Excerpt from The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 17: January October, 1883 In the total stream of present German thought there are dis cernible three main currents - the idealistic, the materialistic, and the agnostic, 011 critical, as its adherents prefer to name it. This division, however, is not distinctive of the present period, being merely the continuation of a world-old divergence in doc trine. But it is distinctive of the present situation, that, as already indicated, these several views are now all defended from stand points more or less empirical. In the case of materialism, to be sure, this is natural and in no wise unexpected but the occurrence of it in the case of idealism and of agnosticism, after Kant's day and in his own land, and among thinkers long given to the study of his works, is a genuine surprise. That the very principles of the Critique of Pure Reason, the historic stronghold of the ap717 should suffer the complete transformation of being made to support empiricism, is a performance truly astonishing. Yet it has been managed, and constitutes the distinguishing feat of the so-called neo-kantians. Each of these three main movements has a leading representa tive. There are thus three men who challenge our attention, as in their several ways typical of the dominant intellectual interests of their day - Eduard von Hartmann, Eugen Diihring, and Fried rich Albert Lange. The first stands for such idealism as is now in vogue, derived in a long line of degeneration from Hegel, through such self-styled adherents as Strauss and Arnold Ruge, Bruno Baur and Feuerbach, and from Kant through the distort ing 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 represents agnosticism with the additional and peculiar interest of being the neo-kant1anpa71 excellence. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.