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The history of philosophy, from the Renaissance onward, has revealed the fact that philosophy is not an exclusive world. It was in fact the new theory of nature and the new methods of natural science that, in all essential respects, determined the problems and the character of modern philosophy; to these must be added the new humanistic movements. And later on Kant was not only influenced by the opposition between Wolff and Hume, but likewise by the Newtonian natural science and Rousseau's problem of civilization. The development which followed during the first decades after Kant furnishes a new type of thought,—the romantic tendency of thought at the transition to the nineteenth century exercised a profound, in part even a fatal, influence on philosophy. Philosophy here reveals an undue susceptibility to the influences of other departments of thought. Otherwise the philosophy of Romanticism would have been unable to supplant the critical philosophy.

Kant had indeed aroused a profound enthusiasm, and he had a large following in his own age. But this was largely due to the seriousness and the depth of his fundamental principles of ethics. The new age was consciously opposed to the eighteenth century, the period of the Enlightenment, to which Kant, despite his profounder conception, nevertheless belonged. It now became necessary to institute a profound investigation of nature and history directly. Men were anxious to enjoy spiritual life in its unity and totality. Science, poetry and religion were