PART I.

HISTORY OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY

From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time

by

RICHARD FALCKENBERG

_Professor of Philosophy in the University of Erlangen_

_THIRD AMERICAN FROM THE SECOND GERMAN EDITION_

TRANSLATED WITH THE AUTHOR'S SANCTION BY

A.C. ARMSTRONG, JR.

_Professor of Philosophy in Wesleyan University_

1893

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

The aim of this translation is the same as that of the original work. Each

is the outcome of experience in university instruction in philosophy, and

is intended to furnish a manual which shall be at once scientific and

popular, one to stand midway between the exhaustive expositions of the

larger histories and the meager sketches of the compendiums. A pupil of

Kuno Fischer, Fortlage, J.E. Erdmann, Lotze, and Eucken among others,

Professor Falckenberg began his career as _Docent_ in the university of

Jena. In the year following the first edition of this work he became

_Extraordinarius_ in the same university, and in 1888 _Ordinarius_ at

Erlangen, choosing the latter call in preference to an invitation to Dorpat

as successor to Teichmüller. The chair at Erlangen he still holds. His work

as teacher and author has been chiefly in the history of modern philosophy.

Besides the present work and numerous minor articles, he has published the

following: _Ueber den intelligiblen Charakter, zur Kritik der Kantischen

Freiheitslehre_ 1879; _Grundzüge der Philosophie des Nicolaus Cusanus_,

1880-81; and _Ueber die gegenwärtige Lage der deutschen Philosophie_, 1890

(inaugural address at Erlangen). Since 1884-5 Professor Falckenberg has

also been an editor of the _Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische

Kritik_, until 1888 in association with Krohn, and after the latter's

death, alone. At present he has in hand a treatise on Lotze for a German

series analogous to Blackwood's Philosophical Classics, which is to be

issued under his direction. Professor Falckenberg's general philosophical

position may be described as that of moderate idealism. His historical

method is strictly objective, the aim being a free reproduction of the

systems discussed, as far as possible in their original terminology and

historical connection, and without the intrusion of personal criticism.

The translation has been made from the second German edition (1892),

with still later additions and corrections communicated by the author in

manuscript. The translator has followed the original faithfully but

not slavishly. He has not felt free to modify Professor Falckenberg's

expositions, even in the rare cases where his own opinions would have led

him to dissent, but minor changes have been made wherever needed to fit the

book for the use of English-speaking students. Thus a few alterations have

been made in dates and titles, chiefly under the English systems and from

the latest authorities; and a few notes added in elucidation of portions

of the text. Thus again the balance of the bibliography has been somewhat

changed, including transfers from text to notes and _vice versa_ and a few

omissions, besides the introduction of a number of titles from our English

philosophical literature chosen on the plan referred to in the preface

to the first German edition. The glossary of terms foreign to the German

reader has been replaced by a revision and expansion of the index, with the

analyses of the glossary as a basis. Wherever possible, and this has been

true in all important cases, the changes have been indicated by the usual

signs.

The translator has further rewritten Chapter XV., Section 3, on recent

British and American Philosophy. In this so much of the author's

(historical) standpoint and treatment as proved compatible with the aim of

a manual in English has been retained, but the section as a whole has been

rearranged and much enlarged.

The labor of translation has been lightened by the example of previous

writers, especially of the translators of the standard treatises of

Ueberweg and Erdmann. The thanks of the translator are also due to several

friends who have kindly aided him by advice or assistance: in particular to

his friend and former pupil, Mr. C.M. Child, M.S., who participated in the

preparation of a portion of the translation; and above all to Professor

Falckenberg himself, who, by his willing sanction of the work and his

co-operation throughout its progress, has given a striking example of

scholarly courtesy.

A.C.A., Jr.

Wesleyan University, June, 1893.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST GERMAN EDITION.

Since the appearance of Eduard Zeller's _Grundriss der Geschichte der

griechischen Philosophie_ (1883; 3d ed. 1889) the need has become even more

apparent than before for a presentation of the history of modern philosophy

which should be correspondingly compact and correspondingly available for

purposes of instruction. It would have been an ambitious undertaking to

attempt to supply a counterpart to the compendium of this honored scholar,

with its clear and simple summation of the results of his much admired five

volumes on Greek philosophy; and it has been only in regard to practical

utility and careful consideration of the needs of students--concerning

which we have enjoyed opportunity for gaining accurate information in the

review exercises regularly held in this university--that we have ventured

to hope that we might not fall too far short of his example.

The predominantly practical aim of this _History_--it is intended to serve

as an aid in introductory work, in reviewing, and as a substitute for

dictations in academical lectures, as well as to be a guide for the

wider circle of cultivated readers--has enjoined self-restraint in the

development of personal views and the limitation of critical reflections

in favor of objective presentation. It is only now and then that critical

hints have been given. In the discussion of phenomena of minor importance

it has been impossible to avoid the _oratio obliqua_ of exposition; but,

wherever practicable, we have let the philosophers themselves develop their

doctrines and reasons, not so much by literal quotations from their

works, as by free, condensed reproductions of their leading ideas. If the

principiant view of the forces which control the history of philosophy, and

of the progress of modern philosophy, expressed in the Introduction and in

the Retrospect at the end of the book, have not been everywhere verified

in detail from the historical facts, this is due in part to the limits, in

part to the pedagogical aim, of the work. Thus, in particular, more space

has for pedagogical reasons been devoted to the "psychological" explanation

of systems, as being more popular, than in our opinion its intrinsic

importance would entitle it to demand. To satisfy every one in the choice

of subjects and in the extent of the discussion is impossible; but our hope

is that those who would have preferred a guide of this sort to be entirely

different will not prove too numerous. In the classification of movements

and schools, and in the arrangement of the contents of the various systems,

it has not been our aim to deviate at all hazards from previous accounts;

and as little to leave unutilized the benefits accruing to later comers

from the distinguished achievements of earlier workers in the field. In

particular we acknowledge with gratitude the assistance derived from the

renewed study of the works on the subject by Kuno Fischer, J.E. Erdmann,

Zeller, Windelband, Ueberweg-Heinze, Harms, Lange, Vorlãnder, and Pünjer.

The motive which induced us to take up the present work was the perception

that there was lacking a text-book in the history of modern philosophy,

which, more comprehensive, thorough, and precise than the sketches of

Schwegler and his successors, should stand between the fine but detailed

exposition of Windelband, and the substantial but--because of the division

of the text into paragraphs and notes and the interpolation of pages of

bibliographical references--rather dry outline of Ueberweg. While the

former refrains from all references to the literature of the subject and

the latter includes far too many, at least for purposes of instruction, and

J.B. Meyer's _Leitfaden_ (1882) is in general confined to biographical and

bibliographical notices; we have mentioned, in the text or the notes and

with the greatest possible regard for the progress of the exposition, both

the chief works of the philosophers themselves and some of the

treatises concerning them. The principles which have guided us in these

selections--to include only the more valuable works and those best adapted

for students' reading, and further to refer as far as possible to the most

recent works--will hardly be in danger of criticism. But we shall not

dispute the probability that many a book worthy of mention may have been

overlooked.

The explanation of a number of philosophical terms, which has been added as

an appendix at the suggestion of the publishers, deals almost entirely

with foreign expressions and gives the preference to the designations of

fundamental movements. It is arranged, as far as possible, so that it may

be used as a subject-index.

JENA, December 23, 1885.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND GERMAN EDITION.

The majority of the alterations and additions in this new edition are in

the first chapter and the last two; no departure from the general character

of the exposition has seemed to me necessary. I desire to return my

sincere thanks for the suggestions which have come to me alike from public

critiques and private communications. In some cases contradictory requests

have conflicted--thus, on the one hand, I have been urged to expand, on the

other, to cut down the sections on German idealism, especially those on

Hegel--and here I confess my inability to meet both demands. Among the

reviews, that by B. Erdmann in the first volume of the _Archiv für

Geschichte der Philosophie_, and, among the suggestions made by letter,

those of H. Heussler, have been of especial value. Since others commonly

see defects more clearly than one's self, it will be very welcome if I can

have my desire continually to make this _History_ more useful supported by

farther suggestions from the circle of its readers. In case it continues to

enjoy the favor of teachers and students, these will receive conscientious

consideration.

For the sake of those who may complain of too much matter, I may remark

that the difficulty can easily be avoided by passing over Chapters I., V.

(§§ 1-3), VI., VIII., XII., XV., and XVI.

Professor A.C. Armstrong, Jr., is preparing an English translation. My

earnest thanks are due to Mr. Karl Niemann of Charlottenburg for his kind

participation in the labor of proof-reading.

R.F.

ERLANGEN, June 11, 1892.

* * * * *

%CONTENTS.%

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I.

THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION: FROM NICOLAS OF CUSA TO DESCARTES

1. Nicolas of Cusa

2. The Revival of Ancient Philosophy and the Opposition to it

3. The Italian Philosophy of Nature

4. Philosophy of the State and of Law

5. Skepticism in France

6. German Mysticism

7. The Foundation of Modern Physics

8. Philosophy in England to the Middle of the Seventeenth Century

(_a_) Bacon's Predecessors

(_b_) Bacon

(_c_) Hobbes

(_d_) Lord Herbert of Cherbury

9. Preliminary Survey

PART I.

%From Descartes to Kant.%

CHAPTER II.

DESCARTES

1. The Principles

2. Nature

3. Man

CHAPTER III.

THE DEVELOPMENT AND TRANSFORMATION OF CARTESIANISM IN THE NETHERLANDS AND

IN FRANCE

1. Occasionalism: Geulincx

2. Spinoza

_(a)_ Substance, Attributes, and Modes

_(b)_ Anthropology; Cognition and the Passions

_(c)_ Practical Philosophy

3. Pascal, Malebranche, Bayle

CHAPTER IV.

LOCKE

_(a)_ Theory of Knowledge

_(b)_ Practical Philosophy

CHAPTER V.

ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

1. Natural Philosophy and Psychology

2. Deism

3. Moral Philosophy

4. Theory of Knowledge

_(a)_ Berkeley

_(b)_ Hume

_(c)_ The Scottish School

CHAPTER VI.

THE FRENCH ILLUMINATION

1. The Entrance of English Doctrines

2. Theoretical and Practical Sensationalism

3. Skepticism and Materialism

4. Rousseau's Conflict with the Illumination

CHAPTER VII.

LEIBNITZ

1. Metaphysics: the Monads, Representation, the Pre-established Harmony;

the Laws of Thought and of the World

2. The Organic World

3. Man: Cognition and Volition

4. Theology and Theodicy

CHAPTER VIII.

THE GERMAN ILLUMINATION

1. The Contemporaries of Leibnitz

2. Christian Wolff

3. The Illumination as Scientific and as Popular Philosophy

4. The Faith Philosophy

PART II.

%From Kant to the Present Time.%

CHAPTER IX.

KANT

1. Theory of Knowledge

_(a)_ The Pure Intuitions (Transcendental Aesthetic)

_(b)_ The Concepts and Principles of the Pure Understanding

(Transcendental Analytic)

_(c)_ The Reason's Ideas of the Unconditioned (Transcendental

Dialectic)

2. Theory of Ethics

3. Theory of the Beautiful and of Ends in Nature

_(a)_ Aesthetic Judgment

_(b)_ Teleological Judgment

4. From Kant to Fichte

CHAPTER X.

FICHTE

1. The Science of Knowledge

_(a)_ The Problem

_(b)_ The Three Principles

_(c)_ The Theoretical Ego

_(d)_ The Practical Ego

2. The Science of Ethics and of Right

3. Fichte's Second Period: his View of History and his Theory

of Religion

CHAPTER XI.

SCHELLING

1_a_. Philosophy of Nature

1_b_. Transcendental Philosophy

2. System of Identity

3_a_. Doctrine of Freedom

3_b_. Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation

CHAPTER XII.

SCHELLING'S CO-WORKERS

1. The Philosophers of Nature

2. The Philosophers of Identity (F. Krause)

3. The Philosophers of Religion (Baader and Schleiermacher)

CHAPTER XIII.

HEGEL

1. Hegel's View of the World and his Method

2. The System

(_a_) Logic

(_b_) The Philosophy of Nature

(_c_) The Doctrine of Subjective Spirit

(_d_) The Doctrine of Objective Spirit

(_e_) Absolute Spirit

CHAPTER XIV.

THE OPPOSITION TO CONSTRUCTIVE IDEALISM: FRIES, HERBART, SCHOPENHAUER

1. The Psychologists: Fries and Beneke

2. Realism: Herbart

3. Pessimism: Schopenhauer

CHAPTER XV.

PHILOSOPHY OUT OF GERMANY

1. Italy

2. France

3. Great Britain and America

4. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Holland

CHAPTER XVI.

GERMAN PHILOSOPHY SINCE THE DEATH OF HEGEL

1. From the Division of the Hegelian School to the Materialistic

Controversy

2. New Systems: Trendelenburg, Fechner, Lotze, and Hartmann

3. From the Revival of the Kantian Philosophy to the Present Time

(_a_) Neo-Kantianism, Positivism, and Kindred Phenomena

(_b_) Idealistic Reaction against the Scientific Spirit

(_c_) The Special Philosophical Sciences

4. Retrospect

INDEX

* * * * *

INTRODUCTION.

In no other department is a thorough knowledge of history so important as

in philosophy. Like historical science in general, philosophy is, on the

one hand, in touch with exact inquiry, while, on the other, it has a

certain relationship with art. With the former it has in common its

methodical procedure and its cognitive aim; with the latter, its intuitive

character and the endeavor to compass the whole of reality with a glance.

Metaphysical principles are less easily verified from experience than

physical hypotheses, but also less easily refuted. Systems of philosophy,

therefore, are not so dependent on our progressive knowledge of facts as

the theories of natural science, and change less quickly; notwithstanding

their mutual conflicts, and in spite of the talk about discarded

standpoints, they possess in a measure the permanence of classical works of

art, they retain for all time a certain relative validity. The thought of

Plato, of Aristotle, and of the heroes of modern philosophy is ever proving

anew its fructifying power. Nowhere do we find such instructive errors as

in the sphere of philosophy; nowhere is the new so essentially a completion

and development of the old, even though it deem itself the whole and assume

a hostile attitude toward its predecessors; nowhere is the inquiry so much

more important than the final result; nowhere the categories "true and

false" so inadequate. The spirit of the time and the spirit of the people,

the individuality of the thinker, disposition, will, fancy--all these exert

a far stronger influence on the development of philosophy, both by way of

promotion and by way of hindrance, than in any other department of thought.

If a system gives classical expression to the thought of an epoch, a

nation, or a great personality; if it seeks to attack the world-riddle from

a new direction, or brings us nearer its solution by important original

conceptions, by a subtler or a simpler comprehension of the problem, by a

wider outlook or a deeper insight; it has accomplished more than it could

have done by bringing forward a number of indisputably correct principles.

The variations in philosophy, which, on the assumption of the unity of

truth, are a rock of offense to many minds, may be explained, on the one

hand, by the combination of complex variety and limitation in the motives

which govern philosophical thought,--for it is the whole man that

philosophizes, not his understanding merely,--and, on the other, by the

inexhaustible extent of the field of philosophy. Back of the logical labor

of proof and inference stand, as inciting, guiding, and hindering agents,

psychical and historical forces, which are themselves in large measure

alogical, though stronger than all logic; while just before stretches

away the immeasurable domain of reality, at once inviting and resisting

conquest. The grave contradictions, so numerous in both the subjective

and the objective fields, make unanimity impossible concerning ultimate

problems; in fact, they render it difficult for the individual thinker to

combine his convictions into a self-consistent system. Each philosopher

sees limited sections of the world only, and these through his own eyes;

every system is one-sided. Yet it is this multiplicity and variety of

systems alone which makes the aim of philosophy practicable as it endeavors

to give a complete picture of the soul and of the universe. The history of

philosophy is the philosophy of humanity, that great individual, which,

with more extended vision than the instruments through which it works,

is able to entertain opposing principles, and which, reconciling old

contradictions as it discovers new ones, approaches by a necessary and

certain growth the knowledge of the one all-embracing truth, which is

rich and varied beyond our conception. In order to energetic labor in the

further progress of philosophy, it is necessary to imagine that the goddess

of truth is about to lift the veil which has for centuries concealed her.

The historian of philosophy, on the contrary, looks on each new system as

a stone, which, when shaped and fitted into its place, will help to raise

higher the pyramid of knowledge. Hegel's doctrine of the necessity

and motive force of contradictories, of the relative justification of

standpoints, and the systematic development of speculation, has great and

permanent value as a general point of view. It needs only to be guarded

from narrow scholastic application to become a safe canon for the

historical treatment of philosophy.

In speaking above of the worth of the philosophical doctrines of the past

as defying time, and as comparable to the standard character of finished

works of art, the special reference was to those elements in speculation

which proceed less from abstract thinking than from the fancy, the heart,

and the character of the individual, and even more directly from the

disposition of the people; and which to a certain degree may be divorced

from logical reasoning and the scientific treatment of particular

questions. These may be summed up under the phrase, views of the world. The

necessity for constant reconsideration of them is from this standpoint at

once evident. The Greek view of the world is as classic as the plastic art

of Phidias and the epic of Homer; the Christian, as eternally valid as the

architecture of the Middle Ages; the modern, as irrefutable as Goethe's

poetry and the music of Beethoven. The views of the world which proceed

from the spirits of different ages, as products of the general development

of culture, are not so much thoughts as rhythms in thinking, not theories

but modes of intuition saturated with feelings of worth. We may dispute

about them, it is true; we may argue against them or in their defense; but

they can neither be established nor overthrown by cogent proofs. It is not

only optimism and pessimism, determinism and indeterminism, that have their

ultimate roots in the affective side of our nature, but pantheism and

individualism, also idealism and materialism, even rationalism and

sensationalism. Even though they operate with the instruments of thought,

they remain in the last analysis matters of faith, of feeling, and of

resolution. The aesthetic view of the world held by the Greeks, the

transcendental-religious view of Christianity, the intellectual view of

Leibnitz and Hegel, the panthelistic views of Fichte I and Schopenhauer are

vital forces, not doctrines, postulates, not results of thought. One view

of the world is forced to yield its pre-eminence to another, which it has

itself helped to produce by its own one-sidedness; only to reconquer its

opponent later, when it has learned from her, when it has been purified,

corrected, and deepened by the struggle. But the elder contestant is no

more confuted by the younger than the drama of Sophocles by the drama of

Shakespeare, than youth by age or spring by autumn.

If it is thus indubitable that the views of the world held in earlier times

deserve to live on in the memory of man, and to live as something better

than mere reminders of the past--the history of philosophy is not a cabinet

of antiquities, but a museum of typical products of the mind--the value

and interest of the historical study of the past in relation to the exact

scientific side of philosophical inquiry is not less evident. In every

science it is useful to trace the origin and growth of problems and

theories, and doubly so in philosophy. With her it is by no means the

universal rule that progress shows itself by the result; the statement of

the question is often more important than the answer. The problem is more

sharply defined in a given direction; or it becomes more comprehensive,

is analyzed and refined; or if now it threatens to break up into subtle

details, some genius appears to simplify it and force our thoughts back

to the fundamental question. This advance in problems, which happily is

everywhere manifested by unmistakable signs, is, in the case of many of the

questions which irresistibly force themselves upon the human heart, the

only certain gain from centuries of endeavor. The labor here is of more

value than the result.

In treating the history of philosophy, two extremes must be avoided,

lawless individualism and abstract logical formalism. The history

of philosophy is neither a disconnected succession of arbitrary

individual opinions and clever guesses, nor a mechanically developed series

of typical standpoints and problems, which imply one another in just the

form and order historically assumed. The former supposition does violence

to the regularity of philosophical development, the latter to its vitality.

In the one case, the connection is conceived too loosely, in the other, too

rigidly and simply. One view underestimates the power of the logical Idea,

the other overestimates it. It is not easy to support the principle that

chance rules the destiny of philosophy, but it is more difficult to avoid

the opposite conviction of the one-sidedness of formalistic construction,

and to define the nature and limits of philosophical necessity. The

development of philosophy is, perhaps, one chief aim of the world-process,

but it is certainly not the only one; it is a part of the universal aim,

and it is not surprising that the instruments of its realization do not

work exclusively in its behalf, that their activity brings about results,

which seem unessential for philosophical ends or obstacles in their way.

Philosophical ideas do not think themselves, but are thought by living

spirits, which are something other and better than mere thought

machines--by spirits who live these thoughts, who fill them with personal

warmth and passionately defend them. There is often reason, no doubt, for

the complaint that the personality which has undertaken to develop some

great idea is inadequate to the task, that it carries its subjective

defects into the matter in hand, that it does too much or too little, or

the right thing in the wrong way, so that the spirit of philosophy seems

to have erred in the choice and the preparation of its instrument. But the

reverse side of the picture must also be taken into account. The thinking

spirit is more limited, it is true, than were desirable for the perfect

execution of a definite logical task; but, on the other hand, it is far

too rich as well. A soulless play of concepts would certainly not help

the cause, and there is no disadvantage in the failure of the history of

philosophy to proceed so directly and so scholastically, as, for instance,

in the system of Hegel. A graded series of interconnected general forces

mediate between the logical Idea and the individual thinker--the spirit of

the people, of the age, of the thinker's vocation, of his time of life,

which are felt by the individual as part of himself and whose impulses

he unconsciously obeys. In this way the modifying, furthering, hindering

correlation of higher and lower, of the ruler with his commands and the

servant with his more or less willing obedience, is twice repeated, the

situation being complicated further by the fact that the subject affected

by these historical forces himself helps to make history. The most

important factor in philosophical progress is, of course, the state of

inquiry at the time, the achievements of the thinkers of the immediately

preceding age; and in this relation of a philosopher to his predecessors,

again, a distinction must be made between a logical and a psychological

element. The successor often commences his support, his development, or his

refutation at a point quite unwelcome to the constructive historian. At all

events, if we may judge from the experience of the past, too much caution

cannot be exercised in setting up formal laws for the development of

thought. According to the law of contradiction and reconciliation, a

Schopenhauer must have followed directly after Leibnitz, to oppose his

pessimistic ethelism to the optimistic intellectualism of the latter; when,

in turn, a Schleiermacher, to give an harmonic resolution of the antithesis

into a concrete doctrine of feeling, would have made a fine third. But it

turned out otherwise, and we must be content.

* * * * *

The estimate of the value of the history of philosophy in general, given at

the start, is the more true of the history of modern philosophy, since the

movement introduced by the latter still goes on unfinished. We are still at

work on the problems which were brought forward by Descartes, Locke, and

Leibnitz, and which Kant gathered up into the critical or transcendental

question. The present continues to be governed by the ideal of culture

which Bacon proposed and Fichte exalted to a higher level; we all live

under the unweakened spell of that view of the world which was developed in

hostile opposition to Scholasticism, and through the enduring influence of

those mighty geographical and scientific discoveries and religious reforms

which marked the entrance of the modern period. It is true, indeed, that

the transition brought about by Kant's noëtical and ethical revolution was

of great significance,--more significant even than the Socratic period,

with which we are fond of comparing it; much that was new was woven on,

much of the old, weakened, broken, destroyed. And yet, if we take into

account the historical after-influence of Cartesianism, we shall find that

the thread was only knotted and twisted by Kantianism, not cut through. The

continued power of the pre-Kantian modes of thought is shown by the fact

that Spinoza has been revived in Fichte and Schelling, Leibnitz in Herbart

and Hegel, the sensationalism of the French Illuminati in Feuerbach; and

that even materialism, which had been struck down by the criticism of the

reason (one would have thought forever), has again raised its head. Even

that most narrow tendency of the early philosophy of the modern period, the

apotheosis of cognition is,--in spite of the moralistic counter-movement

of Kant and Fichte,--the controlling motive in the last of the great

idealistic systems, while it also continues to exercise a marvelously

powerful influence on the convictions of our Hegel-weary age, alike within

the sphere of philosophy and (still more) without it. In view of the

intimate relations between contemporary inquiry and the progress of thought

since the beginning of the modern period, acquaintance with the latter,

which it is the aim of this _History_ to facilitate, becomes a pressing

duty. To study the history of philosophy since Descartes is to study the

pre-conditions of contemporary philosophy.

We begin with an outline sketch of the general characteristics of modern

philosophy. These may be most conveniently described by comparing them with

the characteristics of ancient and of mediaeval philosophy. The character

of ancient philosophy or Greek philosophy,--for they are practically the

same,--is predominantly aesthetic. The Greek holds beauty and truth closely

akin and inseparable; "cosmos" is his common expression for the world and

for ornament. The universe is for him a harmony, an organism, a work of

art, before which he stands in admiration and reverential awe. In quiet

contemplation, as with the eye of a connoisseur, he looks upon the world or

the individual object as a well-ordered whole, more disposed to enjoy the

congruity of its parts than to study out its ultimate elements. He prefers

contemplation to analysis, his thought is plastic, not anatomical. He finds

the nature of the object in its form; and ends give him the key to the

comprehension of events. Discovering human elements everywhere, he is

always ready with judgments of worth--the stars move in circles because

circular motion is the most perfect; the right is better than left, upper

finer than lower, that which precedes more beautiful than that which

follows. Thinkers in whom this aesthetic reverence is weaker than the

analytic impulse--especially Democritus--seem half modern rather than

Greek. By the side of the Greek philosophy, in its sacred festal garb,

stands the modern in secular workday dress, in the laborer's blouse, with

the merciless chisel of analysis in its hand. This does not seek beauty,

but only the naked truth, no matter what it be. It holds it impossible to

satisfy at once the understanding and taste; nay, nakedness, ugliness,

and offensiveness seem to it to testify for, rather than against, the

genuineness of truth. In its anxiety not to read human elements into

nature, it goes so far as completely to read spirit out of nature. The

world is not a living whole, but a machine; not a work of art which is to

be viewed in its totality and enjoyed with reverence, but a clock-movement

to be taken apart in order to be understood. Nowhere are there ends in the

world, but everywhere mechanical causes. The character of modern thought

would appear to a Greek returned to earth very sober, unsplendid, undevout,

and intrusive. And, in fact, modern philosophy has a considerable amount

of prose about it, is not easily impressed, accepts no limitations from

feeling, and holds nothing too sacred to be attacked with the weapon of

analytic thought. And yet it combines penetration with intrusiveness;

acuteness, coolness, and logical courage with its soberness. Never before

has the demand for unprejudiced thought and certain knowledge been made

with equal earnestness. This interest in knowledge for its own sake

developed so suddenly and with such strength that, in presumptuous

gladness, men believed that no previous age had rightly understood what

truth and love for truth are. The natural consequence was a general

overestimation of cognition at the expense of all other mental activities.

Even among the Greek thinkers, thought was held by the majority to be the

noblest and most divine function. But their intellectualism was checked

by the aesthetic and eudaemonistic element, and preserved from the

one-sidedness which it manifests in the modern period, because of the

lack of an effective counterpoise. However eloquently Bacon commends the

advantages to be derived from the conquest of nature, he still understands

inquiry for inquiry's sake, and honors it as supreme; even the ethelistic

philosophers, Fichte and Schopenhauer, pay their tribute to the prejudice

in favor of intellectualism. The fact that the modern period can show

no one philosophic writer of the literary rank of Plato, even though it

includes such masters of style as Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and

Lotze, not to speak of lesser names, is an external proof of how noticeably

the aesthetic impulse has given way to one purely intellectual.

When we turn to the character of mediaeval thinking; we find, instead of

the aesthetic views of antiquity and the purely scientific tendency of the

modern era, a distinctively religious spirit. Faith prescribes the objects

and the limitations of knowledge; everything is referred to the hereafter,

thought becomes prayer. Men speculate concerning the attributes of God, on

the number and rank of the angels, on the immortality of man--all purely

transcendental subjects. Side by side with these, it is true, the world

receives loving attention, but always as the lower story merely,[1] above

which, with its own laws, rises the true fatherland, the kingdom of grace.

The most subtle acuteness is employed in the service of dogma, with the

task of fathoming the how and why of things whose existence is certified

elsewhere. The result is a formalism in thought side by side with profound

and fervent mysticism. Doubt and trust are strangely intermingled, and a

feeling of expectation stirs all hearts. On the one side stands sinful,

erring man, who, try as hard as he may, only half unravels the mysteries of

revealed truth; on the other, the God of grace, who, after our death, will

reveal himself to us as clearly as Adam knew him before the fall. God

alone, however, can comprehend himself--for the finite spirit, even

truth unveiled is mystery, and ecstasy, unresisting devotion to the

incomprehensible, the culmination of knowledge. In mediaeval philosophy

the subject looks longingly upward to the infinite object of his thought,

expecting that the latter will bend down toward him or lift him upward

toward itself; in Greek philosophy the spirit confronts its object, the

world, on a footing of equality; in modern philosophy the speculative

subject feels himself higher than the object, superior to nature. In

the conception of the Middle Ages, truth and mystery are identical; to

antiquity they appear reconcilable; modern thought holds them as mutually

exclusively as light and darkness. The unknown is the enemy of knowledge,

which must be chased out of its last hiding-place. It is, therefore, easy

to understand that the modern period stands in far sharper antithesis to

the mediaeval era than to the ancient, for the latter has furnished it many

principles which can be used as weapons against the former. Grandparents

and grandchildren make good friends.

[Footnote 1: On the separation and union of the three worlds, _natura,

gratia, gloria_, in Thomas Aquinas, cf. Rudolph Eucken, _Die Philosophie

des Thomas von Aquino und die Kultur der Neuzeit_, Halle. 1886.]

When a new movement is in preparation, but there is a lack of creative

force to give it form, a period of tumultuous disaffection with existing

principles ensues. What is wanted is not clearly perceived, but there is a

lively sense of that which is not wanted. Dissatisfaction prepares a place

for that which is to come by undermining the existent and making it

ripe for its fall. The old, the outgrown, the doctrine which had become

inadequate, was in this case Scholasticism; modern philosophy shows

throughout--and most clearly at the start--an anti-Scholastic character. If

up to this time Church dogma had ruled unchallenged in spiritual affairs,

and the Aristotelian philosophy in things temporal, war is now declared

against authority of every sort and freedom of thought is inscribed on

the banner.[1] "Modern philosophy is Protestantism in the sphere of the

thinking spirit" (Erdmann). Not that which has been considered true for

centuries, not that which another says, though he be Aristotle or Thomas

Aquinas, not that which flatters the desires of the heart, is true, but

that only which is demonstrated to my own understanding with convincing

force. Philosophy is no longer willing to be the handmaid of theology,

but must set up a house of her own. The watchword now becomes freedom and

independent thought, deliverance from every form of constraint, alike from

the bondage of ecclesiastical decrees and the inner servitude of prejudice

and cherished inclinations. But the adoption of a purpose leads to the

consideration of the means for attaining it. Thus the thirst for knowledge

raises questions concerning the method, the instruments, and the limits of

knowledge; the interest in noëtics and methodology vigorously develops,

remains a constant factor in modern inquiry, and culminates in Kant, not

again to die away.

[Footnote 1: The doctrine of twofold truth, under whose protecting cloak

the new liberal movements had hitherto taken refuge, was now disdainfully

repudiated. Cf. Freudenthal, _Zur Beurtheilung der Scholastik_, in vol.

iii. of the _Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie_, 1890. Also, H. Reuter,

_Geschichte der religiösen Aufklärung im Mittelalter_ 1875-77; and Dilthey,

_Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften_, 1883.]

This negative aspect of modern tendencies needs, however, a positive

supplement. The mediaeval mode of thought is discarded and the new one is

not yet found. What can more fittingly furnish a support, a preliminary

substitute, than antiquity? Thus philosophy, also, joins in that great

stream of culture, the Renaissance and humanism, which, starting from

Italy, poured forth over the whole civilized world. Plato and Neoplatonism,

Epicurus and the Stoa are opposed to Scholasticism, the real Aristotle to

the transformed Aristotle of the Church and the distorted Aristotle of the

schools. Back to the sources, is the cry. With the revival of the ancient

languages and ancient books, the spirit of antiquity is also revived. The

dust of the schools and the tyranny of the Church are thrown off, and the

classical ideal of a free and noble humanity gains enthusiastic adherents.

The man is not to be forgotten in the Christian, nor art and science, the

rights and the riches of individuality in the interest of piety; work for

the future must not blind us to the demands of the present nor lead us to

neglect the comprehensive cultivation of the natural capacities of the

spirit. The world and man are no longer viewed through Christian eyes, the

one as a realm of darkness and the other as a vessel of weakness and wrath,

but nature and life gleam before the new generation in joyous, hopeful

light. Humanism and optimism have always been allied.

This change in the spirit of thought is accompanied by a corresponding

change in the object of thought: theology must yield its supremacy to the

knowledge of nature. Weary of Christological and soteriological questions,

weary of disputes concerning the angels, the thinking spirit longs to

make himself at home in the world it has learned to love, demands real

knowledge,--knowledge which is of practical utility,--and no longer seeks

God outside the world, but in it and above it. Nature becomes the home, the

body of God. Transcendence gives place to immanence, not only in theology,

but elsewhere. Modern philosophy is naturalistic in spirit, not only

because it takes nature for its favorite object, but also because it

carries into other branches of knowledge the mathematical method so

successful in natural science, because it considers everything _sub ratione

naturae_ and insists on the "natural" explanation of all phenomena, even

those of ethics and politics.

In a word, the tendency of modern philosophy is anti-Scholastic,

humanistic, and naturalistic. This summary must suffice for preliminary

orientation, while the detailed division, particularization, modification,

and limitation of these general points must be left for later treatment.

Two further facts, however, may receive preliminary notice. The

indifference and hostility to the Church which have been cited among the

prominent characteristics of modern philosophy, do not necessarily mean

enmity to the Christian religion, much less to religion in general. In

part, it is merely a change in the object of religious feeling, which

blazes up especially strong and enthusiastic in the philosophy of the

sixteenth century, as it transfers its worship from a transcendent deity to

a universe indued with a soul; in part, the opposition is directed against

the mediaeval, ecclesiastical form of Christianity, with its monastic

abandonment of the world. It was often nothing but a very deep and strong

religious feeling that led thinkers into the conflict with the hierarchy.

Since the elements of permanent worth in the tendencies, doctrines, and

institutions of the Middle Ages are thus culled out from that which is

corrupt and effete, and preserved by incorporation into the new view of the

world and the new science, and as fruitful elements from antiquity enter

with them, the progress of philosophy shows a continuous enrichment in

its ideas, intuitions, and spirit. The old is not simply discarded and

destroyed, but purified, transformed, and assimilated. The same fact

forces itself into notice if we consider the relations of nationality and

philosophy in the three great eras. The Greek philosophy was entirely

national in its origin and its public, it was rooted in the character of

the people and addressed itself to fellow-countrymen; not until toward its

decline, and not until influenced by Christianity, were its cosmopolitan

inclinations aroused. The Middle Ages were indifferent to national

distinctions, as to everything earthly, and naught was of value in

comparison with man's transcendent destiny. Mediaeval philosophy is in its

aims un-national, cosmopolitan, catholic; it uses the Latin of the schools,

it seeks adherents in every land, it finds everywhere productive

spirits whose labors in its service remain unaffected by their national

peculiarities. The modern period returns to the nationalism of antiquity,

but does not relinquish the advantage gained by the extension of mediaeval

thought to the whole civilized world. The roots of modern philosophy are

sunk deep in the fruitful soil of nationality, while the top of the

tree spreads itself far beyond national limitations. It is national and

cosmopolitan together; it is international as the common property of the

various peoples, which exchange their philosophical gifts through an active

commerce of ideas. Latin is often retained for use abroad, as the

universal language of savants, but many a work is first published in the

mother-tongue--and thought in it. Thus it becomes possible for the ideas

of the wise to gain an entrance into the consciousness of the people, from

whose spirit they have really sprung, and to become a power beyond the

circle of the learned public. Philosophy as illumination, as a factor in

general culture, is an exclusively modern phenomenon. In this speculative

intercourse of nations, however, the French, the English, and the Germans

are most involved, both as producers and consumers. France gives the

initiative (in Descartes), then England assumes the leadership (in Locke),

with Leibnitz and Kant the hegemony passes over to Germany. Besides these

powers, Italy takes an eager part in the production of philosophical

ideas in the period of ferment before Descartes. Each of these nations

contributes elements to the total result which it alone is in a position

to furnish, and each is rewarded by gifts in return which it would be

incapable of producing out of its own store. This international exchange of

ideas, in which each gives and each receives, and the fact that the chief

modern thinkers, especially in the earlier half of the era, prior to Kant,

are in great part not philosophers by profession but soldiers, statesmen,

physicians, as well as natural scientists, historians, and priests, give

modern philosophy an unprofessional, worldly appearance, in striking

contrast to the clerical character of mediaeval, and the prophetic

character of ancient thinking.

Germany, England, and France claim the honor of having produced the first

_modern_ philosopher, presenting Nicolas of Cusa, Bacon of Verulam, and

René Descartes as their candidates, while Hobbes, Bruno, and Montaigne have

received only scattered votes. The claim of England is the weakest of all,

for, without intending to diminish Bacon's importance, it may be said that

the programme which he develops--and in essence his philosophy is nothing

more--was, in its leading principles, not first announced by him, and

not carried out with sufficient consistency. The dispute between the two

remaining contestants may be easily and equitably settled by making the

simple distinction between forerunner and beginner, between path-breaker

and founder. The entrance of a new historical era is not accompanied by an

audible click, like the beginning of a new piece on a music-box, but is

gradually effected. A considerable period may intervene between the point

when the new movement flashes up, not understood and half unconscious of

itself, and the time when it appears on the stage in full strength and

maturity, recognizing itself as new and so acknowledged by others: the

period of ferment between the Middle Ages and modern times lasted almost

two centuries. It is in the end little more than logomachy to discuss

whether this time of anticipation and desire, of endeavor and partial

success, in which the new struggles with the old without conquering it, and

the opposite tendencies in the conflicting views of the world interplay in

a way at once obscure and wayward, is to be classed as the epilogue of the

old era or the prologue of the new. The simple solution to take it as a

_transition period_, no longer mediaeval but not yet modern, has met with

fairly general acceptance. Nicolas of Cusa (1401-64) was the first to

announce _fundamental principles_ of modern philosophy--he is the leader in

this intermediate preparatory period. Descartes (1596-1650) brought forward

the first _system_--he is the father of modern philosophy.

A brief survey of the literature may be added in conclusion:

Heinrich Ritter's _Geschichte der neueren Philosophie_ (vols. ix.-xii. of

his _Geschichte der Philosophie_), 1850-53, to Wolff and Rousseau, has

been superseded by more recent works, J.E. Erdmann's able _Versuch einer

wissenschaftlichen Darstellung der neueren Philosophie_ (6 vols., 1834-53)

gives in appendices literal excerpts from non-German writers; the same

author's _Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie_ (2 vols., 1869; 3d ed.,

1878) contains at the end the first exposition of German Philosophy since

the Death of Hegel [English translation in 3 vols., edited by W. S. Hough,

1890.--TR.]. Ueberweg's _Grundriss_ (7th ed. by M. Heinze, 1888) is

indispensable for reference on account of the completeness of its

bibliographical notes, which, however, are confusing to the beginner

[English translation by G.S. Morris, with additions by the translator, Noah

Porter, and Vincenzo Botta, New York, 1872-74.--TR.]. The most detailed and

brilliant exposition has been given by Kuno Fischer (1854 seq.; 3d

ed., 1878 seq.; the same author's _Baco und seine Nachfolger_, 2d ed.,

1875,--English translation, 1857, by Oxenford,--supplements the first two

volumes of the _Geschichte der neueren Philosophie_). This work, which is

important also as a literary achievement, is better fitted than any other

to make the reader at home in the ideal world of the great philosophers,

which it reconstructs from its central point, and to prepare him for the

study (which, of course, even the best exposition cannot replace) of the

works of the thinkers themselves. Its excessive simplification of problems

is not of great moment in the first introduction to a system [English

translation of vol. iii. book 2 (1st ed.), _A Commentary on Kant's Critick

of the Pure Reason_, by J.P. Mahaffy, London, 1866; vol. i. part 1 and part

2, book 1, _Descartes and his School_, by J, P. Gordy, New York, 1887;

of vol. v. chaps, i.-v., _A Critique of Kant_, by W.S. Hough, London,

1888.--TR.]. Wilhelm Windelband _(Geschichte der neueren Philosophie_,

2 vols., 1878 and 1880, to Hegel and Herbart inclusive) accentuates the

connection of philosophy with general culture and the particular sciences,

and emphasizes philosophical method. This work is pleasant reading, yet, in

the interest of clearness, we could wish that the author had given more

of positive information concerning the content of the doctrines treated,

instead of merely advancing reflections on them. A projected third volume

is to trace the development of philosophy down to the present time.

Windelband's compendium, _Geschichte der Philosophie_, 1890-91, is

distinguished from other expositions by the fact that, for the most part,

it confines itself to a history of _problems_. Baumann's _Geschichte der

Philosophie_, 1890, aims to give a detailed account of those thinkers only

who have advanced views individual either in their content or in their

proof. Eduard Zeller has given his _Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie

seit Leibniz_ (1873; 2d ed., 1875) the benefit of the same thorough

and comprehensive knowledge and mature judgment which have made his

_Philosophie der Griechen_ a classic. [Bowen's _Modern Philosophy_,

New York, 1857 (6th ed., 1891); Royce's _Spirit of Modern Philosophy_,

1892.--TR.]

Eugen Dühring's hypercritical _Kritische Geschichte der Philosophie_

(1869; 3d ed., 1878) can hardly be recommended to students. Lewes (German

translation, 1876) assumes a positivistic standpoint; Thilo (1874), a

position exclusively Herbartian; A. Stoeckl (3d ed., 1889) writes from the

standpoint of confessional Catholicism; Vincenz Knauer (2d ed., 1882) is

a Güntherian. With the philosophico-historical work of Chr. W. Sigwart

(1854), and one of the same date by Oischinger, we are not intimately

acquainted.

Expositions of philosophy since Kant have been given by the Hegelian, C.L.

Michelet (a larger one in 2 vols., 1837-38, and a smaller one, 1843); by

Chalybaeus (1837; 5th ed., 1860, formerly very popular and worthy of it,

English, 1854); by Fr. K. Biedermann (1842-43); by Carl Fortlage (1852,

Kantio-Fichtean standpoint); and by Friedrich Harms (1876). The last of

these writers unfortunately did not succeed in giving a sufficiently clear

and precise, not to say tasteful, form to the valuable ideas and original

conceptions in which his work is rich. The very popular exposition by an

anonymous author of Hegelian tendencies, _Deutschlands Denker seit Kant_

(Dessau, 1851), hardly deserves mention.

Further, we may mention some of the works which treat the historical

development of particular subjects: On the history of the _philosophy of

religion_, the first volume of Otto Pfleiderer's _Religionsphilosophie auf

geschichtlicher Grundlage_ (2d ed., 1883;--English translation by Alexander

Stewart and Allan Menzies, 1886-88.--TR.), and the very trustworthy

exposition by Bernhard Pünjer (2 vols., 1880, 1883; English translation by

W. Hastie, vol. i., 1887.--TR.). On the history of _practical philosophy_,

besides the first volume of I.H. Fichte's _Ethik_ (1850), Franz Vorländer's

_Geschichte der philosophischen Moral, Rechts- und Staatslehre der

Engländer und Franzosen_ (1855); Fr. Jodl, _Geschichte der Ethik in der

neueren Philosophie_ (2 vols., 1882, 1889), and Bluntschli, _Geschichte der

neueren Staatswissenschaft_ (3d ed., 1881); [Sidgwick's _Outlines of

the History of Ethics_, 3d ed., 1892, and Martineau's _Types of Ethical

Theory_, 3d ed., 1891.--TR.]. On the history of the _philosophy of

history_: Rocholl, _Die Philosophie der Geschichte_, 1878; Richard Fester,

_Rousseau und die deutsche Geschichtsphilosophie_, 1890 [Flint, _The

Philosophy of History in Europe_, vol. i., 1874, complete in 3 vols., 1893

_seq_.]. On the history of _aesthetics_, R. Zimmermann, 1858; H. Lotze,

1868; Max Schasler, 1871; Ed. von Hartmann (since Kant), 1886; Heinrich

von Stein, _Die Entstehung der neueren Aesthetik_ (1886); [Bosanquet, _A

History of Aesthetic_, 1892.--TR.]. Further, Fr. Alb. Lange, _Geschichte

des Materialismus_, 1866; 4th ed., 1882; [English translation by E.C.

Thomas, 3 vols., 1878-81.--TR.]; Jul. Baumann, _Die Lehren von Raum, Zeit

und Mathematik in der neueren Philosophie_, 1868-69; Edm. König, _Die

Entwickelung des Causalproblems von Cartesius bis Kant_, 1888, _seit

Kant_, 1890; Kurd Lasswitz, _Geschichte der Atomistik vom Mittelalter bis

Newton_, 2 vols., 1890; Ed. Grimm, _Zur Geschichte des Erkenntnissproblems,

von Bacon zu Hume_, 1890. The following works are to be recommended on the

period of transition: Moritz Carrière, _Die philosophische Weltanschauung

der Reformationszeit_, 1847; 2d ed., 1887; and Jacob Burckhardt, _Kultur

der Renaissance in Italien_, 4th ed., 1886. Reference may also be made to

A. Trendelenburg, _Historische Beiträge zur Philosophie_, 3 vols., 1846-67;

Rudolph Eucken, _Geschichte und Kritik der Grundbegriffe der Gegenwart_,

1878; [English translation by M. Stuart Phelps, 1880.--TR.]; the same,

_Geschichte der philosophischen Terminologie_, 1879; the same, _Beiträge

zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie_, 1886 (including a valuable

paper on parties and party names in philosophy); the same, _Die

Lebensanschauungen der grossen Denker_, 1890; Ludwig Noack,

_Philosophiegeschichtliches Lexicon_, 1879; Ed. Zeller, _Vorträge und

Abhandlungen_, three series, 1865-84; Chr. von Sigwart, _Kleine Schriften_,

2 vols., 1881; 2d ed., 1889. R. Seydel's _Religion und Philosophie_, 1887,

contains papers on Luther, Schleiermacher, Schelling, Weisse, Fechner,

Lotze, Hartmann, Darwinism, etc., which are well worth reading.

Among the smaller compends Schwegler's (1848; recent editions revised

and supplemented by R. Koeber) remains still the least bad [English

translations by Seelye and Smith, revised edition with additions, New York,

1880; and J.H. Stirling, with annotations, 7th ed., 1879.--TR.]. The meager

sketches by Deter, Koeber, Kirchner, Kuhn, Rabus, Vogel, and others are

useful for review at least. Fritz Schultze's _Stammbaum der Philosophie_,

1890, gives skillfully constructed tabular outlines, but, unfortunately, in

a badly chosen form.

CHAPTER I.

THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION: FROM NICOLAS OF CUSA TO DESCARTES.

The essays at philosophy which made their appearance between the middle of

the fifteenth century and the middle of the seventeenth, exhibit mediaeval

and modern characteristics in such remarkable intermixture that they can

be assigned exclusively to neither of these two periods. There are eager

longings, lofty demands, magnificent plans, and promising outlooks in

abundance, but a lack of power to endure, a lack of calmness and maturity;

while the shackles against which the leading minds revolt still bind too

firmly both the leaders and those to whom they speak. Only here and there

are the fetters loosened and thrown off; if the hands are successfully

freed, the clanking chains still hamper the feet. It is a time just suited

for original thinkers, a remarkable number of whom in fact make their

appearance, side by side or in close succession. Further, however little

these are able to satisfy the demand for permanent results, they ever

arouse our interest anew by the boldness and depth of their brilliant

ideas, which alternate with quaint fancies or are pervaded by them; by the

youthful courage with which they attacked great questions; and not least

by the hard fate which rewarded their efforts with misinterpretation,

persecution, and death at the stake. We must quickly pass over the broad

threshold between modern philosophy and Scholastic philosophy, which is

bounded by the year 1450, in which Nicolas of Cusa wrote his chief

work, the _Idiota_, and 1644, when Descartes began the new era with

his _Principia Philosophiae_; and can touch, in passing, only the most

important factors. We shall begin our account of this transition period

with Nicolas, and end it with the Englishmen, Bacon, Hobbes, and Lord

Herbert of Cherbury. Between these we shall arrange the various figures

of the Philosophical Renaissance (in the broad sense) in six groups:

the Restorers of the Ancient Systems and their Opponents; the Italian

Philosophers of Nature; the Political and Legal Philosophers; the Skeptics;

the Mystics; the Founders of the Exact Investigation of Nature. In Italy

the new spiritual birth shows an aesthetic, scientific, and humanistic

tendency; in Germany it is pre-eminently religious emancipation--in the

Reformation.

%1. Nicolas of Cusa.%

Nicolas[1] was born in 1401, at Cues (Cusa) on the Moselle near Treves.

He early ran away from his stern father, a boatman and vine-dresser named

Chrypps (or Krebs), and was brought up by the Brothers of the Common Life

at Deventer. In Padua he studied law, mathematics, and philosophy, but the

loss of his first case at Mayence so disgusted him with his profession that

he turned to theology, and became a distinguished preacher. He took part

in the Council of Basle, was sent by Pope Eugen IV. as an ambassador to

Constantinople and to the Reichstag at Frankfort; was made Cardinal in

1448, and Bishop of Brixen in 1450. His feudal lord, the Count of Tyrol,

Archduke Sigismund, refused him recognition on account of certain quarrels

in which they had become engaged, and for a time held him prisoner.

Previous to this he had undertaken journeys to Germany and the Netherlands

on missionary business. During a second sojourn in Italy death overtook

him, in the year 1464, at Todi in Umbria. The first volume of the Paris

edition of his collected works (1514) contains the most important of his

philosophical writings; the second, among others, mathematical essays and

ten books of selections from his sermons; the third, the extended work, _De

Concordantia Catholica_, which he had completed at Basle. In 1440 (having

already written on the Reform of the Calendar) he began his imposing series

of philosophical writings with the _De Docta Ignorantia_, to which the

_De Conjecturis_ was added in the following year. These were succeeded by

smaller treatises entitled _De Quaerendo Deum, De Dato Patris Luminum, De

Filiatione Dei, De Genesi_, and a defense of the _De Docta Ignorantia_. His

most important work is the third of the four dialogues of the _Idiota_ ("On

the Mind"), 1450. He clothes in continually changing forms the one supreme

truth on which all depends, and which cannot be expressed in intelligible

language but only comprehended by living intuition. In many different ways

he endeavors to lead the reader on to a vision of the inexpressible, or

to draw him up to it, and to develop fruitfully the principle of the

coincidence of opposites, which had dawned upon him on his return journey

from Constantinople (_De Visione Dei, Dialogus de Possest, De Beryllo,

De Ludo Globi, De Venatione Sapientiae, De Apice Theoriae, Compendium_).

Sometimes he uses dialectical reasoning; sometimes he soars in mystical

exaltation; sometimes he writes with a simplicity level to the common mind,

and in connection with that which lies at hand; sometimes, with the most

comprehensive brevity. Besides these his philosophico-religious works

are of great value, _De Pace Fidei, De Cribratione Alchorani_. Liberal

Catholics reverence him as one of the deepest thinkers of the Church; but

the fame of Giordano Bruno, a more brilliant but much less original figure,

has hitherto stood in the way of the general recognition of his great

importance for modern philosophy.

[Footnote 1: R. Zimmermann, _Nikolaus Cusanus als Vorläufer Leibnizens_, in

vol. viii. of the _Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-historischen Klasse

der Akademie der Wissenschaften_, Vienna, 1852, p. 306 seq. R. Falckenberg,

_Grundzüge der Philosophie des Nikolaus Cusanus mit besonderer

Berücksichtigung der Lehre vom Erkennen_, Breslau, 1880. R. Eucken,

_Beiträge zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie_, Heidelberg, 1886, p. 6

seq.; Joh. Uebinger, _Die Gotteslehre des Nikolaus Cusanus_, Münster,

1888. Scharpff, _Des Nikolaus von Cusa wichtigste Schriften in deutscher

Uebersetzung, Freiburg i. Br_., 1862.]

Human knowledge and the relation of God to the world are the two poles of

the Cusan's system. He distinguishes four stages of knowledge. Lowest of

all stands sense (together with imagination), which yields only confused

images; next above, the understanding (_ratio_), whose functions comprise

analysis, the positing of time and space, numerical operations, and

denomination, and which keeps the opposites distinct under the law of

contradiction; third, the speculative reason (_intellectus_), which finds

the opposites reconcilable; and highest of all the mystical, supra-rational

intuition (_visio sine comprehensione, intuitio, unio, filiatio_),

for which the opposites coincide in the infinite unity. The intuitive

culmination of knowledge, in which the soul is united with God,--since

here even the antithesis of subject and object disappears,--is but seldom

attained; and it is difficult to keep out the disturbing symbols and images

of sense, which mingle themselves in the intuition. But it is just this

insight into the incomprehensibility of the infinite which gives us a true

knowledge of God; this is the meaning of the "learned ignorance," the

_docta ignorantia_. The distinctions between these several stages of

cognition are not, however, to be understood in any rigid sense, for

each higher function comprehends the lower, and is active therein. The

understanding can discriminate only when it is furnished by sensation with

images of that which is to be discriminated, the reason can combine only

when the understanding has supplied the results of analysis as material for

combination; while, on the other hand, it is the understanding which is

present in sense as consciousness, and the reason whose unity guides

the understanding in its work of separation. Thus the several modes of

cognition do not stand for independent fundamental faculties, but for

connected modifications of one fundamental power which work together and

mutually imply one another. The position that an intellectual function of

attention and discrimination is active in sensuous perception, is a view

entirely foreign to mediaeval modes of thought; for the Scholastics were

accustomed to make sharp divisions between the cognitive faculties, on the

principle that particulars are felt through sense and universals thought

through the understanding. The idea on which Nicolas bases his argument for

immortality has also an entirely modern sound: viz., that space and time

are products of the understanding, and, therefore, can have no power over

the spirit which produces them; for the author is higher and mightier than

the product.

The confession that all our knowledge is conjecture does not simply mean

that absolute and exact truth remains concealed from us; but is intended at

the same time to encourage us to draw as near as possible to the eternal

verity by ever truer conjectures. There are degrees of truth, and our

surmises are neither absolutely true nor entirely false. Conjecture becomes

error only when, forgetting the inadequacy of human knowledge, we rest

content with it as a final solution; the Socratic maxim, "I know that I

am ignorant," should not lead to despairing resignation but to courageous

further inquiry. The duty of speculation is to penetrate deeper and deeper

into the secrets of the divine, even though the ultimate revelation will

not be given us until the hereafter. The fittest instrument of speculation

is furnished by mathematics, in its conception of the infinite and the

wonders of numerical relations: as on the infinite sphere center and

circumference coincide, so God's essence is exalted above all opposites;

and as the other numbers are unfolded from the unit, so the finite proceeds

by explication from the infinite. A controlling significance in the serial

construction of the world is ascribed to the ten, as the sum of the first

four numbers--as reason, understanding, imagination, and sensibility are

related in human cognition, so God, spirit, soul, and body, or infinity,

thought, life, and being are related in the objective sphere; so, further,

the absolute necessity of God, the concrete necessity of the universe,

the actuality of individuals, and the possibility of matter. Beside the

quaternary the tern also exercises its power--the world divides into the

stages of eternity, imperishability, and the temporal world of sense,

or truth, probability, and confusion. The divine trinity is reflected

everywhere: in the world as creator, created, and love; in the mind as

creative force, concept, and will. The triunity of God is very variously

explained--as the subject, object, and act of cognition; as creative

spirit, wisdom, and goodness; as being, power, and deed; and, preferably,

as unity, equality, and the combination of the two.

God is related to the world as unity, identity, _complicatio_, to

otherness, diversity, _explicatio_, as necessity to contingency, as

completed actuality to mere possibility; yet, in such a way that the

otherness participates in the unity, and receives its reality from this,

and the unity does not have the otherness confronting it, outside it. God

is triune only as the Creator of the world, and in relation to it; in

himself he is absolute unity and infinity, to which nothing disparate

stands opposed, which is just as much all things as not all things, and

which, as the Areopagite had taught of old, is better comprehended by

negations than by affirmations. To deny that he is light, truth, spirit,

is more true than to affirm it, for he is infinitely greater than anything

which can be expressed in words; he is the Unutterable, the Unknowable,

the supremely one and the supremely absolute. In the world, each thing has

things greater and smaller by its side, but God is the absolutely greatest

and smallest; in accordance with the principle of the _coincidentia

oppositorum_, the absolute _maximum_ and the absolute _minimum_ coincide.

That which in the world exists as concretely determinate and particular,

is in God in a simple and universal way; and that which here is present

as incompleted striving, and as possibility realizing itself by gradual

development, is in God completed activity. He is the realization of all

possibility, the Can-be or Can-is (_possest_); and since this absolute

actuality is the presupposition and cause of all finite ability and action,

it may be unconditionally designated ability (_posse ipsum_), in antithesis

to all determinate manifestations of force; namely, to all ability to be,

live, feel, think, and will.

However much these definitions, conceived in harmony with the dualistic

view of Christianity, accentuate the antithesis between God and the world,

this is elsewhere much softened, nay directly denied, in favor of a

pantheistic view which points forward to the modern period. Side by side

with the assertion that there is no proportion whatever between the

infinite and the finite, the following naïvely presents itself, in open

contradiction to the former: God excels the reason just as much as

the latter is superior to the understanding, and the understanding to

sensibility, or he is related to thought as thought to life, and life to

being. Nay, Nicolas makes even bolder statements than these, when he calls

the universe a sensuous and mutable God, man a human God or a humanly

contracted infinity, the creation a created God or a limited infinity; thus

hinting that God and the world are at bottom essentially alike, differing

only in the form of their existence, that it is one and the same being

and action which manifests itself absolutely in God, relatively and in a

limited way in the system of creation. It was chiefly three modern ideas

which led the Cusan on from dualism to pantheism--the boundlessness of the

universe, the connection of all being, and the all-comprehensive richness

of individuality. Endlessness belongs to the universe as well as to God,

only its endlessness is not an absolute one, beyond space and time, but

weakened and concrete, namely unlimited extension in space and unending

duration in time. Similarly, the universe is unity, yet not a unity

absolutely above multiplicity and diversity, but one which is divided into

many members and obscured thereby. Even the individual is infinite in a

certain sense; for, in its own way, it bears in itself all that is, it

mirrors the whole world from its limited point of view, is an abridged,

compressed representation of the universe. As the members of the body, the

eye, the arm, the foot, interact in the closest possible way, and no one

of them can dispense with the rest, so each thing is connected with each,

different from it and yet in harmony with it, so each contains all the

others and is contained by them. All is in all, for all is in the universe

and in God, as the universe and God in all. In a still higher degree man is

a microcosm (_parvus mundus_), a mirror of the All, since he not merely,

like other beings, actually has in himself all that exists, but also has

a knowledge of this richness, is capable of developing it into conscious

images of things. And it is just this which constitutes the perfection of

the whole and of the parts, that the higher is in the lower, the cause in

the effect, the genus in the individual, the soul in the body, reason

in the senses, and conversely. To perfect, is simply to make active a

potential possession, to unfold capacities and to elevate the unconscious

into consciousness. Here we have the germ of the philosophy of Bruno and of

Leibnitz.

As we have noticed a struggle between two opposite tendencies, one

dualistic and Christian, one pantheistic and modern, in the theology of

Nicolas, so at many other points a conflict between the mediaeval and the

modern view of the world, of which our philosopher is himself unconscious,

becomes evident to the student. It is impossible to follow out the details

of this interesting opposition, so we shall only attempt to distinguish in

a rough way the beginnings of the new from the remnants of the old. Modern

is his interest in the ancient philosophers, of whom Pythagoras, Plato, and

the Neoplatonists especially attract him; modern, again, his interest in

natural science[1] (he teaches not only the boundlessness of the world, but

also the motion of the earth); his high estimation of mathematics, although

he often utilizes this merely in a fanciful symbolism of numbers; his

optimism (the world an image of the divine, everything perfect of its kind,

the bad simply a halt on the way to the good); his intellectualism (knowing

the primal function and chief mission of the spirit; faith an undeveloped

knowledge; volition and emotion, as is self-evident, incidental results of

thought; knowledge a leading back of the creature to God as its source,

hence the counterpart of creation); modern, finally, the form and

application given to the Stoic-Neoplatonic concept of individuality, and

the idealistic view which resolves the objects of thought into products

thereof.[2] This last position, indeed, is limited by the lingering

influence of nominalism, which holds the concepts of the mind to be merely

abstract copies, and not archetypes of things. Moreover, _explicatio,

evolutio_, unfolding, as yet does not always have the meaning of

development to-day, of progressive advance. It denotes, quite neutrally,

the production of a multiplicity from a unity, in which the former has lain

confined, no matter whether this multiplicity and its procession signify

enhancement or attenuation. For the most part, in fact, involution,

_complicatio_ (which, moreover, always means merely a primal, germinal

condition, never, as in Leibnitz, the return thereto) represents the more

perfect condition. The chief examples of the relation of involution and

evolution are the principles in which science is involved and out of which

it is unfolded; the unit, which is related to numbers in a similar way;

the spirit and the cognitive operations; God and his creatures. However

obscure and unskillful this application of the idea of development may

appear, yet it is indisputable that a discovery of great promise has been

made, accompanied by a joyful consciousness of its fruitfulness. Of the

numberless features which point backward to the Middle Ages, only one need

be mentioned, the large space taken up by speculations concerning the

God-man (the whole third book of the _De Docta Ignorantia_), and by those

concerning the angels. Yet even here a change is noticeable, for the

earthly and the divine are brought into most intimate relation, while in

Thomas Aquinas, for instance, they form two entirely separate worlds. In

short, the new view of the world appears in Nicolas still bound on every

hand by mediaeval conceptions. A century and a half passed before the

fetters, grown rusty in the meanwhile, broke under the bolder touch of

Giordano Bruno.

[Footnote 1: The attention of our philosopher was called to the natural

sciences, and thus also to geography, which at this time was springing into

new life, by his friend Paul Toscanelli, the Florentine. Nicolas was the

first to have the map of Germany engraved (cf. S. Ruge in _Globus_, vol.

lx., No. I, 1891), which, however, was not completed until long after his

death, and issued in 1491.]

[Footnote 2: On the modern elements in his theory of the state and of

right, cf. Gierke, _Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht_, vol. iii. § II,

1881.]

%2. The Revival of Ancient Philosophy and the Opposition to it%.

Italy is the home of the Renaissance and the birthplace of important

new ideas which give the intellectual life of the sixteenth century its

character of brave endeavor after high and distant ends. The enthusiasm

for ancient literature already aroused by the native poets, Dante (1300),

Petrarch (1341), and Boccaccio (1350), was nourished by the influx of Greek

scholars, part of whom came in pursuance of an invitation to the Council of

Ferrara and Florence (1438) called in behalf of the union of the Churches

(among these were Pletho and his pupil Bessarion; Nicolas Cusanus was one

of the legates invited), while part were fugitives from Constantinople

after its capture by the Turks in 1453. The Platonic Academy, whose

most celebrated member, Marsilius Ficinus, translated Plato and the

Neoplatonists into Latin, was founded in 1440 on the suggestion of Georgius

Gemistus Pletho[1] under the patronage of Cosimo dei Medici. The writings

of Pletho ("On the Distinction between Plato and Aristotle"), of Bessarion

(_Adversus Calumniatorem Platonis_, 1469, in answer to the _Comparatio

Aristotelis et Platonis_, 1464, an attack by the Aristotelian, George of

Trebizond, on Pletho's work), and of Ficinus (_Theologia Platonica_, 1482),

show that the Platonism which they favored was colored by religious,

mystical, and Neoplatonic elements. If for Bessarion and Ficinus, just as

for the Eclectics of the later Academy, there was scarcely any essential

distinction between the teachings of Plato, of Aristotle, and of

Christianity; this confusion of heterogeneous elements was soon carried

much farther, when the two Picos (John Pico of Mirandola, died 1494, and

his nephew Francis, died 1533) and Johann Reuchlin (_De Verbo Mirifico_,

1494; _De Arte Cabbalistica_, 1517), who had been influenced by the former,

introduced the secret doctrines of the Jewish Cabala into the Platonic

philosophy, and Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim of Cologne (_De Occulta

Philosophia_, 1510; cf. Sigwart, _Kleine Schriften_, vol. i. p. 1 seq.)

made the mixture still worse by the addition of the magic art. The impulse

of the modern spirit to subdue nature is here already apparent, only that

it shows inexperience in the selection of its instruments; before long,

however, nature will willingly unveil to observation and calm reflection

the secrets which she does not yield to the compulsion of magic.

[Footnote 1: Pletho died at an advanced age in 1450. His chief work, the

[Greek: Nomoi], was given to the flames by his Aristotelian opponent,

Georgius Scholarius, surnamed Gennadius, Patriarch of Constantinople.

Portions of it only, which had previously become known, have been

preserved. On Pletho's life and teachings, cf. Fritz Schultze, _G.G.

Plethon_, Jena, 1874.]

A similar romantic figure was Phillipus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast

Paracelsus[1] von Hohenheim (1493-1541), a traveled Swiss, who endeavored

to reform medicine from the standpoint of chemistry. Philosophy for

Paracelsus is knowledge of nature, in which observation and thought

must co-operate; speculation apart from experience and worship of the

paper-wisdom of the ancients lead to no result. The world is a living

whole, which, like man, the microcosm, in whom the whole content of

the macrocosm is concentrated as in an extract, runs its life course.

Originally all things were promiscuously intermingled in a unity, the

God-created _prima materia_, as though inclosed in a germ, whence the

manifold, with its various forms and colors, proceeded by separation.

The development then proceeds in such a way that in each genus that is

perfected which is posited therein, and does not cease until, at the last

day, all that is possible in nature and history shall have fulfilled

itself. But the one indwelling life of nature lives in all the manifold

forms; the same laws rule in the human body as in the universe; that which

works secretly in the former lies open to the view in the latter, and the

world gives the clew to the knowledge of man. Natural becoming is brought

about by the chemical separation and coming together of substances; the

ultimate constituents revealed by analysis are the three fundamental

substances or primitive essences, quicksilver, sulphur, and salt, by which,

however, something more principiant is understood than the empirical

substances bearing these names: _mercurius_ means that which makes bodies

liquid, _sulfur_, that which makes them combustible, _sal_, that which

makes them fixed and rigid. From these are compounded the four elements,

each of which is ruled by elemental spirits--earth by gnomes or pygmies,

water by undines or nymphs, air by sylphs, fire by salamanders (cf. with

this, and with Paracelsus's theory of the world as a whole, Faust's two

monologues in Goethe's drama); which are to be understood as forces

or sublimated substances, not as personal, demoniacal beings. To each

individual being there is ascribed a vital principle, the _Archeus_, an

individualization of the general force of nature, _Vulcanus_; so also to

men. Disease is a checking of this vital principle by contrary powers,

which are partly of a terrestrial and partly of a sidereal nature; and the

choice of medicines is to be determined by their ability to support the

Archeus against its enemies. Man is, however, superior to nature--he is not

merely the universal animal, inasmuch as he is completely that which other

beings are only in a fragmentary way; but, as the image of God, he has also

an eternal element in him, and is capable of attaining perfection through

the exercise of his rational judgment. Paracelsus distinguishes three

worlds: the elemental or terrestrial, the astral or celestial, and the

spiritual or divine. To the three worlds, which stand in relations of

sympathetic interaction, there correspond in man the body, which nourishes

itself on the elements, the spirit, whose imagination receives its food,

sense and thoughts, from the spirits of the stars, and, finally, the

immortal soul, which finds its nourishment in faith in Christ. Hence

natural philosophy, astronomy, and theology are the pillars of

anthropology, and ultimately of medicine. This fantastic physic of

Paracelsus found many adherents both in theory and in practice.[2] Among

those who accepted and developed it may be named R. Fludd (died 1637), and

the two Van Helmonts, father and son (died 1644 and 1699).

[Footnote 1: On Paracelsus cf. Sigwart, _Kleine Schriften_, vol. i. p. 25

seq.; Eucken, _Beiträge zur Geschichteder neueren Philosophie_, p. 32 seq.;

Lasswitz, _Geschichte der Atomistik_, vol. i. p. 294 seq.]

[Footnote 2: The influence of Paracelsus, as of Vives and Campanella, is

evident in the great educator, Amos Comenius (Komensky, 1592-1670), whose

pansophical treatises appeared in 1637-68. On Comenius cf. Pappenheim,

Berlin, 1871; Kvacsala, Doctor's Dissertation, Leipsic, 1886; Walter

Mueller, Dresden, 1887.]

Beside the Platonic philosophy, others of the ancient systems were also

revived. Stoicism was commended by Justus Lipsius (died 1606) and Caspar

Schoppe (Scioppius, born 1562); Epicureanism was revived by Gassendi

(1647), and rhetorizing logicians went back to Cicero and Quintilian. Among

the latter were Laurentius Valla (died 1457); R. Agricola (died 1485); the

Spaniard, Ludovicus Vives (1531), who referred inquiry from the authority

of Aristotle to the methodical utilization of experience; and Marius

Nizolius (1553), whose _Antibarbarus_ was reissued by Leibnitz in 1670.

The adherents of Aristotle were divided into two parties, one of which

relied on the naturalistic interpretation of the Greek exegete,

Alexander of Aphrodisias (about 200 A.D.), the other on the pantheistic

interpretation of the Arabian commentator, Averroës (died 1198). The

conflict over the question of immortality, carried on especially in Padua,

was the culmination of the battle. The Alexandrist asserted that, according

to Aristotle, the soul was mortal, the Averroists, that the rational part

which is common to all men was immortal; while to this were added the

further questions, if and how the Aristotelian view could be reconciled

with the Church doctrine, which demanded a continued personal existence.

The most eminent Aristotelian of the Renaissance, Petrus Pomponatius (_De

Immortalite Animae_, 1516; _De Fato, Libero Arbitrio, Providentia et

Praedestinatione_), was on the side of the Alexandrists. Achillini and

Niphus fought on the other side. Caesalpin (died 1603), Zabarella, and

Cremonini assumed an intermediate, or, at least, a less decided position.

Still others, as Faber Stapulensis in Paris (1500), and Desiderius Erasmus

(1520), were more interested in securing a correct text of Aristotle's

works than in his philosophical principles.

* * * * *

Among the Anti-Aristotelians only two famous names need be mentioned, that

of the influential Frenchman, Petrus Ramus, and the German, Taurellus.

Pierre de la Ramée (assassinated in the massacre of St. Bartholomew,

1572), attacked the (unnatural and useless) Aristotelian logic in his

_Aristotelicae Animadversiones_, 1543, objecting, with the Ciceronians

mentioned above, to the separation of logic and rhetoric; and attempted a

new logic of his own, in his _Institutiones Dialecticae_, which, in spite

of its formalism, gained acceptance, especially in Germany.[1] Nicolaus

Oechslein, Latinized Taurellus (born in 1547 at Mömpelgard; at his death,

in 1606, professor of medicine in the University of Altdorf), stood quite

alone because of his independent position in reference to all philosophical

and religious parties. His most important works were his _Philosophiae

Triumphus_, 1573; _Synopsis Aristotelis Metaphysicae_, 1596; _Alpes Caesae_

(against Caesalpin, and the title punning on his name), 1597; and _De Rerum

Aeternitate_, 1604.[2] The thought of Taurellus inclines toward the ideal of

a Christian philosophy; which, however, Scholasticism, in his view, did

not attain, inasmuch as its thought was heathen in its blind reverence

for Aristotle, even though its faith was Christian. In order to heal this

breach between the head and the heart, it is necessary in religion to

return from confessional distinctions to Christianity itself, and in

philosophy, to abandon authority for the reason. We should not seek to be

Lutherans or Calvinists, but simply Christians, and we should judge on

rational grounds, instead of following Aristotle, Averroës, or Thomas

Aquinas. Anyone who does not aim at the harmony of theology and philosophy,

is neither a Christian nor a philosopher. One and the same God is the

primal source of both rational and revealed truth. Philosophy is the basis

of theology, theology the criterion and complement of philosophy. The one

starts with effects evident to the senses and leads to the suprasensible,

to the First Cause; the other follows the reverse course. To philosophy

belongs all that Adam knew or could know before the fall; had there been no

sin, there would have been no other than philosophical knowledge. But after

the fall, the reason, which informs us, it is true, of the moral law, but

not of the divine purpose of salvation, would have led us to despair, since

neither punishment nor virtue could justify us, if revelation did not teach

us the wonders of grace and redemption. Although Taurellus thus softens the

opposition between theology and philosophy, which had been most sharply

expressed in the doctrine of "twofold truth" (that which is true in

philosophy may be false in theology, and conversely), and endeavors to

bring the two into harmony, the antithesis between God and the world still

remains for him immovably fixed. God is not things, though he is all. He

is pure affirmation; all without him is composed, as it were, of being and

nothing, and can neither be nor be known independently: _negatio non nihil

est, alias nec esset nec intelligeretur, sed limitatio est affirmationis_.

Simple being or simple affirmation is equivalent to infinity, eternity,

unity, uniqueness,--properties which do not belong to the world. He who

posits things as eternal, sublates God. God and the world are opposed to

each other as infinite cause and finite effect. Moreover, as it is our

spirit which philosophizes and not God's spirit in us, so the faith through

which man appropriates Christ's merit is a free action of the human spirit,

the capacity for which is inborn, not infused from above; in it, God acts

merely as an auxiliary or remote cause, by removing the obstacles which

hinder the operation of the power of faith. With this anti-pantheistic

tendency he combines an anti-intellectualistic one--being and production

precedes and stands higher than contemplation; God's activity does not

consist in thought but in production, and human blessedness, not in the

knowledge but the love of God, even though the latter presupposes the

former. While man, as an end in himself, is immortal--and the whole man,

not his soul merely--the world of sense, which has been created only for

the conservation of man (his procreation and probation), must disappear;

above this world, however, a higher rears its walls to subserve man's

eternal happiness.

[Footnote 1: On Ramus cf. Waddington's treatises, one in Latin, Paris,

1849, the other in French, Paris, 1855.]

[Footnote 2: Schmid Schwarzenburg has written on Taurellus, 1860, 2d ed.,

1864.]

The high regard which Leibnitz expressed for Taurellus may be in part

explained by the many anticipations of his own thoughts to be found in

the earlier writer. The intimate relation into which sensibility and

understanding are brought is an instance of this from the theory of

knowledge. Receptivity is not passivity, but activity arrested (through the

body). All knowledge is inborn; all men are potential philosophers (and, so

far as they are loyal to conscience, Christians); the spirit is a thinking

and a thinkable universe. Taurellus's philosophy of nature, recognizing

the relative truth of atomism, makes the world consist of manifold simple

substances combined into formal unity: he calls it a well constructed

system of wholes. A discussion of the origin of evil is also given, with a

solution based on the existence and misuse of freedom. Finally, it is to

be mentioned to the great credit of Taurellus, that, like his younger

contemporaries, Galileo and Kepler, he vigorously opposed the Aristotelian

and Scholastic animation of the material world and the anthropomorphic

conception of its forces, thus preparing the way for the modern view of

nature to be perfected by Newton.

%3. The Italian Philosophy of Nature%.

We turn now from the restorers of ancient doctrines and their opponents to

the men who, continuing the opposition to the authority of Aristotle, point

out new paths for the study of nature. The physician, Hieronymus Cardanus

of Milan (1501-76), whose inclinations toward the fanciful were restrained,

though not suppressed, by his mathematical training, may be considered the

forerunner of the school. While the people should accept the dogmas of the

Church with submissive faith, the thinker may and should subordinate all

things to the truth. The wise man belongs to that rare class who neither

deceive nor are deceived; others are either deceivers or deceived, or both.

In his theory of nature, Cardanus advances two principles: one passive,

matter (the three cold and moist elements), and an active, formative one,

the world-soul, which, pervading the All and bringing it into unity,

appears as warmth and light. The causes of motion are attraction and

repulsion, which in higher beings become love and hate. Even superhuman

spirits, the demons, are subject to the mechanical laws of nature.

The standard bearer of the Italian philosophy of nature was Bernardinus

Telesius[1] of Cosenza (1508-88; _De Rerum Natura juxta Propria Principia_,

1565, enlarged 1586), the founder of a scientific society in Naples called

the Telesian, or after the name of his birthplace, the Cosentian Academy.

Telesius maintained that the Aristotelian doctrine must be replaced by an

unprejudiced empiricism; that nature must be explained from itself, and by

as few principles as possible. Beside inert matter, this requires only two

active forces, on whose interaction all becoming and all life depend. These

are warmth, which expands, and cold, which contracts; the former resides in

the sun and thence proceeds, the latter is situated in the earth. Although

Telesius acknowledges an immaterial, immortal soul, he puts the emphasis

on sensuous experience, without which the understanding is incapable of

attaining certain knowledge. He is a sensationalist both in the theory of

knowledge and in ethics, holding the functions of judgment and thought

deducible from the fundamental power of perception, and considering the

virtues different manifestations of the instinct of self-preservation

(which he ascribes to matter as well).

[Footnote 1: Cf. on Telesius, Florentine, 2 vols., Naples, 1872-74; K.

Heiland, _Erkenntnisslehre und Ethik des Telesius_, Doctor's Dissertation

at Leipsic, 1891. Further, Rixner and Siber, _Leben und Lehrmeinungen

berühmter Physiker am Ende des XVI. und am Anfang des XVII. Jahrhunderts_,

Sulzbach (1819-26), 7 Hefte, 2d ed., 1829. Hefte 2-6 discuss Cardanus,

Telesius, Patritius, Bruno, and Campanella; the first is devoted to

Paracelsus, and the seventh to the older Van Helmont (Joh. Bapt.).]

With the name of Telesius we usually associate that of Franciscus Patritius

(1529-97), professor of the Platonic philosophy in Ferrara and Rome

_(Discussiones Peripateticae,_ 1581; _Nova de Universis Philosophia_,

1591), who, combining Neoplatonic and Telesian principles, holds that the

incorporeal or spiritual light emanates from the divine original light, in

which all reality is seminally contained; the heavenly or ethereal

light from the incorporeal; and the earthly or corporeal, from the

heavenly--while the original light divides into three persons, the One and

All _(Unomnia)_, unity or life, and spirit.

The Italian philosophy of nature culminates in Bruno and Campanella, of

whom the former, although he is the earlier, appears the more advanced

because of his freer attitude toward the Church. Giordano Bruno was born

in 1548 at Nola, and educated at Naples; abandoning his membership in the

Dominican Order, he lived, with various changes of residence, in France,

England, and Germany. Returning to his native land, he was arrested in

Venice and imprisoned for seven years at Rome, where, on February 17, 1600,

he suffered death at the stake, refusing to recant. (The same fate overtook

his fellow-countryman, Vanini, in 1619, at Toulouse.) Besides three

didactic poems in Latin (Frankfort, 1591), the Italian dialogues, _Della

Causa, Principio ed Uno_, Venice, 1584 (German translation by Lasson,

1872), are of chief importance. The Italian treatises have been edited by

Wagner, Leipsic, 1829, and by De Lagarde, 2 vols., Göttingen, 1888; the

Latin appeared at Naples, in 3 vols., 1880, 1886, and 1891. Of a passionate

and imaginative nature, Bruno was not an essentially creative thinker, but

borrowed the ideas which he proclaimed with burning enthusiasm and lofty

eloquence, and through which he has exercised great influence on later

philosophy, from Telesius and Nicolas, complaining the while that the

priestly garb of the latter sometimes hindered the free movement of his

thought. Beside these thinkers he has a high regard for Pythagoras, Plato,

Lucretius, Raymundus Lullus, and Copernicus (died 1543).[1] He forms the

transition link between Nicolas of Cusa and Leibnitz, as also the link

between Cardanus and Spinoza. To Spinoza Bruno offered the naturalistic

conception of God (God is the "first cause" immanent in the universe, to

which self-manifestation or self-revelation is essential; He is _natura

naturans_, the numberless worlds are _natura naturata_); Leibnitz he

anticipated by his doctrine of the "monads," the individual, imperishable

elements of the existent, in which matter and form, incorrectly divorced by

Aristotle as though two antithetical principles, constitute one unity.

The characteristic traits of the philosophy of Bruno are the lack of

differentiation between pantheistic and individualistic elements, the

mediaeval animation and endlessness of the world, and, finally, the

religious relation to the universe or the extravagant deification of nature

(nature and the world are entirely synonymous, the All, the world-soul,

and God nearly so, while even matter is called a divine being).[2]

[Footnote 1: Nicolaus Copernicus (Koppernik; 1473-1543) was born at Thorn;

studied astronomy, law, and medicine at Cracow, Bologna, and Padua; and

died a Canon of Frauenberg. His treatise, _De Revolutionibus Orbium

Caelestium_, which was dedicated to Pope Paul III., appeared at Nuremberg

in 1543, with a preface added to it by the preacher, Andreas Osiander,

which calls the heliocentric system merely an hypothesis advanced as a

basis for astronomical calculations. Copernicus reached his theory rather

by speculation than by observation; its first suggestion came from the

Pythagorean doctrine of the motion of the earth. On Copernicus cf. Leop.

Prowe, vol. i. _Copernicus Leben_, vol. ii. (_Urkunden_), Berlin, 1883-84;

and K. Lohmeyer in Sybel's _Historische Zeitschrift_, vol. lvii., 1887.]

[Footnote 2: Cf. on Bruno, H. Brunnhofer (somewhat too enthusiastic),

Leipsic, 1882; also Sigwart, _Kleine Schriften_, vol. i. p. 49 _seq_.]

Bruno completes the Copernican picture of the world by doing away with the

motionless circle of fixed stars with which Copernicus, and even Kepler,

had thought our solar system surrounded, and by opening up the view into

the immeasurability of the world. With this the Aristotelian antithesis of

the terrestrial and the celestial is destroyed. The infinite space (filled

with the aether) is traversed by numberless bodies, no one of which

constitutes the center of the world. The fixed stars are suns, and, like

our own, surrounded by planets. The stars are formed of the same materials

as the earth, and are moved by their own souls or forms, each a living

being, each also the residence of infinitely numerous living beings of

various degrees of perfection, in whose ranks man by no means takes the

first place. All organisms are composed of minute elements, called _minima_

or monads; each monad is a mirror of the All; each at once corporeal and

soul-like, matter and form, each eternal; their combinations alone being

in constant change. The universe is boundless in time, as in space;

development never ceases, for the fullness of forms which slumber in the

womb of matter is inexhaustible. The Absolute is the primal unity, exalted

above all antitheses, from which all created being is unfolded and in which

it remains included. All is one, all is out of God and in God. In

the living unity of the universe, also, the two sides, the spiritual

(world-soul), and the corporeal (universal matter), are distinguishable,

but not separate. The world-reason pervades in its omnipresence the

greatest and the smallest, but in varying degrees. It weaves all into

one great system, so that if we consider the whole, the conflicts and

contradictions which rule in particulars disappear, resolved into the

most perfect harmony. Whoever thus regards the world, becomes filled with

reverence for the Infinite and bends his will to the divine law--from true

science proceed true religion and true morality, those of the spiritual

hero, of the heroic sage.

Thomas Campanella[1] (1568-1639) was no less dependent on Nicolas and

Telesius than Bruno. A Calabrian by birth like Telesius, whose writings

filled him with aversion to Aristotle, a Dominican like Bruno, he was

deprived of his freedom on an unfounded suspicion of conspiracy against the

Spanish rule, spent twenty-seven years in prison, and died in Paris after a

short period of quiet. Renewing an old idea, Campanella directed attention

from the written volume of Scripture to the living book of nature as being

also a divine revelation. Theology rests on faith (in theology, Campanella,

in accordance with the traditions of his order, follows Thomas Aquinas);

philosophy is based on perception, which in its instrumental part comprises

mathematics and logic, and in its real part, the doctrine of nature and of

morals, while metaphysics treats of the highest presuppositions and the

ultimate grounds,--the "pro-principles," Campanella starts, as Augustine

before him and Descartes in later times, from the indisputable certitude of

the spirit's own existence, from which he rises to the certitude of God's

existence. On this first certain truth of my own existence there follow

three others: my nature consists in the three functions of power,

knowledge, and volition; I am finite and limited, might, wisdom, and

love are in man constantly intermingled with their opposites, weakness,

foolishness, and hate; my power, knowledge, and volition do not extend

beyond the present. The being of God follows from the idea of God in us,

which can have been derived from no other than an infinite source. It would

be impossible for so small a part of the universe as man to produce from

himself the idea of a being incomparably greater than the whole universe.

I attain a knowledge of God's nature from my own by thinking away from

the latter, in which, as in everything finite, being and non-being are

intermingled, every limitation and negation, by raising to infinity

my positive fundamental powers, _posse, cognoscere_, and _velle_, or

_potentia, sapientia_, and _amor_, and by transferring them to him, who is

pure affirmation, _ens_ entirely without _non-ens_. Thus I reach as the

three pro-principles or primalities of the existent or the Godhead,

omnipotence, omniscience, and infinite love. But the infrahuman world may

also be judged after the analogy of our fundamental faculties. The

universe and all its parts possess souls; there is naught without

sensation; consciousness, it is true, is lacking in the lower creatures,

but they do not lack life, feeling, and desire, for it is impossible

for the animate to come from the inanimate. Everything loves and hates,

desires and avoids. Plants are motionless animals, and their roots,

mouths. Corporeal motion springs from an obscure, unconscious impulse of

self-preservation; the heavenly bodies circle about the sun as the center

of sympathy; space itself seeks a content _(horror vacui_).

[Footnote 1: Campanella's works have been edited by Al. d'Ancona, Turin,

1854, Cf. Sigwart, _Kleine Schriften_, vol. i. p. 125 _seq_.]

The more imperfect a thing is, the more weakened is the divine being in it

by non-being and contingency. The entrance of the naught into the divine

reality takes place by degrees. First God projects from himself the ideal

or archetypal world (_mundus archetypus_), _i.e._, the totality of the

possible. From this ideal world proceeds the metaphysical world of eternal

intelligences _(mundus mentalis)_, including the angels, the world-soul,

and human spirits. The third product is the mathematical world of space

_(mundus sempiternus_), the object of geometry; the fourth, the temporal

or corporeal world; the fifth, and last, the empirical world _(mundus

situalis_), in which everything appears at a definite point in space and

time. All things not only love themselves and seek the conservation of

their own being, but strive back toward the original source of their being,

to God; _i.e._, they possess religion. In man, natural and animal religion

are completed by rational religion, the limitations of which render a

revelation necessary. A religion can be considered divine only when it is

adapted to all, when it gains acceptance through miracles and virtue, and

when it contradicts neither natural ethics nor the reason. Religion is

union with God through knowledge, purity of will, and love. It is inborn,

a law of nature, not, as Machiavelli teaches, a political invention.

Campanella desired to see the unity in the divine government of the world

embodied in a pyramid of states with the papacy at the apex: above the

individual states was to come the province, then the kingdom, the empire,

the (Spanish) world-monarchy, and, finally, the universal dominion of the

Pope. The Church should be superior to the State, the vicegerent of God to

temporal rulers and to councils.

%4. Philosophy of the State and of Law%.

The originality of the modern doctrines of natural law was formerly

overestimated, as it was not known to how considerable an extent the way

had been prepared for them by the mediaeval philosophy of the state and of

law. It is evident from the equally rich and careful investigations of Otto

Gierke[1] that in the political and legal theories of a Bodin, a Grotius,

a Hobbes, a Rousseau, we have systematic developments of principles long

extant, rather than new principles produced with entire spontaneity. Their

merit consists in the principiant expression and accentuation and the

systematic development of ideas which the Middle Ages had produced, and

which in part belong to the common stock of Scholastic science, in part

constitute the weapons of attack for bold innovators. Marsilius of Padua

(_Defensor Pacis_, 1325), Occam (died 1347), Gerson (about 1400), and the

Cusan[2] _(Concordantia Catholica_, 1433) especially, are now seen in a

different light. "Under the husk of the mediaeval system there is revealed

a continuously growing antique-modern kernel, which draws all the living

constituents out of the husk, and finally bursts it" (Gierke, _Deutsches

Genossenschaftsrecht_, vol. iii. p. 312). Without going beyond the

boundaries of the theocratico-organic view of the state prevalent in

the Middle Ages, most of the conceptions whose full development was

accomplished by the natural law of modern times were already employed in

the Scholastic period. Here we already find the idea of a transition on the

part of man from a pre-political natural state of freedom and equality into

the state of citizenship; the idea of the origin of the state by a contract

(social and of submission); of the sovereignty of the ruler (_rex major

populo; plenitudo potestatis_), and of popular sovereignty[3] (_populus

major principe_); of the original and inalienable prerogatives of the

generality, and the innate and indestructible right of the individual to

freedom; the thought that the sovereign power is superior to positive

law _(princeps legibus solutus_), but subordinate to natural law; even

tendencies toward the division of powers (legislative and executive),

and the representative system. These are germs which, at the fall of

Scholasticism and the ecclesiastical reformation, gain light and air for

free development.

[Footnote 1: Gierke, _Johannes Althusius und die Entwickelung der

naturrechtlichen Staatstheorien_, Breslau, 1880; the same, _Deutsches

Genossenschaftsrecht_, vol. iii. § II, Berlin, 1881. Cf. further, Sigm.

Riezler, _Die literarischen Widersacher der Päpste_, Leipsic, 1874; A.

Franck, _Réformateurs et Publicistes de L'Europe_, Paris, 1864.]

[Footnote 2: Nicolas' political ideas are discussed by T. Stumpf, Cologne,

1865.]

[Footnote 3: Cf. F. von Bezold, _Die Lehre von der Volkssouveränität im

Mittelalter_, (Sybel's _Historische Zeitschrift_, vol. xxxvi., 1876).]

The modern theory of natural law, of which Grotius was the most influential

representative, began with Bodin and Althusius. The former conceives

the contract by which the state is founded as an act of unconditional

submission on the part of the community to the ruler, the latter conceives

it merely as the issue of a (revocable) commission: in the view of the one,

the sovereignty of the people is entirely alienated, "transferred," in that

of the other, administrative authority alone is granted, "conceded," while

the sovereign prerogatives remain with the people. Bodin is the founder

of the theory of absolutism, to which Grotius and the school of Pufendorf

adhere, though in a more moderate form, and which Hobbes develops to the

last extreme. Althusius, on the other hand, by his systematic development

of the doctrine of social contract and the inalienable sovereignty of the

people, became the forerunner of Locke[1] and Rousseau.

[Footnote 1: Ulrich Huber (1674) may be called the first representative

of constitutionalism, and so the intermediate link between Althusius and

Locke. Cf. Gierke, _Althusius_, p. 290.]

The first independent political philosopher of the modern period was

Nicolo Machiavelli of Florence (1469-1527). Patriotism was the soul of his

thinking, questions of practical politics its subject, and historical fact

its basis.[1] He is entirely unscholastic and unecclesiastical. The power

and independence of the nation are for him of supreme importance, and the

greatness and unity of Italy, the goal of his political system. He

opposes the Church, the ecclesiastical state, and the papacy as the chief

hindrances to the attainment of these ends, and considers the means by

which help may be given to the Fatherland. In normal circumstances a

republican constitution, under which Sparta, Rome, and Venice have achieved

greatness, would be the best. But amid the corruption of the times, the

only hope of deliverance is from the absolute rule of a strong prince,

one not to be frightened back from severity and force. Should the ruler

endeavor to keep within the bounds of morality, he would inevitably be

ruined amid the general wickedness. Let him make himself liked, especially

make himself feared, by the people; let him be fox and lion together; let

him take care, when he must have recourse to bad means for the sake of the

Fatherland, that they are justified by the result, and still to preserve

the appearance of loyalty and honor when he is forced to act in their

despite--for the populace always judges by appearance and by results. The

worst thing of all is half-way measures, courses intermediate between good

and evil and vacillating between reason and force. Even Moses had to kill

the envious refractories, while Savonarola, the unarmed prophet, was

destroyed. God is the friend of the strong, energy the chief virtue; and

it is well when, as was the case with the ancient Romans, religion is

associated with it without paralyzing it. The current view of Christianity

as a religion of humility and sloth, which preaches only the courage

of endurance and makes its followers indifferent to worldly honor,

is unfavorable to the development of political vigor. The Italians have

been made irreligious by the Church and the priesthood; the nearer Rome,

the less pious the people. When Machiavelli, in his proposals looking

toward Lorenzo (II.) dei Medici (died 1519), approves any means for

restoring order, it must be remembered that he has an exceptional case

in mind, that he does not consider deceit and severity just, but only

unavoidable amid the anarchy and corruption of the time. But neither the

loftiness of the end by which he is inspired, nor the low condition of

moral views in his time, justifies his treatment of the laws as mere means

to political ends, and his unscrupulous subordination of morality to

calculating prudence. Machiavelli's general view of the world and of life

is by no means a comforting one. Men are simple, governed by their passions

and by insatiable desires, dissatisfied with what they have, and inclined

to evil. They do good only of necessity; it is hunger which makes them

industrious and laws that render them good. Everything rapidly degenerates:

power produces quiet, quiet, idleness, then disorder, and, finally, ruin,

until men learn by misfortune, and so order and power again arise. History

is a continual rising and falling, a circle of order and disorder.

Governmental forms, even, enjoy no stability; monarchy, when it has run out

into tyranny, is followed by aristocracy, which gradually passes over into

oligarchy; this in turn is replaced by democracy, until, finally, anarchy

becomes unendurable, and a prince again attains power. No state, however,

is so powerful as to escape succumbing to a rival before it completes the

circuit. Protection against the corruption of the state is possible only

through the maintenance of its principles, and its restoration only by a

return to the healthy source whence it originated. This is secured either

by some external peril compelling to reflection, or internally, by wise

thought, by good laws (framed in accordance with the general welfare, and

not according to the ambition of a minority), and by the example of good

men.

[Footnote 1: In his _Essays on the First Decade of Livy (Discorsi)_,

Machiavelli investigates the conditions and the laws of the maintenance of

states; while in _The Prince (II Principe_, 1515), he gives the principles

for the restoration of a ruined state. Besides these he wrote a history

of Florence, and a work on the art of war, in which he recommended the

establishment of national armies.]

In the interval between Machiavelli and the system of natural law of

Grotius, the Netherlander (1625: _De Jure Belli et Pacis_), belong the

socialistic ideal state of the Englishman, Thomas More (_De Optimo

Reipublicae Statu deque Nova Insula Utopia_, 1516), the political theory of

the Frenchman, Jean Bodin (_Six Livres de la République_, 1577, Latin 1584;

also a philosophico-historical treatise, _Methodus ad Facilem Historiarum

Cognitionem_, and the _Colloquium Heptaplomeres_, edited by Noack, 1857),

and the law of war of the Italian, Albericus Gentilis, at his death

professor in Oxford (_De Jure Belli_, 1588). Common to these three was

the advocacy of religious tolerance, from which atheists alone were to

be excepted; common, also, their ethical standpoint in opposition to

Machiavelli, while they are at one with him in regard to the liberation of

political and legal science from theology and the Church. With Gentilis

(1551-1611) this separation assigns the first five commandments to divine,

and the remainder to human law, the latter being based on the laws of human

nature (especially the social impulse). In place of this derivation of law

and the state from the nature of man, Jean Bodin (1530-96) insists on an

historical interpretation; endeavors, though not always with success, to

give sharp definitions of political concepts;[1] rejects composite

state forms, and among the three pure forms, monarchy, aristocracy, and

democracy, rates (hereditary) monarchy the highest, in which the subjects

obey the laws of the monarch, and the latter the laws of God or of nature

by respecting the freedom and the property of the citizens. So far, no

one has correctly distinguished between forms of the state and modes of

administration. Even a democratic state may be governed in a monarchical

or aristocratic way. So far, also, there has been a failure to take into

account national peculiarities and differences of situation, conditions to

which legislation must be adjusted. The people of the temperate zone are

inferior to those of the North in physical power and inferior to those of

the South in speculative ability, but superior to both in political gifts

and in the sense of justice. The nations of the North are guided by

force, those of the South by religion, those between the two by reason.

Mountaineers love freedom. A fruitful soil enervates men, when less

fertile, it renders them temperate and industrious.

[Footnote 1: What is the state? What is sovereignty? The former is defined

as the rational and supremely empowered control over a number of families

and of whatever is common to them; the latter is absolute and continuous

authority over the state, with the right of imposing laws without being

bound by them. The prince, to whom the sovereignty has been unconditionally

relinquished by the people in the contract of submission, is accountable to

God alone.]

Attention has only recently been called (by O. Gierke, in the work already

mentioned, Heft vii. of his _Untersuchungen zur deutschen Staats- und

Rechtsgeschichte_, Breslau, 1880) to the Westphalian, Johannes Althusius

(Althusen or Althaus) as a legal philosopher worthy of notice. He was born,

1557, in the Grafschaft Witgenstein; was a teacher of law in Herborn and

Siegen from 1586, and Syndic in Emden from 1604 to his death in 1638. His

chief legal work was the _Dicaeologica_, 1617 (a recasting of a treatise

on Roman law which appeared in 1586), and his chief political work the

_Politica_, 1603 (altered and enlarged 1610, and reprinted, in addition,

three times before his death and thrice subsequently). Down to the

beginning of the eighteenth century he was esteemed or opposed as chief

among the _Monarchomachi_, so called by the Scotchman, Barclay (_De Regno

et Regali Potestate_, 1600); since that time he has fallen into undeserved

oblivion. The sovereign power (_majestas_) of the people is untransferable

and indivisible, the authority vested in the chosen wielder of the

administrative power is revocable, and the king is merely the chief

functionary; individuals are subjects, it is true, but the community

retains its sovereignty and has its rights represented over against the

chief magistrate by a college of ephors. If the prince violates the

compact, the ephors are authorized and bound to depose the tyrant, and to

banish or execute him. There is but one normal state-form; monarchy and

polyarchy are mere differences in administrative forms. Mention should

finally be made of his valuation of the social groups which mediate between

the individual and the state: the body politic is based on the narrower

associations of the family, the corporation, the commune, and the province.

While with Bodin the historical, and with Gentilis the _a priori_ method of

treatment predominates, Hugo Grotius[1] combines both standpoints. He bases

his system on the traditional distinction of two kinds of law. The origin

of positive law is historical, by voluntary enactment; natural law is

rooted in the nature of man, is eternal, unchangeable, and everywhere the

same. He begins by distinguishing with Gentilis the _jus humanum_ from the

_jus divinum_ given in the Scriptures. The former determines, on the one

hand, the legal relations of individuals, and, on the other, those of whole

nations; it is _jus personale_ and _jus gentium_.[2]

[Footnote 1: Hugo de Groot lived 1583-1645. He was born in Delft, became

Fiscal of Holland in 1607, and Syndic of Rotterdam and member of the States

General in 1613. A leader of the aristocratic party with Oldenbarneveld, he

adhered to the Arminians or Remonstrants, was thrown into prison, freed in

1621 through the address of his wife, and fled to Paris, where he lived

till 1631 as a private scholar, and, from 1635, as Swedish ambassador. Here

he composed his epoch-making work, _De Jure Belli et Pacis_, 1625. Previous

to this had appeared his treatise, _De Veritate Religionis Christianae_,

1619, and the _Mare Liberum_, 1609, the latter a chapter from his maiden

work, _De Jure Praedae_, which was not printed until 1868.]

[Footnote 2: The meaning which Grotius here gives to _jus gentium_

(=international law), departs from the customary usage of the Scholastics,

with whom it denotes the law uniformly acknowledged among all nations.

Thomas Aquinas understands by it, in distinction to _jus naturale_ proper,

the sum of the conclusions deduced from this as a result of the development

of human culture and its departure from primitive purity. Cf. Gierke,

_Althusius_, p. 273; _Deutsches Genossenschaftsrecht_, vol. iii. p. 612.

On the meaning of natural law cf. Gierke's Inaugural Address as Rector at

Breslau, _Naturrecht und Deutsches Recht_, Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1883.]

The distinction between natural and conventional law which has been already

mentioned, finds place within both: the positive law of persons is called

_jus civile_, and the positive law of nations, _jus gentium voluntarium_.

Positive law has its origin in regard for utility, while unwritten law

finds its source neither in this nor (directly) in the will of God,[1] but

in the rational nature of man. Man is by nature social, and, as a rational

being, possesses the impulse toward ordered association. Unlawful means

whatever renders such association of rational beings impossible, as the

violation of promises or the taking away and retention of the property

of others. In the (pre-social) state of nature, all belonged to all, but

through the act of taking possession _(occupatio)_ property arises (sea and

air are excluded from appropriation). In the state of nature everyone has

the right to defend himself against attack and to revenge himself on the

evil-doer; but in the political community, founded by contract, personal

revenge is replaced by punishment decreed by the civil power. The aim of

punishment is not retribution, but reformation and deterrence. It belongs

to God alone to punish because of sin committed, the state can punish only

to prevent it. (The antithesis _quia peccatum est_--_ne peccetur_ comes

from Seneca.)

[Footnote 1: Natural law would be valid even if there were no God. With

these words the alliance between the modern and the mediaeval philosophy of

law is severed.]

This energetic revival of the distinction already common in the Middle Ages

between "positive and natural," which Lord Herbert of Cherbury brought

forward at the same period (1624) in the philosophy of religion, gave the

catchword for a movement in practical philosophy whose developments extend

into the nineteenth century. Not only the illumination period, but all

modern philosophy down to Kant and Fichte, is under the ban of the

antithesis, natural and artificial. In all fields, in ethics as well as in

noëtics, men return to the primitive or storm back to it, in the hope of

finding there the source of all truth and the cure for all evils. Sometimes

it is called nature, sometimes reason (natural law and rational law are

synonymous, as also natural religion and the religion of the reason), by

which is understood that which is permanent and everywhere the same in

contrast to the temporary and the changeable, that which is innate in

contrast to that which has been developed, in contrast, further, to that

which has been revealed. Whatever passes as law in all places and at all

times is natural law, says Grotius; that which all men believe forms the

content of natural religion, says Lord Herbert. Before long it comes to

be said: that _alone_ is genuine, true, healthy, and valuable which has

eternal and universal validity; all else is not only superfluous and

valueless but of evil, for it must be unnatural and corrupt. This step is

taken by Deism, with the principle that whatever is not natural or rational

in the sense indicated is unnatural and irrational. Parallel phenomena are

not wanting, further, in the philosophy of law (Gierke, _Althusius_). But

these errors must not be too harshly judged. The confidence with which they

were made sprang from the real and the historical force of their underlying

idea.

As already stated, the "natural" forms the antithesis to the supernatural,

on the one hand, and to the historical, on the other. This combination of

the revealed and the historical will not appear strange, if we remember

that the mediaeval view of the world under criticism was, as Christian,

historico-religious, and, moreover, that for the philosophy of religion the

two in fact coincide, inasmuch as revelation is conceived as an historical

event, and the historical religions assume the character of revealed. The

term arbitrary, applied to both in common, was questionable, however: as

revelation is a divine decree, so historical institutions are the products

of human enactment, the state, the result of a contract, dogmas, inventions

of the priesthood, _the results of development, artificial constructions_!

It took long ages for man to free himself from the idea of the artificial

and conventional in his view of history. Hegel was the first to gather

the fruit whose seeds had been sown by Leibnitz, Lessing, Herder, and the

historical school of law. As often, however, as an attempt was made from

this standpoint of origins to show laws in the course of history, only one

could be reached, a law of necessary degeneration, interrupted at times

by sudden restorations--thus the Deists, thus Machiavelli and Rousseau.

Everything degenerates, science itself only contributes to the

fall--therefore, back to the happy beginnings of things!

If, finally, we inquire into the position of the Church in regard to the

questions of legal philosophy, we may say that, among the Protestants,

Luther, appealing to the Scripture text, declares rulers ordained by God

and sacred, though at the same time he considers law and politics but

remotely related to the inner man; that Melancthon, in his _Elements of

Ethics_ (1538), as in all his philosophical text-books,[1] went back to

Aristotle, but found the source of natural law in the Decalogue, being

followed in this by Oldendorp (1539), Hemming (1562), and B. Winkler

(1615).[2]

[Footnote 1: The edition of Melancthon's works by Bretschneider and

Bindseil gives the ethical treatises in vol. xvi. and the other

philosophical treatises in vol. xiii. (in part also in vols. xi. and xx.).]

[Footnote 2: Cf. C.v. Kaltenborn, _Die Vorläufer des Hugo Grotius_,

Leipsic, 1848.]

On the Catholic side, the Jesuits (the Order was founded in 1534, and

confirmed in 1540), on the one hand, revived the Pelagian theory of freedom

in opposition to the Luthero-Augustinian doctrine of the servitude of the

will, and, on the other, defended the natural origin of the state in a

(revocable) contract in opposition to its divine origin asserted by the

Reformers, and the sovereignty of the people even to the sanctioning of

tyrannicide. Bellarmin (1542-1621) taught that the prince derives his

authority from the people, and as the latter have given him power, so they

retain the natural right to take it back and bestow it elsewhere. The view

of Juan Mariana (1537-1624; _De Rege_, 1599) is that, as the people in

transferring rights to the prince retain still greater power themselves,

they are entitled in given cases to call the king to account. If he

corrupts the state by evil manners, and, degenerating into the tyrant,

despises religion and the laws, he may, as a public enemy, be deprived by

anyone of his authority and his life. It is lawful to arrest tyranny in any

way, and those have always been highly esteemed who, from devotion to the

public welfare, have sought to kill the tyrant.

%5. Skepticism in France.%

Toward the end of the sixteenth century, and in the very country which was

to become the cradle of modern philosophy, there appeared, as a forerunner

of the new thinking, a skepticism in which that was taken for complete

and ultimate truth which with Descartes constitutes merely a moment or

transition point in the inquiry. The earliest and the most ingenious among

the representatives of this philosophy of doubt was Michel de Montaigne

(1533-92), who in his _Essays_--which were the first of their kind and soon

found an imitator in Bacon; they appeared in 1580 in two volumes, with an

additional volume in 1588--combined delicate observation and keen thinking,

boldness and prudence, elegance and solidity. The French honor him as one

of their foremost writers. The most important among these treatises or

essays is considered to be the "Apology for Raymond of Sabunde" (ii. 12)

with valuable excursuses on faith and knowledge. Montaigne bases his doubt

on the diversity of individual views, each man's opinion differing from his

fellow's, while truth must be one. There exists no certain, no universally

admitted knowledge. The human reason is feeble and blind in all things,

knowledge is deceptive, especially the philosophy of the day, which clings

to tradition, which fills the memory with learned note-stuff, but leaves

the understanding void and, instead of things, interprets interpretations

only. Both sensuous and rational knowledge are untrustworthy: the former,

because it cannot be ascertained whether its deliverances conform to

reality, and the latter, because its premises, in order to be valid, need

others in turn for their own establishment, etc., _ad infinitum_. Every

advance in inquiry makes our ignorance the more evident; the doubter alone

is free. But though certainty is denied us in regard to truth, it is not

withheld in regard to duty. In fact, a twofold rule of practical life is

set up for us: nature, or life in accordance with nature and founded on

self-knowledge, and supernatural revelation, the Gospel (to be understood

only by the aid of divine grace). Submission to the divine ruler and

benefactor is the first duty of the rational soul. From obedience proceeds

every virtue, from over-subtlety and conceit, which is the product of

fancied knowledge, comes every sin. Montaigne, like all who know men, has

a sharp eye for human frailty. He depicts the universal weakness of human

nature and the corruption of his time with great vivacity and not without a

certain pleasure in the obscene; and besides folly and passion, complains

above all of the fact that so few understand the art of enjoyment, of which

he, a true man of the world, was master.

The skeptico-practical standpoint of Montaigne was developed into a system

by the Paris preacher, Pierre Charron (1541-1603), in his three books _On

Wisdom_ (1601). Doubt has a double object: to keep alive the spirit

of inquiry and to lead us on to faith. From the fact that reason and

experience are liable to deception and that the mind has at its disposal no

means of distinguishing truth from falsehood, it follows that we are born

not to possess truth but to seek it. Truth dwells alone in the bosom of

God; for us doubt and investigation are the only good amid all the error

and tribulation which surround us. Life is all misery. Man is capable of

mediocrity alone; he can neither be entirely good nor entirely evil; he is

weak in virtue, weak in vice, and the best degenerates in his hands. Even

religion suffers from the universal imperfection. It is dependent on

nationality and country, and each religion is based on its predecessor;

the supernatural origin of which all religions boast belongs in fact

to Christianity alone, which is to be accepted with humility and with

submission of the reason. Charron lays chief emphasis, however, on the

practical side of Christianity, the fulfillment of duty; and the "wisdom"

which forms the subject of his book is synonymous with uprightness

(_probité_), the way to which is opened up by self-knowledge and whose

reward is repose of spirit. And yet we are not to practice it for the

sake of the reward, but because nature and reason, i.e., God, absolutely

(entirely apart from the pleasurable results of virtue) require us to be

good. True uprightness is more than mere legality, for even when outward

action is blameless, the motives may be mixed. "I desire men to be upright

without paradise and hell." Religion seeks to crown morality, not to

generate it; virtue is earlier and more natural than piety. In his

definition of the relation between religion and ethics, his delimitation

of morality from legality, and his insistence on the purity of motives (do

right, because the inner rational law commands it), an anticipation of

Kantian principles may be recognized.

Under Francis Sanchez (died 1632; his chief work is entitled _Quod Nihil

Scitur_), a Portuguese by birth, and professor of medicine in Montpellier

and Toulouse, skepticism was transformed from melancholy contemplation into

a fresh, vigorous search after new problems. In the place of book-learning,

which disgusts him by its smell of the closet, its continued prating of

Aristotle, and its self-exhaustion in useless verbalism, Sanchez desires

to substitute a knowledge of things. Perfect knowledge, it is true, can be

hoped for only when subject and object correspond to each other. But how

is finite man to grasp the infinite universe? Experience, the basis of

all knowledge, gropes about the outer surface of things and illumines

particulars only, without the ability either to penetrate to their inner

nature or to comprehend the whole. We know only what we produce. Thus

God knows the world which he has made, but to us is vouchsafed merely an

insight into mediate or second causes, _causae secundae_. Here, however,

a rich field still lies open before philosophy--only let her attack her

problem with observation and experiment rather than with words.

The French nation, predisposed to skepticism by its prevailing acuteness,

has never lacked representatives of skeptical philosophy. The transition

from the philosophers of doubt whom we have described to the great Bayle

was formed by La Mothe le Vayer (died 1672; _Five Dialogues_, 1671), the

tutor of Louis XIV., and P.D. Huet(ius), Bishop of Avranches (died 1721),

who agreed in holding that a recognition of the weakness of the reason is

the best preparation for faith.

6. %German Mysticism%.

In a period which has given birth to a skeptical philosophy, one never

looks in vain for the complementary phenomenon of mysticism. The stone

offered by doubt in place of bread is incapable of satisfying the impulse

after knowledge, and when the intellect grows weary and despairing, the

heart starts out in the quest after truth. Then its path leads inward, the

mind turns in upon itself, seeks to learn the truth by inner experience and

life, by inward feeling and possession, and waits in quietude for divine

illumination. The German mysticism of Eckhart[1] (about 1300), which had

been continued in Suso and Tauler and had received a practical direction

in the Netherlands,--Ruysbroek (about 1350) to Thomas à Kempis (about

1450),--now puts forth new branches and blossoms at the turning point of

the centuries.

[Footnote 1: Master Eckhart's _Works_ have been edited by F. Pfeiffer,

Leipsic, 1857. The following have written on him: Jos. Bach, Vienna, 1864;

Ad. Lasson, Berlin, 1868; the same, in the second part of Ueberweg's

_Grundriss_, last section; Denifle, in the _Archiv für Litteratur und

Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters_. ii. 417 _seq_.; H. Siebeck,

_Der Begriff des Gemuts in der deutschen Mystik (Beiträge zur

Entstehungsgeschichte der neueren Psychologie_, i), Giessen Programme,

1891.]

Luther himself was originally a mystic, with a high appreciation of Tauler

and Thomas à Kempis, and published in 1518 that attractive little book by

an anonymous Frankfort author, the _German Theology_. When, later, he fell

into literalism, it was the mysticism of German Protestantism which, in

opposition to the new orthodoxy, held fast to the original principle of

the Reformation, _i.e._, to the principle that faith is not assent to

historical facts, not the acceptance of dogmas, but an inner experience,

a renewal of the whole man. Religion and theology must not be confounded.

Religion is not doctrine, but a new birth. With Schwenckfeld, and also with

Franck, mysticism is still essentially pietism; with Weigel, and by the

addition of ideas from Paracelsus, it is transformed into theosophy, and as

such reaches its culmination in Böhme.

Caspar Schwenckfeld sought to spiritualize the Lutheran movement and

protested against its being made into a pastors' religion. Though he had

been aroused by Luther's pioneer feat, he soon saw that the latter had not

gone far enough; and in his _Letter on the Eucharist_, 1527, he defined the

points of difference between Luther's view of the Sacrament and his own.

Luther, he maintained, had fallen back to an historical view of faith,

whereas the faith which saves can never consist in the outward acceptance

of an historical fact. He who makes salvation dependent on preaching and

the Sacrament, confuses the invisible and the visible Church, _Ecclesia

interna_ and _externa_. The layman is his own priest.

According to Sebastian Franck (1500-45), there are in man, as in everything

else, two principles, one divine and one selfish, Christ and Adam, an

inner and an outer man; if he submits himself to the former (by a timeless

choice), he is spiritual, if to the latter, carnal. God is not the cause

of sin, but man, who turns the divine power to good or evil. He who denies

himself to live God is a Christian, whether he knows and confesses

the Gospel or not. Faith does not consist in assent, but in inner

transformation. The historical element in Christianity and its ceremonial

observances are only the external form and garb (its "figure"), have merely

a symbolic significance as media of communication, as forms of revelation

for the eternal truth, proclaimed but not founded by Christ; the Bible is

merely the shadow of the living Word of God.

Valentin Weigel (born in 1533, pastor in Zschopau from 1567), whose works

were not printed until after his death, combines his predecessors' doctrine

of inner and eternal Christianity with the microcosmos-idea of Paracelsus.

God, who lacks nothing, has not created the world in order to gain, but in

order to give. Man not only bears the earthly world in his body, and the

heavenly world of the angels in his reason (his spirit), but by virtue of

his intellect (his immortal soul) participates in the divine world also. As

he is thus a microcosm and, moreover, an image of God, all his knowledge

becomes self-knowledge, both sensuous perception (which is not caused by

the object, but only occasioned by it), and the knowledge of God. The

literalist knows not God, but he alone who bears God in himself. Man

is favored above other beings with the freedom to dwell in himself or

in God. When man came out from God, he was his own tempter and made himself

proud and selfish. Thus evil, which had before remained hidden, was

revealed, and became sin. As the separation from God is an eternal act, so

also redemption and resurrection form an inner event. Christ is born in

everyone who gives up the I-ness (_Ichheit_); each regenerate man is a son

of God. But no vicarious suffering can save him who does not put off the

old Adam, no matter how much an atheology sunk in literalism may comfort

itself with the hope that man can "drink at another's cost" (that the merit

of another is imputed to him).[1]

[Footnote 1: Weigel is discussed by J.O. Opel, Leipsic, 1864.]

German mysticism reaches its culmination in the Görlitz cobbler, Jacob

Böhme (1575-1624; _Aurora, or the Rising Dawn_; _Mysterium Magnum, or

on the First Book of Moses_, etc. The works of Böhme, collected by his

apostle, Gichtel, appeared in 1682 in ten volumes, and in 1730 in six

volumes; a new edition was prepared by Schiebler in 1831-47, with a second

edition in 1861 _seq_.). Böhme's doctrine[1] centers about the problem of

the origin of evil. He transfers this to God himself and joins therewith

the leading thought of Eckhart, that God goes through a process, that he

proceeds from an unrevealed to a revealed condition. At the sight of a tin

vessel glistening in the sun, he conceived, as by inspiration, the idea

that as the sunlight reveals itself on the dark vessel so all light needs

darkness and all good evil in order to appear and to become knowable.

Everything becomes perceptible through its opposite alone: gentleness

through sternness, love through anger, affirmation through negation.

Without evil there would be no life, no movement, no distinctions, no

revelation; all would be unqualified, uniform nothingness. And as in nature

nothing exists in which good and evil do not reside, so in God, besides

power or the good, a contrary exists, without which he would remain unknown

to himself. The theogonic process is twofold: self-knowledge on the part of

God, and his revelation outward, as eternal nature, in seven moments.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Windelband's fine exposition, _Geschichte der neueren

Philosophie_, vol. i. §19. The following have written on Böhme: Fr. Baader

(in vols. iii. and xiii. of his _Werke_); Hamberger, Munich, 1844: H. A.

Fechner, Görlitz, 1857; A. v. Harless, Berlin, 1870, new edition, Leipsic,

1882.]

At the beginning of the first development God is will without object,

eternal quietude and rest, unqualified groundlessness without determinate

volition. But in this divine nothingness there soon awakes the hunger after

the aught (somewhat, existence), the impulse to apprehend and manifest

self, and as God looks into and forms an image of himself, he divides into

Father and Son. The Son is the eye with which the Father intuits himself,

and the procession of this vision from the groundless is the Holy Ghost.

Thus far God, who is one in three, is only understanding or wisdom, wherein

the images of all the possible are contained; to the intuition of self must

be added divisibility; it is only through the antithesis of the revealed

God and the unrevealed groundless that the former becomes an actual

trinity (in which the persons stand related as essence, power, and

activity), and the latter becomes desire or nature in God.

At the creation of the world seven equally eternal qualities,

source-spirits or nature-forms, are distinguished in the divine nature.

First comes desire as the contractile, tart quality or pain, from which

proceed hardness and heat; next comes mobility as the expansive, sweet

quality, as this shows itself in water. As the nature of the first was to

bind and the second was fluid, so they both are combined in the bitter

quality or the pain of anxiety, the principle of sensibility. (Contraction

and expansion are the conditions of perceptibility.) From these three forms

fright or lightning suddenly springs forth. This fourth quality is the

turning-point at which light flames up from darkness and the love of

God breaks forth from out his anger; as the first three, or four, forms

constitute the kingdom of wrath, so the latter three constitute the kingdom

of joy. The fifth quality is called light or the warm fire of love, and has

for its functions external animation and communication; the sixth, report

and sound, is the principle of inner animation and intelligence; the

seventh, the formative quality, corporeality, comprehends all the preceding

in itself as their dwelling.

The dark fire of anger (the hard, sweet, and bitter qualities) and the

light fire of love (light, report, and corporeality), separated by the

lightning-fire, in which God's wrath is transformed into mercy, stand

related as evil and good. The evil in God is not sin, but simply the

inciting sting, the principle of movement; which, moreover, is restrained,

overcome, transfigured by gentleness. Sin arises only when the creature

refuses to take part in the advance from darkness to light, and obstinately

remains in the fire of anger instead of forcing his way through to the

fire of love. Thus that which was one in God is divided. Lucifer becomes

enamored of the tart quality (the _centrum naturae_ or the matrix) and will

not grow into the heart of God; and it is only after such lingering behind

that the kingdom of wrath become a real hell. Heaven and hell are not

future conditions, but are experienced here on earth; he who instead of

subduing animality becomes enamored of it, stands under the wrath of God;

whereas he who abjures self dwells in the joyous kingdom of mercy. He alone

truly believes who himself becomes Christ, who repeats in himself what

Christ suffered and attained.

The creation of the material world is a result of Lucifer's fall. Böhme's

description of it, based on the Mosaic account of creation, may be passed

without notice; similarly his view of cognition, familiar from the earlier

mystics, that all knowledge is derived from self-knowledge, that our

destination is to comprehend God from ourselves, and the world from God.

Man, whose body, spirit, and soul hold in them the earthly, the sidereal,

and the heavenly, is at once a microcosm and a "little God."

Under the intractable form of Böhme's speculations and amid their riotous

fancy, no one will fail to recognize their true-hearted sensibility and an

unusual depth and vigor of thought. They found acceptance in England and

France, and have been revived in later times in the systems of Baader and

Schelling.

%7. The Foundation of Modern Physics%.

In no field has the modern period so completely broken with tradition as

in physics. The correctness of the Copernican theory is proved by Kepler's

laws of planetary movement, and Galileo's telescopical observations; the

scientific theory of motion is created by Galileo's laws of projectiles,

falling bodies, and the pendulum; astronomy and mechanics form the entrance

to exact physics--Descartes ventures an attempt at a comprehensive

mechanical explanation of nature. And thus an entirely new movement is at

hand. Forerunners, it is true, had not been lacking. Roger Bacon (1214-94)

had already sought to obtain an empirical knowledge of nature based upon

mathematics; and the great painter Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) had

discovered the principles of mechanics, though without gaining much

influence over the work of his contemporaries. It was reserved for the

triple star which has been mentioned to overthrow Scholasticism. The

conceptions with which the Scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy of nature

sought to get at phenomena--substantial forms, properties, qualitative

change--are thrown aside; their place is taken by matter, forces working

under law, rearrangement of parts. The inquiry into final causes is

rejected as an anthropomorphosis of natural events, and deduction from

efficient causes is alone accepted as scientific explanation. Size, shape,

number, motion, and law are the only and the sufficient principles of

explanation. For magnitudes alone are knowable; wherever it is impossible

to measure and count, to determine force mathematically, there rigorous,

exact science ceases. Nature a system of regularly moved particles of

mass; all that takes place mechanical movement, viz., the combination,

separation, dislocation, oscillation of bodies and corpuscles; mathematics

the organon of natural science! Into this circle of modern scientific

categories are articulated, further, Galileo's new conception of motion

and the conception of atoms, which, previously employed by physicists, as

Daniel Sennert (1619) and others, is now brought into general acceptance

by Gassendi, while the four elements are definitively discarded (Lasswitz,

_Geschichte der Atomistik_, 1890). Still another doctrine of Democritus

is now revived; an evident symptom of the quantification and mechanical

interpretation of natural phenomena being furnished by the doctrine of the

subjectivity of sense qualities, in which, although on varying grounds,

Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Gassendi, and Hobbes agree.[1] Descartes and

Hobbes will be discussed later. Here we may give a few notes on their

fellow laborers in the service of the mechanical science of nature.

[Footnote 1: Cf. chapter vi. in Natorp's work on _Descartes'

Erkenntnisstheorie_, Marburg, 1882, and the same author's _Analekten zur

Geschichte der Philosophie_, in the _Philosophische Monatshefte_, vol.

xviii. 1882, p. 572 _seq_.]

We begin with John Kepler[1] (1571-1630; chief work, _The New Astronomy or

Celestial Physics, in Commentaries on the Motions of Mars_, 1609). Kepler's

merit as an astronomer has long obscured his philosophical importance,

although his discovery of the laws of planetary motion was the outcome of

endeavors to secure an exact foundation for his theory of the world. The

latter is aesthetic in character, centers about the idea of a universal

world-harmony, and employs mathematics as an instrument of confirmation.

For the fact that this theory satisfies the mind, and, on the whole,

corresponds to our empirical impression of the order of nature, is not

enough in Kepler's view to guarantee its truth; by exact methods, by means

of induction and experiment, a detailed proof from empirical facts must be

found for the existence not only of a general harmony, but of definitely

fixed proportions. Herewith the philosophical application of mathematics

loses that obscure mystical character which had clung to it since the time

of Pythagoras, and had strongly manifested itself as late as in Nicolas of

Cusa. Mathematical relations constitute the deepest essence of the real and

the object of science. Where matter is, there is geometry; the latter is

older than the world and as eternal as the divine Spirit; magnitudes are

the source of things. True knowledge exists only where quanta are known;

the presupposition of the capacity for knowledge is the capacity to count;

the spirit cognizes sensuous relations by means of the pure, archetypal,

intellectual relations born in it, which, before the advent of

sense-impressions, have lain concealed behind the veil of possibility;

inclination and aversion between men, their delight in beauty, the pleasant

impression of a view, depend upon an unconscious and instinctive perception

of proportions. This quantitative view of the world, which, with a

consciousness of its novelty as well as of its scope, is opposed to the

qualitative view of Aristotle;[2] the opinion that the essence of the human

spirit, as well as of the divine, nay, the essence of all things, consists

in activity; that, consequently, the soul is always active, being conscious

of its own harmony at least in a confused way, even when not conscious of

external proportions; further, the doctrine that nature loves simplicity,

avoids the superfluous, and is accustomed to accomplish large results with

a few principles--these remind one of Leibnitz. At the same time, the law

of parsimony and the methodological conclusions concerning true hypotheses

and real causes (an hypothesis must not be an artificially constructed set

of fictions, forcibly adjusted to reality, but is to trace back phenomena

to their real grounds), obedience to which enabled him to deduce _a priori_

from causes the conclusions which Copernicus by fortunate conjecture had

gathered inductively from effects--these made our thinker a forerunner of

Newton. The physical method of explanation must not be corrupted either

by theological conceptions (comets are entirely natural phenomena!) or by

anthropomorphic views, which endow nature with spiritual powers.

[Footnote 1: See Sigwart, _Kleine Schriften_, vol. i. p. 182 _seq_.; R.

Eucken, _Beiträge zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie_, p. 54 _seq_.]

[Footnote 2: Aristotle erred when he considered qualitative distinctions

(_idem_ and _aliud_) ultimate. These are to be traced back to quantitative

differences, and the _aliud_ or _diversum_ is to be replaced by _plus et

minus_. There is nothing absolutely light, but only relatively. Since

all things are distinguished only by "more or less," the possibility of

mediating members or proportions between them is given.]

Intermediate between Bacon and Descartes, both in the order of time and in

the order of fact, and a co-founder of modern philosophy, stands Galileo

Galilei (1564-1641).[1] Galileo exhibits all the traits characteristic

of modern thinking: the reference from words to things, from memory to

perception and thought, from authority to self-ascertained principles, from

chance opinion, arbitrary opinion, and the traditional doctrines of the

schools, to "knowledge," that is, to one's own, well grounded, indisputable

insight, from the study of human affairs to the study of nature. Study

Aristotle, but do not become his slave; instead of yielding yourselves

captive to his views, use your own eyes; do not believe that the mind

remains unproductive unless it allies itself with the understanding of

another; copy nature, not copies merely! He equals Bacon in his high

estimation of sensuous experience in contrast to the often illusory

conclusions of the reason, and of the value of induction; but he does not

conceal from himself the fact that observation is merely the first step in

the process of cognition, leaving the chief rôle for the understanding.

This, supplementing the defect of experience--the impossibility of

observing all cases--by its _a priori_ concept of law and with its

inferences overstepping the bounds of experience, first makes induction

possible, brings the facts established into connection (their combination

under laws is thought, not experience), reduces them to their primary,

simple, unchangeable, and necessary causes by abstraction from contingent

circumstances, regulates perception, corrects sense-illusions, _i. e_.,

the false judgments originating in experience, and decides concerning the

reality or fallaciousness of phenomena. Demonstration based on experience,

a close union of observation and thought, of fact and Idea (law)--these

are the requirements made by Galileo and brilliantly fulfilled in his

discoveries; this, the "inductive speculation," as Dühring terms it, which

derives laws of far-reaching importance from inconspicuous facts; this,

as Galileo himself recognizes, the distinctive gift of the investigator.

Galileo anticipates Descartes in regard to the subjective character of

sense qualities and their reduction to quantitative distinctions,[2] while

he shares with him the belief in the typical character of mathematics and

the mechanical theory of the world. The truth of geometrical propositions

and demonstrations is as unconditionally certain for man as for God, only

that man learns them by a discursive process, whereas God's intuitive

understanding comprehends them with a glance and knows more of them than

man. The book of the universe is written in mathematical characters; motion

is the fundamental phenomenon in the world of matter; our knowledge reaches

as far as phenomena are measurable; the qualitative nature of force, back

of its quantitative determinations, remains unknown to us. When Galileo

maintains that the Copernican theory is philosophically true and not merely

astronomically useful, thus interpreting it as more than a hypothesis,

he is guided by the conviction that the simplest explanation is the most

probable one, that truth and beauty are one, as in general he concedes

a guiding though not a controlling influence in scientific work to the

aesthetic demand of the mind for order, harmony, and unity in nature, to

correspond to the wisdom of the Creator.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Natorp's essay on Galileo, in vol. xviii. of the

_Philosophische Monatshefte_, 1882.]

[Footnote 1: This doctrine is developed by Galileo in the controversial

treatise against Padre Grassi, _The Scales (Il Saggiatore_, 1623, in the

Florence edition of his collected works, 1842 _seq_., vol. iv. pp.

149-369; cf. Natorp, _Descartes' Erkenntnisstheorie_, 1882, chap. vi.). In

substance, moreover, this doctrine is found, as Heussler remarks, _Baco_,

p. 94, in Bacon himself, in _Valerius Terminus (Works_, Spedding, vol. iii.

pp. 217-252.)]

One of the most noted and influential among the contemporaries, countrymen,

and opponents of Descartes, was the priest and natural scientist, Petrus

Gassendi,[1] from 1633 Provost of Digne, later for a short period professor

of mathematics at Paris. His renewal of Epicureanism, to which he was

impelled by temperament, by his reverence for Lucretius, and by the

anti-Aristotelian tendency of his thinking, was of far more importance for

modern thought than the attempts to revive the ancient systems which have

been mentioned above (p. 29). Its superior influence depends on the fact

that, in the conception of atoms, it offered exact inquiry a most useful

point of attachment. The conflict between the Gassendists and the

Cartesians, which at first was a bitter one, centered, as far as physics

was concerned, around the value of the atomic hypothesis as contrasted with

the corpuscular and vortex theory which Descartes had opposed to it. It

soon became apparent, however, that these two thinkers followed along

essentially the same lines in the philosophy of nature, sharply as they

were opposed in their noëtical principles. Descartes' doctrine of body is

conceived from an entirely materialistic standpoint, his anthropology,

indeed, going further than the principles of his system would allow.

Gassendi, on the other hand, recognizes an immaterial, immortal reason,

traces the origin of the world, its marvelous arrangement, and the

beginning of motion back to God, and, since the Bible so teaches, believes

the earth to be at rest,--holding that, for this reason, the decision must

be given in favor of Tycho Brahé and against Copernicus, although the

hypothesis of the latter affords the simpler and, scientifically, the more

probable explanation. Both thinkers rejoice in their agreement with the

dogmas of the Church, only that with Descartes it came unsought in the

natural progress of his thought, while Gassendi held to it in contradiction

to his system. It is the more surprising that Gassendi's works escaped

being put upon the Index, a fate which overtook those of Descartes in 1663.

[Footnote 2: Pierre Gassendi, 1592-1655: _On the Life and Character of

Epicurus_, 1647; _Notes on the Tenth Book of Diogenes Laërtius, with a

Survey of the Doctrine of Epicurus_, 1649. _Works_, Lyons, 1658, Florence,

1727. Cf. Lange, _History of Materialism_, book i. § 3, chap, 1; Natorp,

_Analekten, Philosophische Monatshefte_, vol. xviii. 1882, p. 572 _seq_.]

As modern thought derives its mechanical temper equally from both these

sources, and the natural science of the day has appropriated the corpuscles

of Descartes under the name of molecules, as well as the atoms of Gassendi,

though not without considerable modification in both conceptions (Lange,

vol. i. p. 269), so we find attempts at mediation at an early period.

While Père Mersenne (1588-1648), who was well versed in physics, sought

an indecisive middle course between these two philosophers, the English

chemist, Robert Boyle, effected a successful synthesis of both. The son

of Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork, he was born at Lismore in 1626, lived in

literary retirement at Oxford from 1654, and later in Cambridge, and died,

1692, in London, president of the Royal Society. His principal work, _The

Sceptical Chemist (Works_, vol. i. p. 290 _seq_.), appeared in 1661, the

tract, _De Ipsa Natura_, in 1682.[1] By his introduction of the atomic

conception he founded an epoch in chemistry, which, now for the first, was

freed from bondage to the ideas of Aristotle and the alchemists.

Atomism, however, was for Boyle merely an instrument of method and not a

philosophical theory of the world. A sincerely religious man,[2] he regards

with disfavor both the atheism of Epicurus and his complete rejection of

teleology--the world-machine points to an intelligent Creator and a purpose

in creation; motion, to a divine impulse. He defends, on the other hand,

the right of free inquiry against the priesthood and the pedantry of the

schools, holding that the supernatural must be sharply distinguished from

the natural, and mere conjectures concerning insoluble problems from

positions susceptible of experimental proof; while, in opposition to

submission to authority, he remarks that the current coin of opinion must

be estimated, not by the date when and the person by whom it was minted but

by the value of the metal alone. Cartesian elements in Boyle are the start

from doubt, the derivation of all motion from pressure and impact, and the

extension of the mechanical explanation to the organic world. His inquiries

relate exclusively to the world of matter so far as it was "completed on

the last day but one of creation." He defends empty space against Descartes

and Hobbes. He is the first to apply the mediaeval terms, primary and

secondary qualities, to the antithesis between objective properties which

really belong to things, and sensuous or subjective qualities present only

in the feeling subject.[3]

[Footnote 1: Boyle's _Works_ were published in Latin at Geneva, in 1660, in

six volumes, and in 1714 in five; an edition by Birch appeared at London,

1744, in five volumes, second edition, 1772, in six. Cf. Buckle, _History

of Civilization in England_, vol. i. chap. vii. pp. 265-268; Lange,

_History of Materialism_, vol. i. pp. 298-306; vol. ii. p. 351 _seq_.;

Georg Baku, _Der Streit über den Naturbegriff, Zeitschrift für

Philosophie_, vol. xcviii., 1891, p. 162 _seq_.]

[Footnote 2: The foundation named after him had for its object to promote

by means of lectures the investigation of nature on the basis of atomism,

and, at the same time, to free it from the reproach of leading to atheism

and to show its harmony with natural religion. Samuel Clarke's work on _The

Being and Attributes of God_, 1705, originated in lectures delivered on

this foundation.]

[Footnote 3: Eucken, _Geschichte der philosophischen Terminologie_,

pp. 94, 196.]

%8. Philosophy in England to the Middle of the Seventeenth Century.%

%(a) Bacon's Predecessors.%--The darkness which lay over the beginnings

of modern English philosophy has been but incompletely dispelled by

the meritorious work of Ch. de Rémusat _(Histoire de la Philosophie en

Angleterre depuis Bacon jusqu'a Locke_, 2 vols., 1878). The most recent

investigations of J. Freudenthal _(Beiträge zur Geschichte der Englischen

Philosophie_, in the _Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie_, vols. iv. and

v., 1891) have brought assistance in a way deserving of thanks, since they

lift at important points the veil which concealed Bacon's relations to his

predecessors and contemporaries, by describing the scientific tendencies

and achievements of Digby and Temple. The following may be taken from his

results.

Everard Digby (died 1592; chief work, _Theoria Analytica,_ 1579),

instructor in logic in Cambridge from 1573, who was strongly influenced

by Reuchlin and who favored an Aristotelian-Alexandrian-Cabalistic

eclecticism, was the first to disseminate Neoplatonic ideas in England;

and, in spite of the lack of originality in his systematic presentation of

theoretical philosophy, aroused the study of this branch in England into

new life. His opponent, Sir William Temple [1] (1553-1626), by his defense

and exposition of the doctrine of Ramus (introduced into Great Britain by

George Buchanan and his pupil, Andrew Melville), made Cambridge the chief

center of Ramism. He was the first who openly opposed Aristotle.

[Footnote 1: Temple was secretary to Philip Sidney, William Davison, and

the Earl of Essex, and, from 1619, Provost of Trinity College, Dublin.

His maiden work, _De Unica P. Rami Methodo_, which he published under the

pseudonym, Mildapettus 1580, was aimed at Digby's _De Duplici Methodo_. His

chief work, _P. Rami Dialectics Libri Dua Scholiis, Illustrati_, appeared

in 1584.]

Bacon was undoubtedly acquainted with both these writers and took ideas

from both. Digby represented the scholastic tendency, which Bacon

vehemently opposed, yet without being able completely to break away

from it. Temple was one of those who supplied him with weapons for this

conflict. Finally, it must be mentioned that many of the English scientists

of the time, especially William Gilbert (1540-1603; _De Magnete_, 1600),

physician to Queen Elizabeth, used induction in their work before Bacon

advanced his theory of method.

%(b) Bacon%.--The founder of the empirical philosophy of modern times was

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), a contemporary of Shakespeare. Bacon began

his political career by sitting in Parliament for many years under Queen

Elizabeth, as whose counsel he was charged with the duty of engaging in

the prosecution of his patron, the Earl of Essex, and at whose command he

prepared a justification of the process. Under James I, he attained the

highest offices and honors, being made Keeper of the Great Seal in 1617,

Lord Chancellor and Baron Verulam in 1618, and Viscount St. Albans in

1621. In this last year came his fall. He was charged with bribery, and

condemned; the king remitted the imprisonment and fine, and for the

remainder of his life Bacon devoted himself to science, rejecting every

suggestion toward a renewal of his political activity. The moral laxity

of the times throws a mitigating light over his fault; but he cannot be

aquitted of self-seeking, love of money and of display, and excessive

ambition. As Macaulay says in his famous essay, he was neither malignant

nor tyrannical, but he lacked warmth of affection and elevation of

sentiment; there were many things which he loved more than virtue, and many

which he feared more than guilt. He first gained renown as an author by his

ethical, economic, and political _Essays_, after the manner of Montaigne;

of these the first ten appeared in 1597, in the third edition (1625)

increased to fifty-eight; the Latin translation bears the title _Sermones

Fideles_. His great plan for a "restoration of the sciences" was intended

to be carried out in four, or rather, in six parts. But only the first two

parts of the _Instauratio Magna_ were developed: the _encyclopaedia_, or

division of all sciences[1], a chart of the _globus intellectualis_, on

which was depicted what each science had accomplished and what still

remained for each to do; and the development of the _new method_. Bacon

published his survey of the circle of the sciences in the English work, the

_Advancement of Learning_, 1605, a much enlarged revision of which, _De

Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum_, appeared in Latin in 1623. In 1612

he printed as a contribution to methodology the draft, _Cogitata et Visa_

(written 1607), later recast into the [first book of the] _Novum Organum_,

1620. This title, _Novum Organum_, of itself indicates opposition to

Aristotle, whose logical treatises had for ages been collected under the

title _Organon_. If in this work Bacon had given no connected exposition

of his reforming principles, but merely a series of aphorisms, and this

an incomplete one, the remaining parts are still more fragmentary, only

prefaces and scattered contributions having been reduced to writing. The

third part was to have been formed by a description of the world or natural

_history, Historia Naturalis_, and the last,--introduced by a _Scala

Intellectus_ (ladder of knowledge, illustrations of the method

by examples), and by _Prodromi_ (preliminary results of his own

inquiries),--by natural _science, Philosophia Secunda_. The best edition of

Bacon's works is the London one of Spedding, Ellis & Heath, 1857 _seq_., 7

vols., 2d ed., 1870; with 7 volumes additional of _The Letters and Life of

Francis Bacon, including His Occasional Works_, and a Commentary, by J.

Spedding, 1862-74. Spedding followed this further with a briefer _Account

of the Life and Times of Francis Bacon_, 2 vols., 1878[2].

[Footnote 1: According to the faculties of the soul, memory, imagination,

and understanding, three principal sciences are distinguished; history,

poesy, and philosophy. Of the three objects of the latter, "nature strikes

the mind with a direct ray, God with a refracted ray, and man himself

with a reflected ray." Theology is natural or revealed. Speculative

(theoretical) natural philosophy divides into physics, concerned with

material and efficient causes, and metaphysics, whose mission, according to

the traditional view, is to inquire into final causes, but in Bacon's own

opinion, into formal causes; operative (technical) natural philosophy

is mechanics and natural magic. The doctrine concerning man comprises

anthropology (including logic and ethics) and politics. This division of

Bacon was still retained by D'Alembert in his preliminary discourse to the

_Encyclopédie_.]

[Footnote 2: Cf. on Bacon, K. Fischer, 2d ed., 1875; Chr. Sigwart, in the

_Preussische Jahrbücher_, 1863 and 1864, and in vol. ii. of his _Logik_;

H. Heussler, _Baco und seine geschichtliche Stellung_, Breslau, 1889.

[Adamson, _Encyclopedia Britannica_, 9th. ed., vol. iii. pp. 200-222;

Fowler, English Philosophers Series, 1881; Nichol, Blackwood's

Philosophical Classics, 2 vols., 1888-89.--TR.]] Bacon's merit was

threefold: he felt more forcibly and more clearly than previous

thinkers the need of a reform in science; he set up a new and grand

ideal--unbiased and methodical investigation of nature in order to

mastery over nature; and he gave information and directions as to

the way in which this goal was to be attained, which, in spite of their

incompleteness in detail, went deep into the heart of the subject and laid

the foundation for the work of centuries.[1] His faith in the omnipotence

of the new method was so strong, that he thought that science for the

future could almost dispense with talent. He compares his method to a

compass or a ruler, with which the unpractised man is able to draw circles

and straight lines better than an expert without these instruments.

[Footnote 1: His detractors are unjust when they apply the criterion of the

present method of investigation and find only imperfection in an imperfect

beginning.]

All science hitherto, Bacon declares, has been uncertain and unfruitful,

and does not advance a step, while the mechanic arts grow daily more

perfect; without a firm basis, garrulous, contentious, and lacking in

content, it is of no practical value. The seeker after certain knowledge

must abandon words for things, and learn the art of forcing nature to

answer his questions. The seeker after fruitful knowledge must increase

the number of discoveries, and transform them from matters of chance into

matters of design. For discovery conditions the power, greatness, and

progress of mankind. Man's power is measured by his knowledge, knowledge is

power, and nature is conquered by obedience--_scientia est potentia; natura

parendo vincitur_.

Bacon declares three things indispensable for the attainment of this

power-giving knowledge: the mind must understand the instruments of

knowledge; it must turn to experience, deriving the materials of knowledge

from perception; and it must not rise from particular principles to the

higher axioms too rapidly, but steadily and gradually through middle

axioms. The mind can accomplish nothing when left to itself; but undirected

experience alone is also insufficient (experimentation without a plan is

groping in the dark), and the senses, moreover, are deceptive and not acute

enough for the subtlety of nature--therefore, methodical experimentation

alone, not chance observation, is worthy of confidence. Instead of the

customary divorce of experience and understanding, a firm alliance, a

"lawful marriage," must be effected between them. The empiricists merely

collect, like the ants; the dogmatic metaphysicians spin the web of their

ideas out of themselves, like the spiders; but the true philosopher must be

like the bee, which by its own power transforms and digests the gathered

material.

As the mind, like a dull and uneven mirror, by its own nature distorts the

rays of objects, it must first of all be cleaned and polished, that is, it

must be freed from all prejudices and false notions, which, deep-rooted by

habit, prevent the formation of a true picture of the world. It must root

out its prejudices, or, where this is impossible, at least understand them.

Doubt is the first step on the way to truth. Of these Phantoms or Idols to

be discarded, Bacon distinguishes four classes: Idols of the Theater, of

the Market Place, of the Den, and of the Tribe. The most dangerous are

the _idola theatri_, which consist in the tendency to put more trust in

authority and tradition than in independent reflection, to adopt current

ideas simply because they find general acceptance. Bacon's injunction

concerning these is not to be deceived by stage-plays (_i.e._, by the

teachings of earlier thinkers which represent things other than they are);

instead of believing others, observe for thyself! The _idola fori_, which

arise from the use of language in public intercourse, depend upon the

confusion of words, which are mere symbols with a conventional value and

which are based on the carelessly constructed concepts of the vulgar, with

things themselves. Here Bacon warns us to keep close to things. The _idola

specus_ are individual prepossessions which interfere with the apprehension

of the true state of affairs, such as the excessive tendency of thought

toward the resemblances or the differences of things, or the investigator's

habit of transferring ideas current in his own department to subjects of a

different kind. Such individual weaknesses are numberless, yet they may in

part be corrected by comparison with the perceptions of others. The _idola

tribus_, finally, are grounded in the nature of the human species. To this

class belong, among others, illusions of the senses, which may in part be

corrected by the use of instruments, with which we arm our organs; further,

the tendency to hold fast to opinions acceptable to us in spite of contrary

instances; similarly, the tendency to anthropomorphic views, including,

as its most important special instance, the mistake of thinking that we

perceive purposive relations everywhere and the working of final causes,

after the analogy of human action, when in reality efficient causes alone

are concerned. Here Bacon's injunction runs, not to interpret natural

phenomena teleologically, but to explain them from mechanical causes; not

to narrow the world down to the limits of the mind, but to extend the mind

to the boundaries of the world, so that it shall understand it as it

really is.

To these warnings there are added positive rules. When the investigator,

after the removal of prejudices and habitual modes of thought, approaches

experience with his senses unperverted and a purified mind, he is to

advance from the phenomena given to their conditions. First of all, the

facts must be established by observation and experiment, and systematically

arranged,[1] then let him go on to causes and laws.[2] The true or

scientific induction[3] thus inculcated is quite different from the

credulous induction of common life or the unmethodical induction of

Aristotle. Bacon emphasizes the fact that hitherto the importance of

negative instances, which are to be employed as a kind of counter-proof,

has been completely overlooked, and that a substitute for complete

induction, which is never attainable, may be found, on the one hand, in the

collection of as many cases as possible, and, on the other, by considering

the more important or decisive cases, the "prerogative instances." Then the

inductive ascent from experiment to axiom is to be followed by a deductive

descent from axioms to new experiments and discoveries. Bacon rejects

the syllogism on the ground that it fits one to overcome his opponent in

disputation, but not to gain an active conquest over nature. In his own

application of these principles of method, his procedure was that of a

dilettante; the patient, assiduous labor demanded for the successful

promotion of the mission of natural investigation was not his forte. His

strength lay in the postulation of problems, the stimulation and direction

of inquiry, the discovery of lacunae and the throwing out of suggestions;

and many ideas incidentally thrown off by him surprise us by their

ingenious anticipations of later discoveries. The greatest defect in his

theory was his complete failure to recognize the services promised by

mathematics to natural science. The charge of utilitarianism, which has

been so broadly made, is, on the contrary, unjust. For no matter how

strongly he emphasizes the practical value of knowledge, he is still in

agreement with those who esteem the godlike condition of calm and cheerful

acquaintance with truth more highly than the advantages to be expected from

it; he desires science to be used, not as "a courtezan for pleasure," but

"as a spouse for generation, fruit and comfort," and--leaving entirely out

of view his isolated acknowledgments of the inherent value of knowledge--he

conceives its utility wholly in the comprehensive and noble sense that the

pursuit of science, from which as such all narrow-minded regard for direct

practical application must keep aloof, is the most important lever for the

advancement of human culture.

[Footnote 1: Bacon illustrates the method by the explanation of heat. The

results of experimental observation are to be arranged in three tables. The

table of presence contains many different cases in which heat occurs; the

table of absence, those in which, under circumstances otherwise the same,

it is wanting; the table of degrees or comparison enumerates phenomena

whose increase and decrease accompany similar variations in the degree of

heat. That which remains after the _exclusion_ now to be undertaken (of

that which cannot be the nature or cause of heat), yields as a preliminary

result or commencement of interpretation (as a "first vintage"), the

definition of heat: "a motion, expansive, restrained, and acting in its

strife upon the smaller particles of bodies."]

[Footnote 2: This goal of Baconian inquiry is by no means coincident with

that of exact natural science. Law does not mean to him, as to the physical

scientist of to-day, a mathematically formulated statement of the course of

events, but the nature of the phenomenon, to be expressed in a definition

(E. König, _Entwickelung des Causalproblems bis Kant_, 1883, pp. 154-156).

Bacon combines in a peculiar manner ancient and modern, Platonic and

corpuscular fundamental ideas. Rejecting final causes with the atomists,

yet handing over material and efficient causes (the latter of which sink

with him to the level of mere changing occasional causes) to empirical

physics, he assigns to metaphysics, as the true _science_ of nature, the

search for the "forms" and properties of things. In this he is guided by

the following metaphysical presupposition: Phenomena, however manifold

they may be, are at bottom composed of a few elements, namely, permanent

properties, the so-called "simple natures," which form, as it were, the

alphabet of nature or the colors on her palette, by the combination of

which she produces her varied pictures; _e. g_., the nature of heat and

cold, of a red color, of gravity, and also of age, of death. Now the

question to be investigated becomes, What, then, is heat, redness, etc.?

The ground essence and law of the natures consist in certain forms,

which Bacon conceives in a Platonic way as concepts and substances, but

phenomenal ones, and, at the same time, with Democritus, as the grouping or

motion of minute material particles. Thus the form of heat is a particular

kind of motion, the form of whiteness a determinate arrangement of material

particles. Cf. Natge, _Ueber F. Bacons Formenlehre_, Leipsic, 1891, in

which Heussler's view is developed in more detail. [Cf. further, Fowler's

_Bacon_, English Philosophers Series, 1881, chap. iv.--TR.]]

[Footnote 3: The Baconian method is to be called induction, it is true,

only in the broad sense. Even before Sigwart, Apelt, _Theorie der

Induction_, 1854, pp. 151, 153, declared that the question it discussed was

essentially a method of abstraction. This, however, does not detract from

the fame of Bacon as the founder, of the theory of inductive investigation

(in later times carefully elaborated by Mill).]

Bacon intended that his reforming principles should accrue to the benefit

of practical philosophy also, but gave only aphoristic hints to this

end. Everything is impelled by two appetites, of which the one aims at

individual welfare, the other at the welfare of the whole of which the

thing is a part (_bonum suitatis_--_bonum communionis_). The second is not

only the nobler but also the stronger; this holds of the lower creatures as

well as of man, who, when not degenerate, prefers the general welfare to

his individual interests. Love is the highest of the virtues, and is never,

as other human endowments, exposed to the danger of excess; therefore the

life of action is of more worth than the life of contemplation. By this

principle of morals Bacon marked out the way for the English ethics of

later times.[1] He notes the lack of a science of character, for which more

material is given in ordinary discourse, in the poets and the historians,

than in the works of the philosophers; he explains the power of the

affections over the reason by the fact that the idea of present good fills

the imagination more forcibly than the idea of good to come, and summons

persuasion, habit, and morals to the aid of the latter. We must endeavor

so to govern the passions (each of which combines in itself a masculine

impetuosity with a feminine weakness) that they shall take the part of

the reason instead of attacking it. Elsewhere Bacon gives (not entirely

unquestionable) directions concerning the art of making one's way. Acute

observations and ingenious remarks everywhere abound. In order to inform

one's self of a man's intentions and ends, it is necessary to "keep a good

mediocrity in liberty of speech, which invites a similar liberty, and in

secrecy, which induces trust." "In order to get on one must have a little

of the fool and not too much of the honest." "As the baggage is to an

army, so is riches to virtue. It cannot be spared nor left behind, but it

hindereth the march; yea, and the care of it sometimes loseth or disturbeth

the victory" (impedimenta--baggage and hindrance). On envy and malevolence

he says: "For men's minds will either feed upon their own good or upon

others' evil; ... and whoso is out of hope to attain another's virtue will

seek to come at even hand by depressing another's fortune."

[Footnote 1: Cf. Vorlaender, p. 267 _seq_.]

In ethics, as in theoretical philosophy, Bacon demands the completion of

natural knowledge by revelation. The light of nature (the reason and the

conscience) is able only to convince us of sin and not to give us complete

information concerning our duty,--_e.g._, the lofty moral principle, Love

your enemies. Similarly, natural theology is quite sufficient to place

the existence of God beyond doubt, by reasoning from the order in nature

("slight tastes of philosophy may perchance move one to atheism but fuller

draughts lead back to religion"); but the doctrines of Christianity are

matters of faith. Religion and science are separate fields, any confusion

of which involves the danger of an heretical religion or a fabulous

philosophy. The more a principle of faith contradicts the reason, the

greater the obedience and the honor to God in accepting it.

%(c) Hobbes%.--Hobbes stands in sharp contrast to Bacon both in disposition

and in doctrine. Bacon was a man of a wide outlook, a rich, stimulating,

impulsive nature, filled with great plans, but too mobile and desultory to

allow them to ripen to perfection; Hobbes is slow, tenacious, persistent,

unyielding, his thought strenuous and narrow. To this corresponds a

profound difference in their systems, which is by no means adequately

characterized by saying that Hobbes brings into the foreground the

mathematical element neglected by his predecessor, and turns his attention

chiefly to politics. The dependence of Hobbes on Bacon is, in spite of

their personal acquaintance, not so great as formerly was universally

assumed. His guiding stars are rather the great mathematicians of the

Continent, Kepler and Galileo, while Cartesian influences also are not

to be denied. He finds his mission in the construction of a strictly

mechanical view of the world. Mechanism applied to the world gives

materialism; applied to knowledge, sensationalism of a mathematical type;

applied to the will, determinism; to morality and the state, ethical and

political naturalism. Nevertheless, the empirical tendency of his nation

has a certain power over him; he holds fast to the position that all ideas

ultimately spring from experience. With his energetic but short-breathed

thinking, he did not succeed in fusing the rationalistic elements received

from foreign sources with these native tendencies, so as to produce

a unified system. As Grimm has correctly shown (_Zur Geschichte des

Erkenntnissproblems_), there is an unreconciled contradiction between the

dependence of thought on experience, which he does not give up, and the

universal validity of the truths derived from pure reason, which he asserts

on the basis of the mathematico-philosophical doctrines of the Continent. A

similar unmediated dualism will meet us in Locke also.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was repelled while a student at Oxford by

Scholastic methods in thought, with which he agreed only in their

nominalistic results (there are no universals except names). During

repeated sojourns in Paris, where he made the acquaintance of Gassendi,

Mersenne, and Descartes, he devoted himself to the study of mathematics,

and was greatly influenced by the doctrines of Galileo; while the disorders

of the English revolution led him to embrace an absolutist theory of the

state. His chief works were his politics, under the title _Leviathan_,

1651, and his _Elementa Philosophiae_, in three parts (_De Corpore, De

Homine, De Cive_), of which the third, _De Cive_, appeared first (in Latin;

in briefer form and anonymously, 1642, enlarged 1647), the first, _De

Corpore_, in 1655, and the second, _De Homine_, in 1658. These had

been preceded by two books [1] written, like the two last parts of the

_Elements_, in English: _On Human Nature_ and _De Corpore Politico_,

composed 1640, printed without the author's consent in 1650. Besides these

he wrote two treatises _Of Liberty and Necessity_, 1646 and 1654,

and prepared, 1668, a collected edition of his works (in Latin). In

Molesworth's edition, 1839-45, the Latin works occupy five volumes and the

English eleven.[2]

[Footnote 1: Or rather one; the treatise _On Human Nature_ consists of

the first thirteen chapters of the work, _Elements of Law, Natural and

Politic_, and the _De Corpore Politico_ of the remainder.]

[Footnote 2: Cf. on Hobbes, G.C. Robertson (Blackwood's Philosophical

Classics, vol. x.), 1886; Tönnies in the _Vierteljahrsschrift für

wissenschaftliche Philosophie_, Jahrg. 3-5, 1879-81.]

Philosophy is formally defined by Hobbes as knowledge of effects from

causes and causes from effects by means of legitimate rational inference.

This implies the equal validity of the deductive and inductive

methods,--while Bacon had proclaimed the latter the most important

instrument of knowledge,--as well as the exclusion of theology based on

revelation from the domain of science. Philosophy is objectively defined as

the theory of body and motion: _all that exists is body; all that occurs,

motion_. Everything real is corporeal; this holds of points, lines, and

surfaces, which as the limits of body cannot be incorporeal, as well as

of the mind and of God. The mind is merely a (for the senses too) refined

body, or, as it is stated in another place, a movement in certain parts

of the organic body. All events, even internal events, the feelings and

passions, are movements of material parts. "Endeavor" is a diminutive

motion, as the atom is the smallest of bodies; sensation and representation

are changes in the perceiving body. Space is the idea of an existing thing

as such, _i. e_., merely as existing outside the perceiving subject; time,

the idea of motion. All phenomena are corporeal motions, which take place

with mechanical necessity. Neither formal nor final causes exist, but only

efficient causes. All that happens takes its origin in the activity of an

external cause, and not in itself; a body at rest (or in motion) remains

at rest (or in motion) forever, unless affected by another in a contrary

sense. And as bodies and their changes constitute the only objects of

philosophy, so the mathematical method is the only correct method.

There are two kinds of bodies: natural bodies, which man finds in nature,

and artificial bodies, which he himself produces. By the latter Hobbes

refers especially to the state as a human artefact. Man stands between the

two as the most perfect natural body and an element in the political body.

Philosophy, therefore, besides the introductory _philosophia prima_, which

discusses the underlying concepts, consists of three parts: physics,

anthropology, and politics. Even the theory of the state is capable of

demonstrative treatment; moral phenomena are as subject to the law of

mechanical causation as physical phenomena.

The first factor in the cognitive process is an impression on a

sense-organ, which, occasioned by external motion, continues onward to the

heart and from this center gives rise to a reaction. The perception or

sensation which thus arises is entirely subjective, a function of the

knower merely, and in no way a copy of the external movement. The

properties light, color, and sound, which we believe to be without us, are

merely internal phenomena dependent on outer and inner motions, but with no

resemblance to them. Memory consists in the lingering effects or residuary

traces of perception; it is a sense or consciousness of having felt before

_(sentire se sensisse meminisse est_), and ideas are distinguished from

sensations as the perfect from the present tense. Experience is the

totality of perceptions retained in memory, together with a certain

foresight of the future after the analogy of the past. These stages of

cognition, which can yield prudence but not necessary and universal

knowledge, are present in animals as well as men. The human capacity for

science is dependent on the faculty of speech; words are conventional

signs to facilitate the retention and communication of ideas. As the

memory-images denoted by words are weaker, fainter, and less clearly

discriminated than the original sensations, it comes to pass that a number

of similar ideas of memory receive a common name. Thus abstract general

ideas and generic concepts arise, to which nothing real corresponds, for

in reality particulars alone exist. The universal is a human artefact. The

combination of words into propositions, being an addition or subtraction

of arbitrary symbols or marks, is called judgment; the combination of

propositions into syllogisms, inference; the united body of true or

demonstrated principles, science--hence mathematics is the type of all

knowledge. In short, thought is nothing but calculation and the words with

which we operate are mere counters; he who takes counters for coin is a

fool. Animals lack reason, _i.e._, this power of combining artificial

symbols.

Hobbes's theory of the will is characterized by the same! sensationalism

and mechanism as his theory of knowledge. All spiritual events originate

in impressions of sense. Man responds to the action of objects by a double

reaction, adding to the theoretical reaction of sensation a practical one

in the feeling of pleasure or pain (according as the impression furthers or

hinders the vital function), whence desire and aversion follow in respect

to future experience. Further developments from the feelings experienced at

the signs of honor (the acknowledgment of superior power) and the contrary,

are the affections of pride, courage, anger, of shame and repentance, of

hope and love, of pity, etc. Deliberation is the alternation of different

appetites; the final, victorious one which immediately precedes action is

called will. Freedom cannot be predicated of the will, but only of the

action, and even in this case it means simply the absence of external

restraints, the procedure of the action from the will of the agent; while

the action is necessary nevertheless. Every motion is the inevitable result

of the sum of the preceding (including cerebral) motions.

Things which we desire are termed good, and those which we shun, evil.

Nothing is good _per se_ or absolutely, but only relatively, for a given

person, place, time, or set of circumstances. Different things are good to

different men, and there is no objective, universal rule of good and

evil, so long as men are considered as individuals, apart from society. A

definite criterion of the good is first reached in the state: that is right

which the law permits, that wrong which it forbids; good means that which

is conducive to the general welfare. In the state of nature nothing is

forbidden; nature gives every man a right to everything, and right is

coextensive with might. What, then, induces man to abandon the state of

nature and enter the state of citizenship? The opinion of Aristotle and

Grotius that the state originates in the social impulse is false; for man

is essentially not social, but selfish, and nothing but regard for his own

interests bids him seek the protection of the state; the civil commonwealth

is an artificial product of fear and prudence. The highest good is

self-preservation; all other goods, as friendship, riches, wisdom,

knowledge, and, above all, power, are valuable only as instruments of the

former. The precondition of well-being, for which each man strives by

nature, is security for life and health. This is wanting in the state of

nature, in which the passions govern; for the state of nature is a state

of war of everyone against everyone _(bellum omnium contra omnes_). Each

man strives for success and power, and, since he cannot trust his fellow,

seeks to subdue, nay, to kill him; each looks upon his fellow as a wolf

which he prefers to devour rather than submit himself to the like

operation. Now, as no one is so weak as to be incapable of inflicting on

his fellows that worst of evils, death, and thus the strongest is unsafe,

reason, in the interest of everyone, enjoins a search after peace and the

establishment of an ordered community. The conditions of peace are the

"laws of nature," which relate both to politics and to morals but which do

not attain their full binding authority until they become positive laws,

injunctions of the sovereign power. Peace is attainable only when each man,

in return for the protection vouchsafed to him, gives up his natural right

to all. The compact by which each renounces his natural liberty to do what

he pleases, provided all others are ready for the same renunciation,--to

which are added, further, the laws of justice (sanctity of covenants),

equity, gratitude, modesty, sociability, mercifulness, etc., whose

opposites would bring back the state of nature,--this compact is secured

against violation by the transfer of the general power and freedom to a

single will (the will of an assembly or of an individual person), which

then represents the general will. The civil contract includes, then, two

moments: first, renunciation; second, irrevocable transference and

(absolute) submission. The second unites the multitude into a civil

personality, the most perfect unity being vouchsafed by absolute monarchy.

The sovereign is the soul of the political body; the officials, its limbs;

reward and punishment, its nerves; law and equity, its reason.

The social contract theory has often experienced democratic interpretation

and application, both before and since Hobbes's time; and, in fact, it does

not include _per se_ the irrevocability of the transfer, the absoluteness

of the sovereign power, and the monarchical head, which Hobbes considered

indispensable in order to guard against the danger of anarchy. In every

abridgment of the supreme power, whether by division or limitation, he sees

a step toward the renewal of the state of nature; and he defends with iron

rigor the omnipotence of the state and the complete lack of legal status on

the part of all individuals in contrast with it. The citizen is not to obey

his own conscience, which has simply the value of a private opinion,

but the laws, as the public conscience; while the supreme ruler, on the

contrary, is superior to the civil laws, for it is he that decrees,

interprets, alters, and abrogates them. He is lord over the property, the

life, and the death of the citizens, and can do no one wrong. For he

alone has retained his original natural right to all, which the rest have

entirely and forever renounced. He must have regard, indeed, to the welfare

of the people, but he is accountable to God alone. The obligation of the

subject to obey is extinguished in one case only,--when the civil power is

incapable of providing him further with external and internal protection.

For the rest, Hobbes declares the existing public order the lawful one, the

evils of arbitrary rule much more tolerable than the universal hostility of

the state of nature, and aversion to tyrants a disease inherited from the

republicans of antiquity.

The sovereign, by the laws and by instruction, determines what is good and

evil; he determines also what is to be believed. Religion unsanctioned by

the state is superstition. The temporal ruler is also the spiritual ruler,

the king, the chief pastor, and the clergy his servants. One and the same

community is termed state in so far as it consists of men, and church in so

far as it consists of Christian men (the ecclesiastical commonwealth). The

dogmas which the law prescribes are to be received without investigation,

to be swallowed like pills, without mastication.

The principle that every passion and every action is in its nature

indifferent, that right and wrong exist only in the state, that the will

of a despot is to determine what is moral and what immoral, has given just

offense. Moreover, this was not, in fact, Hobbes's deepest conviction. Even

without ascribing great importance to isolated statements,[1] it must

be admitted that his doctrine was interpreted more narrowly than it was

intended. He does not say that no moral distinctions whatever exist before

the foundation of the state, but only that the state first supplies a fixed

criterion of the good. Moral ideas have a certain currency before this, but

they lack power to enforce themselves. Further, when he ascribes the origin

of the state to self-interest, this does not mean that reason, conscience,

generosity, and love for our fellows are entirely wanting in the state of

nature, but only that they are not general enough, and, as against the

passions, not strong enough to furnish a foundation for the edifice of the

state. Not only exaggeration in statement but also uncouthness of thought

may be forgiven the representative of a movement which is at once new and

strengthened by the consciousness of agreement with a naturalistic theory

of knowledge and physics; and the vigor of execution compels admiration,

even though many obscurities remain to be deplored _(e. g_., the relation

of the two moral standards, the standard of the reason or natural law and

the standard of positive law). And recognition must be accorded to the

significant kernel of doctrine formed, on the one hand, by the endeavor to

separate ethics from theology, and on the other, by the thoughts--which, it

is true, were not perfectly brought out--that the moral is not founded on

a natural social impulse, but on a law of the reason, and first gains a

definite criterion in society, and that the interests of the individual are

inseparably connected with those of the community. In any case, the

attempt to form a naturalistic theory of the state would be an undertaking

deserving of thanks, even if the promulgation of this theory had done no

further service than to challenge refutation.

[Footnote 1: God inscribed the divine or natural law (Do not that to

another, etc.) on the heart of man, when he gave him the reason to rule his

actions. The laws of nature are, it is true, not always legally binding

(_in foro externo_), but always and everywhere binding on the conscience

(_in foro interno_). Justice is the virtue which we can measure by civil

laws; love, that which we measure by the law of nature merely. The ruler

_ought_ to govern in accordance with the law of nature.]

%(d) Lord Herbert of Cherbury.%--Between Bacon (1605, 1620) and Hobbes

(1642, 1651) stands Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1581-1648), who, by his

work _De Veritate_ (1624),[1] became the founder of deism, that theory of

"natural religion," which, in opposition to the historical dogmatic faith

of the Church theology, takes the reason, which is the same in all men,

as its basis and morality for its content. Lord Herbert introduces his

philosophy of religion by a theory of knowledge which makes universal

consent the highest criterion of truth (_summa veritatis norma consensus

universalis_), and bases knowledge on certain self-evident principles

(_principia_), common to all men in virtue of a natural instinct, which

gives safe guidance. These common notions (_notitiae communes_) precede all

reflective inquiry, as well as all observation and experience, which would

be impossible without them. The most important among them are the religious

and ethical maxims of conscience.

[Footnote 1: _Tractatus de Veritate prout distinguitur a Revelatione, a

Verisimili, a Possibile, et a False_. Also, _De Religione Gentilium_, 1645,

complete 1663.]

This natural instinct is both an impulse toward truth and a capacity for

good or impulse to self-preservation. The latter extends not only to the

individual but to all things with which the individual is connected, to the

species, nay, to all the rest of the world, and its final goal is eternal

happiness: all natural capacities are directed toward the highest good or

toward God. The sense for the divine may indeed be lulled to sleep or led

astray by our free will, but not eradicated. To be rational and to be

religious are inseparable; it is religion that distinguishes man from the

brute, and no people can be found in which it is lacking. If atheists

really exist, they are to be classed with the irrational and the insane.

The content of natural religion may be summed up in the following five

articles, which all nations confess: 1. That there is a Supreme Being

(_numen supremum_). 2. That he ought to be worshiped. 3. That virtue and

piety are the chief elements of worship. 4. That man ought to repent of his

sins. 5. That there are rewards and punishments in a future life. Besides

these general principles, on the discovery of which Lord Herbert greatly

prides himself, the positive religions contain arbitrary additions, which

distinguish them from one another and which owe their origin, for the most

part, to priestly deception, although the rhapsodies of the poets and the

inventions of the philosophers have contributed their share. The essential

principles of natural religion (God, virtue, faith, hope, love, and

repentance) come more clearly to light in Christianity than in the

religions of heathendom, where they are overgrown with myths and

ceremonies.

The _Religio Medici_ (1642) of Sir Thomas Browne shows similar tendencies.

%9. Preliminary Survey.%

In the line of development from the speculations of Nicolas of Cusa to the

establishment of the English philosophy of nature, of religion, and of the

state by Bacon, Herbert, and Hobbes, and to the physics of Galileo, modern

ideas have manifested themselves with increasing clearness and freedom.

Hobbes himself shows thus early the influence of Descartes's decisive step,

with which the twilight gives place to the brightness of the morning. In

Descartes the empiricism and sensationalism of the English is confronted by

rationalism, to which the great thinkers of the Continent continue loyal.

In Britain, experience, on the Continent the reason is declared to be the

source of cognition; in the former, the point of departure is found in

particular impressions of sense, on the latter, in general concepts and

principles of the understanding; there the method of observation is

inculcated and followed, here, the method of deduction. This antithesis

remained decisive in the development of philosophy down to Kant, so that it

has long been customary to distinguish two lines or schools, the Empirical

and the Rationalistic, whose parallelism may be exhibited in the following

table (when only one date is given it indicates the appearance of the

philosopher's chief work):

_Empiricism. Rationalism_.

Bacon, 1620. (Nicolas, 1450; Bruno, 1584).

Hobbes, 1651. _Descartes_, died 1650.

_Locke_, 1690 (1632-1704). Spinoza, (1632-) 1677.

Berkeley, 1710. _Leibnitz_, 1710.

Hume, 1748. Wolff, died 1754.

We must not forget, indeed, the lively interchange of ideas between the

schools (especially the influence of Descartes on Hobbes, and of the latter

on Spinoza; further, of Descartes on Locke, and of the latter on Leibnitz)

which led to reciprocal approximation and enrichment. Berkeley and

Leibnitz, from opposite presuppositions, arrive at the same idealistic

conclusion--there is no real world of matter, but only spirits and ideas

exist. Hume and Wolff conclude the two lines of development: under the

former, empiricism disintegrates into skepticism; under the latter,

rationalism stiffens into a scholastic dogmatism, soon to run out into a

popular eclecticism of common sense.

If we compare the mental characteristics of the three great nations which,

in the period between Descartes and Kant, participated most productively in

the work of philosophy,--the Italians, with their receptive temperament and

so active in many fields, exerted a decisive influence on its development

and progress in the transition period alone,--it will be seen that the

Frenchman tends chiefly to acuteness, the Englishman to clearness and

simplicity, the German to profundity of thought. France is the land of

mathematical, England of practical, Germany of speculative thinkers; the

first is the home of the skeptics, though of the enthusiasts as well; the

second, of the realists; the third, of the idealists.

The English philosopher resembles a geographer who, with conscientious

care, outlines a map of the region through which he journeys; the

Frenchman, an anatomist who, with steady stroke, lays bare the nerves and

muscles of the organism; the German, a mountaineer who loses in clear

vision of particular objects as much as he gains in loftiness of position

and extent of view. The Englishman describes the given reality, the

Frenchman analyses it, the German transfigures it.

The English thinker keeps as close as possible to phenomena, and the

principles which he uses in the explanation of phenomena themselves lie in

the realm of concrete experience. He explains one phenomenon by another; he

classifies and arranges the given material without analyzing it; he keeps

constantly in touch with the popular consciousness. His reverence for

reality, as this presents itself to him, and his distrust of far-reaching

abstraction, are so strong that it is enough for him to take his bearings

from the real, and to give a true reproduction of it, while he willingly

renounces the ambition to form it anew in concepts. With this respect for

concrete reality he combines a similar reverence for ethical postulates.

When the development of a given line of thought threatens to bring him into

conflict with practical life, he is honest enough to draw the conclusions

which follow from his premises and to give them expression, but he avoids

the collision by a simple compromise, shutting up the refinements of

philosophy in the study and yielding in practice to the guidance of

natural instinct and conscience. His support, therefore, of theories which

contradict current views in morals is free from the levity in which the

Frenchman indulges. Life and thought are separate fields, contradictions

between them are borne in patience, and if science draws its material from

life it shows itself grateful for the favor by giving life the benefit of

the useful outcome of its labors, and, at the same time, shielding it from

the revolutionary or disintegrating effect of its doubtful paradoxes.

While the deliberate craft of English philosophy does not willingly lose

sight of the shores of the concrete world, French thought sails boldly and

confidently out into the open sea of abstraction. It is not strange that

it finds the way to the principles more rapidly than the way back to

phenomena. A free road, a fresh start, a straight course--such is the

motto of French thinking. Whatever is inconsistent with rectilinearity is

ignored, or opposed as unfitting. The line drawn by Descartes through the

world between matter and spirit, and that by Rousseau between nature

and culture, are distinctive of the philosophical character of their

countrymen. Dualism is to them entirely congenial; it satisfies their

need for clearness, and with this they are content. Antithesis is in the

Frenchman's blood; he thinks in it and speaks in it, in the salon or on the

platform, in witty jest or in scientific earnestness of thought. Either A

or not-A, and there is no middle ground. This habit of precision and

sharp analysis facilitates the formation of closed parties, whereas each

individual German, in philosophy as in politics, forms a party of his own.

The demand for the removal of the rubbish of existing systems and the

sanguine return to the sources, give French philosophy an unhistorical,

radical, and revolutionary character. Minds of the second order, who are

incapable of taking by themselves the step from that which is given to the

sources, prove their radicalism by following down to the roots that which

others have begun (so Condillac and the sensationalism of Locke). Moreover,

philosophical principles are to be translated into action; the thinker has

shown himself the doctrinaire in his destructive analysis of that which

is given, so, also, he hopes to play the dictator by overturning existing

institutions and establishing a new order of things,--only his courageous

endeavor flags as soon in the region of practice as in that of theory.

The German lacks the happy faculty, which distinguishes the two nations

just discussed, of isolating a problem near at hand, and he is accustomed

to begin his system with Leda's egg; but, by way of compensation, he

combines the lofty flight of the French with the phlegmatic endurance of

the English, _i.e._, he seeks his principles far above experience, but,

instead of stopping with the establishment of points of view or when he

has set the note, he carries his principles through in detail with loving

industry and comprehensive architectonic skill. While common sense turns

the scale with the English and analytical thought with the French, the

German allows the fancy and the heart to take an important part in the

discussion, though in such a way that the several faculties work together

and in harmony. While in France rationalism, mysticism, and the philosophy

of the heart were divided among different thinkers (Descartes, Malebranche

and Pascal, Rousseau), there is in every German philosopher something of

all three. The skeptical Kant provides a refuge for the postulates of

thought in the sanctuary of faith; the earnest, energetic Fichte, toward

the end of his life, takes his place among the mystics; Schelling thinks

with the fancy and dreams with the understanding; and under the broad cloak

of the Hegelian dialectic method, beside the reflection of the Critique of

Reason and of the Science of Knowledge, the fancies of the Philosophy of

Nature, the deep inwardness of Böhme, even the whole wealth of empirical

fact, found a place. As synthesis is predominant in his view of things, so

a harmonizing, conciliatory tendency asserts itself in his relations to his

predecessors: the results of previous philosophers are neither discarded

out of hand nor accepted in the mass, but all that appears in any way

useful or akin to the new system is wrought in at its proper place, though

often with considerable transformation. In this work of mediation there is

considerable loss in definiteness, the just and comprehensive consideration

of the most diverse interests not always making good the loss. And since

such a philosophy, as we have already shown, engages the whole man, its

disciple has neither impulse nor strength left for reforming labors; while,

on the other hand, he perceives no external call to undertake them, since

he views the world through the glasses of his system. Thus philosophy in

Germany, pursued chiefly by specialists, remains a professional affair, and

has not exercised a direct transforming influence on life (for Fichte, who

helped to philosophize the French out of Germany, was an exception); but

its influence has been the greater in the special sciences, which in

Germany more than any other land are handled in a philosophic spirit.

The mental characteristics of these nations are reflected also in their

methods of presentation. The style of the English philosopher is sober,

comprehensible, diffuse, and slightly wearisome. The French use a fluent,

elegant, lucid style which entertains and dazzles by its epigrammatic

phrases, in which not infrequently the epigram rules the thought. The

German expresses his solid, thoughtful positions in a form which is at

once ponderous and not easily understood; each writer constructs his own

terminology, with a liberal admixture of foreign expressions, and the

length of his paragraphs is exceeded only by the thickness of his books.

These national distinctions may be traced even in externals. The Englishman

makes his divisions as they present themselves at first thought, and rather

from a practical than from a logical point of view. The analytic Frenchman

prefers dichotomy, while trichotomy corresponds to the synthetic,

systematic character of German thinking; and Kant's naïve delight, because

in each class the third category unites its two predecessors, has been

often experienced by many of his countrymen at the sight of their own

trichotomies.

The division of labor in the pre-Kantian philosophy among these three

nationalities entirely agrees with the account given of the peculiarities

of their philosophical endowment. The beginning falls to the share of

France; Locke receives that tangled skein, the problem of knowledge,

from the hand of Descartes, and passes it on to Leibnitz; and while the

Illumination in all three countries is converting the gold inherited from

Locke and Leibnitz into small coin, the solution of the riddle rings out

from Königsberg.

PART I.

FROM DESCARTES TO KANT.