GERMAN PHILOSOPHY SINCE THE DEATH OF HEGEL.
With Hegel the glorious dynasty which, with a strong hand, had guided the
fate of German philosophy since the conclusion of the preceding century
disappears. From his death (1831) we may date the second period of
post-Kantian philosophy,[1] which is markedly and unfavorably distinguished
from the first by a decline in the power of speculative creation and by
a division of effort. If previous to this the philosophical public,
comprising all the cultured, had been eagerly occupied with problems in
common, and had followed with unanimous interest the work of those who were
laboring at them, during the last fifty years the interest of wider circles
in philosophical questions has grown much less active; almost every
thinker goes his own way, giving heed only to congenial voices; the inner
connection of the schools has been broken down; the touch with thinkers of
different views has been lost. The latest decades have been the first
to bring a change for the better, in so far as new rallying points of
philosophical interest have been created by the neo-Kantian movement, by
the systems of Lotze and Von Hartmann, by the impulse toward the philosophy
of nature proceeding from Darwinism, by energetic labors in the field of
practical philosophy, and by new methods of investigation in psychology.
[Footnote 1: On philosophy since 1831 cf. vol. iii. of J.E. Erdmann's
_History_; Ueberweg, _Grundriss_, part iii. §§ 37-49 (English translation,
vol. ii. pp. 292-516); Lange, _History of Materialism_; B. Erdmann, _Die
Philosophie der Gegenwart_ in the _Deutsche Rundschau_, vols. xix., xx.,
1879, June and July numbers; (A. Krohn,) _Streifzüge durch die Philosophie
der Gegenwart_ in the _Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische
Kritik_, vols. lxxxvii., lxxxix., 1885-86; (Burt, _History of Modern
Philosophy_, 1892), also the third volume of Windelband's _Geschichte der
neueren Philosophie_, when it appears.]
%1. From the Division of the Hegelian School to the Materialistic
Controversy.%
A decade after the philosophy of Hegel had entered on its supremacy a
division in the school was called forth by Strauss's _Life of Jesus_(1835).
The differences were brought to light by the discussion of religious
problems, in regard to which Hegel had not expressed himself with
sufficient distinctness. The relation of knowledge and faith, as he had
defined it, admitted of variant interpretations and deductions, and this in
favor of Church doctrine as well as in opposition to it. Philosophy has the
same content as religion, but in a different form, _i.e._, not in the form
of representation, but in the form of the concept--it transforms dogma into
speculative truth. The conservative Hegelians hold fast to the identity of
content in the two modes of cognition; the liberals, to the alteration
in form, which, they assert, brings an alteration in content with it.
According to Hegel the lower stage is "sublated" in the higher, _i.e._,
conserved as well as negated. The orthodox members of the school emphasize
the conservation of religious doctrines, their justification from the side
of the philosopher; the progressists, their negation, their overcoming by
the speculative concept. The general question, whether the ecclesiastical
meaning of a dogma is retained or to be abandoned in its transformation
into a philosopheme, divides into three special questions, the
anthropological, the soteriogical, and the theological. These are: whether
on Hegelian principles immortality is to be conceived as a continuance
of individual existence on the art of particular spirits, or only as the
eternity of the universal reason; whether by the God-man the person of
Christ is to be understood, or, on the other hand, the human species, the
Idea of Humanity; whether personality belongs to the Godhead before the
creation of the world, or whether it first attains to self-consciousness
in human spirits, whether Hegel was a theist or a pantheist, whether he
teaches the transcendence or the immanence of God. The Old Hegelians defend
the orthodox interpretation; the Young Hegelians oppose it. The former,
Göschel, Gabler, Hinrichs, Schaller (died 1868; _History of the Philosophy
of Nature since Bacon_, 1841 _seq_.), J.E. Erdmann in Halle (1805-92; _Body
and Soul_, 1837; _Psychological Letters_, 1851, 6th ed., 1882; _Earnest
Sport_, 1871, 4th ed., 1890), form, according to Strauss's parliamentary
comparison carried out by Michelet, the "right"; the latter, Strauss,
Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and A. Ruge, who, with Echtermeyer, edited the
_Hallesche_, afterward _Deutsche, Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst_,
1838-42, the "left." Between them, and forming the "center," stand Karl
Rosenkranz[1] in Königsberg (1805-79), C.L. Michelet in Berlin (p. 16;
_Hegel, the Unrefuted World-philosopher_, 1870; _System of Philosophy_,
1876 _seq_.), and the theologians Marheineke (a pupil of Daub at
Heidelberg) and W. Vatke (_Philosophy of Religion_, edited by Preiss,
1888). Contrasted with these is the group of semi- or pseudo-Hegelians (p.
596), who declare themselves in accord with the theistic doctrines of the
right, but admit that the left represents Hegel's own opinion, or at least
the correct deductions from his position.
[Footnote 1: K. Rosenkranz: _Psychology_, 1837, 3d ed., 1863; _Science
of the Logical Idea_, 1858; _Studies_, 1839 _seq_., _New Studies_, 1875
_seq_.; _Aesthetics of the Ugly_, 1853; several works on the history of
poetry.]
The following should also be mentioned as Hegelians: the philosopher of
history, Von Cieszkowski, the pedagogical writer, Thaulow (at Kiel, died
1883), the philosopher of religion and of law, A. Lasson at Berlin, the
aesthetic writers Hotho, Friedrich Theodor Vischer[1] (1807-87), and Max
Schasler (_Critical History of Aesthetics_, 1872; _Aesthetics_, 1886),
the historians of philosophy, Schwegler (died 1857; _History of Greek
Philosophy_, 1859, 4th ed., 1886, edited by Karl Köstlin, whose
_Aesthetics_ appeared 1869), Eduard Zeller[2] of Berlin (born 1814),
and Kuno Fischer (born 1824; 1856-72 professor at Jena, since then at
Heidelberg; _Logic and Metaphysics_, 2d ed., 1865). While Weissenborn (died
1874) is influenced by Schleiermacher also, and Zeller and Fischer strive
back toward Kant, Johannes Volkelt[3] in Würzburg (born 1848), who started
from Hegel and advanced through Schopenhauer and Hartmann, has of late
years established an independent noëtical position and has done good
service by his energetic opposition to positivism _(Das Denken als
Hülfvorstellungs--Thätigkeit und als Aupassungsvorgang_ in the _Zeitschrift
für Philosophic_, vols. xcvi., xcvii., 1889-90).
[Footnote 1: Vischer: _Aesthetics_, 1846-58; _Critical Excursions_, 1844
_seq_.; several _Hefte "Altes and Neues_". The diary in the second part of
the novel _Auch Einer_ develops an original pantheistic view of the world.]
[Footnote 2: Zeller: _The Philosophy of the Greeks in its Historical
Development_, 5 vols., 3d ed., vol. i. 5th ed. (English translation, 1868
_seq_.); three collections of _Addresses and Essays_, 1865, 1877, 1884.]
[Footnote 3: Volkelt: _The Phantasy in Dreams_, 1875; _Kant's Theory of
Knowledge_, 1879; _On the Possibility of Metaphysics_, inaugural address at
Basle, 1884; _Experience and Thought, Critical Foundation of the Theory of
Knowledge_, 1886; _Lectures Introductory to the Philosophy of the Present
Time_ (delivered in Frankfort on the Main), 1892.]
The leaders of the Hegelian left require more detailed consideration. In
David Friedrich Strauss[1] (1808-74, born and died at Ludwigsburg) the
philosophy of religion becomes a historical criticism of the Bible and of
dogmatics. The biblical narratives are, in great part, not history (this
has been the common error alike of the super-naturalistic and of the
rationalistic interpreters), but myths, that is, suprasensible facts
presented in the form of history and in symbolic language. It is evident
from the contradictions in the narratives and the impossibility of miracles
that we are not here concerned with actual events. The myths possess
(speculative, absolute) truth, but no (historical) reality. They are
unintentional creations of the popular imagination; the spirit of the
community speaks in the authors of the Gospels, using the historical factor
(the life-history of Jesus) with mythical embellishments as an investiture
for a supra-historical, eternal truth (the speculative Idea of
incarnation). The God become man, in which the infinite and the finite, the
divine nature and the human, are united, is the human race. The Idea of
incarnation manifests itself in a multitude of examples which supplement
one another, instead of pouring forth its whole fullness in a single one.
The (real) Idea of the race is to be substituted for a single individual
as the subject of the predicates (resurrection, ascension, etc.) which the
Church ascribes to Christ. The Son of God is _Humanity_.
[Footnote 1: Strauss: _The Life of Jesus_, 1835-36, 4th ed., 1840 [English
translation by George Eliot, 2d. ed., 1893]; the same "for the German
People," 1864 [English translation, 1865]; _Christian Dogmatics_, 1840-41;
_Voltaire_, 1870; _Collected Writings_, 12 vols., edited by Zeller,
1876-78. On Strauss cf. Zeller, 1874 [English, 1874], and Hausrath,
1876-78.]
In his second principal work Strauss criticises the dogmas of Christianity
as sharply as he had criticised the Gospel narrative in the first one. The
historical development of these has of itself effected their destruction:
the history of dogma is the objective criticism of dogma. Christianity and
philosophy, theism and pantheism, dualism and immanence, are irreconcilable
opposites. To be able to know we must cease to believe. Dogma is the
product of the unphilosophical, uncultured consciousness; belief in
revelation, only for those who have not yet risen to reason. In the
transformation of religious representations into philosophical Ideas
nothing specifically representative is left; the form of representation
must be actually overcome. The Christian contraposition of the present
world and that which is beyond is explained by the fact that the
sensuo-rational spirit of man, so long as it does not philosophically know
itself as the unity of the infinite and the finite, but only feels itself
as finite, sensuo-empirical consciousness, projects the infinite, which
it has in itself, as though this were something foreign, looks on it
as something beyond the world. This separation of faith is entirely
unphilosophical; it is the mission of the philosopher to reduce all that is
beyond the world to the present. Thus for him immortality is not something
to come, but the spirit's own power to rise above the finite to the Idea.
And like future existence, so the transcendent God also disappears. The
absolute is the universal unity of the world, which posits and sublates the
individual as its modes. God is the being in all existence, the life in
all that lives, the thought in all that think: he does not stand as an
individual person beside and above other persons, but is the infinite which
personifies itself and attains to consciousness in human spirits, and this
from eternity; before there was a humanity of earth there were spirits on
other stars, in whom God reflected himself.
Three decades later Strauss again created a sensation by his confession
of materialism and atheism, _The Old Faith and the New_, 1872 (since the
second edition, "With a Postscript as Preface"),[1] in which he continues
the conflict against religious dualism. The question "Are we"--the
cultured men of the day--"still Christians?" is answered in the negative.
Christianity is a cult of poverty, despising the world, and antagonistic to
labor and culture; but we have learned to esteem science and art, riches
and acquisition, as the chief levers of culture and of human progress.
Christianity dualistically tears apart body and soul, time and eternity,
the world and God; we need no Creator, for the life-process has neither
beginning nor end. The world is framed for the highest reason, it is true,
but it has not been framed by a highest reason. Our highest Idea is the
All, which is conformed to law, and instinct with life and reason, and
our feeling toward the universe--the consciousness of dependence on its
laws--exercises no less of ethical influence, is no less full of reverence,
and no less exposed to injury from an irreverent pessimism, than the
feeling of the devout of the old type toward their God. Hence the answer
to the second question "Have we still a religion?" maybe couched in the
affirmative. The new faith does not need a _cultus_ and a Church. Since the
dry services of the free congregations offer nothing for the fancy and the
spirit, the edification of the heart must be accomplished in other ways--by
participation in the interests of humanity, in the national life, and,
not last, by aesthetic enjoyment. Thus in his last work, which in two
appendices reaches a discussion of the great German poets and musicians,
the old man returns to a thought to which he had given earlier expression,
that the religious _cultus_ should be replaced by the _cultus_ of genius.
[Footnote 1: English translation by Mathilde Blind, 1873.]
As Strauss went over from Hegelianism to pantheism, so Ludwig Feuerbach[1]
(1804-72), a son of the great jurist, Anselm Feuerbach, after he had for
a short time moved in the same direction, took the opposite, the
individualistic course, only, like Strauss, to end at last in materialism.
"My first thought," as he himself describes the course of his development,
"was God; my second, reason; my third and last, man." As theology has been
overcome by Hegel's philosophy of reason, so this in turn must give place
to the philosophy of man. "The new philosophy makes man, including nature
as his basis, the highest and sole subject of philosophy, and,
consequently, anthropology the universal science." Only that which is
immediately self-evident is true and divine. But only that which is
sensible is evident (_sonnenklar)_; it is only where sensibility begins
that all doubt and conflict cease. Sensible beings alone are true, real
beings; existence in space and time is alone existence; truth, reality,
and sensibility are identical. While the old philosophy took for its
starting point the principle, "I am an abstract, a merely thinking being;
the body does not belong to my essence," the new philosophy, on the other
hand, begins with the principle, "I am a real, a sensible being; the body
in its totality is my ego, my essence itself." Feuerbach, however, uses
the concept of sensibility in so wide and vague a sense that,
supported--or deceived--by the ambiguity of the word sensation, he
includes under it even the most elevated and sacred feelings. Even the
objects of art are seen, heard, and felt; even the souls of other men are
sensed. In the sensations the deepest and highest truths are concealed. Not
only the external, but the internal also, not only flesh, but spirit, not
only the thing, but the ego, not only the finite, the phenomenal, but also
the true divine essence is an object of the senses. Sensation proves the
existence of objects outside our head--there is no other proof of being
than love, than sensation in general. Everything is perceivable by the
senses, if not directly, yet indirectly, if not with the vulgar, untrained
senses, yet with the "cultivated senses," if not with the eye of the
anatomist or chemist, yet with that of the philosopher. All our ideas
spring from the senses, but their production requires communication and
converse between man and man. The higher concepts cannot be derived from
the individual Ego without a sensuously given Thou; the highest object of
sense is man; man does not reach concepts and reason in general by himself,
but only as one of two. The nature of man is contained in community alone;
only in life with others and for others does he attain his destiny and
happiness. The conscience is the ego putting itself in the place of another
who has been injured. Man with man, the unity of I and Thou, is God, and
God is love.
[Footnote 1: Feuerbach was born at Landshut, studied at Heidelberg and
Berlin, habilitated, 1828, at Erlangen, and lived, 1836-60, in the village
of Bruckberg, not far from Bayreuth, and from 1860 until his death in
Rechenberg, a suburb of Nuremberg. _Collected Works_ in 10 vols., 1846-66.
The chief works are entitled: _P. Bayle_, 1838, 2d ed., 1844; _Philosophy
and Christianity_, 1839; _The Essence of Christianity_, 1841, 4th ed., 1883
[English translation by George Eliot, 1854]; _Principles of the Philosophy
of the Future_, 1843; _The Essence of Religion_, 1845; _Theogony_, 1857;
_God, Freedom, and Immortality_, 1866. Karl Grün, 1874, C.N. Starcke, 1885,
and W. Bolin, 1891, treat of Feuerbach.]
To the philosophy of religion Feuerbach assigns the task of giving a
psychological explanation of the genesis of religion, instead of showing
reason in religion. In bidding us believe in miracles dogma is a
prohibition to think. Hence the philosopher is not to justify it, but to
uncover the illusion to which it owes its origin. Speculative theology is
an intoxicated philosophy; it is time to become sober, and to recognize
that philosophy and religion are diametrically opposed to each other,
that they are related to each other as health to disease, as thought to
phantasy. Religion arises from the fact that man objectifies his own true
essence, and opposes it to himself as a personal being, without coming to a
consciousness of this divestment of self, of the identity of the divine
and human nature. Hence the Hegelian principles, that the absolute is
self-consciousness, that in man God knows himself, must be reversed:
self-consciousness is the absolute; in his God man knows himself only. The
Godhead is our own universal nature, freed from its individual limitations,
intuited and worshiped as another, independent being, distinct from us.
God is self objectified, the inner nature of man expressed; man is
the beginning, the middle, and the end of religion. All theology is
anthropology, for all religion is a self-deification of man. In religion
man makes a division in his own nature, posits himself as double, first as
limited (as a human individual), then as unlimited, raised to infinity (as
God); and this deified self he worships in order to obtain from it the
satisfaction of his needs, which the course of the world leaves unmet. Thus
religion grows out of egoism: its basis is the difference between our will
and our power; its aim, to set us free from the dependence which we feel
before nature. (Like culture, religion seeks to make nature an intelligible
and compliant being, only that in this it makes use of the supernatural
instruments faith, prayer, and magic; it is only gradually that men learn
to attack the evils by natural means.) That which man himself is not, but
wishes to be, that he represents to himself in his gods as existing; they
are the wishes of man's heart transformed into real beings, his longing
after happiness satisfied by the fancy. The same holds true of all dogmas:
as God is the affirmation of our wishes, so the world beyond is the present
embellished and idealized by the fancy. Instead of "God is merciful, is
love, is omnipotent, he performs miracles and hears prayers," the statement
must be reversed: mercy, love, omnipotence, to perform miracles, and to
hear prayers, is divine. In the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's supper
Feuerbach sees the truth that water and food are indispensable and divine.
As Feuerbach, following out this naturalistic tendency, reached the extreme
of materialism, the influence of his philosophy--whose different phases
there is no occasion to trace out in detail--had already passed its
culmination. From his later writings little more has found its way into
public notice than the pun, that man is (_ist_) what he eats (_isst_).
The remaining members of the Hegelian left may be treated more briefly.
Bruno Bauer[1] (died in 1882; his principal work is the _Critique of the
Synoptics_, in three volumes, 1841-42, which had been preceded, in 1840, by
a _Critique of the Evangelical History of John_) at first belonged on the
right of the school, but soon went over to the extreme left. He explains
the Gospel narratives as creations with a purpose (_Tendenzdichtungen_),
as intentional, but not deceitful, inventions, from which, despite their
unreality, history may well be learned, inasmuch as they reflect the spirit
of the time in which they were constructed. His own publications and those
of his brother Edgar are much more radical after the year 1844. In these
the brothers advocate the standpoint of "pure or absolute criticism," which
extends itself to all things and events for or against which sides are
taken from any quarter, and calmly watches how everything destroys
itself. As soon as anything is admitted, it is no longer true. Nothing is
absolutely valid, all is vain; it is only the criticising, all-destroying
ego, free from all ethical ties, that possesses truth.
[Footnote 1: Not to be confused with the head of the Tübingen School,
Ferdinand Christian Baur (died 1860).]
One further step was possible beyond Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, that from
the community to the particular, selfish individual, from the criticising,
therefore thinking, ego, to the ego of sensuous enjoyment. This step was
taken in that curious book _The Individual and his Property_, which Kaspar
Schmidt, who died in 1856 at Berlin, published in 1845 (2d ed., 1882),
under the pseudonym of Max Stirner. The Individual of whom the title speaks
is the egoist. For me nothing is higher than myself; I use men and use up
the world for my own pleasure. I seek to be and have all that I can be
and have; I have a right to all that is within my power. Morality is a
delusion, justice, like all Ideas, a phantom. Those who believe in ideals,
and worship such generalities as self-consciousness, man, society, are
still deep in the mire of prejudice and superstition, and have banished the
old orthodox phantom of the Deity only to replace it by a new one. Nothing
whatever is to be respected.
* * * * *
Among the opponents of the Hegelian philosophy the members of the "theistic
school," who have above been designated as semi-Hegelians, approximate it
most closely. These endeavor, in part retaining the dialectic method, to
blend the immanence of the absolute, which philosophy cannot give up and
concerning which Hegel had erred only by way of over-emphasis, with the
transcendence of God demanded by Christian consciousness, to establish a
theism which shall contain pantheism as a moment in itself. God is present
in all creatures, yet distinct from them; he is intramundane as well as
extramundane; he is self-conscious personality, free creative spirit,
is this from all eternity, and does not first become such through the
world-development. He does not need the world for his perfection, but out
of his goodness creates it. Philosophy must begin with the living Godhead
instead of beginning, like Hegel's Logic, with the empty concept of being.
For the categories--as Schelling had already objected--express necessary
forms or general laws only, to which all reality must conform, but which
are never capable of generating reality; the content which appears in them
and which obeys them, can only be created by a Deity, and only empirically
cognized. This is the standpoint of Christian Hermann Weisse[1] in Leipsic
(1801-66), Karl Philipp Fischer[2] in Erlangen (1807-85), Immanuel Hermann
Fichte[3] (1797-1879; 1842-65 professor in Tübingen), and the follower of
Schleiermacher, Julius Braniss in Breslau (1792-1873). The following hold
similar views, influenced, like Weisse and K. Ph. Fischer, by Schelling:
Jacob Sengler of Freiburg (1799-1878; _The Idea of God_, 1845 _seq_.),
Leopold Schmid of Giessen (1808-69; cf. p. 516, note), Johannes Huber
(died 1879), Moritz Carrière[4] (born 1817), both in Munich, K. Steffensen
of Basle (1816-88; _Collected Essays_, 1890), and Karl Heyder in Erlangen
(1812-86; _The Doctrine of Ideas_, vol. i. 1874). Chalybaeus at Kiel (died
1862), and Friedrich Harms at Berlin (died 1880; _Metaphysics_,
posthumously edited by H. Wiese, 1885), who, like Fortlage and I.H. Fichte,
start from the system of the elder Fichte, should also be mentioned as
sympathizing with the opinions of those who have been named.
[Footnote 1: Weisse: _System of Aesthetics_, 1830; _The Idea of the
Godhead_, 1833; _Philosophical Dogmatics_, 1855. His pupil Rudolf Seydel
has published several of his posthumous works; H. Lotze also acknowledges
that he owes much to Weisse. Rud. Seydel in Leipsic (born 1835), _Logic_,
1866; _Ethics_, 1874; cf. p. 17.]
[Footnote 2: K. Ph. Fischer: _The Idea of the Godhead_, 1839; _Outlines of
the System of Philosophy_, 1848 _seq_.; _The Untruth of Sensationalism and
Materialism_, 1853.]
[Footnote 3: I.H. Fichte: _System of Ethics_, 1850-53, the first volume of
which gives a history of moral philosophy since 1750; _Anthropology_, 1856,
3d ed., 1876; _Psychology_, 1864.]
[Footnote 4: Carrière: _Aesthetics_, 1859, 3d ed., 1885; _The Moral Order
of the World_, 1877, 2d ed., 1891; _Art in connection with the Development
of Culture_, 5 vols., 1863-73.]
The same may be said, further, of Hermann Ulrici[1] of Halle (1806-84),
for many years the editor of the _Zeitschrift für Philosophie und
philosophische Kritik_, founded in 1837 by the younger Fichte and now
edited by the author of this _History_, which, as the organ of the theistic
school, opposed, first, the pantheism of the Young Hegelians, and then the
revived materialism so loudly proclaimed after the middle of the
century. This _Zeitschrift_ of Fichte and Ulrici, following the altered
circumstances of the time, has experienced a change of aim, so that it now
seeks to serve idealistic efforts of every shade; while the _Philosophische
Monatshefte_ (founded by Bergmann in 1868, edited subsequently by
Schaarschmidt, and now) edited by P. Natorp of Marburg, favors
neo-Kantianism, and the _Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche
Philosophie_ (begun in 1877, and) edited by R. Avenarius of Zurich,
especially cultivates those parts of philosophy which are open to exact
treatment.
[Footnote 1: Ulrici: _On Shakespeare's Dramatic Art_, 1839, 3d ed., 1868
[English, 1876]; _Faith and Knowledge_, 1858; _God and Nature_, 1861, 2d
ed., 1866; _God and Man_, in two volumes, _Body and Soul_, 1866, 2d ed.,
1874, and _Natural Law_, 1872; various treatises on Logic--in which
consciousness is based on the distinguishing activity, and the categories
conceived as functional modes of this--on Spiritualism, etc.]
The appearance of _materialism_ was the consequence of the flagging of
the philosophic spirit, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the
dissatisfaction of the representatives of natural science with the
constructions of the Schelling-Hegelian school. If the German naturalist is
especially exposed to the danger of judging all reality from the section
of it with which he is familiar, from the world of material substances and
mechanical motions, the reason lies in the fact that he does not find it
easy, like the Englishman for example, to let the scientific and the
philosophico-religious views of the world go on side by side as two
entirely heterogeneous modes of looking at things. The metaphysical impulse
to generalization and unification spurs him on to break down the boundary
between the two spheres, and, since the physical view of things has become
part of his flesh and blood, psychical phenomena are for him nothing but
brain-vibrations, and the freedom of the will and all religious ideas,
nothing but illusions. The materialistic controversy broke out most
actively at the convention of naturalists at Göttingen in 1854, when
Rudolph Wagner in his address "On the Creation of Man and the Substance
of the Soul" declared, in opposition to Karl Vogt, that there is no
physiological reason for denying the descent of man from one pair and an
immaterial immortal soul. Vogt's answer was entitled "Collier Faith and
Science." Among others Schaller (_Body and Soul_, 1855), J.B. Meyer in a
treatise with the same title, 1856, and the Jena physicist, Karl Snell,[1]
took part in the controversy by way of criticism and mediation. A much
finer nature than the famous leaders of materialism--Moleschott (_The
Circle of Life_, 1852, in answer to Liebig's _Chemical Letters_), and Louis
Büchner, with whose _Force and Matter_ (1855, 16th ed., 1888; English
translation by Collingwood, 4th ed., 1884) the gymnasiast of to-day still
satisfies his freethinking needs--is H. Czolbe (1819-73; _New Exposition of
Sensationalism_, 1855; _The Limits and Origin of Human Knowledge_, 1865),
who, on ethical grounds, demands the exclusion of everything suprasensible
and contentment with the given world of phenomena, but holds that, besides
matter and motion, eternal, purposive forms and original sensations in a
world-soul are necessary to explain organic and psychical phenomena.
[Footnote 1: Snell (1806-86): _The Materialistic Question_, 1858; _The
Creation of Man_, 1863. R. Seydel has edited _Lectures on the Descent of
Man_, 1888, from Snell's posthumous writings.]
%2. New Systems: Trendelenburg, Fechner, Lotze, and Hartmann%.
The speculative impulse, especially in the soul of the German people,
is ineradicable. It has neither allowed itself to be discouraged by the
collapse of the Hegelian edifice, nor to be led astray by the clamor of the
apostles of empiricism, nor to be intimidated by the papal proclamation of
the infallibility of Thomas Aquinas.[1] Manifold attempts have been made
at a new conception of the world, and with varying success. Of the earlier
theories[2] only two have been able to gather a circle of adherents--the
dualistic theism of Günther (1783-1863), and the organic view of the world
of Trendelenburg (1802-72).
[Footnote 2: In 1879 a summons was sent forth from Rome for the revival and
dissemination of the Thomistic system as the only true philosophy (cf. R.
Eucken, _Die Philosophic des Thomas von Aquino und die Kultur der
Neuzeit_, 1886). This movement is supported by the journals, _Jahrbuch für
Philosophie und spekulative Theologie_, edited by Professor E. Commer
of Münster, 1886 _seq_., and _Philosophisches Jahrbuch_, edited, at the
instance and with the support of the Görres Society, by Professor Const.
Gutberlet of Fulda, 1888 _seq_. While the text-books of Hagemann, Stoeckl,
Gutberlet, Pesch, Commer, C.M. Schneider, and others also follow Scholastic
lines, B. Bolzano (died 1848), M. Deutinger (died 1864) and his pupil
Neudecker, Oischinger, Michelis, and W. Rosenkrantz (1821-74; _Science of
Knowledge_, 1866-68), who was influenced by Schelling, have taken a freer
course.]
[Footnote 2: Trahndorff, gymnasial professor in Berlin (1782-1863),
_Aesthetics_, 1827 (cf. E. von Hartmann in the _Philosophische
Monatshefte_, vol. xxii. 1886, p. 59 _seq_., and J. von Billewicz, in the
same, vol. xxi. 1885, p. 561 _seq_.); J.F. Reiff in Tübingen: _System of
the Determinations of the Will_, 1842; K. Chr. Planck (died 1880): _The
Ages of the World_, 1850 _seq_.; _Testament of a German_, edited by Karl
Köstlin, 1881; F. Röse (1815-59), _On the Method of the Knowledge of
the Absolute_, 1841; _Psychology as Introduction to the Philosophy of
Individuality_, 1856. Emanuel Sharer follows Röse. Friedrich Rohmer
(died 1856): _Science of God, Science of Man_, in _Friedrich Rohmer's
Wissenschaft und Leben_, edited by Bluntschli and Rud. Seele, 6 vols.,
1871-92.]
Anton Günther (engaged in authorship from 1827; _Collected Writings_, 1881;
_Anti-Savarese_, edited with an appendix by P. Knoodt), who in 1857
was compelled to retract his views, invokes the spirit of Descartes in
opposition to the Hegelian pantheism. In agreement with Descartes,
Günther starts from self-consciousness (in the ego being and thought are
identical), and brings not only the Creator and the created world, but also
nature (to which the soul is to be regarded as belonging) and spirit into
a relation of exclusive opposition, yet holds that in man nature (body and
soul) and spirit are united, and that they interact without prejudice to
their qualitative difference. J.H. Pabst (died in 1838 in Vienna), Theodor
Weber of Breslau, Knoodt of Bonn (died 1889), V. Knauer of Vienna and
others are Güntherians.
Adolf Trendelenburg[1] of Berlin, the acute critic of Hegel and Herbart,
in his own thinking goes back to the philosophy of the past, especially to
that of Aristotle. Motion and purpose are for him fundamental facts, which
are common to both being and thinking, which mediate between the two, and
make the agreement of knowledge and reality possible. The ethical is a
higher stage of the organic. Space, time, and the categories are forms of
thought as well as of being; the logical form must not be separated from
the content, nor the concept from intuition. We must not fail to mention
that Trendelenburg introduced a peculiar and fruitful method of treating
the history of philosophy, viz., the historical investigation of particular
concepts, in which Teichmüller of Dorpat (1832-88; _Studies in the History
of Concepts_, 1874; _New Studies in the History of Concepts_, 1876-79;
_The Immortality of the Soul_, 2d ed., 1879; _The Nature of Love_, 1880;
_Literary Quarrels in the Fourth Century before Christ_, 1881 and 1884),
and Eucken of Jena (cf. pp. 17 and 623) have followed his example. Kym in
Zurich (born 1822; _Metaphysical Investigations_, 1875; _The Problem of
Evil_, 1878) is a pupil of Trendelenburg.
[Footnote 1: Trendelenburg: _Logical Investigations_, 1840, 3d ed., 1870;
_Historical Contributions to Philosophy_, 3 vols., 1846, 1855, 1867;
_Natural Law on the Basis of Ethics_, 1860, 2d ed., 1868. On Trendelenburg
cf. Eucken in the _Philosophische Monatshefte_, 1884.]
Of more recent systematic attempts the following appear worthy of
mention: Von Kirchmann (1802-84; from 1868 editor of the _Philosophische
Bibliothek_), _The Philosophy of Knowledge_, 1865; _Aesthetics_, 1868; _On
the Principles of Realism_, 1875; _Catechism of Philosophy_ 2d ed., 1881;
E. Dühring (born 1833), _Natural Dialectic_, 1865; _The Value of Life_,
1865, 3d ed, 1881; _Critical History of the Principles of Mechanics_,
1873, 2d ed., 1877; _Course of Philosophy_, 1875 (cf. on Dühring, Helene
Druskowitz, 1889); J. Baumann of Göttingen (born 1837), _Philosophy as
Orientation concerning the World_, 1872; _Handbook of Ethics_, 1879;
_Elements of Philosophy_, 1891; L. Noiré, _The Monistic Idea_, 1875, and
many other works; Frohschammer of Munich (born 1821), _The Phantasy as
the Fundamental Principle of the World-process_, 1877; _On the Genesis
of Humanity, and its Spiritual Development in Religion, Morality and
Language_, 1883; _On the Organization and Culture of Human Society_, 1885.
In the first rank of the thinkers who have made their appearance since
Hegel and Herbart stand Fechner and Lotze, both masters in the use of exact
methods, yet at the same time with their whole souls devoted to the highest
questions, and superior to their contemporaries in breadth of view as in
the importance and range of their leading ideas--Fechner a dreamer and
sober investigator by turns, Lotze with gentle hand reconciling the
antitheses in life and science.
Gustav Theodor Fechner[1] (1801-87; professor at Leipsic) opposes the
abstract separation of God and the world, which has found a place in
natural inquiry and in theology alike, and brings the two into the same
relation of correspondence and reciprocal reference as the soul and the
body. The spirit gives cohesion to the manifold of material parts, and
needs them as a basis and material for its unifying activity. As our
ego connects the manifold of our activities and states in the unity of
consciousness, so the divine spirit is the supreme unity of consciousness
for all being and becoming. In the spirit of God everything is as in ours,
only expanded and enhanced. Our sensations and feelings, our thoughts and
resolutions are His also, only that He, whose body all nature is, and to
whom not only that which takes place in spirits is open, but also that
which goes on between them, perceives more, feels deeper, thinks higher,
and wills better things than we. According to the analogy of the human
organism, both the heavenly bodies and plants are to be conceived as beings
endowed with souls, although they lack nerves, a brain, and voluntary
motion. How could the earth bring forth living beings, if it were itself
dead? Shall not the flower itself rejoice in the color and fragrance which
it produces, and with which it refreshes us? Though its psychical life may
not exceed that of an infant, its sensations, at all events, since they do
not form the basis of a higher activity, are superior in force and richness
to those of the animal. Thus the human soul stands intermediate in the
scale of psychical life: beneath and about us are the souls of plants and
animals, above us the spirits of the earth and stars, which, sharing in and
encompassing the deeds and destinies of their inhabitants, are in
their turn embraced by the consciousness of the universal spirit. The
omnipresence of the divine spirit affords at the same time the means of
escaping from the desolate "night view" of modern science, which looks upon
the world outside the perceiving individual as dark and silent. No, light
and sound are not merely subjective phenomena within us, but extend around
us with objective reality--as sensations of the divine spirit, to which
everything that vibrates resounds and shines.
[Footnote 1: _Nanna, or on the Psychical Life of Plants_, 1848;
_Zend-Avesta, or on the Things of Heaven and the World Beyond_, 1851;
_Physical and Philosophical Atomism_, 1855; _The Three Motives and Grounds
of Belief_, 1863; _The Day View_, 1879; _Elements of Aesthetics_, 1876;
_Elements of Psycho-physics_, 1860; _In the Cause of Psycho-physics_, 1877;
_Review of the Chief Points in Psycho-physics_, 1882; _Book of the Life
after Death_, 1836, 3d ed., 1887; _On the Highest Good_, 1846; _Four
Paradoxes_, 1846; _On the Question of the. Soul_, 1861; _Minor Works by Dr.
Mises_ (Fechner's pseudonym), 1875. On Fechner cf. J. E. Kuntze, Leipsic,
1892.]
The door of the world beyond also opens to the key of analogy. Similar
laws unite the here with the hereafter. As intuition prepares the way for
memory, and lives on in it, so the life of earth merges in the future life,
and continues active in it, elevated to a higher plane. Fechner treats the
problem of evil in a way peculiar to himself. We must not consider the
fact of evil apart from the effort to remove it. It is the spur to all
activity--without evil, no labor and no progress.
Fechner's "psycho-physics," a science which was founded by him in
continuation of the investigations of Bernoulli, Euler, and especially
of E.H. Weber, wears an entirely different aspect from that of his
metaphysics (the "day view," moreover does not claim to be knowledge,
but belief--though a belief which is historically, practically, and
theoretically well-grounded). This aims to be an exact science of the
relations between body and mind, and to reach indirectly what Herbart
failed to reach by direct methods, that is, a measurement of psychical
magnitudes, using in this attempt the least observable differences in
sensations as the unit of measure. Weber's law of the dependence of the
intensity of the sensation on the strength of the stimulus--the increase
in the intensity of the sensation remains the same when the relative
increase of the stimulus (or the relation of the stimuli) remains
constant;[1] so that, _e.g._, in the case of light, an increase from a
stimulus of intensity 1 to one of intensity 100, gives just the same
increase in the intensity of the sensation as an increase from a stimulus
of intensity 2 (or 3) to a stimulus of 200 (or 300)--is much more generally
valid than its discoverer supposed; it holds good for all the senses. In
the case of the pressure sense of the skin, with an original weight of 15
grams (laid upon the hand when at rest and supported), in order to produce
a sensation perceptibly greater we must add not 1 gram, but 5, and with an
original weight of 30 grams, not 5, but 10. Equal additions to the weights
are not enough to produce a sensation of pressure whose intensity shall
render it capable of being distinguished with certainty, but the greater
the original weights the larger the increments must be; while the
intensities of the sensations form an arithmetical, those of the stimuli
form a geometrical, series; the change in sensation is proportional to the
relative change of the stimulus. Sensations of tone show the same
proportion (3:4) as those of pressure; the sensibility of the muscle sense
is finer (when weights are raised the proportion is 15:16), as also that
of vision (the relative brightness of two lights whose difference of
intensity is just perceptible is 100:101). In addition to the
investigations on the threshold of difference there are others on the
threshold of stimulation (the point at which a sensation becomes just
perceptible), on attention, on methods of measurement, on errors, etc.
Moreover, Fechner does not fail to connect his psycho-physics, the
presuppositions and results of which have recently been questioned in
several quarters,[2] with his metaphysical conclusions. Both are pervaded
by the fundamental view that body and spirit belong together (consequently
that everything is endowed with a soul, and that nothing is without a
material basis), nay, that they are the same essence, only seen from
different sides. Body is the (manifold) phenomenon for others, while spirit
is the (unitary) self-phenomenon, in which, however, the inner aspect is
the truer one. That which appears to us as the external world of matter,
is nothing but a universal consciousness which overlaps and influences our
individual consciousness. This is Spinozism idealistically interpreted. In
aesthetics Fechner shows himself an extreme representative of the principle
of association.
[Footnote 1: Fechner teaches: The sensation increases and diminishes in
proportion to the logarithm of the stimulus and of the psycho-physical
nervous activity, the latter being directly proportional to the external
stimulus. Others, on the contrary, find a direct dependence between nervous
activity and sensation, and a logarithmic proportion between the external
stimulus and the nervous activity.]
[Footnote 2: So by Helmholtz; Hering _(Fechners psychophysisches Gesetz_,
1875); P. Langer _(Grundlagen der Psychophysik_, 1876); G.E. Müller in
Göttingen _(Zur Grundlegung der Psychophysik_, 1878); F.A. Müller _(Das
Axiom der Psychophysik_, 1882); A. Elsas _(Ueber die Psychophysik_, 1886);
O. Liebmann _(Aphorismen zur Psychologie, Zeitschrift für Philosophie_,
vol. ci.--Wundt has published a number of papers from his psycho-physical
laboratory in his _Philosophische Studien_, 1881 _seq_. Cf. also Hugo
Münsterberg, _Neue Grundlegung der Psychophysik_ in _Heft_ iii. of his
_Beiträge zur experimentellen Psychologie_, 1889 _seq_). [Further,
Delboeuf, in French, and a growing literature in English as A. Seth,
_Encyclopedia Britannica_, vol. xxiv. 469-471; Ladd, _Elements of
Physiological Psychology_, part ii. chap, v.; James, _Principles of
Psychology_, vol. i. p. 533 _seq_.; and numerous articles as Ward,
_Mind_, vol. i.; Jastrow, _American Journal of Psychology_, vols. i. and
iii.--TR.]]
The most important of the thinkers mentioned in the title of this section
is Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817-81: born at Bautzen; a student of medicine,
and of philosophy under Weisse, in Leipsic; 1844-81 professor in Göttingen;
died in Berlin). Like Fechner, gifted rather with a talent for the fine and
the suggestive than for the large and the rigorous, with a greater reserve
than the former before the mystical and peculiar, as acute, cautious, and
thorough as he was full of taste and loftiness of spirit, Lotze has proved
that the classic philosophers did not die out with Hegel and Herbart. His
_Microcosmus_ (3 vols., 1856-64, 4th ed., 1884 _seq_; English translation
by Hamilton and Jones, 3d ed., 1888), which is more than an anthropology,
as it is modestly entitled, and _History of Aesthetics in Germany_, 1868,
which also gives more than the title betrays, enjoy a deserved popularity.
These works were preceded by the _Medical Psychology_, 1852, and a polemic
treatise against I.H. Fichte, 1857, as well as by a _Pathology_ and a
_Physiology_, and followed by the _System of Philosophy_, which remained
incomplete (part i. _Logic_, 1874, 2d ed., 1881, English translation
edited by Bosanquet, 2d ed., 1888; part ii. _Metaphysics_, 1879, English
translation edited by Bosanquet, 2d ed., 1887). Lotze's _Minor Treatises_
have been published by Peipers in three volumes (1885-91); and Rehnisch has
edited eight sets of dictata from his lectures, 1871-84.[1] Since these
"Outlines," all of which we now have in new editions, make a convenient
introduction to the Lotzean system, and are, or should be, in the
possession of all, a brief survey may here suffice.
[Footnote 1: _Outlines of Psychology, Practical Philosophy, Philosophy of
Religion, Philosophy of Nature, Logic and the Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
Metaphysics, Aesthetics_, and the _History of Philosophy since Kant_, all
of which may be emphatically commended to students, especially the one
first mentioned, and, in spite of its subjective position, the last.
[English translations of these _Outlines_ except the fourth and the
last, by Ladd, 1884 _seq_.] On Lotze cf. the obituaries by J. Baumann
(_Philosophische Monatshefte_, vol. xvii.), H. Sommer (_Im Neuen Reich_),
A. Krohn (_Zeitschrift für Philosophie_, vol. lxxxi. pp. 56-93), R.
Falckenberg (Augsburg _Allgemeine Zeitung_, 1881, No. 233), and Rehnisch
(_National Zeitung_ and the _Revue Philosophique_, vol. xii.). The last of
these was reprinted in the appendix to the _Grundzüge der Aesthetik_, 1884,
which contains, further, a chronological table of Lotze's works, essays,
and critiques, as well as of his lectures. Hugo Sommer has zealously
devoted himself to the popularization of the Lotzean system. Cf., further,
Fritz Koegel, _Lotzes Aesthetik_, Göttingen, 1886, and the article by
Koppelmann referred to above, p. 330.]
The subject of metaphysics is reality. Things which are, events which
happen, relations which exist, representative contents and truths which
are valid, are real. Events happening and relations existing presuppose
existing things as the subjects in and between which they happen and exist.
The being of things is neither their being perceived (for when we say that
a thing is we mean that it continues to be, even when we do not perceive
it), nor a pure, unrelated position, its position in general, but _to be is
to stand in relations_. Further, the _what_ or essence of the things which
enter into these relations cannot be conceived as passive quality, but
only abstractly, as a rule or a law which determines the connection and
succession of a series of qualities. The nature of water, for example, is
the unintuitable somewhat which contains the ground of the change of ice,
first into the liquid condition, and then into steam, when the temperature
increases, and conversely, of the possibility of changing steam back
into water and ice under opposite conditions. And when we speak of an
unchangeable identity of the thing with itself, as a result of which it
remains the same essence amid the change of its phenomena, we mean only the
consistency with which it keeps within the closed series of forms a1, a2,
a3, without ever going over into the series b1, b2. The relations, however,
in which things stand, cannot pass to and fro between things like threads
or little spirits, but are states in things themselves, and the change
of the former always implies a change in these inner states. To stand in
relations means to _exchange actions_. In order to experience such effects
from others and to exercise them upon others, things must neither be wholly
incomparable (as red, hard, sweet) and mutually indifferent, nor yet
absolutely independent; if the independence of individual beings were
complete the process of action would be entirely inconceivable. The
difficulty in the concept of causality--how does being _a_ come to produce
in itself a different state _a_ because another being _b_ enters into the
state [Greek: _b_]?--is removed only when we look on the things as
modes, states, parts of a single comprehensive being, of an infinite,
unconditioned substance, in so far as there is then only an action of
the absolute on itself. Nevertheless the assumption that, in virtue of
the unity and consistency of the absolute or of its impulse to
self-preservation, state [Greek: _b_] in being _b_ follows state
[Greek: _a_] in being _a_ as an accommodation or compensation follows a
disturbance, is not a full explanation of the process of action, does
not remove the difficulty as to how one state can give rise to another.
Metaphysics is, in general, unable to show how reality is made, but only to
remove certain contradictions which stand in the way of the conceivability
of these notions. The so far empty concept of an absolute looks to the
philosophy of religion for its content; the conception of the Godhead as
infinite personality (it is a person in a far higher sense than we) is
first produced when we add to the ontological postulate of a comprehensive
substance the ethical postulate of a supreme good or a universal
world-Idea.
By "thing" we understand the permanent unit-subject of changing states. But
the fact of consciousness furnishes the only guaranty that the different
states _a, [Greek: b], y_, are in reality states of one being, and not so
many different things alternating with one another. Only a conscious
being, which itself effects the distinction between itself and the states
occurring in it, and in memory and recollection feels and knows itself as
their identical subject, is actually a subject which has states. Hence,
if things are to be real, we must attribute to them a nature in essence
related to that of our soul. Reality is existence for self. All beings
are spiritual, and only spiritual beings possess true reality. Thus Lotze
combines the monadology of Leibnitz with the pantheism of Spinoza, just
as he understands how to reconcile the mechanical view of natural science
(which is valid also for the explanation of organic life) with the
teleology and the ethical idealism of Fichte. The sole mission of the
world of forms is to aid in the realization of the ideal purposes of the
absolute, of the world of values.
The ideality of space, which Kant had based on insufficient grounds, is
maintained by Lotze also, only that he makes things stand in "intellectual"
relations, which the knowing subject translates into spatial language. The
same character of subjectivity belongs not only to our sensations, but
also to our ideas concerning the connection of things. Representations are
results, not copies, of the external stimuli; cognition comes under the
general concept of the interaction of real elements, and depends, like
every effect, as much upon the nature of the being that experiences the
effect as upon the nature of the one which exerts it, or rather, more upon
the former than upon the latter. If, nevertheless, it claims objective
reality, truth must not be interpreted as the correspondence of thought and
its object (the cognitive image can never be like the thing itself), nor
the mission of cognition, made to consist in copying a world already
finished and closed apart from the realm of spirits, to which mental
representation is added as something accessory. Light and sound are not
therefore illusions because they are not true copies of the waves of ether
and of air from which they spring, but they are the end which nature has
sought to attain through these motions, an end, however, which it cannot
attain alone, but only by acting upon spiritual subjects; the beauty and
splendor of colors and tones are that which of right ought to be in the
world; without the new world of representations awakened in spirits by the
action of external stimuli, the world would lack its essential culmination.
The purpose of things is to be known, experienced, and enjoyed by spirits.
The truth of cognition consists in the fact that it opens up the meaning
and destination of the world. That which ought to be is the ground of that
which is; that which is exists in order to the realization of values in
it; the good is the only real. It is true that we are not permitted to
penetrate farther than to the general conviction that the Idea of the good
is the ground and end of the world; the question, how the world has arisen
from this supreme Idea as from the absolute and why just this world with
its determinate forms and laws has arisen, is unanswerable. We understand
the meaning of the play, but we do not see the machinery by which it is
produced at work behind the stage. In ethics Lotze emphasizes with Fechner
the inseparability of the good and pleasure: it is impossible to state in
what the worth or goodness of a good is to consist, if it be conceived out
of all relation to a spirit capable of finding enjoyment in it.
If Lotze's philosophy harmoniously combines Herbartian and Fichteo-Hegelian
elements, Eduard von Hartmann (born 1842; until 1864 a soldier, now a man
of letters in Berlin) aims at a synthesis of Schopenhauer and Hegel; with
the pessimism of the former he unites the evolutionism of the latter, and
while the one conceives the nature of the world-ground as irrational will,
and the other as the logical Idea, he follows the example of Schelling
in his later days by making will and representation equally legitimate
attributes of his absolute, the Unconscious. His principal theoretical
work, _The Philosophy of the Unconscious_, 1869 (10th ed., 1891; English
translation by Coupland, 1884), was followed in 1879 by his chief ethical
one, _The Moral Consciousness_ (2d ed., 1886, in the _Selected Works_); the
two works on the philosophy of religion, _The Religious Consciousness of
Humanity in the Stages of its Development_, 1881, and _The Religion of
Spirit_, 1882, together form the third chief work (_The Self-Disintegration
of Christianity and the Religion of the Future_, 1874, and _The Crisis of
Christianity in Modern Theology_, 1880, are to be regarded as forerunners
of this); the fourth is the _Aesthetics_ (part i. _German Aesthetics since
Kant_, 1886; part ii. _Philosophy of the Beautiful_, 1887). The _Collected
Studies and Essays_, 1876, were preceded by two treatises on the philosophy
of nature, _Truth and Error in Darwinism_, 1875, and _The Unconscious
from the Standpoint of Physiology and the Theory of Descent_, published
anonymously in 1872, in the latter of which, disguised as a Darwinian,
he criticises his own philosophy. Of his more recent publications we may
mention the _Philosophical Questions of the Day_, 1885; _Modern Problems_,
1886; and the controversial treatise _Lotzes Philosophy_, 1888.[1]
[Footnote 1: On Hartmann cf. Volkelt in _Nord und Süd_, July, 1881; the
same, _Das Unbewusste und der Pessimismus_, 1873; Vaihinger, _Hartmann_,
_Dühring und Lange_, 1876; R. Koeber, _Das philosophische System Ed.
v, Hartmann_, 1884; O. Pfleiderer, critique of the _Phänomenologie des
sittlichen Bewusstseins (Im neuen Reich)_, 1879; L. von Golther, _Der
moderne Pessimismus_, 1878; J. Huber, _Der Pessimismus_, 1876; Weygoldt,
_Kritik des philosophischen Pessimismus der neuesten Zeit_, 1875; M.
Venetianer, _Der Allgeist_, 1874; A Taubert (Hartmann's first wife),
_Der Pessimismus und seine Gegner_, 1873; O. Plümacher, _Der Kampf ums
Unbewusste_ (with a chronological table of Hartmann literature appended),
1881; the same, _Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart_, 1884;
Krohn, _Streifzüge_ (see above); Seydel (see above). During the year
1882 four publications appeared under the title _Der Pessimismus und die
Sittenlehre_, by Bacmeister, Christ, Rehmke, and H. Sommer (2d ed., 1883).
[English translation of _Truth and Error in Darwinism_ in the _Journal
of Speculative Philosophy_, vols. xi.-xiii., and of _The Religion of the
Future_, by Dare, 1886; cf. also Sully's _Pessimism_, chap. v.--TR.]]
In polemical relation, on the one hand, to the naïve realism of life,
and, on the other, to the subjective idealism of Kant, or rather of
the neo-Kantians, the logical conclusion of which would be absolute
illusionism, Hartmann founds his "transcendental realism," which mediates
between these two points of view (the existence and true nature of the
world outside our representations is knowable, if only indirectly; the
forms of knowledge, in spite of their subjective origin, have a more
than subjective, a transcendental, significance) by pointing out that
sense-impressions, which are accompanied by the feeling of compulsion and
are different from one another, cannot be explained from the ego, but only
by the action of things in themselves external to us, _i.e._, independent
of consciousness, and themselves distinct from one another. The causality
of things in themselves is the bridge which enables us to cross the gulf
between the immanent world of representations and the transcendent world of
being. The causality of things in themselves proves their reality, their
difference at different times, their changeability and their temporal
character; change, however, demands something permanent, existence, an
existing, unchangeable, supra-temporal, and non-spatial substance (whether
a special substance for each thing in itself or a common one for all, is
left for the present undetermined). My action upon the thing in itself
assures me of its causal conditionality or necessity; the various
affections of the same sense, that there are many things in themselves; the
peculiar form of change shown by some bodies, that these, like my body, are
united with a soul. Thus it is evident that, besides the concept of cause,
a series of other categories must be applied to the thing in itself, hence
applied transcendentally.
The "speculative results" obtained by Hartmann on an "inductive" basis
are as follows: The _per se (Ansich)_ of the empirical world is the
Unconscious. The two attributes of this absolute are the active,
groundless, alogical, infinite will, and the passive, finite representation
(Idea); the former is the ground of the _that_ of the world, the latter
the ground of its purposive _what_ and _how_. Without the will the
representation, which in itself is without energy, could not become real,
and without the representation (of an end) the will, which in itself is
without reason, could not become a definite willing (relative or immanent
dualism of the attributes, a necessary moment in absolute monism). The
empirical preponderance of pain over pleasure, which can be shown by
calculation,[1] proves that the world is evil, that its non-existence were
better than its existence; the purposiveness everywhere perceptible in
nature and the progress of history toward a final goal (it is true, a
negative one) proves, nevertheless, that it is the best world that was
possible (reconciliation of eudemonistic pessimism with evolutionistic
optimism). The creation of the world begins when the blind will to live
groundlessly and fortuitously passes over from essence to phenomenon, from
potency to act, from supra-existence to existence, and, in irrational
striving after existence, draws to itself the only content which is capable
of realization, the logical Idea. This latter seeks to make good the
error committed by the will by bringing consciousness into the field as
a combatant against the insatiable, ever yearning, never satisfied will,
which one day will force the will back into latency, into the (antemundane)
blessed state of not-willing. The goal of the world-development is
deliverance from the misery of existence, the peace of non-existence, the
return from the will and representation, become spatial and temporal, to
the original, harmonious equilibrium of the two functions, which has been
disturbed by the origin of the world or to the antemundane identity of the
absolute. The task of the logical element is to teach consciousness more
and more to penetrate the illusion of the will--in its three stages of
childlike (Greek) expectation of happiness to be attained here, youthful
(Christian) expectation of happiness to be attained hereafter, and
adult expectation of happiness to be attained in the future of the
world-development--and, finally, to teach it to know, in senile longing
after rest, that only the doing away with this miserable willing, and,
consequently, with earthly existence (through the resolve of the majority
of mankind) can give the sole attainable blessedness, freedom from pain.
The world-process is the incarnation, the suffering, and the redemption
of the absolute; the moral task of man is not personal renunciation and
cowardly retirement, but to make the purposes of the Unconscious his own,
with complete resignation to life and its sufferings to labor energetically
in the world-process, and, by the vigorous promotion of consciousness, to
hasten the fulfillment of the redemptive purpose; the condition of morality
is insight into the fruitlessness of all striving after pleasure and into
the essential unity of all individual beings with one another and with the
universal spirit, which exists in the individuals, but at the same time
subsists above them. "To know one's self as of divine nature, this does
away with all divergence between selfwill and universal will, with all
estrangement between man and God, with all undivine, that is, merely
natural, conduct."
[Footnote 1: Cf. Volkelt, _Ueber die Lust als höchsten Werthmassstab_
(in the _Zeitschrift für Philosophie_, vol. lxxxviii.), 1886, and O.
Pfleiderer, _Philosophy of Religion_, vol. ii. p. 249 _seq_.]
Religion, which, in common with philosophy, has for its basis the
metaphysical need for, or the mystical feeling of, the unity of the human
individual and the world-ground, needs transformation, since in its
traditional forms it is opposed to modern culture, and the merging of
religion (as a need of the heart) in metaphysics is impossible. The
religion of the future, for which the way has already been prepared by the
speculative Protestantism of the present, is _concrete monism_ (the divine
unity is transcendent as well as immanent in the plurality of the beings of
earth, every moral man a God-man), which includes in itself the abstract
monism (pantheism) of the Indian religions and the Judeo-Christian (mono-)
theism as subordinate moments. (The original henotheism and its decline
into polytheism, demonism, and fetichism was followed by--Egyptian and
Persian, as well as Greek, Roman, and German--naturalism, and then by
supernaturalism in its monistic and its theistic form. The chief defect of
the Christian religion is the transcendental-eudemonistic heteronomy of its
ethics.) The _Religion of Spirit_ divides into three parts. The psychology
of religion considers the religious function in its subjective aspect,
faith as a combined act of representation, feeling, and will, in which one
of these three elements may predominate--though feeling forms the inmost
kernel of the theoretical and practical activities as well--and, as
the objective correlate of faith, grace (revealing, redeeming, and
sanctifying), which elevates man above peripheral and phenomenal dependence
on the world, and frees him from it, through his becoming conscious of his
central and metaphysical dependence upon God. The metaphysics of religion
(in theological, anthropological, and cosmological sections) proves
by induction from the facts of religion the existence, omnipotence,
spirituality, omniscience, righteousness, and holiness of the All-one,
which coincides with the moral order of the world. Further, it proves the
need and the capacity of man for redemption from guilt and evil--here three
spheres of the individual will are distinguished, one beneath God, one
contrary to God, and one conformable to God, or a natural, an evil, and a
moral sphere--and, preserving alike the absoluteness of God and the reality
of the world, shows that it is not so much man as God himself, who, as the
bearer of all the suffering of the world, is the subject of redemption.
The ethics of religion discusses the subjective and objective processes of
redemption, namely, repentance and amendment on the part of the individual
and the ecclesiastical _cultus_ of the future, which is to despise symbols
and art.
It is to Hartmann's credit, though the fact has not been sufficiently
appreciated by professional thinkers, that in a time averse to speculation
he has devoted his energies to the highest problems of metaphysics, and in
their elaboration has approached his task with scientific earnestness and
a comprehensive and thorough consideration of previous results. Thus
the critique of ethical standpoints in the historical part of the
_Phenomenology of the Moral Consciousness_, especially, contains much that
is worthy of consideration; and his fundamental metaphysical idea, that the
absolute is to be conceived as the unity of will and reason, also deserves
in general a more lively assent than has been accorded to it, while his
rejection of an infinite consciousness has justly met with contradiction.
It has been impossible here to go into his discussions in the philosophy of
nature--they cannot be described in brief--on matter (atomic forces), on
the mechanical and teleological views of life and its development, on
instinct, on sexual love, etc., which he very skillfully uses in support of
his metaphysical principle.
%3. From the Revival of the Kantian Philosophy to the Present Time.%
%(a) Neo-Kantianism, Positivism, and Kindred Phenomena.%--The Kantian
philosophy has created two epochs: one at the time of its appearance, and
a second two generations after the death of its author. The new Kantian
movement, which is one of the most prominent characteristics of the
philosophy of the present time, took its beginning a quarter of a century
ago. It is true that even before 1865 individual thinkers like Ernst
Reinhold of Jena (died 1855), the admirer of Fries, J.B. Meyer of Bonn,
K.A. von Reichlin-Meldegg, and others had sought a point of departure for
their views in Kant; that K. Fischer's work on Kant (1860) had given a
lively impulse to the renewed study of the critical philosophy; nay, that
the cry "Back to Kant" had been expressly raised by Fortlage (as early as
1832 in his treatise _The Gaps in the Hegelian System_), and by Zeller
(p. 589). But the movement first became general after F.A. Lange in his
_History of Materialism_ had energetically advocated the Kantian doctrine
according to his special conception of it, after Helmholtz[1] (born 1821)
had called attention to the agreement of the results of physiology with
those of the Critique of Reason, and at the same time Liebmann's youthful
work, _Kant and the Epigones_, in which every chapter ended with the
inexorable refrain, "therefore we must go back to Kant," had given the
strongest expression to the longing of the time.
[Footnote 1: Helmholtz: _On Human Vision_, 1855; _Physiological Optics_,
1867; _Sensations of Tone_, 1863, 4th ed., 1877 [English translation by
Ellis, 2d ed., 1885].]
Otto Liebmann (cf. also the chapter on "The Metamorphoses of the A Priori"
in his _Analysis of Reality_) sees the fundamental truth of criticism in
the irrefutable proof that, space, time, and the categories are functions
of the intellect, and that subject and object are necessary correlates,
inseparable factors of the empirical world, and finds Kant's fundamental
error, which the Epigones have not corrected, but made still worse, in the
non-concept of the thing in itself, which must be expelled from the Kantian
philosophy as a remnant of dogmatism, as a drop of alien blood, and as an
illegitimate invader which has debased it.
According to Friedrich Albert Lange[1] (1828-75; during the last years
of his life professor at Marburg), materialism, which is unfruitful and
untenable as a principle, a system, and a view of the world, but useful
and indispensable as a method and a maxim of investigation, must be
supplemented by formal idealism, which, rejecting all science from mere
reason limits knowledge to the sensuous, to that which can be experienced,
yet at the same time conceives the formal element in the sense world as the
product of the organization of man, and hence makes objects conform to our
representations. Above the sensuous world of experience and of mechanical
becoming, however, the speculative impulse to construction, rounding off
the fragmentary truth of the sciences into a unified picture of the whole
truth, rears the ideal world of that which ought to be. Notwithstanding
their indefeasible certitude, the Ideas possess no scientific truth, though
they have a moral value which makes them more than mere fabrics of the
brain: man is framed not merely for the knowledge of truth, but also for
the realization of values. But since the significance of the Ideas is
only practical, and since determinations of value are not grounds
of explanation, science and metaphysics or "concept poetry"
(_Begriffsdichtung_) must be kept strictly separate.
[Footnote 1: F.A. Lange: _Logical Studies_, 1877. Cf. M. Heinze in the
_Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophic_, 1877, and
Vaihinger in the work cited above, p. 610 note.]
Friedrich Paulsen of Berlin (born in 1846; cf. pp. 330, 332, note) sees in
the Kantian philosophy the foundation for the philosophy of the future. A
profounder Wolff (the self-dominion of the reason), a Prussian Hume (the
categories of the understanding are not world-categories; rejection of
anthropomorphic metaphysics), and a German Rousseau (the primacy of the
will, consideration of the demands of the heart; the good will alone, not
deeds nor culture, constitutes the worth of man; freedom, the rights of
man) in one person, Kant has withdrawn from scientific discussion the
question concerning the dependence of reality on values or the good,
which is theoretically insoluble but practically to be answered in the
affirmative, and given it over to faith. Kant is in so far a positivist
that he limits the mission of knowledge to the reduction of the
temporo-spatial relations of phenomena to rules, and declares the
teleological power of values to be undemonstrable. But science is able
to prove this much, that the belief in a suprasensible world, in the
indestructibility of that which alone has worth, and in the freedom of
the intelligible character, which the will demands, is not scientifically
impossible. Since, according to formal rationalism, the whole order of
nature is a creation of the understanding, and hence atomism and mechanism
are only forms of representation, valid, no doubt, for our peripheral point
of view, but not absolutely valid, since, further, the empirical view of
the world apart from the Idea of the divine unity of the world (which, it
is true, is incapable of theoretical realization) would lack completion,
the immediate conviction of the heart in regard to the power of the good is
in no danger of attack from the side of science, although this can do no
further service for faith than to remove the obstacles which oppose it. The
will, not the intellect, determines the view of the world; but this is only
a belief, and in the world of representation, the intelligible world, with
which the will brings us into relation, can come before us only in the form
of symbols.--While Albrecht Krause (_The Laws of the Human Heart, a Formal
Logic of Pure Feeling_, 1876) and A. Classen (_Physiology of the Sense of
Sight_, 1877) are strict followers of Kant, J. Volkelt (_Analysis of the
Fundamental Principles of Kant's Theory of Knowledge_, 1879) has traced the
often deplored inconsistencies and contradictions in Kant down to their
roots, and has shown that in Kant's thinking, which has hitherto been
conceived as too simple and transparent, but which, in fact, is extremely
complicated and struggling in the dark, a number of entirely heterogeneous
principles of thought (skeptical, subjectivistic, metaphysico-work,
rationalistic, _a priori_, and practical motives) are at which, conflicting
with and crippling one another, make the attainment of harmonious results
impossible. Benno Erdmann (p. 330) and Hans Vaihinger (pp. 323 note, 331)
have given Kant's principal works careful philological interpretation.
Among the various differences of opinion which exist within the neo-Kantian
ranks, the most important relates to the question, whether the individual
ego or a transcendental consciousness is to be looked upon as the executor
of the _a priori_ functions. In agreement with Schopenhauer and with Lotze,
who makes the subjectivity of space, time, and the pure concepts parallel
with that of the sense qualities, Lange teaches that the human individual
is so organized that he must apprehend that which is sensuously given under
these forms. Others, on the contrary, urge that the individual soul with
its organization is itself a phenomenon, and consequently cannot be the
bearer of that which precedes phenomena--space, time, and the categories
as "conditions" of experience are functions of a pure consciousness to be
presupposed. The antithesis of subject and object, the soul and the world,
first arises in the sphere of phenomena. The empirical subject, like the
world of objects, is itself a product of the _a priori_ forms, hence not
that which produces them. To the transcendental group belong Hermann
Cohen[1] in Marburg, A. Stadler[2], Natorp, Lasswitz (p.17), E. König (p.
17), Koppelmann (p. 330), Staudinger (p. 331). Fritz Schultze of Dresden is
also to be counted among the neo-Kantians (_Philosophy of Natural Science_,
1882; _Kant and Darwin_, 1875; _The Fundamental Thoughts of Materialism_,
1881; _The Fundamental Thoughts of Spiritualism_, 1883; _Comparative
Psychology_, i. 1, 1892).
[Footnote 1: Cohen: _Kant's Theory of Experience_, 1871, 2d ed., 1886;
_Kant's Foundation of Ethics_, 1877; _Kant's Foundation of Aesthetics_,
1889.]
[Footnote 2: Stadler: _Kant's Teleology_, 1874; _The Principles of the Pure
Theory of Knowledge in the Kantian Philosophy_, 1876; _Kant's Theory of
Matter_, 1883.]
The German positivists[1]:--E. Laas of Strasburg (1837-85), A. Riehl
of Freiburg in Baden (born 1844), and R. Avenarius of Zurich (born
1843)--develop their sensationalistic theory of knowledge in critical
connection with Kant. Ernst Laas defines positivism (founded by Protagoras,
advocated in modern times by Hume and J.S. Mill, and hostile to Platonic
idealism) as that philosophy which recognizes no other foundations than
positive facts (_i.e._, perceptions), and requires every opinion to exhibit
the experiences on which it rests. Its basis is constituted by three
articles of belief: (1) The correlative facts, subject and object, exist
and arise only in connection (objects are directly known only as the
contents of a consciousness, _cui objecta sunt_, subjects only as centers
of relation, as the scene or foundation of a representative content, _cui
subjecta sunt_: outside my thoughts body does not exist as body, nor I
myself as soul). (2) The variability of the objects of perception. (3)
Sensationalism--all specific differences in consciousness must be conceived
as differences in degree, all higher mental processes and states, including
thought, as the perceptions and experiences, transformed according to
law, of beings which feel, have wants, possess memory, and are capable of
spontaneous motion. The subject coincides with its feeling of pleasure and
pain, from which sensation is distinguished by its objective content. The
illusions of metaphysics are scientifically untenable and practically
unnecessary. Various yearnings, wants, presentiments, hopes, and fancies,
it is true, lead beyond the sphere of that which can be checked by sense
and experience, but for none of their positions can any sufficient proof be
adduced. As physics has discarded transcendent causes and learned how to
get along with immanent causes, so ethics also must endeavor to establish
the worth of moral good without excursions into the suprasensible. The
ethical obligations arise naturally from human relations, from earthly
needs. The third volume of Laas's work differs from the earlier ones by
conceding the rank of facts to the principles of logic as well as to
perception. Aloys Riehl opposes the theory of knowledge (which starts from
the fundamental fact of sensation) as scientific philosophy to metaphysics
as unscientific, and banishes the doctrine of the practical ideals from the
realm of science into the region of religion and art. Richard Avenarius
defends the principle of "pure experience." Sensation, which is all that is
left as objectively given after the removal of the subjective additions,
constitutes the content, and motion the form of being.
[Footnote 1: Laas: _Idealism and Positivism_, 1879-84. Riehl:
_Philosophical Criticism_, 1876-87; Address _On Scientific and Unscientific
Philosophy_, 1883. Avenarius (p. 598): _Philosophy as Thought concerning
the World according to the Principle of Least Work_, 1876; _Critique of
Pure Experience_, vol. i. 1888, vol. ii. 1890; _Man's Concept of the
World_, 1891. C. Göring (died 1879; _System of Critical Philosophy_, 1875)
may also be placed here.]
With the neo-Kantians and the positivists there is associated, thirdly, a
coherent group of noëtical thinkers, who, rejecting extramental elements of
every kind, look on all conceivable being as merely a conscious content.
This monism of consciousness is advocated by W. Schuppe of Greifswald (born
1836; _Noëtical Logic_, 1878), J. Rehmke, also of Greifswald (_The World as
Percept and Concept_, 1880; "The Question of the Soul" in vol. ii. of the
_Zeitschrift für Psychologie_, 1891), A. von Leclair (_Contributions to
a_ _Monistic Theory of Knowledge_, 1882), and R. von Schubert-Soldern
(_Foundations of a Theory of Knowledge_, 1884; _On the Transcendence
of Object and Subject_, 1882; _Foundations for an Ethics_, 1887). J.
Bergmann[1] in Marburg (born 1840) occupies a kindred position.
[Footnote 1: Bergmann: _Outlines of a Theory of Consciousness_, 1870; _Pure
Logic_, 1879; _Being and Knowing_, 1880; _The Fundamental Problems of
Logic_, 1882; _On the Right_, 1883; _Lectures on Metaphysics_, 1886; _On
the Beautiful_, 1887; _History of Philosophy_, vol. i., _Pre-Kantian
Philosophy_, 1892.]
It is the same scientific spirit of the time, which in the fifties led many
who were weary of the idealistic speculations over to materialism, that now
secures such wide dissemination and so widespread favor for the endeavors
of the neo-Kantians and the positivists or neo-Baconians, who desire to see
metaphysics stricken from the list of the sciences and replaced by noëtics,
and the theory of the world relegated to faith. The philosophy of the
present, like the pre-Socratic philosophy and the philosophy of the early
modern period, wears the badge of physics. The world is conceived from the
standpoint of nature, psychical phenomena are in part neglected, in part
see their inconvenient claims reduced to a minimum, while it is but rarely
that we find an appreciation of their independence and co-ordinate value,
not to speak of their superior position. The power which natural science
has gained over philosophy dates essentially from a series of famous
discoveries and theories, by which science has opened up entirely new and
wide outlooks, and whose title to be considered in the formation of a
general view of reality is incontestable. To mention only the most
prominent, the following have all posited important and far-reaching
problems for philosophy as well as for science: Johannes Müller's (Müller
died 1858) theory of the specific energies of the senses, which Helmholtz
made use of as an empirical confirmation of the Kantian apriorism; the law
of the conservation of energy discovered by Robert Mayer (1842, 1850;
Helmholtz, 1847, 1862), and, in particular, the law of the transformation
of heat into motion, which invited an examination of all the forces active
in the world to test their mutual convertibility; the extension of
mechanism to the vital processes, favored even by Lotze; the renewed
conflict between atomism and dynamism; further, the Darwinian theory[1]
(1859), which makes organic species develop from one another by natural
selection in the struggle for existence (through inheritance and
adaptation); finally, the meta-geometrical speculations[2] of Gauss (1828),
Riemann (_On the Hypotheses which lie at the Basis of Geometry_, 1854,
published in 1867), Helmholtz (1868), B. Erdmann (_The Axioms of Geometry_,
1877). G. Cantor, and others, which look on our Euclidean space of three
dimensions as a special case of the unintuitable yet thinkable analytic
concept of a space of _n_ dimensions. The circumstance that these theories
are still largely hypothetical in their own field appears to have stirred
up rather than moderated the zeal for carrying them over into other
departments and for applying them to the world as a whole. Thus,
especially, the Darwinians[3] have undauntedly attempted to utilize the
biological hypothesis of the master as a philosophical principle of the
world, and to bring the mental sciences under the point of view of the
mechanical theory of development, though thus far with more daring and
noise than success. The finely conceived ethics of Höffding (p. 585) is an
exception to the rule which is the object of this remark.
[Footnote 1: A critical exposition of the modern doctrine of development
and of the causes used to explain it is given by Otto Hamann,
_Entwickelungslehre und Darwinismus_, Jena, 1892. Cf. also, O. Liebmann,
_Analysis der Wirklichkeit_; and Ed. von Hartmann (above, p. 610). [Among
the numerous works in English the reader may be referred to the article
"Evolution," by Huxley and Sully, _Encyclopedia Britannica_, 9th ed., vol.
viii.; Wallace's _Darwinism_, 1889; Romanes, _Darwin and after Darwin_,
i. _The Darwinian Theory_, 1892; and Conn's _Evolution of To-day_,
1886.--TR.]]
[Footnote 2: Cf. Liebmann, _Analysis der Wirklichkeit_, 2d ed., pp. 53-59.
G. Frege (_Begriffsschrift_, 1879; _The Foundations of Arithmetic_, 1884;
_Function and Concept_, 1891; "On Sense and Meaning" in the _Zeitschrift
für Philosophie,_ vol. c. 1892) has also chosen the region intermediate
between mathematics and philosophy for his field of work. We note, further,
E.G. Husserl, _Philosophy of Arithmetic_, vol. i., 1891.]
[Footnote 3: Ernst Haeckel of Jena (born 1834; _General Morphology_, 1866;
_Natural History of Creation_, 1868 [English, 1875] I _Anthropogeny_, 1874;
_Aims and Methods of the Development History of To-day_, 1875; _Popular
Lectures_, 1878 _seq_.--English, 1883), G. Jäger, A. Schleicher _(The
Darwinian Theory and the Science of Language_, 1865), Ernst Krause
(Carus Sterne, the editor of _Kosmos_) O. Caspari, Carneri (_Morals and
Darwinism_, 1871), O. Schmidt, Du Prel, Paul Rée (_The Origin of the Moral
Feelings_, 1877; _The Genesis of Conscience_, 1885; _The Illusion of Free
Will_, 1885); G.H. Schneider (_The Animal Will_, 1880; _The Human Will_,
1882; _The Good and III of the Human Race_, 1883).]
Besides the theory of knowledge, in the elaboration of which the most
eminent naturalists[1] participate with acuteness and success, psychology
and the practical disciplines also betray the influence of the scientific
spirit. While sociology and ethics, following the English model, seek an
empirical basis and begin to make philosophical use of statistical results
(E.F. Schäffle, _Frame and Life of the Social Body_, new ed., 1885; A. von
Oettingen, _Moral Statistic in its Significance for a Social Ethics_, 3d
ed., 1882), psychology endeavors to attain exact results in regard to
psychical life and its relation to its physical basis--besides Fechner and
the Herbartians, W. Wundt and A. Horwicz should be mentioned here. Wundt
and, of late, Haeckel go back to the Spinozistic parallelism of material
and psychical existence, only that the latter emphasizes merely the
inseparability _(Nichtohneeinander)_ of the two sides (the cell-body and
the cell-soul) with a real difference between them and a metaphysical
preponderance of the material side, while the former emphasizes the
essential unity of body and soul, and the higher reality of the spiritual
side.
[Footnote 1: Helmholtz, Virchow (born 1821), Zöllner (1834-82; _On the
Nature of Comets_, 1872), and Du Bois-Reymond (born 1818), who, in his
lectures _On the Limits of the Knowledge of Nature_, 1872, and _The Seven
World-riddles_, 1880 (both together in 1882, and reprinted in the first
series of his _Addresses_, 1886), looks on the origin of life, the
purposive order of nature, and thought as problems soluble in the future,
but declares, on the other hand, that the nature of matter (atoms)
and force _(actio in distant)_, the origin of motion, the genesis of
consciousness (of sensation, together with pleasure and pain) from the
knowable conditions of psychical life, and the freedom of the will, are
absolute limits to our knowledge of nature.]
%(b) Idealistic Reaction against the Scientific Spirit.%--In opposition to
the preponderance of natural science and the empirico-skeptical tendency of
the philosophy of the day conditioned by it, an idealistic counter-movement
is making itself increasingly felt as the years go on. Wilhelm Dilthey[1]
abandons metaphysics as a basis, it is true, but (with the assent of
Gierke, _Preussische Jahrbücher_, vol. liii. 1884) declares against the
transfer of the method of natural science to the mental sciences, which
require a special foundation. In spite of his critical rejection of
metaphysics, Wilhelm Windelband in Strasburg (born 1848; _Preludes_, 1884)
is, like Dilthey, to be counted among the idealists. In opposition to the
individualism of the positivists, the folk-psychologists--at their head
Steinthal and Lazarus (p. 536); Gustav Glogau[2] in Kiel (born 1844) is
an adherent of the same movement--defend the power of the universal over
individual spirits. The spirit of the people is not a phrase, an empty
name, but a real force, not the sum of the individuals belonging to the
people, but an encompassing and controlling power, which brings forth
in the whole body processes (_e.g._, language) which could not occur in
individuals as such. It is only as a member of society that anyone becomes
truly man; the community is the subject of the higher life of spirit.
[Footnote 1: Dilthey: _Introduction to the Mental Sciences_, part i.,
1883; _Poetic Creation_ in the Zeller _Aufsätze_, 1887; "Contributions to
the Solution of the Question of the Origin of our Belief in the Reality of
the External World, and its Validity," _Sitzungsberichte_ of the Berlin
Academy of Sciences, 1890; "Conception and Analysis of Man in the
Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries" in the _Archiv für Geschichte der
Philosophie_, vols. iv., v., 1891-92.]
[Footnote 2: Glogau: _Sketch of the Fundamental Philosophical Sciences_
(part i., _The Form and the Laws of Motion of the Spirit_, 1880; part
ii., _The Nature and the Fundamental Forms of Conscious Spirit_, 1888);
_Outlines of Psychology_; 1884.]
If folk-psychology, whose title but imperfectly expresses the comprehensive
endeavor to construct a psychology of society or of the universal spirit,
is, as it were, an empirical confirmation of Hegel's theory of Objective
Spirit, Rudolf Eucken[1] (born 1846), pressing on in the Fichtean manner
from the secondary facts of consciousness to an original real-life,
endeavors to solve the question of a universal becoming, of an
all-pervasive force, of a supporting unity ("totality") in the life of
spirit (neither in a purely noëtical nor a purely metaphysical, but) in a
noölogical way, and demands that the fundamental science or doctrine of
principles direct its attention not to cognition by itself, but to the
activity of psychical life as a whole.
[Footnote 1: Eucken: _The Unity of Spiritual Life in the Consciousness and
Deeds of Humanity_, 1888; _Prolegomena_ to this, 1885. A detailed analysis
of the latter by Falckenberg is given in the _Zeitschrift für Philosophie_,
vol. xc, 1887; cf. above, pp. 17 and 610.]
We have elsewhere discussed the more recent attempts to establish a
metaphysic which shall be empirically well grounded and shall cautiously
rise from facts.[1] In regard to the possibility of metaphysics three
parties are to be distinguished: On the left, the positivists, the
neo-Kantians, and the monists of consciousness, who deny it out of hand. On
the right, a series of philosophers--e.g., adherents of Hegel, Herbart, and
Schopenhauer--who, without making any concessions to the modern theory of
knowledge, hold fast to the possibility of a speculative metaphysics of the
old type. In the center, a group of thinkers who are willing to renounce
neither a solid noëtical foundation nor the attainment of metaphysical
conclusions--so Eduard von Hartmann, Wundt,[2] Eucken, Volkelt (pp. 590,
617). Otto Liebmann (born 1840; _On the Analysis of Reality_, 1876, 2d
ed., 1880; _Thoughts and Facts_, Heft i. 1882) demands a sharp separation
between the certain and the uncertain and an exact estimation of the degree
of probability which theories possess; puts the principles of metaphysics
under the rubric of logical hypothesis; and, in his _Climax of the
Theories_, 1884, calls attention to the fact that experiential science, in
addition to axioms necessarily or apodictically certain and empeiremes
possessing actual or assertory certainty, needs, further, a number of
"interpolation maxims," which form an attribute of our type of intellectual
organization _(i.e._, principles, according to the standard of which we
supplement the fragmentary and discrete series of single perceptions and
isolated observations by the interpolation of the needed intermediate
links, so that they form a connected experience). The most important of
these maxims are the principles of real identity, of the continuity of
existence, of causality, and of the continuity of becoming. Experience is
a gift of the understanding; the premises, as a rule, latent in ordinary
consciousness, on whose anticipatory application our experience is based
throughout, assert something absolutely incapable of being experienced.
If, in order to the production of a "pure experience," we eliminate all
subjective additions of the understanding contained in experiential thought
(all that cannot be present at the moment or locally at hand, in short, all
that cannot be the direct object and content of actual observation),
this breaks up into an unordered, unconnected aggregate of discontinuous
perceptual fragments; in order that a complete and articulated condition
of experience may result, these fragments (the purely factual content of
observation, the incoherent matter of perception) must be supplemented and
connected by very much that is not observed.
[Footnote 1: R. Falckenberg, _Ueber die gegenwärtige Lage der deutschen
Philosophie_, inaugural address at Erlangen, Leipsic, 1890.]
[Footnote 2: Wundt: _Essays_, 1885, including "Philosophy and Science";
_System of Philosophy_, 1889. On the latter cf. Volkelt's paper in the
_Philosophische Monatshefte_, vol. xxvii. 1891; and on the _Essays_ a
notice by the same author in the same review, vol. xxiii. 1887.]
Further, a reaction against crude naturalism is observable in the practical
field, though political economists (Roscher) and jurists take a more active
part in it than the philosophers. Personally R. von Jhering (1818-92;
_Purpose in Law_, 2 vols., 1877-83, 2d ed., 1884-86) stands on idealistic
ground, although, rejecting the nativistic and formalistic theory, he is in
principle an adherent of "realism," of the principle of interest and social
utility (the moral is that Which is permanently useful to society).
Finally, similar motives underlie the growing interest in the history
of philosophy. The idealistic impulse seeks the nourishment which the
un-metaphysical present denies to it from the great works of the past, and
hopes, by keeping alive the classical achievements of previous times, to
enhance the consciousness of the urgency and irrepressibleness of the
highest questions, and to awaken courage for renewed attempts at their
solution. Thus the study of history enters the service of systematic
philosophy.
%(c) The Special Philosophical Sciences.%--The more the courage to attack
the central problems of philosophy has been paralyzed by the neo-Kantian
theory of knowledge and the coming-in of the positivistic spirit, the more
lively has been the work of the last decades in the special departments:
the transfer of the center of gravity from metaphysics to the particular
sciences is the most prominent characteristic of the philosophy of the
time. Logic sees century-old convictions shattered and new foundations
arising. Psychology has entered into competition with physiology in regard
to the discovery of the laws of the psychical functions which depend
on bodily processes, while metaphysical questions are forced into the
background and there is a growing distrust of the reliability of inner
observation. The philosophy of religion is favored with undiminished
interest and aesthetics, after long neglect, with a renewal of attention;
the philosophy of history is about to reconquer its former rights.
There is, moreover, an especially lively interest in ethics; and the
investigation of the history of philosophy is more widely extended than
ever before. We will close our sketch with a short survey of the particular
disciplines.
In the department of _logic_ the following should be mentioned as classical
achievements: the works of Christoph Sigwart of Tübingen (vol. i. 1873,
2d ed., 1889; vol. ii. 1878), of Lotze (p. 605), and of Wundt (vol. i.
_Erkenntnisslehre_, 1880; vol. ii. _Methodenlehre_, 1883). Besides these,
Bergmann (p. 620), Schuppe (p. 619), and Benno Erdmann (_Logik_, vol. i.
1892) deserve notice.
In _psychology_ the following writers have made themselves prominent:
Wilhelm Wundt at Leipsic (born 1832), _Grundzüge der physiologischen
Psychologie_, 1874, 3d ed., 1887; A. Horwicz, _Psychologische Analysen auf
physiologischer Grundlage_, 1872 _seq_.; Franz Brentano in Vienna (born
1838), _Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte_, vol. i. 1874; Carl
Stumpf of Munich (born 1848), _Ueber den psychologischen Ursprung der
Raumvorstellung_, 1873, _Tonpsychologie_, vol. i. 1883, vol. ii. 1890;
Theodor Lipps of Breslau (born 1851), _Grundthatsachen des Seelenlebens_,
1883. The following may be mentioned in the same connection: J.H. Witte,
_Das Wesen der Seele_, 1888; H. Münsterberg, _Die Willenshandlung_, 1888,
_Beiträge zur experimentellen Psychologie_, 1889 _seq_,; Goswin K. Uphues
at Halle, _Wahrnehmung und Empfindung_, 1888, _Ueber die Erinnerung_, 1889;
H. Schmidkunz, _Psychologie der Suggestion_, 1892; H. Ebbinghaus, the
co-editor of the _Zeitschrift für Psychologie una Physiologie der
Sinnesorgane_, 1890 _seq_.; H. Spitta; Max Dessoir, _Der Hautsinn_, in
the _Archiv für Anatomie una Physiologie_, 1892. The following works are
psychological contributions to the theory of knowledge: E.L. Fischer,
_Theorie der Gesichtswahrnehmung_, 1891; Hermann Schwarz, _Das
Wahrnehmungsproblem_, 1892. Finally we may add A. Dorner in Königsberg,
_Das menschliche Erkennen_, 1887; and E.L. Fischer, _Die Grundfragen der
Erkenntnisstheorie_, 1887.
The literature of _moral philosophy_ has been substantially enriched by
Wundt, _Ethik_, 1886, 2d ed., 1892; and Friedrich Paulsen, _System der
Ethik_, 1889, 2d ed., 1891. We may mention, further, Baumann (p. 601);
Schuppe, _Grundzüge der Ethik und Rechtsphilosophie_, 1882; Witte,
_Freiheit des Willens_, 1882; G. Class in Erlangen, _Ideale und Güter_,
1886; Richard Wallaschek, _Ideen zur praktischen Philosophic_, 1886;
F. Tönnies in Kiel, _Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft_, 1887; A. Döring,
_Philosophische Güterlehre_, 1888; Th. Ziegler, _Sittliches Sein und
Werden_, 2d ed., 1890; G. Simmel, _Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft_,
vol. i. 1892.
Of the newer works in the field of _aesthetics_, in addition to A.
Zeising's _Aesthetische Forschungen_, 1855, C. Hermann's _Aesthetik_,
1875, and Hartmann's _Philosophie des Schönen_, 1887, we may mention the
_Einleitung in die Aesthetik_ of Karl Groos, 1892, and the following by
Lipps: _Der Streit über die Tragödie_, 1890; _Aesthetische Faktoren der
Raumanschauung_, 1891; the essay _Psychologie der Komik (Philosophische
Monatshefte_, vols. xxiv.-xxv. 1888-89), and _Aesthetische
Litteraturberichte_, (in the same review, vol. xxvi. 1890 _seq_.).
Among the writers and works on the _philosophy of history_ we may note
Conrad Hermann in Leipsic (born 1819), _Philosophie der Geschichte_, 1870;
Bernheim, _Geschichtsforschung und Geschichtsphilosophie_, 1880; Karl
Fischer, _Ist eine Philosophie der Geschichte wissenschaftlich erforderlich
bezw. möglich?_ Dillenburg Programme, 1889; Hinneberg, _Die philosophischen
Grundlagen der Geschichtswissenschaft_ in Sybel's _Historische
Zeitschrift_, vol. lxiii. 1889; A. Dippe, _Das Geschichtsstudium mit
seinen Zielen und Fragen_, 1891; Georg Simmel, _Die Probleme der
Geschichtsphilosophie_, 1892.
In the _philosophy of religion_, which is discussed especially by the
theologians, a neo-Kantian and a neo-Hegelian tendency confront each other.
The former, dividing in its turn, is represented, on the one hand, by
the Ritschlian school--W. Herrmann in Marburg (_Die Metaphysik in der
Theologie_, 1876, _Die Religion im Verhältniss zum Welterkennen und zur
Sittlichkeit_, 1889), J. Kaftan in Berlin (_Das Wesen der christlichen
Religion_, 1881)--and, on the other, by R.A. Lipsius in Jena (born 1830;
_Dogmatik_, 1876, 2d ed., 1879; _Philosophie und Religion_, 1885). The
latter is represented by A.E. Biedermann of Zurich (1819-85; _Christliche
Dogmatik_, 1868; 2d ed., 1884-85), a pupil of W. Vatke, and by Otto
Pfleiderer of Berlin (born 1839; _Religionsphilosophie_, 1879; 2d ed.,
1883-4). The neo-Kantians base religion exclusively on the practical side
of human nature, especially on the moral law, derive it from the contrast
between external dependence on nature and the inner freedom or supernatural
destination of the spirit, and wish it preserved from all intermixture
with metaphysics. According to the neo-Hegelians, on the contrary, the
theoretical element in religion is no less essential; and is capable of
being purified, of being elevated from the form of representation, which is
full of contradictions, into the adequate form of pure thought, capable,
therefore, of reconciliation with philosophy. Hugo Delff (_Ueber den Weg
zum Wissen und zur Gewissheit zu gelangen_, 1882; _Die Hauptprobleme der
Philosophie und Religion_, 1886) follows Jacobi's course.
Among the numerous works on the _history of philosophy_, besides the
masterpieces of Zeller, J.E. Erdmann, and Kuno Fischer, the following are
especially worthy of attention:
Cl. Bäumker in Breslau, _Das Problem der Materie in der griechischen
Philosophie_, 1890; H. Bonitz, _Platonische Studien_, 3d ed., 1886,
_Aristotelische Studien_, 1862 _seq., Index Aristotelicus_, 1870, _Kleine
Schriften_; P. Deussen (born 1845), _Das System der Vedanta_, 1883, H.
Diels in Berlin, _Doxographi Graeci_, 1879; Eucken in Jena (p. 17), _Die
Methode der aristotelischen Forschung_, 1872, Address _Ueber den Werth der
Geschichte der Philosophie_, 1874; J. Freudenthal in Breslau (born 1839,
pp. 63, 118), _Hellenistische Studien, 3 Hefte_, 1879, _Ueber die Theologie
des Xenophanes_, 1886; M. Heinze in Leipsic, _Die Lehre vom Logos in der
griechischen Philosophie_, 1872; G. Freiherr von Hertling in Munich (born
1843), _Materie und Form und die Definition der Seele bei Aristoteles_,
1871, _Albertus Magnus_, 1880; H. Heussler in Basle (p. 65 note),
_Der Rationalismus des XVII. Jahrhunderts in seinen Beziehungen zur
Eniwickelungslehre_, 1885; Fr. Jodl in Prague (born 1849; pp. 16, 221
note); A. Krohn (1840-89), _Sokrates und Xenophon_, 1874, _Der platonische
Staat_, 1876, _Die platonische Frage_, 1878--on Krohn, an obituary by
Falckenberg in the _Biographisches Jahrbuch für Alterthumskunde, Jahrg_.
12, 1889; P. Natorp (pp. 88 note, 598), _Forschungen zur Geschichte des
Erkenntnissproblems im Alterthum_, 1884; Edmund Pfleiderer in Tübingen
(born 1842; p. 113 note[1]), _Empirismus und Skepsis im D. Humes
Philosophie_, 1874, _Die Philosophie des Heraklit im Lichte der
Mysterienidee_, 1886; K. von Prantl (1820-88), _Geschichte der Logik im
Abendlande_, 4 vols., 1855-70; Carl Schaarschmidt (pp. 88 note, 117-118);
_Johannes Sarisberiensis_, 1862, _Die Sammlung der platonischen Schriften_,
1866; L. Schmidt in Marburg (born 1824), _Die Ethik der alten Griechen_,
1881; Gustav Schneider, _Die platonische Metaphysik_, 1884; H. Siebeck in
Giessen, _Untersuchungen zur Philosophie der Griechen_, 1873, 2d ed., 1888,
_Geschichte der Psychologie_, part i. 1880-84; Chr. von Sigwart (born 1830;
pp. 17, 118); Heinrich von Stein in Rostock (born 1833), _Sieben Bücher zur
Geschichte des Platonismus_, 1862-75; Ludwig Stein in Berne, editor of the
_Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie_, founded in 1877, _Die Psychologie
der Stoa_, I. _Metaphysisch-Anthropologischer Theil_, 1886, II.
_Erkenntnisstheorie_, 1888, _Leibniz und Spinoza_, 1890; L. Strümpell,
_Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie_, 1854, 1861; Susemihl in
Greifswald, _Die Politik des Aristoteles_, Greek and German with notes,
1879, further, a series of essays on Plato and Aristotle; Teichmüller (p.
601); Trendelenburg (pp. 600-601), _Aristotelis de Anima_, 2d ed., by
Belger. 1887; Th. Waitz, _Aristotelis Organon_, 1844-46; J. Walter in
Königsberg, _Die Lehre von der praktischen Vernunft in der griechischen
Philosophie_, 1874, _Geschichte der Aesthetik im Alterthum_, 1892; Tob.
Wildauer in Innsbruck, _Die Psychologie des Willens bei Sokrates, Platon,
und Aristoteles_, 1877, 1879; W. Windelbund in Strasburg (pp. 15-16),
_Geschichte der alten Philosophie_, 1888; Theob. Ziegler in Strasburg,
_Geschichte der christlichen Ethik_, 1886, 2d ed., with index, 1892; Rob.
Zimmermann (pp. 19 note, 331, 536), _Studien und Kritiken_, 1870.
%4. Retrospect.%
In order to avoid the appearance of arbitrary construction we have been
sparing with references of a philosophico-historical character. In
conclusion, looking back at the period passed over, we may give expression
to some convictions concerning the guiding threads in the development of
modern philosophy, though these here claim only the rights of subjective
opinion.
A mirror of modern culture, and conscious of its sharp antithesis to
Scholasticism, modern philosophy in its pre-Kantian period is pre-eminently
characterized by naturalism. Nature, as a system of masses moved according
to law, forms not only the favorite object of investigation, but also
the standard by which psychical reality is judged and explained. The two
directions in which this naturalism expresses itself, the mechanical
view of the world, which endeavors to understand the universe from the
standpoint of nature and all becoming from the standpoint of motion,[1] and
the intellectualistic view, which seeks to understand the mind from the
standpoint of knowledge, are most intimately connected. Where the general
view of the All takes form and color from nature, a content and a mission
can come to the mind from no other source than the external world; whether
we (empirically) make it take up the material of representation from
without or (rationalistically) make it create an ideal reproduction of
the content of external reality from within, it is always the function of
knowledge, conceived as the reproduction of a completed reality, which,
since it brings us into contact with nature, advances into the foreground
and determines the nature of psychical activity. As is conceivable, along
with dogmatic faith in the power of the reason to possess itself of the
reality before it and to reconstrue it in the system of science, and with
triumphant references to the mathematical method as a guaranty for the
absolute certainty of philosophical knowledge, the noëtical question
emerges as to the means by which, and the limits within which, human
knowledge is able to do justice to this great problem. Descartes gave out
the programme for all these various tendencies--the mechanical explanation
of nature, the absolute separation of body and soul (despiritualization of
matter), thought the essence of the mind, the demand for certain knowledge,
armed against every doubt, and the question as to the origin of ideas. Its
execution by his successors shows not only a lateral extension in the
most various directions (the dualistic view of the world held by the
occasionalists, the monistic or pantheistic view of Spinoza, the
pluralistic or individualistic view of Leibnitz; similarly the antithesis
between the sensationalism of Locke and Condillac and the rationalism
of Spinoza and Leibnitz), but also a progressive deepening of problems,
mediated by party strife which puts every energy to the strain. What a
tremendous step from the empiricism of Bacon to the skepticism of Hume,
from the innate ideas of Descartes to the potential _a priori_ of Leibnitz!
From the moment when the negative and positive culminations of the
pre-Kantian movement in thought--Hume and Leibnitz--came together in
one mind, the conditions of the Kantian reform were given, just as the
preparation for the Socratic reform had been given in the skepticism of the
Sophists and the [Greek: nous] principle of Anaxagoras.
[Footnote 1: Even for Leibnitz the mind is a machine (_automaton
spirituale_), and psychical action a movement of ideas.]
Kant, who dominates the second period of modern philosophy down to the
present time, is related to his predecessors in a twofold way. In his
criticism he completes the noëtical tendency, and at the same time
overcomes naturalism, by limiting the mechanical explanation (and with
it certain knowledge, it is true) to phenomena and opposing moralism to
intellectualism. Nature must be conceived from the standpoint of the spirit
(as its product, for all conformity to law takes its origin in the spirit),
the spirit from the standpoint of the will. Metaphysics, as the theory of
the _a priori_ conditions of experience, is raised to the rank of a
science, while the suprasensible is removed from the region of proof and
refutation and based upon the rock of moral will. In the positive side of
the Kantian philosophy--the spirit the law-giver of nature, the will the
essence of spirit and the key to true reality--we find its kernel, that
in it which is forever valid. The conclusions on the absolute worth of
the moral disposition, on the ultimate moral aim of the world, on the
intelligible character, and on radical evil, reveal the energy with which
Kant took up the mission of furnishing the life-forces opened up by
Christianity--which the Middle Ages had hidden rather than conserved under
the crust of Aristotelian conceptions entirely alien to them, and the
pre-Kantian period of modern times had almost wholly ignored--an entrance
into philosophy, and of transforming and enriching the modern view of the
world from this standpoint. Kant's position is as opposite and superior to
the specifically modern, to the naturalistic temper of the new period, as
Plato stands out, a stranger and a prophet of the future, above the level
of Greek modes of thought. More fortunate, however, than Plato, he found
disciples who followed further in the direction pointed out by that face of
the Janus-head of his philosophy which looked toward the future: the
ethelism of Fichte and the historicism of Hegel have their roots in Kant's
doctrine of the practical reason. These are acquisitions which must never
be given up, which must ever be reconquered in face of attack from forces
hostile to spirit and to morals. In life, as in science, we must ever anew
"win" ethical idealism "in order to possess it." As yet the reconciliation
of the historical and the scientific, the Christian and the modern spirit
is not effected. For the inbred naturalism of the modern period has not
only asserted itself, amalgamated with Kantian elements, in the realistic
metaphysics and mechanical psychology of Herbart and in the system of
Schopenhauer, as a lateral current by the side of Fichte, Schelling, and
Hegel, but, under the influence of the new and powerful development of the
natural sciences, has once more confidently risen against the traditions of
the idealistic school, although now it is tempered by criticism and
concedes to the practical ideals at least a refuge in faith. The conviction
that the rule of neo-Kantianism is provisional does not rest merely on the
mutability of human affairs. The widespread active study of the philosophy
of the great Königsberger gives ground for the hope that also those
elements in it from which the systems of the idealists have proceeded as
necessary consequences will again find attention and appreciation. The
perception of the fact that the naturalistico-mechanical view represents
only a part, a subordinate part, of the truth will lead to the further
truth, that the lower can only be explained by the higher. We shall also
learn more and more to distinguish between the permanent import of the
position of fundamental idealism and the particular form which the
constructive thinkers have given it; the latter may fall before legitimate
assaults, but the former will not be affected by them. _The revival of the
Fichteo-Hegelian idealism by means of a method which shall do justice to
the demands of the time by a closer adherence to experience, by making
general use of both the natural and the mental sciences, and by an exact
and cautious mode of argument--this seems to us to be the task of the
future_. The most important of the post-Hegelian systems, the system of
Lotze, shows that the scientific spirit does not resist reconciliation with
idealistic convictions in regard to the highest questions, and the
consideration which it on all sides enjoys, that there exists a strong
yearning in this direction. But when a deeply founded need of the time
becomes active, it also rouses forces which dedicate themselves to its
service and which are equal to the work.
THE END.
* * * * *
INDEX.
Abbt
Absolute, the
Fichte on
Schelling on
F. Krause on
Schleiermacher on
Hegel on
Fortlage on
Spencer on
Böstrom on
Strauss on
Feuerbach on
the theistic school on
Lotze on
Hartmann on
See also
God
the Unconditioned
Achillini
Adamson, R.
Aesthetics
of Home (Lord Kames)
of Burke
of Baumgarten
of Herder
of Kant
of Schiller
of Schelling
of Hegel
of J.F. Fries
of Herbart
of Schopenhauer
Agnosticism, of Spencer
Agricola, R.
Agrippa of Nettesheim
Ahrens, H.
Alexandrists
Allihn
Althusius
Anderson
Angiulli, A.
Annet, P.
Antal, G. von
Antinomies, the
of Kant
his antinomy of aesthetic judgment
and of teleological judgment
Apelt, E.F.
_A priori_, the
in Kant
in Kant and the post-Kantians
nature, in Schelling
in J.F. Fries
Beneke on
Herbart on
J.S. Mill on
Spencer's doctrine of the racial origin of
Opzoomer on
_Cf_. Ideas
Aquinas, Thomas
Ardigò, R.
Aristotelians, the
opponents of
Arnauld
Arnoldt, E.
Associationalism
of Hartley and Priestley
of Hume
of the Mills
of Bain
Ast, G.A.F.
Atomism
in modern physics
in Gassendi and Descartes
in Boyle
Leibnitz on
Attributes
in Descartes
Spinoza's doctrine of
Auerbach
Augustine
Avenarius, R.
Averroists
Baader, F. (von),
and Schelling
system of
Bach, J.
Bacmeister
Bacon, Francis
a beginner of modern philosophy,
doctrine of,
in relation to Locke