Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/489

 PHILOSOPHICAL TERMINOLOGY. 475 on the eighteenth a rapid and determined appropriation and elaboration of rationalistic principles. That was a result of the system of competition and of the small courts. Character- istic of it was the reception of Wolff at Marburg ; while such figures as that of Chr. Thomasitcs and Nicol. Hier- onymus Gundling are only conceivable in the small state system of Germany at that time. In France it was the Revolution which first established a free university philo- sophy, the school of Condillac. 70. But from Germany had issued that many volumed system of the new world wisdom, dignified in the language of the learned, which combined to a certain point the antithesis of scholastic strictness of form and free rational content, the work of Chr. Wolff, who was later privy councillor of the Prussian king. For the first time this whole content was systematically subjected to a formed terminology, combined from new and old material, which could not but help powerfully to break down professional antagonism so far as it consisted in handing down the old content in the traditional dish. Without the predominance of the Wolffian philosophy at the universities we could understand neither the deep impression of the " illumination " upon the German bourgeois consciousness, nor the impetus partly due to it of poetic literature, nor again the transforming influence which the greatest thinker who issued from this state of things, Immanuel Kant, was able to attain as professor of philosophy. Kant, who recoined the terminology for his ends with the greatest freedom, still remained to a large extent dependent upon what he had received from the books of the Wolffians, as we may see from his habit of adding the Latin render- ing in a parenthesis to the German term. But the common language of the republic of learning sank deeper than before into the background, in the nineteenth century which he intro- duced. The consequent disadvantages affect especially the smaller nations, and thereby indirectly the whole community, in that they hinder the development of capable minds in these smaller nations, and make it more difficult for their works to become known than it is for works in a more widely spread language, which expands a more general capacity of mutual understanding, and where the aid of translations can be more easily called in. On the other hand, smaller nations have indeed the advantage of being more or less indifferent to the writings of this larger language, of being able to suck the honey out of the blossoms, instead of being forced to make their way through the enormous production of worth- less matter in each particular larger language, as the scholars