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In the present lecture we have to follow the further story of German idealism as exemplified in the views and experiences of a number of persons who, for lack of a better name, are usually classed together as constituting the German Romantic School. The peculiar character of our undertaking in this course bids us attend as much as possible to the relations between philosophy and life. Where, as in the case of the German romantic school, a group of writers tried to embody a philosophy in a literary movement, and to translate their own lives directly into philosophy, such a phenomenon cannot but be of great service to our purpose. And therefore I shall spend time upon matter that will indeed lack the technicality inseparable from even the most general account of Kant’s philosophy, but that will still have its bearing on our general task. In fact, my discussion will for the time leave the field of technical philosophy almost altogether, and for the rest of this lecture I shall speak of thoughts that will have their more metaphysical bearings shown only in later lectures.

I mentioned in the last lecture how Fichte’s philosophy is an example of that beautiful waywardness which is everywhere characteristic of the Germany of the classical and romantic periods. For the rest, to particularize concerning this waywardness as it shows itself in Fichte, he is, after all, a very arbitrary thinker. His system has vast gaps in it. You in vain seek to get from Fichte, for instance, any precise deduction of how the world of our senses, down to its very details, is an embodiment of the moral law. We, in this age, whose world is so full of material facts, whose science has delved so deeply into physical nature, whose industrial art is so multiform in its inventions, whose whole view of man makes him so dependent for his health, his fortune, and his very reason,