But the revolutionary movement has been checked and directed into the paths of a healthy natural advancement.

The inevitable need of a free intellectual self-determination has again and again disengaged itself from the inner life of the soul of the people, and broadened into world-historical importance.
Thus two great movements were born from the German intellectual life, on which, henceforth, all the intellectual and moral progress of man must rest: the Reformation and the critical philosophy.

The Reformation, which broke the intellectual yoke, imposed by the Church, which checked all free progress; and the Critique of Pure Reason, which put a stop to the caprice of philosophic speculation by defining for the human mind the limitations of its capacity for knowledge, and at the same time pointed out in what way knowledge is really possible.

On this substructure was developed the intellectual life of our time, whose deepest significance consists in the attempt to reconcile the result of free inquiry with the religious needs of the heart, and to lay a foundation for the harmonious organization of mankind.

Torn this way and that, between hostile forces, in a continuous feud between faith and knowledge, mankind seems to have lost the straight road of progress.
Reconciliation only appears possible when the thought of religious reformation leads to a permanent explanation of the idea of religion, and science remains conscious of the limits of its power, and does not attempt to explain the domain of the supersensual world from the results of natural philosophy.
The German nation not only laid the foundations of this great struggle for an harmonious development of humanity, but took the lead in it.