A call
Seven

and help to raise the standard of education for the state. was issued for a mass meeting of the teachers of the state. men responded to the call, three of whom were residents at the capital. An association was organized, admitting "all friends of education" to membership. This wide-opened door was needed, that enough might enter to fill the offices at least. After two days of pleasant acquaintance and informal talk round a table in the state superintendent's office, an organization was effected with a graduate of Williams College, Colonel J. G. McMynn, then principal of the public schools at Racine, as president. Adjournment for one year was followed by the four betaking themselves to private carriages for a two-days' ride homeward.

The executive committee set themselves at work to arrange a programme. Those who had accepted places upon the programme and who did not forget their promises to be present, gathered at the capital at the appointed time. The friends of education representing Eastern publishing houses were early at the meeting. Counting heads, teachers saw themselves outnumbered, and at once amended the constitution, making teachers alone eligible to membership. It was an unmanly thing to do, but teachers were new to the business, and had very ill-founded suspicions of Eastern bookmakers. After a year's contrition the matter was set right, and our best "friends" came back to us, never reproving us for our folly. The local committee did not materialize. No place had been secured for the meeting. Lecturers present could not bear the thought of going home without delivering themselves of their precious ideas which the educational world so much needed to hear. One hies to the sheriff's office and obtains the key to the court room. Another finds a grocer and purchases a few candles. While the process of lighting goes on, the audience files in. The singular verb is just right for audience as not a noun of multitude in this case. Five lecturers are present, six book agents, and one hearer, who was afterward found to be a deaf man. (He was deaf before the eloquence began.)

Seriously, this was not a very hopeful beginning, but the five who had come were not easily discouraged. They resolved to make one more trial at a place where much interest in popular education prevailed. Mr. McMynn said: "Come to Racine next year, and I will guarantee a good hall and an interested audience." To make good his guarantee, in the early summer, some weeks

before the time set for the meeting, with an old white horse he traversed the most populous parts of the state urging teachers to attend the meeting. McMynn's zeal, as white as the horse he drove, proved effective, and more than a hundred teachers were enrolled at Racine, and for thirty-five years since that cheering response to personal effort, the largest halls have been filled at the annual gatherings.

Thirty years after the shameful neglect of the five teachers who composed the second meeting of the State Association, Madison redeemed herself most gloriously in the welcome she gave to the five thousand members of the National Educational Association. Two of the early five were there to rejoice in the wonderful change.

Illinois and Iowa had more auspicious beginnings in their vigurous state associations, but they will ever lack the fragrance which Wisconsin's tribulations caused to flow.

PHILOSOPHICAL teaching flows from a scientific knowledge

of education. It embraces, first, a knowledge of the mind, and of minds; second, a knowledge of the branches of knowledge taught; third, a knowledge of the relations of these branches and the mind, considered as materials or instruments of education, not to mention other matters. Such knowledge as this includes personal experience, but it also includes much of the best that has been thought and said of the science, history, and art of education.

Accordingly the philosophical teacher expands what he has seen and thought into what others have seen and thought; he has corrected his own theories and tested his own process by bringing them into contact with the general body of educational doctrine and history.

Perhaps it is needless to say that this is the highest kind of teaching; and that to lift the teaching of the country nearer and nearer to this level is the great endeavor of those who are intelligently engaged in educational work.

B. A. HINSDALE.

THE

GERMAN PHILOSOPHY SINCE HEGEL.

BY B. C. BURT,

Docent in History of Philosophy, Clark University.

I.

HE author of this admirable book too modestly termed by him a "contribution towards" a history of German philosophy since Hegel, has been for more than fifty years Professor of Philosophy in the University of Halle, has published, besides various other works, an elaborate history of German speculation since Kant, and has participated as an eye-witness, as it were, and as an active agent in the general movement of German thought since Hegel's death in 1831. He has in the volume before us discussed German philosophy since Hegel under two chief heads: The Dissolution of the Hegelian school and Attempt at a Reconstruction of Philosophy. Under the first head are treated phenomena in the logico-metaphysical sphere, phenomena in the sphere of the philosophy of religion, phenomena in the spheres of ethics and politics; under the second, returns to earlier systems, attempts at innovations, further development of earlier systems. In the "Conclusion" to the second general division of the work the author notes and explains the fact that the period has been especially fruitful in histories of philosophy; pointing out to those who would treat this fact as a "symptom of philosophical decrepitude" that thought in its history may as naturally as anything else be a proper subject of thought, and that there appears no reason why it should not have become a matter of prime interest in the present age, as nature, the state, and dogma have been in others.

Instead of following the author's account just as it stands, the present article will attempt to deal with the matter so ably presented by him, in a way to give what it is hoped may serve as a

1German Philosophy Since Hegel, by Johann Eduard Erdmann, Professor of Philosophy in the University of Halle. English translation by Rev. E. B. Spiers. Vol. III. of trans lation of the Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. by W. S. Hough, Ass't Professor in University of Minnesota, constituting the introductory number in the projected Library of Philosophy to be published by Swan Sonneschein & Co., London, and Macmillan N. Y.

brief, general conspectus of the standpoint and leading ideas of the period covered by the "contribution." If, with this end in view, we adopt the familiar distinction between matter and spirit, and consider the various ways in which these terms may separately and in combination be regarded, we get such names as the following: materialism, phenomenalistic idealism, agnostic "monism," spiritualistic dualism, rationalistic monism, ideal-realism. The principal "phenomena" described by our author may, for our purpose, be conveniently grouped according to these names, and in the order in which the names here occur.

German materialism in this century may be said to have two or three leading phases. One of these, the most popular in influence, is that purely mechanical materialism, which reduces everything to terms of mere matter and motion, denying, of course, real existence, freedom and immortality to finite spirits, and being to God. This is identical with the doctrine of La Mettrie, Von Holbach, and Cabanis, the leading French materialists of the last century. The chief upholders of this doctrine in Germany have been Büchner, Moleschott, Feuerbach and Vogt, the two last-named of whom declared man to be literally what he eats.

A materialism of a different sort was held by the noted David Friedrich Strauss-a materialism admitting into itself elements of a dynamic and evolutionary theory of things, e. g., the law of the conservation of energy and the Darwinian doctrine of natural selection. This materialism does not, like the former, deny order in nature, but does deny teleological connection, and substitutes æsthetic enjoyment for worship, though regarding religion considered as the sensible consciousness of our dependence on the All, as a fact. Strauss was, it appears, brought to his materialistic standpoint by the study of the works of Voltaire, and the study of the latest works of Feuerbach, in which physical nature is deified, and man is declared to be what he eats.

To be classed better as materialism than otherwise, perhaps, is the doctrine of Heinrich Czolbe, though it contains the assertion of the impossibility of deducing the phenomena of life from mere matter, and its author prefers to be styled a "naturalist." Czolbe's views twice underwent change, but at no time did they recognize the supernatural in any form, and they finally gravitated towards almost simple, undisguised materialism. In the first form of his doctrine were posited, as eternal, besides atoms,

certain forms or species as the source of life and consciousness; in the next, a third principle besides atoms and species-a "worldsoul"—was introduced, in which sensations and feelings, in themselves eternal, were supposed to lie dormant until awakened by cerebral activity; lastly, instead of a world-soul, space was treated as the source of sensuous qualities and sensations. Czolbe professed to explain all teleological connection on purely mechanical principles.

A recent materialistic thinker, in whose doctrines, however, materialism has a part rather as a basis for ethics than as a leading theoretical dogma put forth on its own account, is Eugene Dühring, a hater of supernaturalism, and especially religion, which he believes to be the worst enemy of true philosophy because more than anything else it seduces men away from the sensuous present, the world of action. According to Dühring, nineteentwentieths of true philosophy is the theory of conduct; the doc. trine of matter as the only reality and the source of life and consciousness, constituting but the remaining one-twentieth. In his ethics the fundamental impulses in human nature are declared to be the impulse to self-preservation, and the sexual impulse; and the basis of ethical conceptions the passions, revenge, for example, of penal justice, envy of communism. The individ

ual is the true sovereign. The existing police force, denominated the State, must be annihilated, and a free society organized in which friendly reciprocity among mere individuals shall be the only law, and oaths, worship, and any such childish notion as that of the supernatural shall be unknown. Rousseau and Byron are, respectively, the highest types of manhood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; Comte and Feuerbach, the greatest philosophers of the present century.

What we have chosen to call phenomenalistic idealism, counts among its upholders at least two important thinkers, Beneke and Fechner. This idealism makes observation and calculation (including hypothesis) the sole instrumentalities of philosophic comprehension, and phenomenal consciousness, "internal" and "external," the limit of real cognition. It appears to be a sort of psychological materialism. In it the essence of phenomena is their law, i.e., their How or What, but not their Wherefore. It attempts to avoid the perplexities of an unsophisticated materialism, with its hypothesis of a-thing-in-itself (the atom) causing sensation by conceiving as "atom" merely the minimum scibile of phenomena.