By the 1860s, Schelling's early comment that “[t]he beginning and end of all philosophy is freedom!” had lost the rhetorical force it had earlier in the century; even if people uttered it, it had become a cliché, even a shorthand for something else not being said and which was not itself about freedom. In terms of the more general intellectual culture, philosophy, which from Kant to Hegel had been at the leading edge of the way educated Germans tried to come to grips with what things meant to them, had been replaced by the natural sciences – at first by chemistry and physiology, then later in the century by physics and biology. For many people, the Industrial Revolution and the shattering disappointments of 1848–1849 seemed to have shown that the entire movement from Kant to Hegel was overblown, something with far too much metaphysics and far too little practicality. For those people, progress was from now on to be marked by materialism and industry, not by invocations of the development of spirit. Names like Helmholz and Virchow became the heroes of the new generation of intellectuals who shifted their faith to the authority of the natural sciences (and therefore of “reason” itself, interpreted differently than Kant and Hegel had thought) to contribute to the progress of humankind. If anything, the generation following the 1850s tended to see the generations that had embraced idealism as ancient relics, a part of the pre-industrial past, incapable of giving any guidance to the future.