world is wholly void of human significance. The matter of thinking overwhelms us; we forget to study the form, and so we accept, with a blank wonder, the results of our thinking as if they were self-existent entities that had walked into our souls of themselves. For example, we make molecules by reasoning about facts of sensation, and by grouping these facts in the simplest and easiest fashion possible; then we fall into a fear lest the molecules have, after all, made us, and we write countless volumes on a stupid theme called materialism. This unreflective fashion of regarding the products of our thought as the conditions and source of our thought, is largely responsible for the strife between the ethical and the scientific tendencies of the time. The scientific tendency stops in one direction at a certain point, content with having made a theory of evolution, and fearing, or, at any rate, neglecting, any further analysis of fundamental ideas. The ethical tendency, on the other hand, rests on a rooted feeling that, after all, conscious life is of more worth than anything else in the universe. But this is, nowadays, commonly a mere feeling, which, finding nothing to justify it in current scientific opinion, becomes morose, and results in books against science. The books are wrong, but the feeling, when not morose, is right. The world is of importance only because of the conscious life in it, and the Evolution theory is onesided because of the subordinate place it gives to consciousness. But the cure is not in writing books against science, but solely in such a broad philosophy as shall correct the narrowness of the day, and bring back to the first rank of interest once more the problems of Goethe's Faust and of Kant's Critique. We want not less talk about evolution, but more study of human life and destiny, of the nature of men's thought, and the true goal of men's actions. Send us the thinker that can show us just what in life is most worthy of our toil, just what makes men's destiny more than poor and comic, just what is the ideal that we ought to serve; let such a thinker point out to us plainly that ideal, and then say, in a voice that we must hear, "Work, work for that; it is the highest"-then such a thinker will have saved our age from one-sideedness, and have given it eternal significance. Now, to talk about those problems of thought which concern the destiny, the significance, and the conduct of human life, is to talk about what I have termed "the ethical aspect of thought." Some study we must give to these things if we are not to remain, once for all, hopelessly onesided.

In looking for the view of the world which shall restore unity to our divided age, we must first not forget the fact that very lately all these

now neglected matters have been much talked about. It is the theory of Evolution that, with its magnificent triumphs, its wonderful ingenuity and insight, has put them out of sight. Only within twenty years has there been a general inattention to the study of the purposes and the hopes of human life-a study that, embodied in German Idealism, or in American Transcendentalism, in Goethe, in Schiller, in Fichte, in Wordsworth, in Shelley, in Carlyle, in Emerson, had been filling men's thoughts since the outset of the great Revolution. But since the end of the period referred to our knowledge of the origin of the forms of life has driven from popular thought. the matters of the worth and of the conduct of life, so that one might grow up nowadays well taught in the learning of the age, and when asked, “Hast thou as yet received into thy heart any Ideal?" might respond very truthfully, "I have not heard so much as whether there be any Ideal."

Yet, I repeat, the fault in our time is negative rather than positive. We have to enlarge, not to condemn. Evolution is a great truth, but it is not all truth. We need more, not less, of science. We need a more thorough-going, a more searching—yes, a more critical and skeptical-thought than any now current. For cur

rent thought is, in fact, naïf and dogmatic, accepting without criticism a whole army of ideas because they happen to be useful as bases for scientific work. We need, then, in the interests of higher thought, an addition to our present philosophy-an addition that makes use of the neglected thought of the last three generations. But, as preliminary to all this, it becomes us to inquire: Why was modern thought so suddenly turned from the contemplation of the ethical aspect of reality to this present absorbing study of the material side of the world? How came we to break with Transcendentalism, and to begin this search after the laws of the redistribution of matter and of force? To this question I want to devote the rest of the present study; for just here is the whole problem in a nut-shell. Transcendentalism, the distinctly ethical thought-movement of the century, failed to keep a strong hold on the life of the century. Why? In the answer to this question lies at once the relative justification, and at the same time the understanding, of the incompleteness cf our present mode of thinking.

By Transcendentalism, I mean a movement that began in Germany in the last thirty years of the eighteenth century, and that afterward spread, in one form or another, all over Europe, and even into our own country-a movement that answered in the moral and mental world to the French Revolution in the political world.

a multitude of forms, a single great idea: the idea that in the free growth and expression of the highest and strongest emotions of the civilized man might be found the true solution of the problem of life. Herein was embodied a reaction against the characteristic notions of the eighteenth century. In the conventional, in submission to the external forms of government, religion, and society, joined with a total indifference to the spiritual, and with a general tendency to free but shallow speculation, the average popular thought of the last century had sought to attain repose rather than perfection. The great thinkers rose far above this level; but, on the whole, we look to the age of the rationalists rather for ingenuity than for profundity, rather for good sense than for grand ideas. The prophetic, the emotional, the sublime, are absent from the typical eighteenth century mind-life. Instead, we find cultivation, criticism, skepticism, and at times, as a sort of relief, a mild sentimentality. The Transcendental movement expressed a rebound from this state of things. With the so-called Storm and Stress Period of German literature the protest against conventionality and in favor of a higher life began. Love, enthusiasm, devotion, the affection for humanity, the search after the ideal, the faith in a spiritual life—these became objects of the first interest. A grand new era of history seemed opening. Men felt themselves on the verge of great discoveries. The highest hopes were formed. A movement was begun that lasted through three generations, and far into a fourth. It was, to be sure, in nature a young men's movement; but as the men of one generation lost their early enthusiasm, others arose to follow in their footsteps-blunderingly, perhaps, but earnestly. When Goethe had outgrown his youthful extravagances, behold there were the young Romanticists to undertake the old work once more. When they crystallized with time, and lost hold on the German national life, there came Heine and the Young Germany to pursue with new vigor the old path. In England, Wordsworth grows very sober with age, when there come Byron and Shelley; Coleridge fails, and Carlyle is sent; Shelley and Byron pass away, but Tennyson arises. And with us in America Emerson and his helpers renew the spirit of a half century before their time. This movement now seems a thing of the past. There is no Emerson among the younger men, no Tennyson among the new school of poets, no Heine in Germany—much less, then, a Fichte or a Schiller. Not merely is genius lacking, but the general public interest, the soil from which a genius draws nour

the age is represented by George Eliot's later novels, where everything is made subordinate to analysis, by the poetry of several skillful masters of melody, by the cold critical work of the authors of the series on "English Men of Letters." Men of wonderful power there are among our writers-men like William Morris in poetry, or Mathew Arnold in both criticism and poetry; but their work is chiefly esoteric, appealing to a limited class. Widely popular writers we have upon many subjects; but they are either great men of abstract thought, like Spencer and Huxley; or else, alas! mere superficial scribblers like Mr. Mallock, or rhetoricians like Rev. Joseph Cook. The moral leader, the seer, the man to awaken deep interest in human life as human life, no longer belongs to the active soldiers of the army of to-day; and, what is worse, the public mind no longer inquires after such a leader. There must surely be a cause for this state of public sentiment. Neglect of such vital questions must have sprung from some error in their treatment. Let us look in history for that error.

The Storm and Stress Period in Germany began with the simplest and most unaffected desire possible to get back from conventionality and from shallow thought to the purity and richness of natural emotion. There was at first no set philosophy or creed about the universe common to those engaged in the movement. The young poets worshiped genius, and desired to feel intensely and to express emotion worthily. To this end they discarded the traditions as to form which they found embodied in French poetry and in learned text-books. Lessing had furnished them critical authority. He had shown the need of appealing to Nature for instruction, both in the matter and in the manner of poetry. Popular ballads suggested to some of the young school their models. Their own overflowing hearts, their warm, ideal friendships with one another, their passion for freedom, their full personal experiences, gave them material. Together they broke down conventions, and opened a new era in literary life, as the French Revolution, twenty years later, did in national life. Every one knows that Goethe's famous Werther is the result of this time of ferment. Now, if one reads Werther attentively, and with an effort (for it needs an effort) to sympathize with the mood that produced and enjoyed it, one will see in it the characteristic idea that the aim of life is to have as remarkable and exalted emotional experiences as possible, and those of a purely personal character; that is, not the emotion that men feel in common when they engage in great

causes, not the devotion to sublime impersonal objects, not surrender to unworldly ideals, but simply the overwhelming sense of the magnitude and worth of one's own loves and longings, of one's own precious soul-experiences-this, and not the other, is to be sought. Werther cannot resist the fate that drives him to load his heart down with emotion until it breaks. He feels how far asunder from the rest of mankind all this drives him. But he insists upon despising mankind, and upon reveling in the dangerous wealth of his inspiration. Now, surely such a state of mind as this must injure men if they remain long in it. Men need work in life, and so long as they undertake to dig into their own bowels for the wonderful inner experiences that they may find by digging, so long must their lives be bad dreams. The purpose of these young men was the highest, but only those of them who, following this purpose, passed far beyond the simplicity of their youth, did work of lasting merit. The others stayed in a state of passionate formlessness, or died early. The result of remaining long in this region, where nothing was of worth but a violent emotion or an incredible deed, one sees in such a man as Klinger, who lived long enough to reap what he had sown, but did not progress sufficiently to succeed in sowing anything but the wind. I remember once spending an idle hour on one of his later romances, written years after the time of Storm and Stress had passed by, which well expresses the state of mind, the sort of katzenjammer, resulting from a long life of literary dissipation. It is Klinger's Faustus—the same subject as Goethe's masterpiece, but how differently treated! Faustus is a man desperately anxious to act. He wants to reform the world, to be sure, but that only by the way. His main object is to satisfy a vague, restless craving for tremendous excitement. The contract with the devil once made, he plunges into a course of reckless adventure. Where he undertakes to do good he only makes bad worse. Admirable about him is merely the magnitude of his projects, the vigor of his actions, the desperate courage wherewith he defies the universe. Brought to hell at last, he ends his career by cursing all things that are with such fearless and shocking plainness of speech that the devils themselves are horrified. Satan has to invent a new place of torment for him. He is banished, if I remember rightly, into horrible darkness, where he is to pass eternity perfectly alone. Thus terribly the poet expresses the despair in which ends for him, as for all, this self-adoration of the man whose highest object is violent emotional experiences, enjoyed merely because they are his own, not because by having them one

VOL. III.-2.

serves the Ideal. As a mere beginning, then, the Storm and Stress Period expressed a great awakening of the world to new life. But an abiding place in this state of mind there was none. What then followed?

The two masters of German literature who passed through and rose above this period of beginnings, and created the great works of the classical period, were Goethe and Schiller. As poets, we are not now specially concerned with them. As moral teachers, what have they to tell us about the conduct and the worth of life? The answer is, they bear not altogether the same message. There is a striking contrast, well recognized by themselves and by all subsequent critics, between their views of life. Both aim at the highest, but seek in different paths. Goethe's mature ideal seems to be a man of finely appreciative powers, who follows his lifecalling quietly and with such diligence as to gain for himself independence and leisure, who so cultivates his mind that it is open to receive all noble impressions, and who then waits with a sublime resignation, gained through years of self-discipline, for such experiences of what is grand in life and in the universe as the Spirit of Nature sees fit to grant to him. Wilhelm Meister, who works eagerly for success in a direction where success is impossible, and who afterward finds bliss where he least expected to find it, seems to teach this lesson. Faust, at first eagerly demanding indefinite breadth and grandeur of life, and then coming to see what the limitations of human nature are, "that to man nothing perfect is given," and so at last finding the highest good of life in the thought that he and posterity must daily earn anew freedom, never be done with progressing, seems to illustrate the same thought. Do not go beyond or behind Nature, Goethe always teaches. Live submissively the highest that it is given you to live, and neither cease quietly working, nor despair, nor rebel, but be open to every new and worthy experience. For Goethe this was a perfect solution of the problem of life. He needed no fixed system of dogmas to content him. In the divine serenity of one of the most perfect of minds, Goethe put in practice this maxim: Live thy life out to the full, earnestly but sub. missively, demanding what attainment thy nature makes possible, but not pining for morc.

Now, this of course is a selfish maxim. If the highest life is to be unselfish, Goethe cannot have given us the final solution to the problem. His selfishness was not of a low order. It was like the selfishness in the face of the Apollo Belvedere, the simple consciousness of vast personal worth. But it was selfishness for all that. We see how it grew for him out of his

its significance, how it is to be preached to the race, how sought by each one of us—these questions remain still open.

And open they are, the constant theme for eager discussion and for song all through the early part of the nineteenth century. Close upon the classical period followed the German Romantic school. Young men again, full of earnestness and of glorious experience! On they come, confident that they at least are called to be apostles, determined to 1eform life and poetry-the one through the other. Surely they will solve the problem, and tell us how to cultivate this all important higher nature. Fichte, the great idealist, whose words set men's hearts afire, or else, alas! make men laugh at him; young Friedrich Schlegel, versatile, liberal in conduct even beyond the bounds that may not safely be passed, bold in spirit even to insolence; the wonderful Novalis, so profound, and yet so unaffected and child-like, so tender in emotion and yet so daring in speculation; Schelling, full of vast philosophic projects; Tieck, skillful weaver of romantic fancies; Schleiermacher, gifted theologian and yet disciple of Spinoza; surely, these are the men to complete the work that will be left unfinished when Schiller dies and Goethe grows older. So at least they thought and their friends. Never were young men more confident; and yet never did learned and really talented men, to the most of whom was granted long life with vigor, more completely fail to accomplish anything of permanent value in the direction of their early efforts. As mature men, some of them were very influential and useful, but not in the way in which they first sought to be useful. There is to my mind a great and sad fascination in studying the lives and thoughts of this school, in whose fate seems to be exemplified the tragedy of our century. Such aspirations, such talents, and such a failure! Fragments of inspired verse and prose, splendid plans, earnest private letters to friends, prophetic visions, and nothing more of enduring worth. Further and further goes the movement, in its worship of the emotional, away from the actual needs of human life. Dramatic art,'the test of the poet that has a deep insight into the problems of our nature, is tried, with almost complete failure. The greatest dramatic poet of the new era, one that, if he had lived, might have rivaled Schiller, was Heinrich von Kleist, author of the Prinz von Homburg. Driven to despair by unsolved problems and by loneliness, this poet shot himself before his life-work was more than fairly begun. There remain a few dramas, hardly finished, a few powerful tales, and a bundle of fragments to tell us what he

younger school between the years 1805 and 1815. There was a keen sense of the worth of emotional experience, and an inability to come into unity with one's aspirations. Life and poetry, as the critics have it, were at variance.

Now, in all this, these men were not merely fighting shadows. What they sought to do is eternally valuable. They felt, and felt nobly, as all generous-minded, warm-hearted youths and maidens at some time do feel. They were not looking for fame alone; they wanted to be and to produce the highest that mortals may. It is a pity that we have not just now more like them. Yet their efforts failed. What problems Goethe and Schiller, men of genius and of good fortune, had solved for themselves alone, men of lesser genius or of less happy lives could only puzzle over. The poetry of the next following age is largely the poetry of melancholy. The emotional movement spread all over Europe; men everywhere strove to make life richer and worthier; and most men grew sad at their little success. Alfred de Musset, in a well known book, has told in the gloomiest strain the story of the unrest, the despair, the impotency of the youth of the Restoration.

Wordsworth and Shelley represent in very much contrasted ways the efforts of English poets to carry on the work of Transcendentalism, and these men succeeded, in this respect, better than their fellows. Wordsworth is full of a sense of the deep meaning of little things and of the most common life. Healthy men, that work like heroes, that have lungs full of mountain air, and that yet retain the simplicity of shepherd life, or children, whose eyes and words teach purity and depth of feeling, are to him the most direct suggestions of the ideal. Life is, for Wordsworth, everywhere an effort to be at once simple and full of meaning; in harmony with nature, and yet not barbarous. But Wordsworth, if he has very much to teach us, seems to lack the persuasive enthusiasm of the poetic leader of men. At all events, his appeal has reached, so far, only a class. He can be all in all to them, his followers, but he did not reform the world. Shelley, is, perhaps, the one of all English poets in this century to whom was given the purest ideal delight in the higher affections. If you want to be eager to act out the best that is in you, read Shelley. If you want to cultivate a sense for the best in the feelings of all human hearts, read Shelley. He has taught very many to long for a worthy life and for purity of spirit. But alas! Shelley, again, knows not how to teach the way to the acquirement of the end that he so enthusiastically describes. If you can feel with him, he does you you good. If you fail to understand him, he is