____ The German nation has often been called a people of "thinkers.» That had perhaps in the past sometimes a slighting impli cation, as if the Germans lived in a world of dreams and were unfit for success in the prac tical world of reality; only the last decades have removed completely such a tacit meaning, since the German Empire has proved itself not less strong in its achievements in commerce and industry and politics than in the fields of science and scholarship. Yet, on the whole, it was at all times a sincere acknowledgment of that German contribution to the progress of human civilization which has been most original and most lasting. German earnestness and thor oughness, German love of truth and of free dom, have blended, at least twice since the days of Leibnitz, into a productiveness of knowledge which is not paralleled in the world.
1. The most valuable contribution of the earliest times was the historiography done in the German cloisters. Their "annals» were faithful work and Einhardt's 'Life of Char lemagne> (written 820) is a noble piece of history writing. But the scholarly thought was still essentially imitative. When in the 9th century the Benedictine Rhabanus Maurits in the cloisters of Fulda wrote his enc-yclo pmdia Universo,> in 20 books setting forth the status of German knowledge in the time of Charlemagne, it was on the whole a repeti tion of that which Isidor of Sevilla had brought together in the 7th century. All thought about nature was controlled by the ancients. And when in the I lth century a new European movement of thought was growing, the great scholastic effort to harmonize belief and reason, France, Italy and England gave the signal. Yet Germans, as, for instance, Hugo, Count of Blankenburg, took an important part, and Al bert von Ballstadt, called Albertus Magnus (1193-1280), was one of the deepest and most brilliant scholastic thinkers, whose knowledge of natural science, too, was far superior to his age. Theologians and philosophers of repute, like Thomas von Strassburg, followed in the 14th century and certainly no thinker of the 15th century equalled the Cardinal Nicolaus von Cusa (1401-61), who combined scholasti cism and Platonism, mathematics and theology. In the meantime Germany had founded its famous seats of higher learning, the universities, which have been always at the same time schools for the professional training of clergy men, teachers, doctors and lawyers and centres of productive scholarship. (See GERMANY, UNIVERSITY SYSTEM IN). Through the 13th century the University of Paris was the point of crystallization for scholasticism; in 1348 the first German university was founded in Prague, soon after that the University of Vienna and Western Germany followed immediately with Heidelberg (1385) and Cologne (1388). The political disturbances in Boehmen brought about a secession in Prague, and its immigrating scholars founded the University of Leipzig (1409). These new centres of scholarly influ ence increased the independence of German scholasticism of the dogmas of Paris, and in the declining period of medixval thought the German systems of nominalistic philosophy played an important role.
The opposition to the hairsplitting rational ism of scholastic thought came from two move ments which better expressed the German in stincts: mysticism (q.v.) and humanism (q.v.). Mystical speculation became influential from the beginning of the 14th century; in an immediate personal unity with God there was sought a deeper knowledge than that of Church and university. Meister Ecichart's pantheistic mys ticism, a Christian neo-platonism, stands with such daring independence against the doctrines of the hierarchy that it must be acknowledged as the first original German philosophy, in spite of its unsystematic character. The mys tical schools develop themselves, especially in western Germany, through the 15th and 16th centuries and emphasize now the theo logical interests or even the practical religion (Thomas is Kempis, (Imitation of Christ)), now the naturalistic interests. The mystical study of nature was most strongly influenced by the physician Paracelsus (1493-1541). His aim was a fundamental reform of medicine, which had still the stamp of Galen and Avicenna. But to understand man's body the microcosmos must be understood as image of the macrocosmos and thus natural science, astronomy, and theology become the basis of medicine. His numerous writings influenced, through all Europe, medicine, alchemy, and theosophy. The last great mystic was Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), whose speculations con cerning God's relation to the world and its evils became influential through the following centuries.
Far more systematic and scholarly was the opposition -which arose against scholasticism from the humanistic side. The European Renaissance which flourished from the 14th to the 16th century found nowhere a more enthusiastic echo than in Germany. The best minds entered into its service and here, too, the movement took a threefold form: it created the historical aesthetic interest in the literary treasures of classical antiquity, it opened the eyes to nature and it liberated from the mediaeval onesidedness of christianized Aristotelianism. The time thus demanded philology, natural science, and independent phi losophy. The great philological movement was carried by Germans like Johann Wessel, Ru dolph Agricola, Johann Reuthlin (1455-1521), whose handbooks and editions stimulated the study of Latin and Greek throughout Germany, and who at the same time inaugurated the study of the Hebrew language in western Eu rope; Erasmus of Rotterdam (1457-1537), the most eminent scholar and the most witty writer of his time, who published the first edition of the Greek New Testament, and whose writings fill 24 folio volumes; and above all the of Germany," Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560). Famous as theologian and diplomatist, he de sired to be in first line philologist and ex pounder of the classics. For 40 years he taught in Wittenberg. His (Loci Communes) appeared in 60 editions during his lifetime.