Herein he proceeds in an absolutely natural manner, without preconceived purpose or self-consciousness.  He stands before the dilemma of the conceivable and the real, and, as he must advise moderation to control or to unite the two, he must hold himself in check, and must be many-sided, since he wishes to be just.

He had long been attracted by the pure, rational uprightness of noble Englishmen, and by their influence in the moral sphere, by an Addison, by a Steele; but now in their society he finds a man whose type of thought is far more agreeable to him.

Shaftesbury, whom I need only mention to recall a great thinker to the mind of every well-informed man,—­Shaftesbury lived at a time when much disturbance reigned in the religion of his native land, when the dominant church sought by force to subdue men of other modes of thought.  State and morals were also threatened by much that must arouse the anxiety of the intelligent and right-thinking.  The best counter-action to all this, he believed, was cheerfulness; in his opinion, only what was regarded with serenity would be rightly seen.  He who could look serenely into his own bosom must be a good man.  This was the main thing, and from it sprang all other good.  Spirit, wit, and humor were, he held, the real agencies by which such a disposition should come in contact with the world.  All objects, even the most serious, must be capable of such clarity and freedom if they were not bedizened with a merely arrogant dignity, but contained within themselves a true value which did not fear the test.  In this spirited endeavor to become master of things it was impossible to avoid casting about for deciding authorities, and thus human reason was set as judge over the content, and taste over the manner, of presentation.

In such a man our Wieland now found, not a predecessor whom he was to follow, nor a colleague with whom he was to work, but a true elder twin brother in the spirit, whom he perfectly resembled, without being formed in his likeness; even as it could not be said of the Menaechmi which was the original, and which the copy.

What Shaftesbury, born in a higher station, more favored with worldly advantages, and more experienced by travel, office, and cosmopolitan knowledge, did in a wider circle and at a more serious period in sea-girt England, precisely this our friend, proceeding from a point at first extremely limited, accomplished through persistent activity and through ceaseless toil, in his native land, surrounded on every side by hills and dales; and the result was—­to employ, in our condensed address, a brief but generally intelligible term—­that popular philosophy whereby a practically trained intelligence is set in decision over the moral worth of things, and is made the judge of their aesthetic value.

This philosophy, prepared in England and fostered by conditions in Germany, was thus spread far and wide by our friend, in company with countless sympathizers, by poems and by scholarly works, even by life itself.