ABSTRACT
THE philosophical systems of the 19th century which we have considered were at bottom philosophies of death. Romanticism and heroism lead men to destruction for the sake of goals which cannot be reached, and Hegel and the followers of the natural scientists, who want to escape this destruction, accept external reality so completely that, by subordinating man to it, they too destroy him. The fundamental problem of the Renaissance, whose solution appears more and more clearly as the most important task of the 19th century—the problem of how to focus all attention upon man without either falsifying his true nature or stunting his growth—still remains unsolved.
