cal life, he is honest enough to draw the conclusions
which follow from his premises and to give them expression, but he avoids
the collision by a simple compromise, shutting up the refinements of
philosophy in the study and yielding in practice to the guidance of
natural instinct and conscience. His support, therefore, of theories which
contradict current views in morals is free from the levity in which the
Frenchman indulges. Life and thought are separate fields, contradictions
between them are borne in patience, and if science draws its material from
life it shows itself grateful for the favor by giving life the benefit of
the useful outcome of its labors, and, at the same time, shielding it from
the revolutionary or disintegrating effect of its doubtful paradoxes.

While the deliberate craft of English philosophy does not willingly lose
sight of the shores of the concrete world, French thought sails boldly and
confidently out into the open sea of abstraction. It is not strange that
it finds the way to the principles more rapidly than the way back to
phenomena. A free road, a fresh start, a straight course--such is the
motto of French thinking. Whatever is inconsistent with rectilinearity is
ignored, or opposed as unfitting. The line drawn by Descartes through the
world between matter and spirit, and that by Rousseau between nature
and culture, are distinctive of the philosophical character of their
countrymen. Dualism is to them entirely congenial; it satisfies their
need for clearness, and with this they are content. Antithesis is in the
Frenchman's blood; he thinks in it and speaks in it, in the salon or on the
platform, in witty jest or in scientific earnestness of thought. Either A
or not-A, and there is no middle ground. This habit of precision and
sharp analysis facilitates the formation of closed parties, whereas each
individual German, in philosophy as in politics, forms a party of his own.
The demand for the removal of the rubbish of existing systems and the
sanguine return to the sources, give French philosophy an unhistorical,
radical, and revolutionary character. Minds of the second order, who are
incapable of taking by themselves the step from that which is given to the
sources, prove their radicalism by following down to the roots that which
others have begun (so Condillac and the sensationalism of Locke). Moreover,
philosophical principles are to be translated into action; the thinker has
shown himself