is therefore the motto of free thought.  If it be asked, “Do we live in a free-thinking age?” the answer is, “No, but we live in an age of free thought.”  As things are at present, men in general are very far from possessing, or even from being able to acquire, the power of making a sure and right use of their own understanding without the guidance of others.  On the other hand, we have clear indications that the field now lies, nevertheless, open before them, to which they can freely make their way and that the hindrances to general freedom of thought are gradually becoming less.  And again he says:  ’If we wish to insure the true use of the understanding by a method which is universally valid, we must first critically examine the laws which are involved in the very nature of the understanding itself.  For the knowledge of a truth which is valid for everyone is possible only when based on laws which are involved in the nature of the human mind, as such, and have not been imported into it from without through facts of experience, which must always be accidental and conditional.’

There speaks, of course, the prophet of the new age which was to transcend the old rationalist movement.  Men had come to harp in complacency upon reason.  They had never inquired into the nature and laws of action of the reason itself.  Kant, though in fullest sympathy 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 Aufklaerung, 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 mediaeval 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.