Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 60.djvu/521

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URING the first third of the past century the intelligence of the world honored philosophy as the Queen of Science. In Germany, the capital of higher learning, students crowded into the lecture-rooms of the philosophers and accepted their teachings as gospel truths. Everywhere the deepest interest was manifested in the solution of the great problems of life. A powerful longing seized mankind to unravel the world's profoundest mysteries, and this longing, too impetuous to linger over an examination of the facts, satisfied itself in the study and production of metaphysical systems. A suggestive example of the immense influence wielded by the royal science during this epoch is furnished by the experience of Friederich Vischer, who declares that the entire time and energy of his youth were devoted to the interpretation of the world-riddle. "Indeed, it seemed to me in those days," he adds, "that a man had not attained his majority, and ought not, therefore, to be allowed to marry until he had at least dispersed the darkness surrounding the problem of free will and determinism."

It was the golden age of philosophy, an age, however, which bore within itself the seeds of its own decay. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, the members of the learned dynasty, defined metaphysics or philosophy as the ideal reconstruction of the universe from certain indisputable principles, the discovery of these principles being, for the most part, dependent on the possession of a special mental genius. Like Spinoza before them, they deduced from premises which they regarded as absolute, conclusions which seemed to them to be necessary. Closing their eyes to the facts, these thinkers trusted in their ability to account for those facts, by showing what would be the unavoidable logical consequences of certain axiomatic first principles. Experience they considered as valueless in this connection; the most that it could do was to verify the deductions of philosophy. Schelling denies to it even this worth; the ideal construction or hypothesis of the thinker needs no such verification; it is self-sufficient, a law unto itself. If the facts do