of these vast Teutonic treatises that takes the heart out of the English student.  Some witty person has said that German science consists in demonstrating over again with enormously elaborate apparatus what an Englishman has already made plain enough to any sensible person with the aid of a gingerbeer bottle and an old sardine tin.  But I suspect there is another side to the question.  The German has probably worked out his figures to the twentieth decimal where the Englishman was content with the second, and it may always turn out that the twentieth decimal has its value.  Be that as it may, the co-operation of both types of mind is necessary, and patient endeavour in the elaboration of detail is the peculiar function which the German academic tradition has developed in the service of the general cause of the advancement of learning.

In more speculative thought the equipoise of international co-operation reveals itself in the changes which national thought has undergone under foreign influence.  In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries English and Scottish metaphysics developed in the main on lines of their own.  It was the heyday of the so-called English school of experience.  This school was influential in France, and in Germany acted as the ferment which dissolved the older academic tradition and stimulated the growth of the new idealism.  German idealism first became an influence in England through the medium of Coleridge and later of Carlyle.  But it had little effect on the national philosophy except in shaking the younger Mill out of the narrow rut in which he had been educated and contributing to his thought that stream of influence which throughout life he tried in vain to merge harmoniously with the paternal teaching.  But in the last third of the nineteenth century new channels of influence were opened.  The authority of Green at Oxford and of Caird in the Scottish universities brought the tide of Hegelian influence, on the ebb in Germany, in full flood over the intellectual world of Great Britain and America.  English empiricism was rapidly swept out of existence.  Mill and Spencer, the dominating figures of the sixties and seventies were reduced to the position of dummies used for target practice by beginners.  Being intelligible they could be read by the first-year student, and the exposition of their fallacies provided an easy task for the lecturer’s wit.  There was none so poor to do them reverence, or if any did he was relegated to a fourth class in the Final Schools.  It would be a very interesting study in our object to analyse the Anglo-Scottish idealism in close relation to the German original, and measure the changes which a philosophy undergoes in the process of assimilation by a people of very different intellectual tradition.  Lack of sympathy with German and particularly with Hegelian idealism disqualifies me from the task, but this much in spite of this lack I can see.  The German philosophers had a hold on those large and general ideas which