from the innate ideas of Descartes to the potential a priori of Leibnitz!  From the moment when the negative and positive culminations of the pre-Kantian movement in thought—­Hume and Leibnitz—­came together in one mind, the conditions of the Kantian reform were given, just as the preparation for the Socratic reform had been given in the skepticism of the Sophists and the [Greek:  nous] principle of Anaxagoras.

[Footnote 1:  Even for Leibnitz the mind is a machine (automaton spirituale), and psychical action a movement of ideas.]

Kant, who dominates the second period of modern philosophy down to the present time, is related to his predecessors in a twofold way.  In his criticism he completes the noetical tendency, and at the same time overcomes naturalism, by limiting the mechanical explanation (and with it certain knowledge, it is true) to phenomena and opposing moralism to intellectualism.  Nature must be conceived from the standpoint of the spirit (as its product, for all conformity to law takes its origin in the spirit), the spirit from the standpoint of the will.  Metaphysics, as the theory of the a priori conditions of experience, is raised to the rank of a science, while the suprasensible is removed from the region of proof and refutation and based upon the rock of moral will.  In the positive side of the Kantian philosophy—­the spirit the law-giver of nature, the will the essence of spirit and the key to true reality—­we find its kernel, that in it which is forever valid.  The conclusions on the absolute worth of the moral disposition, on the ultimate moral aim of the world, on the intelligible character, and on radical evil, reveal the energy with which Kant took up the mission of furnishing the life-forces opened up by Christianity—­which the Middle Ages had hidden rather than conserved under the crust of Aristotelian conceptions entirely alien to them, and the pre-Kantian period of modern times had almost wholly ignored—­an entrance into philosophy, and of transforming and enriching the modern view of the world from this standpoint.  Kant’s position is as opposite and superior to the specifically modern, to the naturalistic temper of the new period, as Plato stands out, a stranger and a prophet of the future, above the level of Greek modes of thought.  More fortunate, however, than Plato, he found disciples who followed further in the direction pointed out by that face of the Janus-head of his philosophy which looked toward the future:  the ethelism of Fichte and the historicism of Hegel have their roots in Kant’s doctrine of the practical reason.  These are acquisitions which must never be given up, which must ever be reconquered in face of attack from forces hostile to spirit and to morals.  In life, as in science, we must ever anew “win” ethical idealism “in order to possess it.”  As yet the reconciliation of the historical and the scientific, the Christian and the modern spirit is not effected.  For the