tained and consistently carried out. In his own words, “As a beaten army looks about for some strong position on which it may hope to rally, so now for some time the signal has been heard on all sides, Fall back on Kant! Still, not till recently has this retreat been really in earnest, and now it is found that Kant’s standpoint could never in strict justice be described as left below. To be sure, misconceptions of his meaning and the pressure of the impulse to metaphysical invention did for a while tempt his successors to endeavour the rupture of the strict limits he had drawn to speculation. But the sobering that has followed this metaphysical debauch has compelled a return to the abandoned position; and all the more, that men see themselves again confronted by the materialism which once, on Kant’s appearance, had fled and hardly left a trace.” Lange is deeply sensible of the deficiencies of materialism, but at the same time appreciates the truth of a certain phase in it, as against the pretences of what he takes for idealism. He says: “Materialism lacks for rapports with the highest functions of man’s intelligence. Contenting itself with the mere actual, it is, aside from the question of its theoretic admissibility, sterile for art and science, indifferent or else inclined to egoism in the relations of man to man.”
And yet, on the other hand, “the whole principle of modern philosophy, outside of our German ‘spell’
