Economic conquest has become a necessity for Germany.  Transformed into an industrial State, it no longer produces its own food.  Since 1885 its imports have exceeded its exports by 1,353,000,000 marks.  Whence did Germany derive these 1,300,000,000 marks which were needed, good year and bad, to meet its balance of trade?  It owes them to its maritime commerce and the revenue of its capital invested abroad.  Its maritime commerce then must augment and must triumph over all competition.  At every cost it must open for itself outlets for its industrial products in order to buy foodstuffs which it does not produce sufficiently.  If not, famine.

Let us see now how the complicated play of all these social forces and the effect of this economic situation have been embodied in formulas, what has been its intellectual expression.

This is no idle question, for men have always claimed to be guided by ideas, and generally they are, but they rarely know where their ideas come from or in what they consist.  Without intellectual expression imperialism would not have extended to all the classes of society.  The passion of economic conquest did not prevail throughout the whole of Germany.  The bourgeois in the Liberal provinces, the corps of officers, the corps of teachers, the clergy were refractory to it.  This direct form of imperialism does not seduce them.  Not everybody can see his country and the universe through the eyes of an oligarch of high finance.  A doctrine works with power when it appeals to instincts, when it awakens collective emotions, diverse enough in themselves, and joins them to each other with an appearance of logical deduction.  It is not indispensable, but it is useful that it should borrow the language of the day.  In the mediaeval epoch this language was religious.  Beginning with the seventeenth century it was metaphysical.  In our own time it is a scientific language set off by Greek words.

If the German philosophies of the second half of the nineteenth century are considered, there are not many of them that pass beyond the limit of the school.  They are honest, scholarly productions elaborated by men who have read much, of whom some, like Wundt, are eminent specialists, but who have not conquered either their subjects or their readers.  One feels that they are not of their century.

It is not from them, it is not from Eucken, the pleasant popularizer, it is not from Windelbund or Ostwald that the cultivated public sought the direction for its thought.  To satisfy the need of general ideas which was everywhere felt, associations were formed, churches with or without God, of which a very important one was the “Monistenbund,” in which Haeckel exploited his materialism transformed into a sort of biological pantheism.