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THE NATURAL SCIENCES. 441
Contemporaneously with the political emancipation of the
middle-classes began also the increasing activity of the
daily press, the development of journalism, and the popularization
of art and science. An interest in the efforts
made in these directions penetrated into circles which before
had been entirely uninfluenced by them. All nations of
any moral elevation took part in the development of culture,
but especially the French, the English, and the German.
The German face, wdiich already in the eighteenth century
had produced LESSING, HERDER, GOETHE, SCHILLER,
MOZART, BEETHOVEN, KANT, and other enlightened spirits,
•and in poetry and literature, in music and philosophy had
attained a position which commanded respect, by degrees
.assumed the lead in medicine and the natural sciences.
While at first in the history of these branches of knowledge
the names met with are those of Frenchmen and a few
Englishmen, since the middle of the nineteenth century the
men of learning and the investigators of German origin
have acquired a preponderating influence.
It was otherwise with philosophy, for this unfortunately
•in Germany lost touch completely with practical life under
the baneful influence of scholastic pedantry, and has only
rediscovered the lost path in the most recent times. The
.great thinker of Konigsberg had with critical acuteness
indicated the sources, the extent, and the limits of human
thought; but the philosophers following KANT were able to
add but little to his theory of knowledge, and confined themselves
to a further development of his system in this or that
direction. Inasmuch as they attacked directly the question
of the essential nature and ultimate foundation of things—a
•question KANT himself had declared to be superfluous and
unanswerable, limiting inquiry, as he did, to the world of
phenomena—they displaced once more the problems of
philosophy into the mystico-transcendental realms of speculation.
The subtle hypotheses of a FlCHTE who sought an
answer to the enigma of existence in the conception of an
Ego, thus arriving at an unlimited idealism, of a ScHELLING