German philosophers, would-be philosophers,and beaux esprits (men of letters), eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting, that when these writings immigrated from France into Germany,French social conditions had not immigrated along with them. In contact with German social conditions,this French literature lost all its immediate practical significance and assumed a purely literary aspect.Thus, to the German philosophers of the Eighteenth Century, the demands of the first French Revolution were nothing more than the demands of "Practical Reason" in general, and the utterance of the will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified, in their eyes, the laws of pure Will, of Will as it was bound to be, of true human Will generally.