Lord Macaulay, man of letters, member of Parliament, the only historian ever raised to the peerage on the strength of his work, recorded in his diary in 1852 his first and only attempt to read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

Despite this reaction from one of Britain's leading intellectuals, in twenty-five years the philosophy of Kant and, more amazing still, Hegel had progressed from being unintelligible to providing much of the metaphysical backbone of the dominant philosophy. It supplanted both empiricism and the Scottish philosophy of common sense, while claiming possession of articulate bands of followers at Glasgow and Oxford. This change in the philosophical climate was certainly not the result of the attractive style in which German philosophy was written.