But between the German and English philosophy there was a great difference. The English philosophised at a time of great practical advance, of great practical struggles.
The practical captured their entire intellectual force; even their philosophy was entirely ruled by practical considerations. Their philosophers were greater in their achievements in economics, politics, and natural science, than in philosophy.
The German thinkers found no practicality which could prevent them from concentrating their entire mental power on the deepest and most abstract problems of science. They were therefore in this respect without their like outside of Germany. This was not owing to any race quality of the Germans but to the circumstances of the time. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the deepest philosophic thinkers were to be found in Italy, France, Holland, England, and not in Germany. The quiet that came over German political life in the century following the Thirty Years' War first gave Germany the lead in philosophy, just as Marx's "Capital" had its origin in the period of reaction following on 1848.
Kant, despite his sympathy for the English, could not find satisfaction in their philosophy. He was just as critical towards it as towards Materialism.
The weakest point in both cases was bound to strike him—the Ethics. It seemed to him quite impossible to bring the moral law into a necessary connection with nature, that is, with the world of phenomena. Its explanation required another world, a timeless and spaceless world of pure spirit, a world of freedom in contrast to the world of appearances (phenomena), which is ruled by the necessary chain of cause and effect. On the other hand, his Christian feelings, the outcome of a pious education, were bound to awaken the need for the recognition of a world in which God and immortality were possible.[1]
- ↑ As a curiosity it may be mentioned here that it is possible to confront Bernstein's witty remark "Kant against Cant" with the fact that Kant himself was Cant. "His ancestors came from
