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474
FERDINAND TONNIES:

has taken place. Think for instance of the "blending," the "threshold of consciousness," etc., terms which we do not intend to question here. Much greater difficulties again in terminology are met with in the analysis of the feelings and will, in depicting which poetical and rhetorical language is triumphant. But all these difficulties are most closely connected with difficulties in the matter, to which a subsequent exposition will lead us.


69. (2) Among the historical causes of the observed phenomenon, as it presents itself at the present time, one is most prominent: the downfall of the European language of scholars, of neo-Latin. So long as we possessed this there was, even if only in the forms of words, a scientific terminology common to all; while at the same time there was an external distinction between the technical expressions of the learned, and the inconstant language of daily life, of poetry, etc. The Latin language was international as the language of the Church; from the Church it had spread itself abroad over old and new arts and sciences. The more these separated and liberated themselves from the Church, the more they became "national," that is primarily nothing else than belonging to a large community of written language, the formation of which they themselves promoted. As Latin was the language of the spiritual class, so the national language belonged to the lay nobility and to the bourgeois, strata which stood beside it. But side by side with these social forces there rose up the natural sciences, and consequently the new philosophy. Meanwhile the official science lingered on with little deviation under the spiritual influence; the universities and schools remained faithful in essential matters to the Latin language until towards the end of the eighteenth century. The new philosophy was a realm of free-masters as opposed to the guilds. Of the brilliant names mentioned in §66 only one belonged to the learned dignitaries, and this one (Christian Wolff) was driven from his chair at Halle in 1723 under threat of the halter. To these free-masters there may still be added (among others) Hartley, Priestley, Hume, Voltaire, Diderot, Helvetius, Rousseau; among the Germans we may mention, still from the seventeenth century, Tschirnhaus, and from the eighteenth Lessing and Herder. But the state of learning among the Germans distinguishes itself in a most remarkable way from that of the two other leading nations—after Galileo's trial Italy sank back into clericalism. While the German universities remained almost untouched by the new paradoxes until towards the end of the seventeenth century, there took place