Political and social conditions contributed to the change. France stood
on the morrow of a shattering catastrophe. The complacency of
mid-Victorian England began to be disturbed by menaces from the
workshops of industry. And it was precisely in triumphant Germany
herself that revolutionary Socialism found, in Karl Marx, its first
organizing mind and authoritative exponent. The millennium was not so
near as it had seemed; the problems of society, instead of having been
solved once for all, were only, it appeared, just coming into view.

In the secluded workshops of Thought, subtler changes were silently
going on. The dazzling triumphs of physical science, which had led
poetry itself to emulate the marble impassivity of the scientific
temper, were undiminished; but they were seen in a new perspective,
their authority ceased to be exclusive, the focus of interest was slowly
shifting from the physical to the psychical world. Lange, writing the
history of _Materialism_ in 1874, virtually performed its obsequies; and
Tyndall's brilliant effort, in 1871, to equip primordial Matter with the
'promise and the potency' of mind, unconsciously confessed that its
cause was lost. Psychology, after Fechner, steadily advanced in prestige
and importance from the outlying circumference of the sciences to their
very centre and core.

But it was not merely particular doctrines that lost ground; the scope
and validity of scientific method itself began to be questioned. In the
most varied fields of thought there set in that 'idealistic reaction
against science' which has been described in one of the most penetrating
books of our time. Most significant of all, science itself, in the
person of Mach, and Pearson, has abandoned the claim to do more than
provide descriptive formulas for phenomena the real nature of which is