THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN FRANCE AND GERMANY[46]
=The Situation in France in the Enlightenment.= The historian of the
French Enlightenment has to take account of the reign of two kings;
that of Louis XIV (1643–1715); and that of Louis XV (1715–1774).
Together they cover the long period of one hundred and thirty-one years.
The reign of Louis XV marks the actual development of the Enlightenment,
while that of Louis XIV contains the causes. The long reign of
seventy-two years of Louis XIV had been an absolute, arbitrary, and
personal government. It had been an age unsurpassed in literature
and eloquence, but also an age in which all those subjects that did
not redound to the glory of the church were suppressed. It had been
the age of Molière, Corneille, Racine, La Fontaine, and Fénelon;
an age when art was encouraged, but also an age in which political
and philosophical originality would not presume to breathe. Between
Descartes’ death in 1650 and the death of Louis XIV in 1715, one finds
a single philosopher, Pierre Bayle, and he had to leave France. The
Newtonian physics was not accepted in France until 1732――forty-five
years after its publication in England. Upon the death of Louis XIV the
artistic glories of his reign lost all their value for the nation. In
their place was set the problem of the material misery of the nation,
which had been caused by the long wars and the extravagance of paternal
government.
The reign of Louis XV seethes with the struggle of social forces. It is
a period in which the individual is striving to gain his rights under
the institutions that have so long repressed him. The development of
the French Enlightenment is identical with the struggle for political
liberty. In no other period of history――except perhaps the Age of
Pericles――is the history of philosophic thought so intimately connected
with political history. The fifty-nine years of the reign of Louis XV
are filled with exciting events which interest both the philosopher
and the historian. The French Enlightenment is the “reaction against
that protective and interfering spirit which reached its zenith
under Louis XIV.” With Louis XV the magnificence and the utility of
ecclesiastical and political absolutism could not be maintained. For
the hierarchy of the church was unable longer to keep up its claim of
independence and morality; and the State was rapidly exhausting its
power by exhausting its financial resources. Each event in the history
of France in the eighteenth century had therefore two aspects――each
led to the Revolution, and each was a step in the development of the
Enlightenment of the individual. The pioneers in the movement could
not have been conscious of the end to which their criticism would lead;
but to us looking back upon the century the result seems inevitable.
A comparison with the situation in England is interesting. While in
England the political and ecclesiastical institutions were so elastic
that they could without disintegrating absorb the movement of the
Enlightenment, and while they were so little bound to traditional
institutions that the growth in individualism would be constitutional,
the situation in France was exactly opposite. (1) In France the church
and the political institutions had become inelastic bodies under
Louis XIV. They had reached the limit of their development. So deeply
rooted in absolutism and special privileges were they that they were
not open to innovation or reform. During the reign of Louis XV the
only question was, which would be crushed――the new individualism or the
old institutions. No compromise was possible. The institutions, having
survived their usefulness, gave way. (2) In the next place the French
church and state had for many years been identified with oppression
and tyranny, while the English people had within a century gained
many needed reforms by beheading one king and forcing out another.
Consequently the English government of the eighteenth century was
identified with the liberty of the individual. In England political and
religious speculation followed and did not precede political reforms.
In France the opposite was true. To the mind of the French people the
church represented only superstition, and the state only profligacy
and tyranny. The more they seemed to support each other in one social
structure, the more rapid, virulent, and excessive would naturally be
the reaction against both when once individualism got a footing.
The result was that while in England the Enlightenment always remained
critical and negative, in France it became an obstinate and positive
dogmatism. Behind French criticism was developing a philosophical creed.
The French Enlightenment was a social cause and a self-sustaining idea.
The French philosophers of the eighteenth century, on the whole, were
not superior men intellectually, for they were inclined to make the
small look large and the large great. But although their perspective
was inaccurate, they had an enthusiastic faith in progress and humanity.
=The English Influence in France.= Louis XIV and his two predecessors
had made Paris the intellectual centre of Europe, and up to 1690 it had
no rival. The French language had taken its place beside the Latin as
the language of science. The circle of scientists existing just before
and at the beginning of Louis XIV’s reign had its equal nowhere in
Europe. We remember how Hobbes found Euclid in Paris, Locke spent four
years at or near Paris, Leibnitz gained there all his mathematical
erudition and training. During the seventeenth century Paris was the
centre of scholastic influence, and this is seen directly or indirectly
in the writings of all seventeenth century philosophers. The English
had taken their cue from the French; but on the other hand, it is
doubtful if as late as the death of Louis there were a half dozen
Frenchmen that knew the English language.
About the time of the publication of Locke’s _Essay_ the intellectual
centre of gravity began to move from Paris to London. The founding
of the Royal Society in Oxford in 1660 was the beginning of the
organization of British scientific influence. Newton’s physics (1687)
then began to supplant the Cartesian physics, and Locke’s psychological
doctrines the dogmatism of the Rationalists, among the thinkers of
western Europe. Newtonian physics and English empiricism became the
scientific watchwords of the eighteenth century; and although the
French were late in accepting them, it is said that at the end of
the Enlightenment there was no cultured Frenchman who could not read
English. We find that such notable Frenchmen as Voltaire, Montesquieu,
Buffon, Brissot, Helvetius, Gournay, Jussieu, Lafayette, Maupertuis,
Mirabeau, Roland, and Rousseau visited England during the period
from the death of Louis XIV to the Revolution. Poets, mathematicians,
historians, naturalists, philologists, philosophers, and essayists all
agreed to the necessity of studying the language and people on whom
their fathers had not deigned to waste thought except in contempt.
But perhaps the political motive was quite as strong as the scientific
in turning the French of the eighteenth century toward England. The
English government was the example of political liberty of that time.
The rising inquisitive thinkers of France had no alternative but to
turn to free England for spiritual support against their own decrepit
tyranny. The first French visitors were amazed at English prosperity,
even though the crown had decreased in power――amazed at the liberty
of the press and Parliament, amazed at the control of the revenues by
the representative body. England thus became the school for all the
thinkers of Europe, and through her literature taught the lesson of
political liberty first to France, and then to all Europe.
=The Two Periods of the French Enlightenment.= The eighteenth century
divides itself in France much the same as it does in England. There
are two periods: the first extending to the middle of the century, when
the Enlightenment of the individual is thought to lie in intellectual
cultivation; the second, when his salvation becomes social and
practical. The first period is dominated by Voltaire, and advanced by
Montesquieu and the Encyclopædists; the second is dominated by Rousseau,
and results in the Revolution.
The two periods have a common fundamental motive, although the means
used are radically different. Both represent a gradual progression
toward the elevation of the individual in his reaction against
the institutions of the seventeenth century. But the first was an
intellectual Enlightenment and all that this means, while the second
was emotional and social. The first was aristocratic, while the second
was democratic. Yet the whole movement was a gradual filtering of
the doctrine of individualism from the upper to the lower classes. It
naturally took the form, first, of intellectual culture, and then of
an appeal to spontaneity. The intellectual theories of the first period
were bound to find practical expression in the second. In the first
period the champions of the ancient monarchy were forced to defend
it on their opponents’ own ground――that of rationality. In the second
period, the monarchists had to change their battleground and make some
practical reforms. In the first, the attack was made principally on the
church, in the second on society. While the attack on the state began
early, it attained significance not until the middle of the century.
=The Intellectual Enlightenment (1729–1762). Voltaire, Montesquieu,
and the Encyclopædists.= The first representatives of the French
Enlightenment were Voltaire and Montesquieu. Voltaire went to England
in 1726, and Montesquieu in 1728, and they both returned to France
in 1729. Voltaire published his _Letters on the English_ in 1734 and
his _Elements of the Philosophy of Newton_ in 1738.[47] Montesquieu
had published a fierce invective against the political institutions
of France in 1721, a discussion of the decadence of the Romans in
1734, and his famous _Spirit of the Laws_ in 1748, selling twenty-two
editions in eighteen months. Voltaire introduced and espoused the
religious theory of Locke in deistic form, and Montesquieu expounded
Locke’s theory of government. Their writings were widely read by the
upper classes, and this theoretical revolutionary movement against all
existing institutions got momentum about 1735.
The aim of this movement was entirely aristocratic. The solution of the
existing predicament in France lay for them in the greater care of the
masses by an enlightened tyranny. The dualism of the classes was always
assumed. The few are to be cultured; for them reason is to take the
place of dogma. The masses are not amenable to reason, have no capacity
for education, and for them religion suffices. To free the individual
from terror of the supernatural, to release his morality from
Jesuitical dominance, to give him intellectual independence of state
and church――this was the working idea of the intellectual Enlightenment.
Thought should be free, and the conscience of the individual should
be untrammeled, because the reason is a sufficient guide. Being thus
rationalistic, the movement was aristocratic. A new aristocracy should
be substituted for the old――an aristocracy of the cultured instead of
the corrupt and ignorant, who were then the dominant French classes
in church and state. The illuminati should participate in the existing
political privileges.
=Voltaire= (1694–1778).[48] Voltaire was a deist when he went to
England, and he was therefore very much impressed by the prevalent
English deism. Among the English deists, Bolingbroke had the greatest
influence over him, and he was the “direct progenitor of Voltaire’s
religious opinions.” Bolingbroke’s light and supercilious infidelity
of the man of the world was suited to Voltaire. A universal genius,
Voltaire wrote on every subject; but “not one of his books but bears
marks of his sojourn in England.” He read with familiarity all the
English philosophers,――Hobbes, Berkeley, Cudworth, Locke; but always
returning to Locke. “Harassed, wearied, ashamed of having sought so
many truths and found so many chimeras, I returned like a prodigal
son to his father and threw myself into the arms of that modest man
who never pretends to know what he does not know; who in truth has no
enormous possessions, but whose substance is well assured.”
In his _Philosophical Letters_ Voltaire makes invidious comparisons
between Locke’s Empiricism and Descartes’ Rationalism, between English
Deism and French Catholicism, and between the English government
and the French government. Toward Christianity, as he saw it in his
own country, his hatred amounted to fanaticism. His strictures were
so scathing that Christians have looked upon him as an atheist. He
was, however, a deist, who believed that, while we can know God’s
existence, we cannot know his nature. He was fond of bringing all
dogma under criticism, and “while he denied nothing, he cast suspicion
upon everything.” He called himself the “ignorant philosopher.” To
him atheism was preferable to dogma and superstition. His passion for
invective against the French clergy was so great that his constructive
statements about God and immortality were cold and impersonal.
=The Encyclopædists.=[49] In modern times the French have been
unequaled in their encyclopædias and dictionaries. The famous
_Encyclopédie_ or _Dictionnaire Raisonné_ was what its name implies.
It was published in seventeen volumes during the years from 1751 to
1766, and had an addition of eleven volumes of plates (1766–1772).
Thirty thousand copies were printed in the first instance, and
in 1774 it was translated into four foreign languages. The moving
spirit and editor-in-chief was Diderot (1713–1784) and his chief
assistant d’Alembert. They were assisted by many notable French
writers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Grimm, von Holbach, etc., who wrote
separate articles. There was a host of unsolicited contributors.
Two years before the _Encyclopædia_, Buffon had begun to publish his
_Natural History_ in forty-three volumes, the last volume appearing
in 1789. The _Encyclopædia_ had two predecessors,――Bacon’s chapter
on _Experimental History_ and Chambers’s _Encyclopædia_. The articles
in the _Encyclopædia_ were presumably scientific explanations
alphabetically arranged, such as would appear in any work of the
sort. Frequently they were disguised attacks upon existing French
institutions. Often a detailed description, as on the subject “Taxes”
or “God,” would reveal existing French conditions. As Comte says,
“The _Encyclopædia_ furnished a rallying ground for the most divergent
efforts without any sacrifice of essential independence, and made a
mass of incoherent speculation appear like a coherent system.” The two
successive periods of the movement of the Enlightenment unite in the
_Encyclopædia_ against the common enemy of authority.
There are two things to be noticed in connection with the
_Encyclopædia_: the men who wrote it went much further toward
individualism and skepticism than did Voltaire; and the _Encyclopædia_
reached a wider circle and different classes than did the works of
Voltaire. Instead of the deism of Voltaire we find contributions
from skeptics, atheists, and materialists,――men who are becoming more
negative in their opinions as the century advances. The thorough-going
agnosticism of the Encyclopædist group reached a point where it ceased
to be a philosophy. Diderot had said that the first step in philosophy
is unbelief, and his associates went so far as to think that unbelief
is all of philosophy. Their extreme sensationalism, naturalism, and
materialism sometimes appeared in disguised form in the _Encyclopædia_,
but more often in independent writings. The _Encyclopædia_ became the
source of information for everybody. It spread information among all
classes and undermined their reverence for French institutions. The
result was that what had been sacred to the court and the laborer
because it was traditional, now became the object of scorn to all.
The most profound of the sensationalists of this time was Condillac
(1715–1780),[50] who does not, however, appear to be connected with
the _Encyclopædia_. He published his _Treatise on Sensations_ in 1754,
which reduced Locke’s psychological analysis to a pure sensationalism.
The well-known figurative statue endowed only with the sense of smell
was conceived by him. He introduced Locke’s psychology into France,
whence it was carried into Germany.
=The Social Enlightenment= (1762–1789). The second period of the
French Enlightenment begins with the publication of Rousseau’s _Contrat
Social_ in 1762 and culminates in the Revolution. The influence of
Rousseau dominates the second period as that of Voltaire dominated the
first. Voltaire had never aimed at a social revolution. His objective
point was to reinstate the understanding, to emancipate the individual
by self-culture and by freedom of thought. He was not historian enough
to see that he could not revolutionize intellectual France without
pulling down the social structure. He did not realize that in striking
at the tyranny of the church he was dealing a fatal blow at the
structure of French society. The literary fencing between Voltaire and
the adroit churchmen might have been amusing, had the issue not been
so serious. But although superficial and vain, Voltaire was downright
in earnest. At one time it seemed as if the intellectual Enlightenment
would work itself out in the church. But the causes of the revolt were
too deeply social, the malady against which Voltaire was aiming was too
vital; and besides, at that moment attention was being directed to the
character of the State itself.
=Rousseau= (1712–1778).[51] Rousseau began at the point where Voltaire
left off. He was under the influence of Voltaire at the first and
received from Voltaire his original productive impulse. But the
concrete right of individuals, and not their abstract intellectual
freedom, was what appealed to Rousseau. Strict moderation and literary
freedom were too negative, half-hearted, for a reformer of Rousseau’s
type. Public opinion was not to be found in Versailles, as Voltaire
thought, but in the streets of Paris. The Revolution then came to a
head, and we find the schools of Voltaire and Rousseau locking horns.
Voltaire’s theory of moderation was represented in the Constituent
Assembly and the upper and middle classes, while Rousseau’s radicalism
was introduced in the Convention and fully expounded in the sections of
the Commune of Paris which attacked the Convention. History shows how
impossible the aim of each school was, and how the contest had to be
fought over again in the nineteenth century.
Rousseau lived a wandering and adventurous life, full of hallucinations
and self-created trouble. He made many friends, only to quarrel with
them. He was half insane, and his career inspires both disgust and
admiration. His numerous works fill twenty-two volumes, the most
important ones being two prize essays published in 1750 and 1773, which
represent the negative side of his doctrine; _Héloïse_, 1761; _Emile_,
1762; _Le Contrat Social_, 1762; and his _Confessions_, which contain
his constructive thought.
Rousseau was at first a contributor to the _Encyclopædia_, but at
heart he cared nothing for the diffusion of knowledge and art. He did
not understand the comprehensive intellectual ambition of Diderot; he
resented the utilitarianism of Helvetius and the materialism of Holbach.
When he wrote his prize essay in 1750, he suddenly perceived how absurd
the intellectual Enlightenment was amid the distressing social state
of France. He turned against both the existing order and the would-be
intellectual reformers. The temporal order of things was to him awry.
Study, knowledge, and cultivation were to him only a gloss over the
deep-lying degradation. Society, as it is constructed, is artificial,
and all organization is a tyranny. God exists, and He is good. Man
was good until civilization and art invaded his simplicity, corrupted
his virtues, and transformed him into a suffering and a sinful being.
Rousseau’s call was that of anarchism. It was a condemnation of the
entire past. Sweep all the so-called civilization away, and level
inequalities. Go back to nature; and in the simplicity of that idyllic
state let children grow up undirected except by their own uncorrupted
instinct,――that “immortal and celestial voice.”
In an age tired of oppression and corruption Rousseau struck a
sympathetic chord which made the intellectual Enlightenment sound
false. His contemporaries did not inquire into the motives of the mean
lunatic. They did not then see that he was a doctrinaire holding up an
unpractical ideal in contrast with their present state. He alone in all
France was the one to appeal to man’s self-respect. He alone appealed
to the only motives that will result in action,――the human emotions.
His plea was for every Frenchman, and his words for the unfortunate
were given with such eloquence that the fortunate were compelled to
listen. They were a majestic language of wide compassion and sympathy.
He saw in the French monarchy the greatest misery for the greatest
number, and no one of its supporters appeared to the people so generous
and true as he. His influence not only upon his own time but upon
the nineteenth century was extraordinary, and some have said that he
is the greatest modern. At all events he sounded the keynote of our
own civilization, especially in art, literature, and education; for
he showed the fundamental correlation between Nature and the passions.
Rousseau taught a sentimental deism, in which sentiment is the
essential part.
The Revolution was the natural consummation of the Enlightenment in
France. The immediate issues out of which it grew were the practical
ones of finance, legislation, economics, and policy. The growth in the
physical sciences (beginning 1760), in the study of political science,
in the theory of government, as well as the financial distress of
the French government, the success of the American Revolution, the
advance of the French middle class to a position of power, the foolish
and half-hearted measures of the French statesmen――all these were
factors that at the end brought on the crisis. Yet the words of
Rousseau, falling on fruitful soil, were the real cause. In the years
immediately preceding the Revolution there was a world-wide agitation,
an enthusiasm for nature, an exaltation of man, and a contempt for the
age and for the society then existing. There was a vague presentiment
of impending change, which most people were prepared to welcome.
Thinkers were full of illusions. Even such despots as Frederick the
Great, Catherine of Russia, and Joseph of Austria affected a radicalism,
and Spain, Portugal, and Tuscany, as well as England, France, and
Germany, were moved with great humanitarian sentiments. The debate
was universal as to the condition of the human race. Rousseau was the
eloquent expression of this world-wide movement.
=The German Enlightenment= (1740–1781). As the Enlightenment in France,
so the Enlightenment in Germany had its introductory period. The
history of Germany from the end of the Thirty Years’ War (1648) to the
publication of Kant’s _Critique_ (1781), or 133 years, is divided into
two periods at the year 1740, when Frederick the Great was crowned.
The period from 1740 to 1781, or forty-one years, is the German
Enlightenment. The period from 1648 to 1740, or ninety-two years,
is introductory to the Enlightenment, and, as in France, a period
of absolutism.
=The Introductory Period= (1648–1740). =Absolutism.= The spirit of
absolutism, both politically and intellectually, dominated Germany from
the end of the Thirty Years’ War (1648) to the crowning of Frederick
the Great (1740). Absolutism dominated Germany and France a full one
hundred years. There are some differences between the two countries,
however. It began and ended in Germany about thirty-five years later
than in France. Again, in France it grew in splendor from the efforts
of Richelieu and Louis XIII (1610) to the great protective idea of
Louis XIV, who for seventy-two years ruled as absolute political and
intellectual dictator. In Germany, on the other hand, it was a spectre
hovering over a disintegrating and decaying nation once known as the
Holy Roman Empire, but since the Thirty Years’ War only a collection of
states under a nominal central government. The idea of absolutism
prevailed none the less, for within the several states each monarch was
dictator as to the religious, intellectual, and political opinions of
his subjects.
Politically and socially the Holy Roman Empire was in striking contrast
to the power and splendor of contemporaneous France. The Thirty Years’
War had left the empire absolutely desolate. The land was impoverished,
the nation disrupted, and the population reduced from seventeen
millions before the war to five millions after the war. The war had
been a generation long and it had degraded the nation. It had settled
nothing. It left the people poor and the princes absolute within their
respective states. The upper classes everywhere, except at Weimar, had
become profligate. The universities were reduced to a position below
what they were in the Renaissance. The prince of each state established
the religion for his state, so that practically no religious liberty
had been gained. Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics were exhausted,
but were still antagonistic. There was no moral activity among
the Orthodox; often they set their own immorality up to prove the
absolutism of their respective dogma. The war left Germany politically
prostrate and intellectually stagnant.
In the years that follow the Thirty Years’ War it is possible to
detect movements that are the beginnings of the Enlightenment. It is
an important point that Germany was resuscitated from sources that
lay within her own civilization. The French Enlightenment and the
intellectual freedom of modern France were due largely to the influence
of foreign ideas from England. The seeds of the German intellectual
revival were developed on her own soil. Those beginnings are (1) the
rise of Prussia; (2) the early German literature; (3) the Pietistic
movement; (4) the transformation of Leibnitz’s rationalism.
1. The rise of the little electorate of Brandenburg to the powerful
kingdom of Prussia in 1740 was the political basis of the Enlightenment
that followed. No state had suffered more during the Thirty Years’ War.
The entire population was reduced to less than a million, and Berlin,
the capital, had only three hundred citizens. The government was as
harshly absolute as elsewhere. The rights of the citizens were entirely
taken away by the three princes who ruled over Prussia between 1648 and
1740. But a powerful kingdom was built up, with a strong and patriotic
army. It extended its dominions and was a refuge for Protestants, who
fled to it in large numbers. It came to be feared by all the German
states, and in the latter part of this period it had to be reckoned
with in the councils of Europe. Itself an absolutism, it was the
vigorous political body that alone could destroy the traditional
absolutism of the Hapsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire. Puffendorf
declared that the old Empire with its feeble sovereignties was a
monster. It was a monster spectre――a stubborn political idea that
hovered over Europe. Frederick the Great’s mission in the next period
was to destroy it.
2. The meagre German literature of this early period was also an
important factor in the development of the Enlightenment. Poor, indeed,
it was. Never was German literary production so low. Before the war the
Germans had taken Greek as their model; after the war they copied the
language, manners, and methods of the French of Louis XIV. The early
literature was ruled in the same spirit of absolutism by Opitz until
1700, and after him by Gottsched, especially in the years from 1730
to 1740. It was for only a small fraction of the people, and was in
the interests of the depraved aristocrats of the courts. Such pedantic
absolutism was the basis of the reaction in the next period of the
literary Enlightenment, which proved the redemption of Germany.
3. The Pietistic movement was the third factor that went to make up
the German Enlightenment. It was a positive expression of religious
individualism, similar in its position to the Prussian state in its
independent growth in politics. It was a religious movement outside the
church. Its two leaders were Spener (1635–1705) and Francke (1663–1727).
The movement entered Germany from the Netherlands; and the members
were devout and holy men consecrated to good deeds. The Pietists were
not heroic figures like the early Lutherans, but they stood for what
Luther had in his early period taught. They opposed ecclesiastical
formalism, and they proclaimed the need of personal regeneration and
of the universal priesthood. They stood for religious freedom. They
made no onslaught upon the church, but they were content with saving
individuals. Pietism united at first with Rationalism――of which we
shall next speak――against orthodoxy, but when the two had won their
victory they quarreled. Although the Pietistic movement later became
itself conventional, it furnished the ground for the religious freedom
of the Enlightenment. During these hundred years of German religious
absolutism, the Pietists represent the moral activity among religious
bodies.
4. The chief source of the Enlightenment was the philosophy of
Leibnitz. In turning back to the life of this distinguished German the
reader will remember that he was the “first scientist in two hundred
years,” and that he was the Rationalist who presaged the Enlightenment.
Leibnitz was born in 1646, just two years before the war closed, and
he died in 1716, one year after the death of Louis XIV. He lived during
those unfruitful years after the war and before the Enlightenment;
and his philosophy stands out prominently from the low plane of
the intellectual activity of that time. In 1686 he completed the
construction of his philosophy by introducing the conception of the
individual as a dynamic centre.
Many German philosophers, about the time of Leibnitz, had later tried
to free philosophy from its technical difficulties and make it readable
for the people as the French Encyclopædia was for the French people.
Among these were Tschirnhausen (1651–1708), Mendelssohn (1729–1786),
and Tetens (1736–1805), but the German Enlightenment for many reasons
did not come about like the French in the popularizing of philosophy.
The philosophy of Leibnitz did reach the people directly, but the
people were stirred through the medium of literature rather than of
philosophy. Leibnitz’s philosophy became the dominant thought only
in the universities and academic circles, and remained so until the
publication of Kant’s _Critique_ in 1781. The Halle professor, Wolff
(1679–1754), developed and transformed it, not to its advantage, into
an absolutism, and under the name of the Leibnitz-Wolffian philosophy
it was the canon for the German schools. Once established in the
universities it remained unchanged there even by the invasion of
French thought that penetrated other German circles. Even Voltaire’s
residence at the court at Berlin (1750) had no influence upon the
Leibnitz-Wolffian philosophy of the Berlin Academy. The dogmatic
absolutism of this philosophy remained impregnable in academic circles
and was the last to be dislodged――and then only by a German. There was
little progress among these Rationalists, once their doctrine had been
cast, except in incorporating in an eclectic fashion the doctrine of
others.
Wolff systematized the unordered and desultory doctrines of Leibnitz
for the purpose of teaching them logically. This was in 1706, when by
the aid of Leibnitz he obtained the professorship of mathematics at
Halle. He met with instant success. The rationalism of his doctrine
is seen from the title of many of his works, which are _Reasonable
Thoughts on God_, _Reasonable Thoughts on the Powers of the Human
Understanding_, etc. He lectured at Halle until 1723, when he was
expelled by the theological influence. His return to Halle in 1740 was
coincident with the crowning of Frederick the Great and the beginning
of the German Enlightenment. We can note a few general aspects of his
teaching. He employed the German language in his lectures, following
Thomasius, who was the first to do it. Leibnitz had written in letters
and treatises for the few, and had used either Latin or French. Wolff
expanded Leibnitz’s doctrine, broadly and superficially, for a larger
public, in the German tongue. He systematized Leibnitz’s teaching,
and thereby could disseminate it. But in doing this he so toned down
Leibnitz’s leading ideas that they lost all their peculiar force.
For instance, he taught that only the human mind has the power of
representation; and again, that preëstablished harmony applies only
to the relation of the soul and body of the human monad. In general, he
so extended the Leibnitz principle of sufficient reason that it applied
to all departments, and was reduced to the principle of identity.
The world is a huge mechanism designed for divine ends. Rationality
is assumed to be everywhere, and knowledge of its existence is to be
obtained only by deduction from evident principles. The result was
that the philosophy of Leibnitz was reduced to a commonplace and empty
rationalism――a purely deductive affair. Wolff undertook to demonstrate
everything, and to make intelligible what is above reason. The
Wolffian philosophy was a reversion to mediæval scholasticism, since
it solved all problems by proof through the cogency of mathematical and
logical processes. Truth is a matter of definition and classification.
Thus Wolff produced a philosophy that was pedantic and formal,
clear but shallow. It was Leibnitzian with Leibnitz omitted; it was
a thorough-going dogmatism, because no problem was difficult to it; it
was a rationalism, because to it all truth is the deliverance of the
reason and none is derived from experience.
The Wolffian Rationalism became a factor in the German Enlightenment
on the one hand by combining with Pietism, and on the other through
its translation into the new German literature. In itself the Wolffian
Rationalism was a dogmatism that merely supplanted the dogmatic
scholasticism of Melanchthon and Luther. It lost its absolutism in its
combination with Pietism, and became a personal and individualistic
religion. It also lost its absolutism and became more like the
philosophy of Leibnitz through its translation into the literary
writings of Lessing and Herder; and thus was subordinated to an
incident in individual culture.
=Summary of the Literary Enlightenment of Germany= (1740–1781). The
German Enlightenment was thus made possible by the political growth
of Prussia, by the development of a meagre literature, by the rise of
Pietism, and by the Wolffian interpretation of Leibnitz’s philosophy.
All these were important features of the century following the Thirty
Years’ War. The year 1740 is the beginning of the German Enlightenment.
It marks the crowning of Frederick the Great, the decline of the
influence of Gottsched in literature, and Wolff’s return to Halle.
The arrival of Voltaire in Berlin (1750) is an important factor in
the rise of the German Enlightenment. The spirit of the Enlightenment
was at its height twenty years later (1760), contemporaneous with the
Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and with the publication by Lessing in
1759 of his _Letters concerning the most Modern Literature_. In these
_Letters_ Lessing gave the death-blow to Gottschedism, and established
the Enlightenment on a firm basis. This was followed by the Storm and
Stress movement (1773–1787), which brought the Enlightenment proper to
an end.
1730–1750 Period of Experimentation――Gottsched, the Swiss, the
Anacreonticists, etc.
1740 The Enlightenment inaugurated――the crowning of Frederick the Great,
the decline of Gottschedism, the return of Wolff to Halle.
1750 The coming of Voltaire to Berlin.
1751–1780 Lessing and the Enlightenment.
1773–1787 Storm and Stress Period.――The Enlightenment proper at an
end.[52]
1787–1805 Classicism. (Schiller d. 1805).
1795–1850 (approximately) The Romantic Movement.
1850– The Realistic Movement.
=The Political Enlightenment of Germany――Frederick the Great.=
Political changes preceded and did not follow philosophical theories
in the German Enlightenment. Germany was therefore like England
and unlike France in this respect. The coming of Frederick to the
throne of the now powerful Prussia, the reforms that he inaugurated,
the religious toleration that he granted, his recall of Wolff to
Halle, his avowed support of intellectual things, and especially the
Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) were the political groundwork that made
possible the Enlightenment in Germany. Frederick himself is the great
figure in the German Enlightenment, just as Voltaire is in the French.
Frederick accomplished in concrete acts for political Europe what
Voltaire accomplished for ecclesiastical Europe. Voltaire destroyed
the ecclesiastical absolutism of the spiritual power, while Frederick
destroyed the absolutism so long connected with the name of the Holy
Roman Empire and the House of Hapsburg. Before he died, he had freed
the German states from the dominance of Austria, and had given to
the Empire its death-blow. In the Seven Years’ War he had given to
modern Europe an example of a new political ideal in an autocrat who
professed to be the servant of the State. His whole thought was upon
the advancement of his State. He set up the principle of the equality
of his subjects before the law, and the principle of religious and
philosophical liberty. In his external struggles with Austria and in
the internal construction of his kingdom Frederick is the protest of
the Enlightenment against the arbitrary despotism of political Europe.
The example of Frederick was an inspiration to all Germany. Kant calls
the eighteenth century the Age of Frederick the Great. Frederick had
made his subjects feel that they were Prussians, or, as Goethe puts it,
“Fritzche” (Fritz’s men); that the great foe of the German people was
the German Empire as personified by the Austrians and Saxons. When he
had conducted to a successful issue a deadly war of seven years single
handed against the combined force of more than half of Europe,――Austria,
Russia, and France, all representing political absolutism,――he inspired
patriotism not only in his own subjects, but in the people of many
other German states. Reforms were undertaken in Bavaria, Baden, Saxony,
Brunswick, etc., and by Catherine of Russia and Joseph of Austria.
Furthermore, Frederick himself was personally enlightened; he looked
upon himself as the greatest among those of enlightened intellects. He
had become denationalized by his early training. His father was fond
of what was German, his mother of what was English, and he himself
of what was French. He had studied Bayle, read French philosophy, and
become acquainted with the rationalism of Wolff and the empiricism of
Locke. He was at one time an atheist and materialist; but deism was his
natural attitude of mind, for he emphasized morality above speculation.
Conceiving himself, as the most enlightened, to be the great servant
of the State, he undertook the enlightenment of his people. All Prussia
must be enlightened by him, and therefore no restrictive institutions,
such as guilds and corporations, could be permitted. The best man
should rule, and he was the best man. Since the people are incapable of
looking after themselves, they must be compelled under his benevolent
autocracy to be enlightened, rational, and happy.
=The Course of the German Enlightenment.= Why did not the movement
become as in France a political revolution? There are three reasons
why it did not: (1) the reforms that the German princes adopted were
wise; (2) Germany was composed of segregated states in which concerted
action was difficult; (3) a new intellectual and æsthetic current was
begun by Lessing, of whom we shall speak. There is no doubt that the
Enlightenment in Germany pointed to the same result as in France. From
1760 to 1780 it looked as if Germany as well as France would witness
a tremendous social upheaval. From 1773 to 1787, Germany was stirred
by the Storm and Stress movement. Frederick himself had pointed to the
English parliamentary government as the “model for our days.” The most
of the German thinkers were at heart republicans,――Klopstock, Schiller,
Kant. Every man in Germany became a little Frederick, and tried to
enlighten those who were inferior to him. The movement extended to the
schoolroom. Secret societies were formed of kindred enlightened souls
to enlighten the world. The most important of these societies was the
Illuminati. The aim of these was to free men from national and civil
ties, from pedantry, intolerance, political and theological slavery.
The human heart is the basis of society, and the only worthy object of
study. The Illuminati included even princes among its members. It was
established in 1776 and prohibited in 1786. There was a distinctive
Storm and Stress literature. This was set in motion by Rousseau’s
_Héloïse_ and _Emile_, which were widely read in Germany. Writers
glorified the individual, called men back to primitive and uncorrupted
nature, denounced civilization, and for twenty years it almost seemed
as if the German Enlightenment had turned from the intellectual
achievements of Lessing, and would follow the sentimental appeal of
Rousseau. Herder was particularly prominent in this movement, also
Goethe and Schiller in their early writings.
Of the three factors that saved Germany from a political revolution,
perhaps the most potent was the new, fresh, literary ideas of Lessing.
If Frederick is the originator of the German Enlightenment, Lessing
is the savior of it. The Enlightenment in England stopped with the
phenomenalism of Hume, in France with the Revolution, but in Germany it
has in a sense continued even to the present day. The classic period of
Goethe and Schiller, the modern scientific achievements of the Germans,
have their perpetual source in Lessing. He not only gave the death-blow
to the pedantic absolutism of the intellectual past, but he set the
movement upon a permanent intellectual basis, upon which it has stood
against the assaults of sentimentalism for a hundred and fifty years.
=Lessing.= G. E. Lessing (1729–1781) was not only a sound scholar,
but a polished man of the social world. He was a writer of epigrams,
fables, and comedies, a dramatic and literary critic, a translator
and essayist, a student of philosophy and ecclesiastical history, and
a writer upon art. His _Nathan the Wise_ is, after Goethe’s _Faust_,
the greatest literary production of German thought. With him German
literature begins. He rejected the French models accepted by Gottsched;
he introduced Shakespeare to the Germans; and he surpassed all his
contemporaries in literary and artistic reform, social enlightenment,
and religious emancipation. Lessing and Winckelmann were the first to
spread a love for the past by a critical study of it. Lessing was not
a violent iconoclast like Voltaire, but a discriminating critic. He
said that if Leibnitz had wished for an interpreter, he would not
have chosen Wolff. The new literary writers, Lessing and Herder, in
their insistence upon subjectivity and intuition, rather than Wolff,
were the true interpreters of Leibnitz. Lessing differed from the
Enlightenment in his conception of the present in its continuity with
the past. Herder, too, was interested in development. Lessing pointed
to the perfect models in the past; Herder to the origins of things.
Both believed in an immanent God and the harmony of the universe.
At this time the problems in æsthetics came to light, and with them
the creation of “world literature,” which drew from all historical
thought――from antiquity, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. The
Pietists, the Wolffians, and the literary writers agreed in taking the
subjective point for their view of life. Thus Leibnitz appears through
Lessing as a motive power in the German Enlightenment. Lessing’s
doctrine of individuality so transcended that of the Storm and Stress
Period that he was not understood by it. His enlightened individual
suppresses his individuality. But his principles were so fundamental
that the Storm and Stress Period proved to be only an interruption,
and the German Enlightenment was perpetuated. He thus projected himself
beyond the eighteenth century by the instruments of that century.