elegant, lucid style which entertains and dazzles by its epigrammatic
phrases, in which not infrequently the epigram rules the thought. The
German expresses his solid, thoughtful positions in a form which is at
once ponderous and not easily understood; each writer constructs his own
terminology, with a liberal admixture of foreign expressions, and the
length of his paragraphs is exceeded only by the thickness of his books.
These national distinctions may be traced even in externals. The Englishman
makes his divisions as they present themselves at first thought, and rather
from a practical than from a logical point of view. The analytic Frenchman
prefers dichotomy, while trichotomy corresponds to the synthetic,
systematic character of German thinking; and Kant's naïve delight, because
in each class the third category unites its two predecessors, has been
often experienced by many of his countrymen at the sight of their own
trichotomies.

The division of labor in the pre-Kantian philosophy among these three
nationalities entirely agrees with the account given of the peculiarities
of their philosophical endowment. The beginning falls to the share of
France; Locke receives that tangled skein, the problem of knowledge,
from the hand of Descartes, and passes it on to Leibnitz; and while the
Illumination in all three countries is converting the gold inherited from
Locke and Leibnitz into small coin, the solution of the riddle rings out
from Königsberg.




PART I.

FROM DESCARTES TO KANT.