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[240] Creighton. As this review has always been open to scholarly contributions in all the various fields of philosophy, the character of its contributions during its first decade bears ample evidence to the complete dominance of the Kantian and Hegelian idealism. The old Scottish philosophy could not hold its own before the superior finesse and technical equipment of the new school.1 At bottom, too, it realized the necessity of an alliance with the new rationalistic philosophy in the fight for a theistic and spiritual view of the world against scientific positivism and popular materialism. At Harvard Francis Bowen continued for many years to oppose dialectic Hegelianism as well as the ‘mind philosophy’ of the British empiricists; but his assistant and successor, the gentle and classical minded G. H. Palmer, turned in the main to the Hegelian idealism introduced at Harvard in 1869 by C. C. Everett. At Princeton James McCosh, the leader of the Scottish school, poured forth an interminable list of books defending common-sense realism and attacking without excessive refinements all its opponents, including the Hegelians with their ‘thinking in trinities.’ But most of his attention had to be devoted to rendering the new evolutionary philosophy harmless to the cause of orthodoxy. His successor, Ormond, so expanded the realism of his master with Berkeleian and Kantian elements as to make it lose its historic identity. A similar development took place at Yale. Noah Porter had studied in Germany under Trendelenburg, and his great textbook on The human mind (1868) showed a painstaking, if not a penetrating, knowledge of Herbart, Lotze, and Wundt as well as of the British empiricists. But he remained substantially an adherent of a Scottish intuitive philosophy. Like McCosh, but with greater urbanity, he directed his energy mainly against popular agnosticism and materialism. His pupil and successor, George Trumbull Ladd, while professing to be eclectic and independent, follows in the main the method of Lotze,2 and in the
1 This increased technical interest necessarily led philosophy to become less popular and somewhat more narrow in its aims. Hence popular thought came to draw its inspiration either from the vague but sweeping generalizations of Spencer or other popularizers of science, or from mystic culture—theosophy, spiritualism, or ‘new thought’—which except in the writings of Horatio Dresser have nothing to do with the philosophy treated in this chapter.
2 A more direct follower of Lotze was Borden P. Bowne, one of the keenest of American metaphysicians.
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