,2 HUGO MUNSTERBERG 
Carlyle. But in the meantime Idealism too had exaggerated its claims, 
it had gone forward to Hegel, and while Hegelian thought, about 
1830, held in an iron grasp the deepest knowledge of his time, his 
neglect of positive experience demanded reaction, a counter-movement 
became necessary, and in the midst of the nineteenth century the 
great idealistic movement with all its philosophical and historical 
energies went down, and a new Positivism, full of enthusiasm for 
natural science and technique and full of contempt for philosophy, 
gained the day. With logical consistency, the spirit of empiricism 
went from realm to realm. It began with the inorganic world, 
passed into physics, then forward to chemistry, became more ambi¬ 
tious and conquered the world of organisms, and when biology had 
said its positivistic say, turned from the outer nature of being to the 
inner nature. The mind of man was scrutinized with positivistic 
methods; we came to experimental psychology, and finally, as the 
highest possible aim of naturalism, to the positivistic treatment of 
society as a whole, to sociology. But naturalism again has overdone 
its mission, the world has begun to feel that all the technique and all 
the naturalistic knowledge makes life not more worth living, that 
comfort and bigness do not really mean progress, that naturalism 
cannot give us an ultimate view of the world. And above all, the 
reaction has come from the midst of the sciences themselves. Twenty 
years ago scientific work received its fullest applause for the neglect 
of philosophical demands. Ten years ago the feeling came up that 
there are after all problems which need philosophy, and to-day 
philosophers, with good or bad philosophy, are at work everywhere. 
The physicists, the chemists and the biologists, the astronomers and 
the mathematicians, the psychologists and the sociologists, the his¬ 
torians and the economists, the linguists and the jurists, all aie 
to-day busily engaged in philosophical enquiries, in enquiries into the 
conditions of their knowledge, into the presuppositions and methods 
of their sciences, into their ultimate principles and conceptions; in 
short, without a word of sudden command, the front has changed its 
direction. We are moving again towards philosophy, towards Ideal¬ 
ism, towards Emerson. _ 
Does all this mean that we are to forget the achievements of natural 
science, and ignore the results of empirical labor, of labor which 
has given us an invincible mastery of stubborn nature and an un¬ 
dreamed-of power to calculate all processes of the physical and of 
the psychical world ? No sane man can entertain such a notion. Yes, 
such ideas would contradict the laws which have controlled the