riod forbidden
to our scheme, the latter part of the time has not seen any writer who
could vie even with those of the earlier. To a certain extent the
historical and critical tendencies so often noticed have here been
unfortunate, inasmuch as they have diverted philosophical students from
original writing--or at least from writing as original as the somewhat
narrow and self-repeating paths of philosophy admit--to historical and
critical exercises. But there is also no doubt that the immense
authority which the too long neglected writers of Germany attained, a
little before the middle of the century, has been unfortunate in at
least one respect, if not also in others. The ignorant contempt of
technicalities, and the determination to refer all things to common
sense employing common language, which distinguished the eighteenth
century with us, was certain to provoke a reaction; and this reaction,
assisted by imitation of the Germans, produced in the decades from 1840
onwards an ever-increasing tendency among English philosophers or
students of philosophy to employ a jargon often as merely technical as
the language of the schoolmen, and not seldom far emptier of any real
argument. It is not too much to say that if the rough methods of Hobbes
with a terminology far less fallacious, were employed with this jargon,
it would look much poorer than Bramhall's scholasticisms look in the
hands of the redoubtable Nominalist. Fortunately of late there have been
more signs than one of yet another turn of tide, and of a fresh appeal
to the _communis sensus_, not it may be hoped of the obstinately and
deafly exoteric character of the eighteenth century, but such as will
refuse to pay itself with words, and will exercise a judicious criticism
in a language understanded of all educated people. Then, and not till
then, we may expect to meet philosophy that is literature and literature
that is philosophic.

Science, that is to say physical science, which has sometimes openly
boasted itself as about to take, and has much more commonly made silent
preparations for taking, the place both of philosophy and of theology,
will hardly be said by the hardiest of her adherents to have done very
much to justify these claims to seats not yet quite vacant from the
point of view of the purely literary critic. We have had some excellent
scientific writers, from Bishop Watson to Professor Huxley; and some of
the books of the century which would deserve r