The Danish philosophy of the nineteenth century has been described by Hoeffding in the second volume of the Archiv fuer Geschichte der Philosophie, 1888.  He begins with the representatives of the speculative movement:  Steffens (see above), Niels Treschow (1751-1833), Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851; Spirit in Nature, German translation, Munich, 1850-51), and Frederik Christian Sibbern (1785-1872).  A change was brought about by the philosophers of religion Soeren Kierkegaard (1813-55) and Rasmus Nielsen (1809-84; Philosophy of Religion, 1869), who opposed speculative idealism with a strict dualism of knowledge and faith, and were in turn opposed by Georg Brandes (born 1842) and Hans Broechner (1820-75).  Among younger investigators the Copenhagen professors, Harald Hoeffding[1] (born 1843) and Kristian Kroman[2] (born 1846) stand in the first rank.

[Footnote 1:  Hoeffding:  The Foundations of Human Ethics, 1876, German translation, 1880; Outlines of Psychology, 1882, English translation by Lowndes, 1891, from the German translation, 1887; Ethics, 1887, German translation by Bendixen, 1888.]

[Footnote 2:  Kroman:  Our Knowledge of Nature, German translation, 1883; A Brief Logic and Psychology, German translation by Bendixen, 1890.]

Land (Mind, vol. iii. 1878) and G. von Antal (1888) have written on philosophy in Holland.  Down to the middle of the nineteenth century the field was occupied by an idealism based upon the ancients, in particular upon Plato:  Franz Hemsterhuis (1721-90; Works, new ed., 1846-50), and the philologists Wyttenbach and Van Heusde.  Then Cornelius Wilhelm Opzoomer[3] (1821-92; professor in Utrecht) brought in a new movement.  Opzoomer favors empiricism.  He starts from Mill and Comte, but goes beyond them in important points, and assigns faith a field of its own beside knowledge.  In opposition to apriorism he seeks to show that experience is capable of yielding universal and necessary truths; that space, time, and causality are received along with the content of thought; that mathematics itself is based upon experience; and that the method of natural science, especially deduction, must be applied to the mental sciences.  The philosophy of mind considers man as an individual being, in his connection with others, in relation to a higher being, and in his development; accordingly it divides into psychology (which includes logic, aesthetics, and ethology), sociology, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of history.  Central to Opzoomer’s system is his doctrine of the five sources of knowledge:  Sensation, the feeling of pleasure and pain, aesthetic, moral, and religious feeling.  If we build on the foundation of the first three alone, we end in materialism; if we leave the last unused, we reach positivism; if we make religious feeling the sole judge of truth, mysticism is the outcome.  The criteria of science are utility and