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Each of these three main currents has had a leading representative. There are thus three men who command our attention, as in their several ways typical of the dominant intellectual interests of their time, — Eduard von Hartmann, Eugen Dühring, and Friedrich Albert Lange. The first stands for such idealism as is now in vogue, derived in a long line of degeneration from Hegel, through such “left-wing” adherents as Strauss and Arnold Ruge, Bruno Bauer and Feuerbach, and from Kant through the distorting medium of Schopenhauer. The second represents materialism, with the singular trait of blending with the legitimate line of its empirical defences certain remarkable elements of a transcendental logic. The third illustrates agnosticism, with the additional and peculiar interest of being the Neo-Kantian par excellence.

Hartmann was born in Berlin, in 1842, the son of a general in the Prussian army, in which he held a commission himself till disease that left him a permanent cripple turned him aside into the career of letters. Dühring, also born in Berlin, in 1833, began his career in the Prussian department of justice, but