as units of bodily systems with most complex processes of locomotion, which are regulated by the universal law of the conservation of energy. But by the side of these processes of locomotion which the physiologist observes, and whose laws he tries to discover, there are going on other processes which are not accessible to the scrutiny of the physiologist. These mental processes are accessible to us directly only in one way, namely, through our own consciousness; but they are inferred by everybody as existing for the whole realm of human and animal life. To the thoughtful observer of nature, however, it is impossible not to go beyond this. The inner affinity and unity of the universe, with its constant interchange of cause and effect and its constant transformation of the organic and the inorganic, is so great that even the physicist finds himself constrained to believe in a psycho-physical principle of all nature. And thus we come to the conclusion: To every uniform physical system, to the simplest, such as cells and molecules, as well as to the largest, such as celestial bodies and cosmic systems, there corresponds some sort and some form of mental life, comparable in a way to the life which we experience in ourselves.

Had Haeckel gone the whole length of his thoughts, he would have arrived at the view which Fechner has developed with full precision and clearness. Are Fechner's thoughts, after having rested for a generation almost inactive in the womb of time, at last about to be called to new life? Are they to accomplish in the new century what they clearly point to? Are they to win back natural science to an idealistic view of the world from which it had been estranged by the failure of a priori speculation ?

In a highly suggestive and truly enlightening book on contemporary German life by William H. Dawson, which has just come to my notice,' there is a particularly well-balanced chapter on Religious Life and Thought." The burden of this chapter is an expression of regret that the materialistic doctrines as preached by the Social Democracy should have taken away from a large part of the working classes all respect for religion, all supernatural faith, all recognition of supreme and objective ethical laws. Although this statement seems to me to leave out of account the ethical and religious forces embodied in the Socialist movement itself, it is certainly true that these constructive forces have not yet produced a system of idealistic opinions, to which the mass of those who have fallen away from the old church creed would be willing to subscribe. It is to such men as Paulsen, Eucken, Kalthoff, and Naumann that we must look for helping on the day of this new secular religion of the masses.

1 German Life in Town and Country. G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1901.

IV. HERMAN GRIMM

An Obituary (June, 1901)

During the last six years I have had the privilege of friendly relations with the man whom in the preceding sketch I designated as one of the few living representatives of that sublimated culture of heart and mind which we associate with the great names of classic German literature. Now that death has come to him, I may perhaps be permitted to say a few words in homage to the spirit so suddenly, if not unexpectedly, departed.

Three years ago, when his seventieth birthday brought forth many public protestations of regard and appreciation, Herman Grimm wrote to me: "I am very much surprised to find that, in the eyes of others, my life has had consistency and inner unity. To myself, it has seemed all along a series of impulses from without; and nearly everything I have done was the result of some chance suggestion of the moment." The two fundamental qualities of Herman Grimm's nature could not be better formulated than in these words of his

own.

What Goethe says of lyric art, that all

genuine poetry is poetry of the moment, may indeed be applied to all of Herman Grimm's writings. Whether he speaks of Michelangelo or Homer, of Goethe or Emerson, of Raphael or Dürer, we always feel that he expresses in the first place his own mood, a momentary phase of his own feeling, a state of his mind. as determined by certain impressions from without. This it is, I take it, that gives to Herman Grimm's biographical and æsthetic estimates their supreme artistic charm. He had no sympathy with that soulless and spiritless method of literary or artistic research, only too common in our universities to-day, according to which it is the sole office of the critic to dissolve a poet's or artist's work into the various elements of which it may be composed, to detect in it traces of the work of some other artist or author, to discuss its relation to its models, and so on. Such a method, if applied exclusively or even prevailingly, seemed to Herman Grimm' a perversion of the true mission of the critic, which is, to interpret the essential meaning of a work of genius. For this essential meaning, he thought, could be grasped only by letting the work as a whole exert its concentrated force upon the critic's

mind, by letting it, as it were, pass through his mind into a new, spiritualized form of existence. This is the way in which he himself approached the works of the masters to the interpretation of which he devoted his life.

As the lyric poet draws inspiration from the moment, and, by reproducing it in his song, gives permanence to it, so Herman Grimm imbued himself with the impressions from great lives and great works of art; and, by giving shape to these impressions, himself produced works of art worthy to stand by the side of the originals from which he had drawn his inspiration. His lectures on Goethe, his biographies of Michelangelo and Raphael, his essays on Homer, Bettina von Arnim, or Böcklin, are, therefore, in a most pregnant sense, part of his own self; they are not so much contributions to knowledge (although they are this also) as creations of the imagination; they should be judged by artistic rather than by scientific standards. They undoubtedly have the faults of the artistic temper; they are not free from willfulness and mannerism; they often reveal more clearly the personality of the writer than the subject-matter of which he writes. But they never fail to bring before