This book is one of the many that the present war has brought forth, but it is the fruit of a long gestation. During more than twenty years, while I taught philosophy at Harvard College, I had continual occasion to read and discuss German metaphysics. From the beginning it wore in my eyes a rather questionable shape. Under its obscure and fluctuating tenets I felt something sinister at work, something at once hollow and aggressive. It seemed a forced method of speculation, producing more confusi

What I propose in these pages to call German philosophy is not identical with philosophy in Germany. The religion of the Germans is foreign to them; and the philosophy associated with religion before the Reformation, and in Catholic circles since, is a system native to the late Roman Empire. Their irreligion is foreign too; the sceptical and the scientific schools that have been conspicuous in other countries have taken root in Germany as well. Thus, if we counted the Catholics and the old-fashi