ABSTRACT
There was a spell that lay over certain significant ideas, pregnant with meaning for the future, which were already thought of in the seventeenth century. They were not yet able to hatch out properly in the severe climate of that century, they could not yet develop their full productive qualities. It was only Goethe that brought Spinoza completely to life, and German Idealism did the same for Leibniz. The intellectual movement must already have been restricted by the stiff garment of the Latin scholar-tongue; for there is a very close connection between the liveliness of modern cultural and national languages, and the liveliness of modern thought. But the spiritual life of the seventeenth century in general was also stiff, even in comparison with that of the late eighteenth century, softened as this was by idealism and the Enlightenment. At the same time however it was capable of displaying in several of its greatest thinkers that powerful constructive intellectual strength which bears analogy in the political field with the State-forming energy of a Richelieu, a Cromwell or a Great Elector.
