FOURTH BOOK
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN FRANCE
AND GERMANY
The great philosophical systems and English empiricism affected a comparatively small circle of thinkers. But about the middle of the eighteenth century an effort was made to popularize the ideas of these solitary thinkers. This movement, which is generally spoken of as the enlightenment, assumed a more definite form in France and Germany than in England. In France, Locke's fundamental principle, that all ideas proceed from experience, furnished the basis for criticizing the existing order of things both in Church and State. The opinion generally prevailed that man had attained the climax of enlightenment and that he was now in possession of adequate presuppositions for the final solution of all the old problems or to dismiss them definitely as groundless. A new dogmatism arose, which was perhaps necessary in order to destroy the old form of dogmatism. In Germany the popularization of the Leibnitzian philosophy, with its reduction of all mental distinctions to the distinction between obscurity and clearness, was particularly influential, and the inference was drawn that enlightenment, and nothing but enlightenment, is the one thing needful. But there were minds both in France and in Germany whose thoughts were centered on the profounder presuppositions of mental life, of which neither the protagonists of the new nor the exponents of the old had the least suspicion. In this respect Rousseau in France and Lessing in Germany occupied middle ground between the opposing views—and at the same time above them.
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