation have they left untouched. On every question that men had thought upon they thought again, and in every realm they entered they startled the world by their boldness and originality. Armed with the single weapon of human reason, relying absolutely upon the human faculties in their legitimate exercise, and seeking truth, they went out into the universe to solve its endless and perplexing problem. They advanced upon the strongholds of established opinion in philosophy, theology, art, and politics. They have known no limit, they have recognized no bound, either in their examination of the phenomena of the outer world, cr in the application of an unbending logic to the wonder and mystery of the inner world. In the history of German Rationalism human reason has had its deification. Never in the history of the race, not even in the Groves of the Academy, the School of Athens, or the Halls of the Sorbonne, has human thought had such free course, and the human mind performed such intellectual feats. Never has one century embodied so grandly the genius of a peculiar people.

In this great intellectual activity and development many are the fields of conflict whereon we see arrayed contending forces. And among

those conflicts one of the highest and gravest that can engage man is the conflict between Philosophy and Science, sweeping the whole domain of human knowledge and involving the whole interest of this civilization -a subject involving, on the one hand, the rights of exact science, its place in the vast system of human knowledge, its methods, its content and extent, its legitimate possibilities, and the meaning of its results; a subject which, on the other hand, involves a higher interest, the existence, powers, and capacities of a rational subject, a spiritual self, and its relation to the universe of which it forms a part.

My endeavor shall be to present briefly the historical and present relation of Philosophy and Science in Germany. I shall have occasion to dwell especially upon the absolute sway of the Idealistic systems, more particularly the Hegelian, as one extreme of thought, and the late reaction into Materialism and Positivism as another extreme; and I shall then consider the present relation of these two historical factors of German thought, and the ultimate prospect for the future.

To proceed historically, let us first look at the Idealistic systems of Germany, their absolute domination in the past, and their culmination in the Hegelian Philosophy, the ripest product of that tendency and development.

The German mind is essentially ideal. The history of German Philosophy is the most brilliant history of Idealism in the course of human thought. Even in the mysticism of the earliest speculators, in Boehme, for example, we can trace the distinctive ideal tendency. And when thought advances to a higher philosophic plane, we perceive most plainly the ideal feature. Leibnitz, the father of German Philosophy, found the last ground and reason of existence in the monad, an intelligent atom, an entity more spiritual than material, a microscosm, containing a reflection of the universe in itself. Kant reasoned away the basis for the substantiality of the outer world by demonstrating that time and space are not objective relations, but mere subjective forms of sensuous perception. And by his Categories of the Understanding and Reason, as forms of human thought, he paved the way for a yet more pronounced idealistic development. In Fichte, German Idealism comes forth full-fledged. The Ego is made the principle whence all is derived. By a dialectic that is unanswerable logic, he makes the Ego and non-Ego the inner and the outer world, the subject and object to be the creation of mind, the thinking personality. And as this creative mind is the spontaneous and active cause of its own presentations, so it is its own lawgiver, and in the exercise of its will and in the whole moral realm it is supremely sovereign, bound by no circumstance, as absolute as the expression of deity itself. This was the highest form

of Ethical Idealism, a philosophical assertion of the divinity of the moral nature and the omnipotence of the moral law. After Fichte came Schelling. And here again prevailed a transcendental Idealism, whose chief feature was the so-called "Intuition of the Absolute." The mind is the creator of nature. Nature is the mere shell or organ of the universal mind. The universal mind, or world spirit, finds its objectivation in nature, and through nature returns to itself in human self-consciousness and intelligence.

The climax of this idealistic development was the almost contemporaneous system of Hegel, which was to the German mind the very goal of rational effort, the apotheosis of Philosophy. This Absolute Idealism was to them the brilliant culmination of the history, not only of German, but of all human thought. Presupposing and resting upon the past, it stood as the perfect and satisfying work of the human mind. It seized and possessed the German world. It ruled immediately. In the universities, in the church, and in the State, in art and jurispru dence, it held absolute sway. It was identified with the Prussian Govment in the absolutism of that time. In all the Universities of North Germany it was the idol of their worship, the lawgiver to their activity.

To illustrate the spirit of these ideal systems, and to show the ultimate product of the a priori method, a statement of the chief features of the Hegelian Philosophy is necessary.

With Hegel the Universe is not only a mass of facts; it is not only a system of laws. In its essence it is cause, rational cause, mind, thought. There are not only phenomena, but noumena. These facts, these phenomena, are temporary and fleeting; they are but the momentary expression of abiding cause. These laws are enduring, eternal, as the cause whose mode of operation they are. We can know not only phenomena, we can also know noumena. The absolute is the noumenon. The knowledge of the absolute is the knowledge of the noumenon, of cause, of substance, of essence. The universe is the objectivation of thought; the laws of the universe are, therefore, the laws of thought; the logic of nature is the logic of the mind. As a simple notion is developed into its consequences by the operation of the mental laws, in the same way must this notion be developed in its objectivation in the universe. As thought moves in the mind, so must it move in nature. From one simple notion, from the primal, absolute, abstract notion of existence, pure being (Sein), Hegel would evolve dialectically the universe: There are certain primary notions, like that of being, universally known to every one, however limited his experience. The combination of these engenders all others; the laws of their mutual unio

or antagonism are the primary fundamental laws of the universe. As in geometry there are two or three primitive notions, abstract, absolute, universal truths, from which are deduced the properties of lines, and from these the properties of surfaces, solids, and the numberless forms that nature can produce or the mind of man imagine, so from these elementary formulæ, these absolute and abstract notions, by their logical development, Hegel would educe the laws of the human mind, the mechanism of the heavens, the laws of our planetary system, the various laws of physics, chemistry, zoölogy, the origin and development of religions, the progress of civilizations, the course of human history and of human thought. The universal formulæ in their evolution will express the reality of each and all particular cases. First cause, law, and fact must be bound together, and their inner connection made visible. Chance must be banished, and deductive logic, the unerring power of mind, must forge every link that binds fact to fact, and unifies this multitude of phenomena and these systems of laws.

In one word, the Hegelian Philosophy is the boldest attempt in the history of the human mind to rethink creation, to demonstrate logically the way in which the Creator must have proceeded. It would follow the path of creative energy, and assert that such is the only path that philosophy can follow. From the notion of pure being, we have seen, Hegel would reason out the whole universe, as a necessary logical consequence. The Absolute Existence, the universal mind or spirit, or God (if such a term can be used in this idealistic Pantheism), by the necessity that inhered in infinite existence, must become finite, and that process, which is ever continuing, is the universe, a perpetual onflow, an unceasing self-objectivation of infinite mind in finite being. For mind and thought are the Alpha and Omega in the Hegelian system, and beyond them there is no reality. The universe itself exists only as thought. All nature in all her forms and manifestations, in all her laws and operations, is simply the phenomenon whose noumenon is thought. The whole animal world and all the forms of life that crowd upon our vision are simply the objectivation of thought. The history of this globe, the history of the human race, all human institutions, society, the state, the church, and this developing civilization, are all divine thought in their essence. Man himself, at the top of the scale of creation, the climax of this objectivation of the absolute mind, is only as he thinks. His thought is his existence. In man and through his mental operations, both as an individual and as a race, the Infinite mind, Geist, returns to self-consciousness after a developing manifestation through all the gradations of the forms of the mineral, vegetable, and animal worlds. Man is, in his essence, infinite mind become finitely