ABSTRACT
Of the two great ideas, which we have noticed in the new German spirit, the idea of identity and the idea of individuality, it was in the long run the latter that proved more powerful and fruitful. The systems of identity that desired to blend together mind and nature, reason and reality, in a profound unity and harmony which were either real or capable of being made real, collapsed because the underlying construction showed itself too weak in the face of the unavoidable facts of experience and history. But all these facts (which were raised by the nineteenth-century impulse towards empirical investigation to an unlooked-for height of fullness and significance) confirmed more and more the new discovery that the historical world was an abyss of individuality. The historical empiricism of the nineteenth century was thereby essentially distinguished from all the empirical onsets of earlier centuries, in that it accustomed itself ever more constantly to look upon the facts as an expression of definite spiritual and intellectual entities; and also in that it looked for the intellectual bond that held them together, not merely in the universal causal nexus and a few universal laws of Reason, but in the individually different laws of life and vital tendencies, which were immeasurably rich. Once the gaze was sharpened to detect the presence of such vital tendencies among the most visible appearances of the historical foreground, then it became possible to discern or to surmise, as it were behind the visible star-filled sky, new unknown worlds of stars, all of which were also following their own paths.
