[Footnote 1:  Helmholtz, Virchow (born 1821), Zoellner (1834-82; On the Nature of Comets, 1872), and Du Bois-Reymond (born 1818), who, in his lectures On the Limits of the Knowledge of Nature, 1872, and The Seven World-riddles, 1880 (both together in 1882, and reprinted in the first series of his Addresses, 1886), looks on the origin of life, the purposive order of nature, and thought as problems soluble in the future, but declares, on the other hand, that the nature of matter (atoms) and force (actio in distant), the origin of motion, the genesis of consciousness (of sensation, together with pleasure and pain) from the knowable conditions of psychical life, and the freedom of the will, are absolute limits to our knowledge of nature.]

%(b) Idealistic Reaction against the Scientific Spirit.%—­In opposition to the preponderance of natural science and the empirico-skeptical tendency of the philosophy of the day conditioned by it, an idealistic counter-movement is making itself increasingly felt as the years go on.  Wilhelm Dilthey[1] abandons metaphysics as a basis, it is true, but (with the assent of Gierke, Preussische Jahrbuecher, vol. liii. 1884) declares against the transfer of the method of natural science to the mental sciences, which require a special foundation.  In spite of his critical rejection of metaphysics, Wilhelm Windelband in Strasburg (born 1848; Preludes, 1884) is, like Dilthey, to be counted among the idealists.  In opposition to the individualism of the positivists, the folk-psychologists—­at their head Steinthal and Lazarus (p. 536); Gustav Glogau[2] in Kiel (born 1844) is an adherent of the same movement—­defend the power of the universal over individual spirits.  The spirit of the people is not a phrase, an empty name, but a real force, not the sum of the individuals belonging to the people, but an encompassing and controlling power, which brings forth in the whole body processes (e.g., language) which could not occur in individuals as such.  It is only as a member of society that anyone becomes truly man; the community is the subject of the higher life of spirit.

[Footnote 1:  Dilthey:  Introduction to the Mental Sciences, part i., 1883; Poetic Creation in the Zeller Aufsaetze, 1887; “Contributions to the Solution of the Question of the Origin of our Belief in the Reality of the External World, and its Validity,” Sitzungsberichte of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, 1890; “Conception and Analysis of Man in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries” in the Archiv fuer Geschichte der Philosophie, vols. iv., v., 1891-92.]

[Footnote 2:  Glogau:  Sketch of the Fundamental Philosophical Sciences (part i., The Form and the Laws of Motion of the Spirit, 1880; part ii., The Nature and the Fundamental Forms of Conscious Spirit, 1888); Outlines of Psychology; 1884.]