Fourteen chapters, viz. II, XXIV, and the group from VII to XVIII inclusive, are in this edition almost entirely new. Three chapters of the first edition, numbered XIX, XXII, XXIII, have been dropped. For the rest, Chaps. III-VI in the present correspond to Chaps. II-V in the first edition: Chap. XIX to parts of VII, VIII: Chaps. XX-XXIII to Chaps. IX-XII: Chaps. XXV-XXX to Chaps. XIII-XVIII: and Chaps. XXXI, XXXII to Chaps. XX, XXI. But some of those nominally retained have been largely rewritten.
The new chapters present, amongst other things, a synopsis of the progress of thought in Germany during the half-century which is bisected by the year 1800, with some indication of the general conditions of the intellectual world, and with some reference to the interconnexion of speculation and actuality. Jacobi and Herder, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling have been especially brought under succinct review. In the first edition I did Kant less than justice. I have now, so far as my limits allowed, tried to rectify the impression; and even more perhaps, by a clear palinode, to tender my apology for the meagre and somewhat inappreciative notice I gave to the great names of Fichte and Schelling. For like reasons, and from a growing perception how much post-Kantian thought owed to the pre-Kantian thinkers, Spinoza and Leibniz have been partly brought within my range. If, furthermore, I may seem to have transgressed the due amount of allusions and comparisons drawn from Plato and Aristotle, Bacon and Mill, the excuse must be sought in that fixture of philosophical horizon which can hardly but creep on after a quarter of a century spent in teaching philosophy under the customs and ordinances of the Oxford School of Classical Philology.
It would be to mistake the scope of this survey to seek in it a history of the philosophers of the period I have named. They have been presented, not in and for themselves, but as _momenta_ or constituent! factors in producing Hegel's conception of the aim and method of philosophy. To do this it was necessary to lay stress on their inner purport and implications: to treat the individual thinker in subordination to the general movement of ideas: to give, as far as was possible, a constructive conception of them rather than an analysis and chronicle. Yet as the picture had to be done, so to say, with a few vigorous touches, and made characteristic rather than descriptive, it cannot have that fairness and completeness which only patient study of every feature and untiring experiment in reconstruction can enable even the artist to produce. I may have seemed to confine the environment too exclusively to continental thinkers: but this is not, I think, due to any anti-patriotic bias. English (by which term, I may explain to my countrymen, I mean English-writing) thought, if it has its own intrinsic value, has after all been only an occasional influence, of suggestion and modification, in Germany. It is not therefore an integral portion of my theme. Even in Kant's case, too much may be made of the stimulus he received from Hume.