Professor Zdziechowski, a Polish patriot who does not think himself bound to hate Russians who are friendly to Poland, and has strong sympathies for other Slav races, was last year, for this reason, prevented from lecturing in Lemberg and Cracow by excited students who, most unjustly, held him for a Panslavist and a 'Moskalophil.'

Few of the other parties need lengthy notice, being mostly counterparts of those which bear the same name in other lands. There are the Catholics, for whom religion comes even before patriotism, and is not only a means of preserving the unity of the nation; the Progressists or Liberals, who feel hatred rather for the upper classes of their own nation than for others; and the Socialists, who fraternise with the Progressists, talk of a Polish Republic in which socialistic principles are to be realised, and boast to their adherents, mostly workmen, that they are the only true patriots. But there is one party that we must review at greater length, not so much on account of its influence as for the marked contrast in which it stands to the others, and to our practical, if not materialistic, age.

The party of the Philaretes was founded and is led by the gifted though eccentric Dr Lutoslawski, known in the philosophical world by his numerous works, written in many languages, including English, as a Platonist of a special type. The essential character of Polish society is, according to him, free union and harmonious co-operation through mutual love. With hatred he would have nothing to do; he would conquer both Germans and Russians by winning their love towards the Poles, their superiors in virtue. His Philaretes form, though not in the usual sense, a secret society, a sort of Polish religion within the Catholic pale. Men and women, calling themselves 'Brothers and Sisters,' after a public confession of all their lives, must swear to give up gambling, drinking, smoking, and all immorality. It is only thus, he says, that Poland can be regenerated; but the virtues which he teaches will make her so great that her foes of the present hour will fall at her feet; without striking a blow she will regain the independence due to a people of saints. Much in his teaching smacks of the Messianic doctrine of Towianski, who exerted so great an influence

over Mickiewicz in his later years. Lutoslawski's adherents are mostly young students of an extraordinary turn of mind, as may well be supposed. As to their number, it cannot be computed, on account of the reticence observed; but there are certainly many more than those who openly profess that they belong to the party. Many branches of it are supposed to exist both in Russian and in Prussian Poland. He affirms-the present writer has heard him— that he gets his thoughts and inspirations directly from God. His followers, as a consequence, believe in him blindly; as a consequence, too, other persons think him a heretic or a madman. But he, too, strange as are the means which he advocates, has for his aim and end the independence of Poland. On that point all parties are agreed.

With this exception, and another, of great momentnamely, that no one at present looks forward to a speedy return of lost freedom-these parties are at daggers drawn, and treat each other with much violence of language. But one great cause of their mutual exasperation is the difficulty, the seeming impossibility of getting a satisfactory answer to many problems which, in one way or another, have to be solved if the present state of things is to come to an end. For example, the struggle against Germany and Russia combined appears hopeless on the face of it. On the other hand, any inclination of the whole Polish people towards one or the other of those two powers, slight though it might be, would create reciprocal feelings of friendship which might go far to alleviate present sufferings, and in the end perhaps bring about unity as a prelude to freedom. Yet such a course, however advantageous it may seem, is absolutely excluded. The sense of wrong suffered by the people is so deep that any attempt or fancied attempt towards such a rapprochement is resented at once; they cannot bear the idea of it. We have already noticed the fate of the Agreement party (Ugodisci), both in Prussia and in Russia. But still less reasonable occurrences are frequent. At the time of the Wreschen trials most of the Russian newspapers condemned Prussian policy in strong terms. By way of acknowledgment, the National Democrats of Warsaw published a manifesto rejecting their sympathy with the utmost scorn. In Prussia, Rakowski ventured

to assert that the future of Poland now lay beyond the eastern frontier; his utterance was instantly silenced by a storm of abuse. A Moscow society had sent some rubles to Jaworski, leader of the Polish party in the Vienna Parliament, desiring him to forward them to the victims of Wreschen; almost on all sides he was assailed for not returning the money. And this hatred of Russia (and certainly of Germany no less) deepens as the national spirit grows stronger. There is no dream of making even a temporary alliance with either against the other; men may be diplomatic; nations cannot. Therefore,

judging from the past, men of foresight already begin to predict a cataclysm worse in its results to Poland than any of those which preceded it. This, however, the Conservative party, and all those who have anything to lose, will certainly avert if possible. Only those who have nothing are prepared to risk it.

The Polish question, then, even to men who know all that can be known, seems to be an insoluble problem. For the nation, aware of its great past, and of its present not quite bereft of a certain greatness, refuses either to die or to be assimilated, and will not in 1903, any more than in 1772, give up its claim to what is just-to full and entire liberty. But those who enthralled her, on the other hand, dare neither destroy her nor set her free; and day by day they see assimilation farther off than in the days of Kosciuszko. Only two final solutions can be found to this problem-impossible solutions both. One is to be found in the words of Zamoyski, who, when the Governor of Warsaw, shortly before the rising of 1863, asked him what was to be done, curtly replied, 'Allez-vous-en.' The other would be to dig twenty millions of graves, shoot twenty millions of Poles, bury them, and have done with it. As matters stand, the question is still unsolved; and a population almost half as large as that of the United Kingdom lives and must live on in perpetual unrest and fermentation, not less disquieting than disquieted, ever growing in down-trodden strength. And all this is but the result of that first great act of injustice which was committed towards the close of the eighteenth century.

Art. V.--THE INFLUENCE OF KANT ON MODERN

THOUGHT.

1. Kants Gesammelte Schriften. Herausgegeben von der Königlich-Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin Reuther und Reichard, 1902.

2. Kant-Studien: Philosophische Zeitschrift. Bände I-XI. Herausgegeben von Dr Hans Vaihinger. Berlin: Reuther und Reichard, 1896-1904.

IN the history of human thought it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to say exactly when any new idea or tendency begins to operate. But if any modern writer has a claim to the German epithet 'epoch-making,' it is the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, the centenary of whose death fell on February 12, 1904. He it was who gave to the great questions of philosophy the form which they still retain; and he also indicated the principal lines of investigation in which the answers to these questions are still sought. On the other hand, if we go back beyond Kant, we find that the whole intellectual atmosphere has changed. The philosophical problem is stated in a different way; the solutions attempted are of another character. The philosophical situation of that time is well described by Kant himself. Two forms of dogmatism, an abstract materialism and an abstract spiritualism, contended with each other, and both were undermined by an equally abstract scepticism, which, if carried out consistently, would have been fatal to science as well as to metaphysics. The narrowness of these theories was mainly due to the individualistic presuppositions which were common to them all. The unreality of the Universal, except as the sum of the particulars, or at best as a common quality in them, was the tacit assumption of all philosophical writers. The thought of any unity in society which was more than an agreement between its members, or of any unity in the universe which was more than the action and reaction of its parts, was generally repudiated as mysticism or enthusiasm. Even Leibniz, who sought to find the universal in the individual, the principle of the whole in all the monads which were its parts, was driven to express this idea in the unsatisfactory form of a pre-established harmony; in other words, to treat the difference of individual things as real, and their

unity as only ideal; for each of the monads was conceived by him as representing all the others, from which, nevertheless, it was in existence entirely separated.

The result of this way of thinking was seen in the next generation. From the individualistic principles of Locke, Berkeley drew the conclusion that we know nothing directly except the states of our own consciousness; and Hume, following out the same logic, maintained that beyond these passing states we know nothing either of the self, the world, or God, though the action of association may give rise to beliefs which have the appearance of such knowledge. Thus mind was dissolved into the atomism of sensations, without any rational principle to organise them into the consciousness of an intelligible world. And if, in Germany, this conclusion was evaded by Wolff, who still maintained the spiritualism of Leibniz while emptying it of most of its speculative elements, yet the result was a worse than scholastic dogmatism, a philosophy of foregone conclusions, which proved nothing and explained nothing. For Wolff based the possibility of knowledge of the soul, the world, and God upon certain a priori principles which were independent of all experience, and could therefore neither be confirmed nor refuted by it. Indeed the very fact that the a priori or universal element of thought was absolutely separated from the particulars of sense tended to deprive both of all significance; for, as Kant was soon to declare, 'perceptions without conceptions are blind, and conceptions without perceptions are empty.' In other words, unconnected particulars have no meaning, and universals which are not principles of connexion have no content. Thus, on the one side, we have the dust and powder of individuality' and, on the other side, abstractions which have no relation to reality.

Now the epoch-making' significance of Kant's work lay in this, that, though his mind was deeply affected by dualism, and could never entirely escape from it, he yet revolted against it and endeavoured to bring the two terms together in a fruitful union. His philosophy, therefore, had a twofold direction, negative and positive. He had to show the futility of the dogmatism of Wolff, and yet to defend against Hume the validity of the universal principles that underlie all our knowledge or belief. And