something of all three.  The skeptical Kant provides a refuge for the postulates of thought in the sanctuary of faith; the earnest, energetic Fichte, toward the end of his life, takes his place among the mystics; Schelling thinks with the fancy and dreams with the understanding; and under the broad cloak of the Hegelian dialectic method, beside the reflection of the Critique of Reason and of the Science of Knowledge, the fancies of the Philosophy of Nature, the deep inwardness of Boehme, even the whole wealth of empirical fact, found a place.  As synthesis is predominant in his view of things, so a harmonizing, conciliatory tendency asserts itself in his relations to his predecessors:  the results of previous philosophers are neither discarded out of hand nor accepted in the mass, but all that appears in any way useful or akin to the new system is wrought in at its proper place, though often with considerable transformation.  In this work of mediation there is considerable loss in definiteness, the just and comprehensive consideration of the most diverse interests not always making good the loss.  And since such a philosophy, as we have already shown, engages the whole man, its disciple has neither impulse nor strength left for reforming labors; while, on the other hand, he perceives no external call to undertake them, since he views the world through the glasses of his system.  Thus philosophy in Germany, pursued chiefly by specialists, remains a professional affair, and has not exercised a direct transforming influence on life (for Fichte, who helped to philosophize the French out of Germany, was an exception); but its influence has been the greater in the special sciences, which in Germany more than any other land are handled in a philosophic spirit.

The mental characteristics of these nations are reflected also in their methods of presentation.  The style of the English philosopher is sober, comprehensible, diffuse, and slightly wearisome.  The French use a fluent, elegant, lucid style which entertains and dazzles by its epigrammatic phrases, in which not infrequently the epigram rules the thought.  The German expresses his solid, thoughtful positions in a form which is at once ponderous and not easily understood; each writer constructs his own terminology, with a liberal admixture of foreign expressions, and the length of his paragraphs is exceeded only by the thickness of his books.  These national distinctions may be traced even in externals.  The Englishman makes his divisions as they present themselves at first thought, and rather from a practical than from a logical point of view.  The analytic Frenchman prefers dichotomy, while trichotomy corresponds to the synthetic, systematic character of German thinking; and Kant’s naive delight, because in each class the third category unites its two predecessors, has been often experienced by many of his countrymen at the sight of their own trichotomies.