with its fundamental principles, was yet aware of the excesses and
weaknesses in which the rationalist movement was running out. No man was
ever more truly a child of rationalism. No man has ever written, to whom
the human reason was more divine and inviolable. Yet no man ever had
greater reserves within himself which rationalism, as it had been, had
never touched. It was he, therefore, who could lay the foundations for a
new and nobler philosophy for the future. The word _Aufklärung_, which
the speech of the Fatherland furnished him, is a better word than ours.
It is a better word than the French _l'Illuminisme_, the Enlightenment.
Still we are apparently committed to the term Rationalism, although it
is not an altogether fortunate designation which the English-speaking
race has given to a tendency practically universal in the thinking of
Europe, from about 1650 to the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Historically, the rationalistic movement was the necessary preliminary
for the modern period of European civilization as distinguished from the
ecclesiastically and theologically determined culture which had
prevailed up to that time. It marks the great cleft between the ancient
and mediæval world of culture on the one hand and the modern world on
the other. The Reformation had but pushed ajar the door to the modern
world and then seemed in surprise and fear about to close it again. The
thread of the Renaissance was taken up again only in the Enlightenment.
The stream flowed underground which was yet to fertilise the modern
world.

We are here mainly concerned to note the breadth and universality of the
movement. It was a transformation of culture, a change in the principles
underlying civilisation, in all departments of life. It had indeed, as
one of its most general traits, the antagonism to ecclesiastical and
theological authority. Whatever it was doing, it was never without a
sidelong glance at religion. That was because the alleged divine right