For a thousand years after the schools of Athens were closed by Justinian philosophy made no real advance; no essentially new ideas about the constitution of nature, the workings of mind, or the ends of life were put forward. It would be false to say that during this period no progress was made. The civilisation of the Roman Empire was extended far beyond its ancient frontiers; and, although much ground was lost in Asia and Africa, more than the equivalent was gained in Northern Europe. Within E

Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz. René Descartes (1596-1650) was a Frenchman, born in Touraine, and belonging by family to the inferior nobility. Educated at the Jesuit college of La Flèche, he early acquired a distaste for the scholastic philosophy, or at least for its details; the theology of scholasticism, as we shall see, left a deep impression on him through life. On leaving college he took up mathematics, varied by a short plunge into the dissipations of Paris. Some years of milita

Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant. Epistemology, or theory of knowledge, did not begin in modern times. Among the Greeks it goes back, at least, to Empedocles, and figures largely in the programmes of the later schools. And Descartes's universal doubt seems to give the question, How can we be sure of anything? a foremost place in speculation. But the singular assurance with which the Cartesian metaphysicians presented their adventurous hypotheses as demonstrated certainties showed that with them the t

Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Herbart. The Critical Philosophy won its first success in Germany less as a new epistemology than as what, in fact, its author meant it to be, a rehabilitation of religious belief. The limits of Reason had been drawn so closely only to make room for Faith. But the current of Rationalism was running too strongly to be so summarily stopped; and so with Kant's ablest successors faith is altogether abandoned, while the claims of reason are pushed relentlessly

The philosophical movement of the nineteenth century, after the collapse of German idealism, has not been dominated by any single master or any single direction to anything like the same extent as its predecessors. But if we are called on to select the dominant note by which all its products have been more or less coloured and characterised, none more impressive than the note of Humanism can be named. As applied to the culture of the Renaissance, humanism meant a tendency to concentrate interest

Kuno Fischer. Geschichte der neuern Philosophie. Nine vols. Fourth ed.; Heidelberg, 1897-1904. (Comes down to Schopenhauer.) Erdmann. Geschichte der Philosophie. Vol. ii. Fourth ed.; Berlin, 1896. (Comes down to Lotze; third ed.; trans. by W. S. Hough; London, 1889.) Windelband. Geschichte der neuern Philosophie. Two vols. Fifth ed. (Comes down to Herbart and Beneke. There is an English trans. of Windelband's General History of Philosophy , by J. H. Tufts, New York, 1893. In his contribution to