The influence of German idealism upon British thought was tardy. In spite of Coleridge and Carlyle there was in this country little systematic knowledge of post-Kantian tendencies. Mansel was a notable exception, but he himself had no sympathy with the movement and deplored any attempt tc interpret Christian theology in terms of a speculative metaphysic. The leading figure in British philosophy was J. S, Mill, whilst Comte's positivism was being enthusiastically introduced to English readers by G. H. Lewes and Harriet Martineau. The appearance of an idealist school, therefore, in the persons of James Ferrier, whose Institutes of Metaphysics was published in 1854, Benjamin Jowett—an essentially eclectic thinker, however—and finally of T. H. Green and his disciples, was in strong contrast with the prevailing philosophical outlook, although, somewhat ironically, the doctrines it espoused were already losing favour in the land of their origin. It was a reaction in no small part explicable, in a nation at the time more consistently traditionalist in its religious attitudes than any other in western Europe, by growing distaste for both a dry empiricism and the religious agnosticism which was its usual concomitant, and the naturalism which the new evolutionary hypothesis seemed, in the name of science, to wish to impose upon all thought. The spirit of man, it was felt, needed the concept of God, and oi God not as a merely residual or marginal existence but as the soul and substance of all reality.