X. FICHTE

Fichte is a Kantian in about the same sense that Plato was a Socratic. Instead of taking up and developing particular critical problems he makes the vivifying kernel, the soul of criticism, his own. With the self-activity of reason (as a real force and as a problem) for his fundamental idea, he outlines with magnificent boldness a new view of the world, in which the idealism concealed in Kant's philosophy under the shell of cautious limitations was roused into vigorous life, and the great Königsberger's noble words on the freedom, the position, and the power of the spirit translated from the language of sober foresight into that of vigorous enthusiasm. The world can be understood only from the standpoint of spirit, the spirit only from the will. The ego is pure activity, and all reality its product. Fichte's system is all life and action: its aim is not to mediate knowledge, but to summon the hearer and reader to the production of a new and pregnant fundamental view, in which the will is as much a participant as the understanding; it begins not with a concept or a proposition, but with a demand for action (posit thyself; do consciously what thou hast done unconsciously so often as thou hast called thyself I; analyze, then, the act of self-consciousness, and cognize in their elements the forces from which all reality proceeds); its God is not a completed absolute substance, but a self-realizing world-order. This inner vivacity of the Fichtean principle, which recalls the pure actuality of Aristotle's [Greek: nous] and the ceaseless becoming of Heraclitus, finds its complete parallel in the fact that, although he was wanting neither in logical consecutiveness nor in the talent for luminous and popular exposition, Fichte felt continually driven to express his ideas in new forms, and, just when he seemed to have succeeded in saying what he meant with the greatest clearness, again unsatisfied, to seek still more exact and evident renderings for his fundamental position, which proved so difficult to formulate.

The author of the Wissenschaftslehre was the son of a poor ribbon maker, and was born at Rammenau in Lusatia in 1762. The talents of the boy induced the Freiherr von Miltiz to give him the advantage of a good education. Fichte attended school in Meissen and in Pforta, and was a student of theology at the universities of Jena and Leipsic. While a tutor in Zurich he made the acquaintance of Lavater and Pestalozzi, as well as of his future wife, Johanna Rahn, a niece of Klopstock. Returning to Leipsic, his whole mode of thought was revolutionized by the Kantian philosophy, in which it was his duty to instruct a pupil. This gives to the mind, as his letters confess, an inconceivable elevation above all earthly things. "I have adopted a nobler morality, and, instead of occupying myself with things without me, have been occupied more with myself." "I now believe with all my heart in human freedom, and am convinced that only on this supposition duty and virtue of any kind are possible." "I live in a new world since I have read the Critique of Practical Reason. Things which I believed never could be proved to me, e.g., the idea of an absolute freedom and duty, have been proved, and I feel the happier for it. It is inconceivable what reverence for humanity, what power this philosophy gives us, what a blessing it is for an age in which the citadels of morality had been destroyed, and the idea of duty blotted out from all the dictionaries!" A journey to Warsaw, whither he had been attracted by the expectation of securing a position as a private tutor, soon afforded him the opportunity of visiting at Königsberg the author of the system which had effected so radical a transformation in his convictions. His rapidly written treatise, Essay toward a Critique of All Revelation, attained the end to which its inception was due by gaining for its author a favorable reception from the honored master. Kant secured for Fichte a tutor's position in Dantzic, and a publisher for his maiden work. When this appeared, at Easter, 1792, the name of its author was by oversight omitted from the title page, together with the preface, which had been furnished after the rest of the book; and as the anonymous work was universally ascribed to Kant (whose religious philosophy was at this time eagerly looked for), the young writer became famous at a stroke as soon as the error was explained. A second edition was issued as early as the following year.

After his marriage in Zurich, where he had completed several political treatises (the address, Reclamation of the Freedom of Thought from the Princes of Europe, who have hitherto suppressed it, Heliopolis in the Last Year of the Old Darkness, and the two Hefte, Contributions toward the Correction of the Public Judgment on the French Revolution, 1793), Fichte accepted, in 1794, a call to Jena, in place of Reinhold, who had gone to Kiel, and whose popularity was soon exceeded by his own. The same year saw the birth of the Wissenschaftslehre. His stay in Jena was embittered by conflicts with the clergy, who took offense at his ethical lectures (On the Vocation of the Scholar) held on Sunday mornings (though not at an hour which interfered with church service), and with the students, who, after they had been untrue to their decision--which they had formed as a result of these lectures--to dissolve their societies or orders, gave vent to their spite by repeatedly smashing the windows of Fichte's residence. Accordingly he took leave of absence, and spent the summer of 1795 in Osmannstädt. The years 1796-98, in which, besides the two Introductions to the Science of Knowledge, the Natural Right and the Science of Ethics (one of the most all important works in German philosophical literature) appeared, mark the culmination of Fichte's famous labors. The so-called atheistic controversy[1] resulted in Fichte's departure from Jena. The Philosophisches Journal, which since 1797 had been edited by Fichte in association with Niethammer, had published an article by Magister Forberg, rector at Saalfeld, entitled "The Development of the Concept of Religion," and as a conciliating introduction to this a short essay by Fichte, "On the Ground of our Belief in a Divine Government of the World."[2] For this it was confiscated by the Dresden government on the charge of containing atheistical matter, while other courts were summoned to take like action. In Weimar hopes were entertained of an amicable adjustment of the matter. But when Fichte, after publishing two vindications[3] couched in vehement language, had in a private letter uttered the threat that he would answer with his resignation any censure proceeding from the University Senate, not only was censure for indiscretion actually imposed, but his (threatened) resignation accepted.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Karl August Hase, Jenaisches Fichtebüchlein, 1856.]

[Footnote 2: It is a mistake, Fichte writes here, referring to the conclusion of Forberg's article ("Is there a God? It is and remains uncertain," etc.), to say that it is doubtful whether there is a God or not. That there is a moral order of the world, which assigns to each rational individual his determined place and counts on his work, is most certain, nay, it is the ground of all other certitude. The living and operative moral order (ordo ordinans) is itself God; we need no other God, and can conceive no other. There is no ground in reason for going beyond this world order to postulate a particular being as its cause. Whoever ascribes personality and consciousness to this particular being makes it finite; consciousness belongs only to the individual, limited ego. And it is allowable to state this frankly and to beat down the prattle of the schools, in order that the true religion of joyous well-doing may lift up its head.]

[Footnote 3: Appeal to the Public, and Formal Defense against the Charge of Atheism, 1799. The first of these maintains that Fichte's standpoint and that of his opponents are related as duty and advantage, sensible and suprasensible, and that the substantial God of his accusers, to be derived from the sensibility, is, as personified fate, as the distributer of all happiness and unhappiness to finite beings, a miserable fetich.]

Going to Berlin, Fichte found a friendly government, a numerous public for his lectures, and a stimulating circle of friends in the romanticists, the brothers Schlegel, Tieck, Schleiermacher, etc. In the first years of his Berlin residence there appeared The Vocation of Man. The Exclusive Commercial State, 1800; The Sun-clear Report to the Larger Public on the Essential Nature of the New Philosophy, and the Answer to Reinhold, 1801. Three works, which were the outcome of his lectures and were published in the year 1806 (Characteristics of the Present Age, The Nature of the Scholar, Way to the Blessed Life or Doctrine of Religion), form a connected whole. In the summer of 1805 Fichte filled a professorship at Erlangen, and later, after the outbreak of the war, he occupied for a short time a chair at Königsberg, finding a permanent university position at the foundation of the University of Berlin in 1810. His glowing Addresses to the German Nation, 1808, which essentially aided in arousing the national spirit, have caused his name to live as one of the greatest of orators and most ardent of patriots in circles of the German people where his philosophical importance cannot be understood. His death in 1814 was also a result of unselfish labor in the service of the Fatherland. He succumbed to a nervous fever contracted from his wife, who, with self-sacrifice equal to his own, had shared in the care of the wounded, and who had brought the contagion back with her from the hospital. On his monument is inscribed the beautiful text, "The teachers shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars that shine forever and ever." Forberg in his journal records this estimate: The leading trait in Fichte's character is his absolute integrity. All his words are weighty and important. His principles are stern and little modified by affability. The spirit of his philosophy is proud and courageous, one which does not so much lead as possess us and carry us along. His philosophemes are inquiries in which we see the truth arise before our eyes, and which just for this reason lay the foundations of science and conviction.

The philosopher's son, Immanuel Hermann Fichte (his own name was Johann Gottlieb), wrote a biography of his father (1830; 2d ed., 1862), and supervised the publication of both the Posthumous Works (1834-35, 3 vols.) and the Collected Works (1845-46, 8 vols.). The simple and luminous Facts of Consciousness of 1811, or 1817 (not the lecture of 1813 with the same title), is especially valuable as an introduction to the system. Among the many redactions of the Wissenschaftslehre, the epoch-making Foundation of the whole Science of Knowledge, 1794, with the two Introductions to the Science of Knowledge, 1797, takes the first rank, while of the practical works the most important are the Foundation of Natural Right according to the Principles of the Science of Knowledge, 1796, and the System of the Science of Ethics according to the Principles of the Science of Knowledge, 1798, and next to these the Lectures on the Theory of the State, 1820 (delivered in 1813).[1]

[Footnote 1: At the same time as J.H. Löwe's book Die Philosophie Fichtes, 1862, there appeared in celebration of the centenary of Fichte's birthyear, or birthday, a large number of minor essays and addresses by Friedrich Harms, A.L. Kym, Trendelenburg, Franz Hoffman, Karl Heyder, F.C. Lott, Karl Köstlin, J.B. Meyer, and others (cf. Reichlin-Meldegg in vol. xlii. of the Zeitschrift für Philosophie). Lasson has written, 1863, on Fichte's relation to Church and state, Zeller on Fichte as a political thinker (Vorträge und Abhandlungen, 1865), and F. Zimmer on his philosophy of religion. Among foreign works we may note Adamson's Fichte, 1881, and the English translations of several of Fichte's works by Kroeger [Science of Knowledge, 1868; Science of Rights, 1869--both also, 1889] and William Smith [Popular Writings, 4th ed., 1889; also Everett's Fichte's Science of Knowledge (Griggs's Philosophical Classics, 1884), and several translations in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, including one of The Facts of Consciousness.--TR.]]

%1. The Science of Knowledge.%

%(a) The Problem.%--In Fichte's judgment Kant did not succeed in carrying through the transformation in thought which it was his aim to effect, because the age did not understand the spirit of his philosophy. This spirit, and with it the great service of Kant, consists in transcendental idealism, which by the doctrine that objects conform themselves to representations, not representations to objects, draws philosophy away from external objects and leads it back into ourselves. We have followed the letter, he thinks, instead of the spirit of Kant, and because of a few passages with a dogmatic ring, whose references to a given matter, the thing in itself, and the like, were intended only as preliminary, have overlooked the numberless others in which the contrary is distinctly maintained. Thus the interpreters of Kant, using their own prejudices as a criterion, have read into him exactly that which he sought to refute, and have made the destroyer of all dogmatism himself a dogmatist; thus in the Kantianism of the Kantians there has sprung up a marvelous combination of crude dogmatism and uncompromising idealism. Though such an absurd mingling of entirely heterogeneous elements may be excused in the case of interpreters and successors, who have had to construct for themselves the guiding principle of the whole from their study of the critical writings, yet we cannot assume it in the author of the system, unless we believe the Critique of Pure Reason the result of the strangest chance, and not the work of intellect. Two men only, Beck, the teacher of the Standpoint, and Jacobi, the clearest mind of the century, are to be mentioned with respect as having risen above the confusion of the time to the perception that Kant teaches idealism, that, according to him, the object is not given, but made.

Besides the perspicuity which would have prevented these misunderstandings, Fichte misses something further in Kant's work. Considered as a system Kant's expositions were incomplete; and, on his own confession, his aim was not to furnish the science itself, but only the foundation and the materials for it. Therefore, although the Kantian philosophy is established as far as its inner content is concerned, there is still need of earnest work to systematize the fragments and results which he gives into a firmly connected and impregnable whole. The Wissenschaftslehre takes this completion of idealism for its mission. It cannot solve the problem by a commentary on the Kantian writings, nor by the correction and addition of particulars, but only by restoring the whole at a stroke. He alone finds the truth who new creates it in himself, independently and in his own way. Thus Fichte's system contains the same view of the matter as the critical system--the author is aware, runs the preface to the programme, On the Concept of the Science of Knowledge, 1794, "that he never will be able to say anything at which Kant has not hinted, immediately or mediately, more or less clearly, before him,"--but in his procedure he is entirely independent of the Kantian exposition. We shall first raise the question, What in the Kantian philosophy is in need of completion? and, secondly, What method must be adopted in completing it?

Kant discusses the laws of intelligence when they are already applied to objects, without enlightening us concerning the ground of these laws. He derived the pure concepts (the laws of substantiality, of causality, etc.) from (logic, and thus mediately from) experience instead of deducing them from the nature of intelligence; similarly he never furnished this deduction for the forms of intuition, space and time. In order to understand that intelligence, and why intelligence, must act in just this way (must think just by means of these categories), we must prove, and not merely, with Kant, assert, that these functions or forms are really laws of thought--or, what amounts to the same thing, that they are conditions of self-consciousness. Again, even if it be granted that Kant has explained the properties and relations of things (that they appear in space and time, and that their accidents must be referred to substances), the question still remains unanswered, Whence comes the matter which is taken up into these forms? So long as the whole object is not made to arise before the eyes of the thinker, dogmatism is not driven out of its last corner. The thing in itself is, like the rest, only a thought in the ego. If thus the antithesis between the form and the matter of cognition undergoes modification, so, further, the allied distinction between understanding and sensibility must, as Reinhold accurately recognized, be reduced to a common principle and receptivity be conceived as self-limiting spontaneity. In his practical philosophy also Kant left much unfinished. The categorical imperative is susceptible of further deduction, it is not the principle itself, but a conclusion from the true principle, from the injunction to absolute self-dependence on the part of reason; moreover, the nature of our consciousness of the moral law must be more thoroughly discussed, and in order to gain a real, instead of a merely formal, ethics the relation of this law to natural impulse. Finally, Kant never discussed the foundation of philosophy as a whole, but always separated its theoretical from its practical side, and Reinhold also did nothing to remove this dualism. In short, some things that Kant only asserted or presupposed can and must be proved, some that he kept distinct must be united. In what way are both to be accomplished?

Since correct inferences from correct premises yield correct results, and correct inference is easy to secure, everything depends on the correct point of departure. If we neglect this and consider only the process and the results of inference, there are two consistent systems: the dogmatic or realistic course of thought, which seeks to derive representations from things; and the idealistic, which, conversely, seeks to derive being from thought. Now, no matter how consistently dogmatism may proceed (and when it does so it becomes, like the system of Spinoza, materialism and fatalism or determinism, maintaining that all is nature, and all goes on mechanically; treats the spirit as a thing among others, and denies its metaphysical and moral independence, its immateriality and freedom), it may be shown to be false, because it starts from a false principle. Thought can never be derived from being, because it is not contained therein; from being only being can proceed, and never representation. Being, however, can be derived from thought, for consciousness is also being; nay, it is more than this, it is conscious being. And as consciousness contains both being and a knowledge of this being, idealism is superior to realism, because idealism includes the latter as a moment in itself, and hence can explain it, though it is not explicable by it. Dogmatism makes the mistake of going beyond consciousness or the ego, and working with empty, merely formal concepts. A concept is empty when nothing actual corresponds to it, or no intuition can be subsumed under it (here it is to be noted that, besides sensuous intuition, there is an intellectual intuition also; an example is found in the ego as a self-intuiting being). Philosophy, indeed, may abstract and must abstract, must rise above that which is given--for how could she explain life and particular knowledge if she assumed no higher standpoint than her object?--but true abstraction is nothing other than the separation of factors which in experience always present themselves together; it analyzes empirical consciousness in order to reconstruct it from its elements, it causes empirical consciousness to arise before our eyes, it is a pragmatic history of consciousness. Such abstraction, undertaken in order to a genetic consideration of the ego, does not go beyond experience, but penetrates into the depths of experience, is not transcendent, but transcendental, and, since it remains in close touch with that which is intuitable, yields a real philosophy in contrast to all merely formal philosophy.

These theoretical advantages of idealism are supplemented by momentous reasons of a practical kind, which determine the choice between the two systems, besides which none other is possible. The moral law says: Thou shalt be self-dependent. If I ought to be so I must be able to be so; but if I were matter I would not be able. Thus idealism proves itself to be the ethical mode of thought, while the opposite mode shows that those who favor it have not raised themselves to that independence of all that is external which is morally enjoined, for in order to be able to know ourselves free we must have made ourselves free.[1] Thus the philosophy which a man chooses depends on what sort of a man he is. If, on the other hand, the categorical imperative calls for belief in the reality of the external world and of other minds, this is nothing against idealism. For idealism does not deny the realism of life, but explains it as a necessary, though not a final, mode of intuition. The dogmatic mode of thought is merely an explanation from the standpoint of common consciousness, and for idealism, as the only view which is both scientifically and practically satisfactory, this explanation itself needs explaining. Realism and idealism, like natural impulse and moral will in the sphere of action, are both grounded in reason. But idealism is the true standpoint, because it is able to comprehend and explain the opposing theory, while the converse is not the case.

[Footnote 1: Cf. O. Liebmann (Ueber den individuellen Beweis für die Freiheit des Willens p, 131. 1866) "Here we discover the noteworthy point where theoretical and practical philosophy actually pass over into each other. For this principle results: In order to carry out the individual proof for the freedom of the will, I must do my duty."]

The nature, the goal, and the methods of the Science of Knowledge have now been determined. It is genuine, thoroughgoing idealism, which raises the Kantian philosophy to the rank of an evident science by deducing its premises from a first principle which is immediately certain, and by removing the twofold dualism of intuition and thought, of knowledge and volition, viz., by proving both contraries acts of one and the same ego. While Reinhold had sought a supreme truth as a fundamental principle of unity, without which the doctrine of knowledge would lack the systematic form essential to science, while Beck had interpreted the spirit of the Kantian philosophy in an idealistic sense, and Jacobi had demanded the elimination of the thing in itself, all these desires combined are fulfilled in Fichte's doctrine, and at the same time the results of the Critique of Reason are given that evidence which Aenesidemus-Schulze had missed in them. As an answer to the question, "How is knowledge brought about?" (as well the knowledge of common sense as that given in the particular sciences), "how is experience possible?", and as a construction of common consciousness as this manifests itself in life and in the particular sciences, Fichteanism adopts the name Science of Knowledge, being distinguished from the particular sciences by the fact that they discuss the voluntary, and it the necessary, representations or actions of the spirit. (The representation of a triangle or a circle is a free one, it may be omitted; the representation of space in general is a necessary one, from which it is impossible for us to abstract.) How does intelligence come to have sensations, to intuit space and time, and to form just such categories (thing and property, cause and effect, and not others quite different)? While Kant correctly described these functions of the intuiting and thinking spirit, and showed them actual, they must further be proven, be shown necessary or deduced. Deduced whence? From the "deed-acts" (Thathandlungen) of the ego which lie at the basis of all consciousness, and the highest of which are formulated in three principles.

%(b) The Three Principles.%--At the portal of the Science of Knowledge we are met not by an assertion, but by a summons--a summons to self-contemplation. Think anything whatever and observe what thou dost, and of necessity must do, in thinking. Thou wilt discover that thou dost never think an object without thinking thyself therewith, that it is absolutely impossible for thee to abstract from thine ego. And second, consider what thou dost when thou dost think thine "ego." This means to affirm or posit one's self, to be a subject-object. The nature of self-consciousness is the identity of the representing [subject] and the represented [object]. The pure ego is not a fact, but an original doing, the act of being for self (Fürsichsein), and the (philosophical, or--as seems to be the case according to some passages--even the common) consciousness of this doing an intellectual intuition; through this we become conscious of the deed-act which is ever (though unconsciously) performing. This is the meaning of the first of the principles: "The ego posits originally and absolutely its own being," or, more briefly: The ego posits itself; more briefly still: I am. The nature of the ego consists in positing itself as existing.[1] Since, besides this self-cogitation of the ego, an op-position is found among the facts of empirical consciousness (think only of the principle of contradiction), and yet, besides the ego, there is nothing which could be opposed, we must assume as a second principle: To the ego there is absolutely opposited a non-ego. These two principles must be united, and this can be accomplished only by positing the contraries (ego and non-ego), since they are both in the ego, as reciprocally limiting or partially sublating one another, that is, each as divisible (capable of quantitative determination). Accordingly the third principle runs: "The ego opposes in the ego a divisible non-ego to the divisible ego." From these principles Fichte deduces the three laws of thought, identity, contradiction, and sufficient reason, and the three categories of quality--reality, negation, and limitation or determination. Instead of following him in these labors, we may emphasize the significance of his view of the ego as pure activity without an underlying substratum, with which he carries dynamism over from the Kantian philosophy of nature to metaphysics. We must not conceive the ego as something which must exist before it can put forth its activities. Doing is not a property or consequence of being, but being is an accident and effect of doing. All substantiality is derivative, activity is primal; being arises from doing. The ego is nothing more than self-position; it exists not only for itself (für sich), but also through itself (durch sich).

[Footnote 1: The ego spoken of in the first of the principles, the ego as the object of intellectual intuition and as the ground and creator of all being, is, as the second Introduction to the Science of Knowledge clearly announces, not the individual, but the I-ness (Ichheit) (which is to be presupposed as the prius of the manifold of representation, and which is exalted above the opposition of subject and object), mentality in general, eternal reason, which is common to all and the same in all, which is present in all thinking and at the basis thereof, and to which particular persons stand related merely as accidents, as instruments, as special expressions, destined more and more to lose themselves in the universal form of reason. But, further still, a distinction must be made between the absolute ego as intuition (as the form of I-ness), from which the Science of Knowledge starts, and the ego as Idea (as the supreme goal of practical endeavor) with which it ends. In neither is the ego conceived as individual; in the former the I-ness is not yet determined to the point of individuality, in the latter individuality has disappeared, Fichte is right when he thinks it remarkable that "a system whose beginning and end and whole nature is aimed at forgetfulness of individuality in the theoretical sphere and denial of it in the practical sphere" should be "called egoism." And yet not only opponents, but even adherents of Fichte, as is shown by Friedrich Schlegel's philosophy of genius, have, by confusing the pure and the empirical ego, been guilty of the mistake thus censured. On the philosophy of the romanticists cf. Erdmann's History, vol. ii. §§ 314, 315; Zeller, p. 562 seq.; and R. Haym, Die Romantische Schule, 1870.]

The actions expressed in the three principles are never found pure in experience, nor do they represent isolated acts of the ego. Intelligence can think nothing without thinking itself therewith; it is equally impossible for it to think "I am" without at the same time thinking something else which is not itself; subject and object are inseparable. It is rather true that the acts of position described are one single, all-inclusive act, which forms only the first member in a connected system of pre-conscious actions, through which consciousness is produced, and the complete investigation of whose members constitutes the further business of the Science of Knowledge as a theory of the nature of reason. In this the Science of Knowledge employs a method which, by its rhythm of analysis and synthesis, development and reconciliation of opposites, became the model of Hegel's dialectic method. The synthesis described in the third principle, although it balances thesis and antithesis and unites them in itself, still contains contrary elements, in order to whose combination a new synthesis must be sought. In this, in turn, the analytic discovery and the synthetic adjustment of a contrariety is repeated, etc., etc. The original synthesis, moreover, prescribes a division of the inquiry into two parts, one theoretical and the other practical. For it contains the following principles: The ego posits itself as limited by the non-ego--it functions cognitively; and: The ego posits itself as determining the non-ego--it functions volitionally and actively.

%(c) The Theoretical Ego.%--In positing itself as determined by the non-ego, the ego is at once passive (affected by something other than itself) and active (it posits its own limitation). This is possible only as it posits reality in itself only in part, and transfers to the non-ego so much as it does not posit in itself. Passivity is diminished activity, negation of the totality of reality. From reflection on this relation between ego and non-ego spring the categories of reciprocal determination, of causality (the non-ego as the cause of the passion of the ego), and substantiality (this passion merely the self-limitation of the ego). The conflict between the causality of the non-ego (by which the ego is affected) and the substantiality of the ego (in which and the activity of which all reality is contained) is resolved only by the assumption of two activities (or, rather, of two opposite directions of one activity) in the ego, one of which (centrifugal, expansive) strives infinitely outward while the other (centripetal or contractile) sets a bound to the former, and drives the ego back into itself, whereupon another excursus follows, and a new limitation and return, etc. With every repetition of this double act of production and reflection a special class of representations arises. Through the first limitation of the in itself unlimited activity "sensation" arises (as a product of the "productive imagination"). Because the ego produces this unconsciously, it appears to be given, brought about by influence from without. The second stage, "intuition," is reached when the ego reflects on sensation, when it opposes to itself something foreign which limits it. Thirdly, by reflection on intuition an "image" of that which is intuited is constructed, and, as such, distinguished from a real thing to which the image corresponds; at this point the categories and the forms of intuition, space and time, appear, which thus arise along with the object.[1] The fourth stadium is "understanding," which steadies the fluctuating intuition into a concept, realizes the object, and looks upon it as the cause of the intuition. Fifthly, "judgment" makes its appearance as the faculty of free reflection and abstraction, or the power to consider a definite content or to abstract from it. As judgment is itself the condition of the bound reflection of the understanding, so it points in turn to its condition, to the sixth and highest stage of intelligence, "reason," by means of which we are able to abstract from all objects whatever, while reason itself, pure self-consciousness, is that from which abstraction is never possible. It is only in the highest stage that consciousness or a representation of representation takes place. And at the culmination of the theoretical ego the point of transition to the practical ego appears. Here the ego becomes aware that in positing itself as determined by the non-ego it has only limited itself, and therefore is itself the ground of the whole content of consciousness; here it apprehends itself as determining the non-ego or as acting, and recognizes as its chief mission to impress the form of the ego as far as possible on the non-ego, and ever to extend the boundary further.

[Footnote 1: The object is a product of the ego only for the observer, not for the observed ego itself, to which, from this standpoint of imagination, it appears rather as a thing in itself independent of the ego and affecting it. Further, it must so appear, because the ego, in its after reflection on its productive activity, and just by this reflection, transforms the productive action considered into a fixed and independent product found existing.]

The "deduction of representation" whose outline has just been given was the first example (often imitated in the school of Schelling and Hegel) of a constructive psychology, which, from the mission or the concept of the soul--in this case from the nature of self-consciousness--deduces the various psychical functions as a system of actions, each of which is in its place implied by the rest, as it in turn presupposes them. This is distinguished from the sensationalistic psychology, which is also genetic (cf. pp. 245-250), as well as from the mechanical or associational psychology, which likewise excludes the idea of an isolated coexistence of mental faculties, by the fact that it demands a new manifestation of the soul-ground in order to the ascent from one member of the series to the next higher. It is also distinguished from sensationalism by its teleological point of view. For no matter how much Fichte, too, may speak of the mechanism of consciousness, it is plain to the reader of the theoretical part of his system not only that he makes this mechanism work in the service of an end, but also that he finds its origin in purposive activity of the ego; while the practical part gives further and decisive confirmation of the fact. The danger and the defect of such a constructive treatment of psychology--as we may at once remark for all later attempts--lies in imagining that the task of mental science has been accomplished and all its problems solved when each particular activity of the ego has been assigned its mission and work for the whole, and its place in the system, without any indication of the means through which this destination can be fulfilled.

%(d) The Practical Ego.%--The deduction of representation has shown how (through what unconscious acts of the ego) the different stages of cognition, the three sensuous and the three intellectual functions of representation, come into being. It has proved incapable, however, of giving any account of the way in which the ego comes at one point to arrest its activity, which tends infinitely outward, and to turn it back upon itself. We know, indeed, that this first limitation, through which sensation arises, and on which as a basis the understanding, by continued reflection constructs the objective world, was necessary in order that consciousness and knowledge might arise. If the ego did not limit its infinite activity neither representation nor an objective world would exist. But why, then, are there such things as consciousness, representation, and a world? From the standpoint of the theoretical ego this problem, "Whence the original non-ego or opposition (Anstoss), which impels the ego back upon itself?" cannot be solved, since it is only through the opposition that it itself arises. The "deduction of the opposition," which the theoretical part of the Science of Knowledge did not furnish, is to be looked for from the practical part. The primacy of practical reason, already emphasized by Kant, gives us the answer: The ego limits itself and is theoretical, in order to be practical. The whole machinery of representation and the represented world exists only to furnish us the possibility of fulfilling our duty. We are intelligence in order that we may be able to be will.

Action, action--that is the end of our existence. Action is giving form to matter, it is the alteration or elaboration of an object, the conquest of an impediment, of a limitation. We cannot act unless we have something in, on, and against which to act. The world of sensation and intuition is nothing but a means for attaining our ethical destiny, it is "the material of our duty under the form of sense." The theoretical ego posits an object (Gegenstand) that the practical ego may experience resistance (Widerstand). No action is possible without a world as the object of action; no world is possible without a consciousness which represents it; no consciousness possible without reflection of the ego on itself; no reflection without limitation, without an opposition or non-ego. The Anstoss is deduced. The ego posits a limit (is theoretical) in order (as practical) to overcome it. Our duty is the only per se (Ansich) of the phenomenal world, the only truly real element in it: "Things are in themselves that which we ought to make of them." Objectivity exists only to be more and more sublated, that is, to be so worked up that the activity of the ego may in it become evident.--The same ground of explanation which reveals the necessity of an external nature enables us to understand why the one infinite ego (the universal life or the Deity, as Fichte puts it in his later works) divides into the many empirical egos or individuals, why it does not carry out its plan immediately, but through finite spirits as its organs. Action is possible only under the form of the individual, only in individuals are consciousness and morality possible. Without resistance, no action; without conflict, no morality. Individuality, it is true, is to be overcome and destroyed in moral endeavor; but in order to this it must have existed. Virtue is a conquest over external and internal nature.

A gradation of practical functions corresponding to the series of theoretical activities leads from feeling and striving (longing and desire) through the system of impulses (the impulse to representation or reflection, to production, to satisfaction) up to moral will or the impulse to harmony with self, which stands opposed to the natural impulses as the categorical imperative. The practical ego mediates between the theoretical and the absolute ego. The ego ought to be infinite and self-dependent, but finds itself finite and dependent on a non-ego--a contradiction which is resolved by the ego becoming practical, by the fact that in ever increasing measure it subdues nature to itself, and by such increasing extension of the boundary draws nearer and ever nearer to the realization of its destination, to become absolute ego.

%2. The Science of Ethics and of Right.%

The moral law demands the control of the sensuous impulse by the pure impulse. If the former aims at comfortable ease and enjoyment, the latter is directed toward satisfaction with one's self, to endeavor and self-dependence. (Enjoyment is inevitable, it is true, as satisfaction where any impulse whatever is carried out; only it must not form the end of action.) Morality is activity for its own sake, the radical evil--from which only a miracle can deliver us, but a miracle which we must ourselves perform--is inertness, lack of will to rise above the natural determinateness of the impulse of self-preservation to the clear consciousness of duty and of freedom. For the moral man there is no resting; each end attained becomes for him the impulse to renewed endeavor, each task fulfilled leads him to a fresh one. Become self-dependent, act autonomously, make thyself free; let every action have a place in a series, in the continuation of which the ego must become independent. To this formal and universal norm, again, there is added a special injunction for each individual. Each individual spirit has its definite mission assigned to it by the world-order: each ought to do that which it alone should and can do. Always fulfill thy moral vocation, thy special destination.[1] Or both in popular combination: Never act contrary to conscience.

[Footnote 1: Although Fichte was justly charged with surpassing even the abstractness of the Kantian ethics with his bald moral principle, the self-dependence of the ego, he deserves praise for having given ethics a concrete content of indisputable soundness and utility by his introduction of Jacobi's idea of purified individuality.]

The elevation to freedom is accomplished gradually. At first freedom consists only in the consciousness of the natural impulse, then follows a breaking away from this by means of maxims, which in the beginning are maxims of individual happiness. Later on a blind enthusiasm for self-dependence arises and produces an heroic spirit, which would rather be generous than just, which bestows sympathy more readily than respect; true morality, however, does not arise until, with constant attention to the law and continued watchfulness of self, duty is done for its own sake. No man is for a moment secure of his morality without continued endeavor. In order to deliverance from the original sin of inertness and its train, cowardice and falsity, men stand in need of examples, such as have been given them in the founders of religions, to construe for them the riddle of freedom. The necessary enlightenment concerning moral conviction is given by the Church, whose symbols are not to be looked upon as dogmatic propositions, but only as means for the proclamation of the eternal verities, and which, like the state (for both are institutions based on necessity), has for its object to make itself unnecessary as time goes on.

The system of duties distinguishes four classes of duties on the basis of the twofold opposition of universal (non-transferable) and particular (transferable) duties, and of unconditional duties (directed to the whole) and conditional duties (directed toward self). These four classes are the duties of self-preservation, of class, of non-interference with others, and of vocation. The lower calling includes the producers, artisans, and tradesmen, whose action terminates directly on nature; and the higher, the scholars, teachers of the people or clergy, artists, and government officials, who work directly on the community of rational beings. Fichte's thoughtful and sympathetically written discussion of marriage is in pleasant contrast to the bald, purely legal view of this relation adopted by Kant.

Natural right is for Fichte, as for Kant, whose theory of right, moreover, appeared later than Fichte's, entirely independent of ethics, and distinguished from the latter by its exclusive reference to external conduct instead of to the disposition and the will. The rule of right gains from the moral law, it is true, new sanction for conscience, but cannot be derived from the law.--The concept of right is to be deduced as a necessary act of the ego, i.e., to be shown a condition of self-consciousness. The ego must posit itself as an individual, and can accomplish this only by positing itself in a relation of right to other finite rational beings; without a thou, no I. A finite rational being cannot posit itself without ascribing to itself a free activity in an external sense-world; and it cannot effect this latter unless (1) it ascribes free activity to other beings as well, hence not without assuming other finite rational beings outside itself, and positing itself as standing in the relation of right to them; and unless (2) it ascribes to itself a material body and posits this as standing under the influence of a person outside it. But, further, Fichte considers it possible to deduce the particular constitution both of the external world and of the human body (as the sphere of all free actions possible to the person). In the former there must be present a tough, durable matter capable of resistance, and light and air in order to the possibility of intercourse between spirits; while the latter must be an organized, articulated nature-product, furnished with senses, capable of infinite determination, and adapted to all conceivable motions.

If a community of free beings, such as has been shown the condition of individual self-consciousness, is to be possible, the following must hold as the law of right: So limit thy freedom that others may be free along with thee. This law is conditioned on the lawful behavior of others. Where this is lacking, where my fellow does not recognize and treat me as a free, rational being, the right of coercion comes in; coercion, however, is not to be exercised by the individual himself--since then there would be no guaranty either for its successful exercise or for the non-violation of the legal limit--but devolves upon the state. The state takes its origin in the common will of all to unite for the safeguarding of their rights, and determines by positive laws (intermediate between the law of right and legal judgments) what shall be considered rights. Thus there result three subjects for natural right: original rights or the sum of that which pertains to freedom or personality (inviolability of the body and of property), the right of coercion, and political right. The aim of punishment is the reform of the evil doer and the deterrence of others. Fichte is in agreement with Kant concerning the principle of popular sovereignty (Rousseau) and the exercise of the political power through representatives; but not so concerning the guaranties against the violation of the fundamental law of the state. Instead of the division of powers recommended by Kant he demands supervision of the rulers of the state by ephors, who, themselves without any legislative or executive authority, shall suspend the rulers in case they violate the law, and call them to account before the community. Every constitution in which the rulers are not responsible is despotic. Fichte did not continue loyal to this principle, that the state is merely a legal institution. He not only demands a state organization of labor by which everyone shall be placed in a position to live from his work, in the Natural Right and the Exclusive Commercial State, but, in his posthumous Theory of Right, 1812, he makes it the chief duty of the state to lead men, by the moral and intellectual training of the people, to do from insight what they have hitherto done from traditional belief. Through the education of the people the empirical state is gradually to transform itself into the rational state.

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

Fichte's transfer to Berlin brought him into more intimate contact with the world, and along with new experiences and new emotions gave him new problems. While a vigorously developing religious sentiment turned his speculation to the relation of the individual ego to the primal source of spiritual life, empirical reality also acquired greater significance for him, and the intellectual, moral, and political situation of the time especially attracted his attention. The last required philosophical interpretation, demanded at once inquiry into its historical conditions and a consideration of the means by which the glaring contradiction between the condition of the nation at the time and the ideals of reason could be diminished. The Addresses to the German Nation outlined a plan for a moral reformation of the world, to start with the education of the German people;[1] while the Characteristics of the Present Age, which had preceded the Addresses, defined the place of the age in the general development of humanity. The scheme of historical periods given in the Characteristics and similarly in the Theory of the State (innocence--sin--supremacy of reason, with intermediate stages between each two) is interesting as a forerunner of Hegel's undertaking.

[Footnote 1: "Among all nations you are the one in whom the germ of human perfection is most decidedly present." The spiritual regeneration of mankind must proceed from the German people, for they are the one original or primitive people of the new age, the only one which has preserved its living language--French is a dead tongue--and has raised itself to true creative poetry and free science. The ground of distinction between Germanism and the foreign spirit lies in the question, whether we believe in an original element in man, in the freedom, infinite perfectibility, and eternal progress of our race, or put no faith in all these.]

History is produced through the interaction of the two principles, faith and understanding, which are related to each other as law and freedom, and strives toward a condition in which these two shall be so reconciled that faith shall have entirely passed over into the form of understanding, shall have been transformed into insight, and understanding shall have taken up the content of faith into itself. History begins with the coming together of two original and primitive races, one of order or faith, and one of freedom or understanding, neither of which would attain to an historical development apart from the other. From the legal race the free race learns respect for the law, as in turn it arouses in the former the impulse toward freedom. The course of history divides into five periods. In the state of "innocence" or of rational instinct that which is rational is done unconsciously, out of natural impulse; in the state of "commencing sin" the instinct for the good changes into an external compulsory authority, the law of reason appears as a ruling power from without, which can be disobeyed as well as obeyed. We ourselves live in the period of "completed sinfulness," of absolute license and indifference to all truth, of unlimited caprice and selfishness. But however far removed from the moral ideal this age appears, in which the individual, freed from all restraints, heeds naught except his egoistic desire, and in his care for his own welfare forgets to labor for the universal, yet this ultimate goal, this doing from free insight that which in the beginning was done out of blind faith, cannot be attained unless authority shall have first been shaken off and the individual become self-dependent. A few signs already betoken the dawn of the fourth era, that of rational science or of "commencing justification," in which truth shall be acknowledged supreme, and the individual ego, at least as cognitive, shall submit itself to the generic reason. Finally, with the era of rational art, or the state of "completed justification and sanctification," wherein the will of the individual shall entirely merge in life for the race, the end of the life of humanity on earth--the free determination of all its relations according to reason--will be fulfilled.

In the Jena period the religious life of the ego simply coincided for Fichte with its practical life; piety coincided with moral conduct; the Deity with the absolute ego, with the moral law, with the moral order of the world. A change subsequently took place in his views on this point. He experienced feelings which, at least in quality, were distinct from readiness for moral action, no matter how intimately they are intertwined with this, and no matter how little they can actually be separated from it; religion is possible neither without a metaphysical belief in a suprasensible world, nor without obedience to the moral law, yet in itself it is not that belief nor this action, but the inner spirit which pervades and animates all our thought and action--it is life, love, blessedness. And as quiet blessedness is here distinguished from ceaseless action, so for our thinker the inactive Deity, the self-identical life of the absolute, separates from the active universal reason, which in its individual organs advances from task to task. The earlier undivided and unique principle, the absolute ego, divides into the Ichheit (moral law, world-order), and an absolute as the ground thereof. "The spirit (the ego, or, as Fichte now prefers to say, knowledge) an image of God, the world an image of the spirit." The active order of the world (the moral law which realizes itself in individuals) the immediate, and objective reality the mediate, revelation of the absolute!

Does this view of religion, which Fichte incorporates also in the later expositions of the Science of Knowledge, indicate an abandonment and denial of the earlier standpoint? The philosophy of Fichte's second period is a new system--so judge the majority of the historians of philosophy. It is not a transformation, but a completion of the earlier system; the doctrine promulgated in Berlin continues to be idealistic, as that advanced in Jena had itself been pantheistic--this is the opinion of Fortlage and Harms, in agreement with the philosopher himself and with his son. Kuno Fischer, also, who shows a constant advance in the development of Fichteanism, a gradual transition "without a break," may be counted among the minority who hold that throughout his life Fichte taught but one system. We believe it our duty to adhere to this latter view. The Science of Knowledge (the world a product of the ego) enters as it is into the later form of the Fichtean philosophy; the latter gives up none of the fundamental positions of the former, but only adds to it a culmination, by which the appearance of the building is altered, it is true, but not the edifice itself. In the discussion of the question the following three have been emphasized as the most important points of distinction between the two periods: In the earlier system God is made equivalent to the absolute ego and the moral order of the world, in the later he is separated from these and removed beyond them; in the former the nature of God is described as activity, in the latter, as being; in the one, action is designated as the highest mission of man, in the other, blessed devotion to God. All three variations of the later doctrine from the earlier may be admitted without giving up the position that the former is only an extension of the latter and not an essential modification of it (i.e., in its teachings concerning the relation of the ego and the world). Fichte experienced religious feelings the philosophical outcome of which he worked into his system. He now knows a first thing (the Deity as distinct from the absolute ego) and a last thing (the inwardness of religious devotion to the world-ground), which he had before not overlooked, much less denied, but combined in one with the second (the absolute ego or the moral order of the world) and the one before the last (moral action). It is incorrect to say that, in his later doctrine, Fichte substituted the inactive absolute in place of the active absolute ego, and the quiet blessedness of contemplation in place of ceaseless action. Not in place of these, but beyond them, while all else remains as it was. The categorical imperative, the absolute ego or knowledge is no longer God himself, but the first manifestation of God, though a necessary revelation of him. Religion had previously been included for Fichte in moral action; now fellowship with God goes beyond this, though morality remains its indispensable condition and inseparable companion. Finally, how to construe the previously avoided predicate, being, in relation to the Deity, is shown by the no less frequent designation of the absolute as the "Universal Life." The expression being, which it must be confessed is ambiguous, here signifies in our opinion only the quiet, self-identical activity of the absolute, in opposition to the unresting, changeful activity of the world-order and its finite organs, not that inert and dead being posited by the ego, the ascription of which to the Deity Fichte had forbidden in his essay which had been charged with atheism, not to speak of the existence-mode of a particular self-conscious and personal being. Instead of speaking of a conversion of Fichte to the position of his opponents, we might rather venture the paradoxical assertion, that, when he characterizes the absolute as the only true being, he intends to produce the same view in the mind of the reader as in his earlier years, when he expressed himself against the application of the concepts existence, substance, and conscious personality to God, on the ground that they are categories of sense. The chief thing, at least, remains unaltered: the opposition to a view of religion which transforms the sublime and sacred teaching of Christianity "into an enervating doctrine of happiness."

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XI. SCHELLING

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph (von) Schelling was born January 27, 1775, at Leonberg (in Würtemberg), and died August 20, 1854, at the baths of Ragatz (in Switzerland). In 1790-95 he attended the seminary at Tübingen, in company with Hölderlin and Hegel, who were five years older than himself; at seventeen he published a dissertation on the Fall of Man, and a year later an essay on Religious Myths; and was called in 1798 from Leipsic--where, after several treatises[1] in explanation of the Science of Knowledge, he had issued, in 1797, the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature--to Jena. In the latter place he became acquainted with his future wife, Caroline,[2] née Michaëlis (1763-1809), widow of Böhmer and at this time the brilliant wife of August Wilhelm Schlegel. From 1803 to 1806 he served as professor in Würzburg; then followed two residences of fourteen years each in Munich, separated by seven years in Erlangen: 1806-20 as Member of the Academy of Sciences and General Secretary of the Academy of the Plastic Arts (he received this latter position after delivering on the king's birthday his celebrated address on "The Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature," 1807); and 1827-41 as professor in the newly established university, and President of the Academy of Sciences. In 1812 Schelling married his second wife, Pauline Gotter. Besides various journals[3] and the works to be noticed later, two polemic treatises should be mentioned, the Exposition of the True Relation of the Philosophy of Nature to the Improved Doctrine of Fichte, 1806, in which his former friend is charged with plagiarism, and the Memorial of the Treatise on Divine Things by Herr Jacobi, 1812, which answers a bitter attack of Jacobi still more bitterly. From this on our philosopher, once so fond of writing, becomes silent.[4] The often promised issue of the positive philosophy, which had already been twice commenced in print (The Ages of the World, 1815; Mythological Lectures, 1830), was both times suspended. Being called to the Berlin Academy by Frederick William IV., in order to counterbalance the prevailing Hegelianism, Schelling delivered lectures in the university also (on Mythology and Revelation), which he ceased, however, when notes taken by his hearers were printed without his consent.[5] His collected works were published in fourteen volumes (1856-61) under the care of his son, K.E.A. Schelling.[6]

[Footnote 1: On the Possibility of a Form of Philosophy in General, On the Ego as Principle of Philosophy, both in 1795; Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, 1796; Essays in Explanation of the Science of Knowledge, 1797.]

[Footnote 2: Karoline, Letters, edited by G. Waitz, 1871.]

[Footnote 3: Kritisches Journal der Philosophie (with Hegel), 1802; Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik, 1800 (continued as Neue Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik); Jahrbücher der Medizin als Wissenschaft (with Marcus), 1806-08; Allgemeine Zeitschrift von Deutschen für Deutsche, 1813.]

[Footnote 4: Besides a supplement to Die Weltalter and his inaugural lecture at Berlin, he published only two prefaces, one to Viktor Cousin über französische und deutsche Philosophie, done into German by Hubert Beckers, 1834, and one to Steffens's Nachgelassene Schriften, 1846.]

[Footnote 5: Paulus, Die endüch offenbar gewordene positive Philosophie der Offenbarung, 1843. Frauenstädt had previously published a sketch from this later doctrine, 1842.]

[Footnote 6: On Schelling cf. the Lectures by K. Rosenkranz, 1843; the articles by Heyder in vol. xiii. of Herzog's Realencyclopädie für protestantische Theologie, 1860, and Jodl in the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie; R. Haym, Die romantische Schule, 1870; Aus Schellings Leben, in Briefen, edited by Plitt, 3 vols., 1869-70. [Cf. also Watson's Schelling's Transcendental Idealism (Griggs's Philosophical Classics, 1882); and several translations from Schelling in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.--TR.]]

The leading motive in Schelling's thinking is an unusually powerful fancy, which gives to his philosophy a lively, stimulating, and attractive character, without making it to a like degree logically satisfactory. If the systems of Fichte and Hegel, which in their content are closely related to Schelling's, impress us by their logical severity, Schelling chains us by his lively intuition and his suggestive power of feeling his way into the inner nature of things. With him analogies outweigh reasons; he is more concerned about the rich content of concepts than about their sharp definition; and in the endeavor to show the unity of the universe, both in the great and in the little, especially to show the unity of nature and spirit, he dwells longer on the relationship of objects than on their antitheses, which he is glad to reduce to mere quantitative and temporary differences. He adds to this an astonishing mobility of thought, in virtue of which every offered suggestion is at once seized and worked into his own system, though in this the previous standpoint is unconsciously exchanged for a somewhat altered one. Schelling's philosophy is, therefore, in a continual state of flux, nearly every work shows it in a new form, and it is always ideas from without whose incorporation has caused the transition. Besides Leibnitz, Kant, and Fichte, who were already familiar to Schelling as a pupil at Tübingen, it was first Herder, then Spinoza and Bruno, who exerted a transforming influence on his system, to be followed later by Neoplatonism and Böhme's mysticism, and, finally, by Aristotle and the Gnostics, not to speak of his intercourse with his contemporaries Kielmeyer, Steffens, Baader, Eschenmayer, and others. Omitting his early adherence to Fichte, at least three periods must be distinguished in Schelling's thinking. The first period (1797-1800) includes the epoch-making feat of his youth, the philosophy of nature, and, as an equally legitimate second part of his system, the philosophy of spirit or transcendental philosophy. The latter is a supplementary recasting of Fichte's Science of Knowledge, while in the former Schelling follows Kant and Herder. The second period, from 1801, adds to these two co-ordinate parts, the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit, and as a fundamental discipline, a science of the absolute, the philosophy of identity, which may be characterized as Spinozism revived on a Fichtean basis. Besides the example of Spinoza, Giordano Bruno had most influence on this form of Schelling's philosophy. With the year 1809, after the signs of a new phase had become perceptible from 1804 on, his system enters on its third, the theosophical, period, the period of the positive philosophy, in which we shall distinguish a mystical and a scholastic stage. The former is represented by the doctrine of freedom inspired by Jacob Böhme; the latter, by the philosophy of mythology and revelation, which goes back to Aristotle and the Gnostics. In the first period the absolute for Schelling is creative nature; in the second, the identity of opposites; in the third it is an antemundane process which advances from the not-yet-present of the contraries to their overcoming. In neither of these advances is it Schelling's intention to break with his previous teachings, but in each case only to add a supplement. That which has hitherto been the whole is retained as a part. The philosophy of nature takes its place beside the completed Fichtean transcendental philosophy, with equal rights, though with a reversed procedure; then the theory of identity assumes a place above both; finally, a positive (existential) philosophy is added to the previous negative (rational) philosophy.

%1a. Philosophy of Nature.%

Schelling agrees with Fichte that philosophy is transcendental science, the doctrine of the conditions of consciousness, and has to answer the question, What must take place in order that knowledge may arise? They agree, further, that these conditions of knowledge are necessary acts, outgoings of an active original ground which is not yet conscious self, but seeks to become such, and that the material world is the product of these actions. Nature exists in order that the ego may develop. But while Fichte correctly understood the purpose of nature, to help intelligence into being, he failed to recognize the dignity of nature, for he deprived it of all self-dependence, all life of its own, all generative power, and treated it merely as a dead tool, as a passive, merely posited non-ego. Nature is not a board which the original ego nails up before itself in order, striking against it, to be driven back upon itself, to be compelled to reflection, and thereby to become theoretical ego; in order, further, working over the non-ego, and transforming it, to exercise its practical activity: but it is a ladder on which spirit rises to itself. Spirit develops out of nature; nature itself has a spiritual element in it; it is undeveloped, slumbering, unconscious, benumbed intelligence. By transferring to nature the power of self-position or of being subject, Schelling exalts the drudge of the Science of Knowledge to the throne. The threefold division, "infinite original activity--nature or object--individual ego or subject," remains as in Fichte, only that the first member is not termed pure ego, but nature, yet creative nature, natura naturans. Schelling's aim is to show how from the object a subject arises, from the existent something represented, from the representable a representer, from nature an ego. He could only hope to solve this problem if he conceived natural objects--in the highest of which, man, he makes conscious spirit break forth or nature intuit itself--as themselves the products of an original subject, of a creative ground striving toward consciousness. For him also doing is more original than being. It would not be exact, therefore, to define the difference between Fichte and Schelling by saying that, with the former, nature proceeds from the ego, and with the latter the ego, from nature. It is rather true that with them both nature and spirit are alike the products of a third and higher term, which seeks to become spirit, and can accomplish this only by positing nature. In the Science of Knowledge, it is true, this higher ground is conceived as an ethical, in the Philosophy of Nature as a physical, power, although one framed for intelligence; in the former, moreover, the natura naturata appears as the position once for all of a non-spiritual, in the latter as a progressive articulated construction, with gradually increasing intelligence. In the unconscious products of nature, nature's aim to reflect upon itself, to become intelligence, fails, in man it succeeds. Nature is the embryonic life of spirit. Nature and spirit are essentially identical: "That which is posited out of consciousness is in its essence the same as that which is posited in consciousness also." Therefore "the knowable must itself bear the impress of the knower." Nature the preliminary stage, not the antithesis, of spirit; history, a continuation of physical becoming; the parallelism between the ideal and the real development-series--these are ideas from Herder which Schelling introduces into the transcendental philosophy. The Kantio-Fichtean moralism, with its sharp contraposition of nature and spirit, is limited in the Naturphilosophie by Herder's physicism.

"Nature is a priori" (everything individual in it is pre-determined by the whole, by the Idea of a nature in general); hence the forms of nature can be deduced from the concept of nature. The philosopher creates nature anew, he constructs it. Speculative physics considers nature as subject, becoming, productivity (not, like empirical science, as object, being, product), and for this purpose it needs, instead of individualizing reflection, an intuition directed to the whole. To this productive nature, as to the absolute ego of Fichte, are ascribed two opposite activities, one expansive or repulsive, and one attractive, and on these is based the universal law of polarity. The absolute productivity strives toward an infinite product, which it never attains, because apart from arrest no product exists. At definite points a check must be given it in order that something knowable may arise. Thus every product in nature is the result of a positive, centrifugal, accelerating, universalizing force, and a negative, limiting, retarding, individualizing one. The endlessness of the creative activity manifests itself in various ways: in the striving for development on the part of every product, in the preservation of the genus amid the disappearance of individuals, in the endlessness of the series of products. Nature's creative impulse is inexhaustible, it transcends every product. Qualities are points of arrest in the one universal force of nature; all nature is a connected development. Because of the opposition in the nature-ground between the stimulating and the retarding activity, the law of duality everywhere rules. To these two forces, however, still a third factor must be added as their copula, which determines the relation or measure of their connection. This is the source of the threefold division of the Philosophy of Nature. The magnet with its union of opposite polar forces is the type of all configuration in nature.

With Fichte's synthetic method and Herder's naturalistic principles Schelling combines Kantian ideas, especially Kant's dynamism (matter is a force-product),[1] and his view of the organic (organisms are self-productive beings, and are regarded by us as ends in themselves, because of the interaction between their members and the whole). The three organic functions sensibility, irritability, and reproduction, on the other hand, Schelling took from Kielmeyer, whose address On the Relations of the Organic Forces, 1793, excited great attention. The concept of life is dominant in Schelling's theory of nature. The organic is more original than the inorganic; the latter must be explained from the former; that which is dead must be considered as a product of departing life. No less erroneous than the theory of a magic vital force is the mechanical interpretation, which looks on life merely as a chemical phenomenon. The dead, mechanical and chemical, forces are merely the negative conditions of life; to them there must be added as a positive force a vital stimulus external to the individual, which continually rekindles the conflict between the opposing activities on which the vital process depends. Life consists, that is, in the perpetual prevention of the equilibrium which is the object of the chemical process. This constant disturbance proceeds from "universal nature," which, as the common principle of organic and inorganic nature, as that which determines them for each other, which founds a pre-established harmony between them, deserves the name of the world-soul. Schelling thus recognizes a threefold nature: organized, inorganic, and universal organizing (according to Harms, cosmical) nature, of which the two former arise from the third and are brought by it into connection and harmony. (As Schelling here takes an independent middle course between the mechanical explanation of life and the assumption of a specific vital force, so in all the burning physical questions of the time he seeks to rise above the contending parties by means of mediating solutions. Thus, in the question of "single or double electricity," he ranges himself neither on the side of Franklin nor on that of his opponents; in regard to the problem of light, endeavors to overcome the antithesis between Newton's emanation theory and the undulation theory of Euler; and, in his chapter on combustion, attacks the defenders of phlogiston as well as those who deny it).

[Footnote 1: Schelling terms his philosophy of nature dynamic atomism, since it posits pure intensities as the simple (atoms), from which qualities are to be explained.]

Schelling's philosophy of nature[1] proposes to itself three chief problems: the construction of general, indeterminate, homogeneous matter, with differences in density alone, of determinate, qualitatively differentiated matter and its phenomena of motion or the dynamical process, and of the organic process. For each of these departments of nature an original force in universal nature is assumed--gravity, light, and their copula, universal life. Gravity--this does not mean that which as the force of attraction falls within the view of sensation, for it is the union of attraction and repulsion--is the principle of corporeality, and produces in the visible world the different conditions of aggregation in solids, fluids, and gases. Light--this, too, is not to be confounded with actual light, of which it is the cause--is the principle of the soul (from it proceeds all intelligence, it is a spiritual potency, the "first subject" in nature), and produces in the visible world the dynamical processes magnetism, electricity, and chemism. The higher unity of gravity and light is the copula or life, the principle of the organic, of animated corporeality or the processes of growth and reproduction, irritability, and sensibility.

[Footnote 1: This is contained in the following treatises: Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, 1797; On the World-soul, 1798; First Sketch of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, 1799; Universal Deduction of the Dynamical Process or the Categories of Physics (in the Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik) 1800. In the above exposition, however, the modified philosophy of nature of the second period has also been taken into account.]

General matter or the filling of space, arises from the co-operation of three forces: the centrifugal, which manifests itself as repulsion (first dimension), the centripetal, manifested as attraction (second dimension), and the synthesis of the two, manifested as gravity (third dimension). These forces are raised by light to a higher potency, and then make their appearance as the causes of the dynamical process or of the specific differences of matter. The linear function of magnetism is the condition of coherence; the surface force of electricity, the basis of the qualities perceivable by sense; the tri-dimensional force of the chemical process, in which the two former are united, produces the chemical qualities. Galvanism forms the transition to living nature, in which through the operation of the "copula" these three dynamical categories are raised to organic categories. To magnetism as the most general, and hence the lowest force, corresponds reproduction (the formative impulse, as nutrition, growth, and production, including the artistic impulse); electricity develops into irritability or excitability; the higher analogue to the chemical process as the most individual and highest stage is sensibility or the capacity of feeling. (Such at least is Schelling's doctrine after Steffens had convinced him of the higher dignity of that which is individual, whereas at first he had made sensibility parallel with magnetism, and reproduction with chemism, because the former two appear most seldom, and the latter most frequently. Electricity and irritability always maintained their intermediate position.) With the awakening of feeling nature has attained its goal--intelligence. As inorganic substances are distinguished only by relative degrees of repulsion and attraction, so the differentiation of organisms is conditioned by the relation of the three vital functions: in the lower forms reproduction predominates, then irritability gradually increases, while in the highest forms both of these are subordinated to sensibility. All species, however, are connected by a common life, all the stages are but arrests of the same fundamental force. This accentuation of the unity of nature, which establishes a certain kinship between Schelling's philosophy of nature and Darwinism, was a great idea, which deserves the thanks of posterity in spite of such defects as its often sportive, often heedlessly bold reasoning in details.

The parallelism of the potencies of nature, as we have developed it by leaving out of account the numerous differences between the various expositions of the Naturphilosophie, may be shown by a table:

%1b. Transcendental Philosophy.%

The philosophy of nature explained the products of nature teleologically, deduced them from the concept or the mission of nature, by ignoring the mechanical origin of physical phenomena and inquiring into the significance of each stage in nature in view of this ideal meaning of the whole. It asks what is the outcome of the chemical process for the whole of nature, what is given by electricity, by magnetism, etc.--what part of the general aim of nature is attained, is realized through this or that group of phenomena. The philosophy of spirit given in the System of Transcendental Idealism, 1800, finds itself confronted by corresponding questions concerning the phenomena of intelligence, of morals, and of art. Here again Schelling does not trace out the mechanics of the soul-life, but is interested only in the meaning, in the teleological significance of the psychical functions. His aim is a constructive psychology in the Fichtean sense, a history of consciousness, and the execution of his design as well closely follows the example of the Wissenschaftslehre.

Since truth is the agreement of thought and its object, every cognition necessarily implies the coming together of a subjective and an objective factor. The problem of this coming together may be treated in two ways. With the philosophy of nature we may start from the object and observe how intelligence is added to nature. The transcendental philosophy takes the opposite course, it takes its position with the subject, and asks, How is there added to intelligence an object corresponding to it? The transcendental philosopher has need of intellectual intuition in order to recognize the original object-positing actions of the ego, which remain concealed from common consciousness, sunk in the outcome of these acts. The theoretical part of the system explains the representation of objective reality (the feeling connected with certain representations that we are compelled to have them), from pure self-consciousness, whose opposing moments, a real and an ideal force, limit each other by degrees,--and follows the development of spirit in three periods ("epochs"). The first of these extends from sensation, in which the ego finds itself limited, to productive intuition, in which a thing in itself is posited over against the ego and the phenomenon between the two; the second, from this point to reflection (feeling of self, outer and inner intuition together with space and time, the categories of relation as the original categories); the third, finally, through judgment, wherein intuition and concept are separated as well as united, up to the absolute act of will. Willing is the continuation and completion of intuition;[1] intuition was unconscious production, willing is conscious production. It is only through action that the world becomes objective for us, only through interaction with other active intelligences that the ego attains to the consciousness of a real external world, and to the consciousness of its freedom. The practical part follows the will from impulse (the feeling of contradiction between the ideal and the object) through the division into moral law and resistant natural impulse up to arbitrary will. Observations on legal order, on the state, and on history are added as "supplements." The law of right, by which unlawful action is directed against itself, is not a moral, but a natural order, which operates with blind necessity. The state, like law, is a product of the genus, and not of individuals. The ideal of a cosmopolitan legal condition is the goal of history, in which caprice and conformity to law are one, in so far as the conscious free action of individuals subserves an unconscious end prescribed by the world-spirit. History is the never completed revelation of the absolute (of the unity of the conscious and the unconscious) through human freedom. We are co-authors in the historical world-drama, and invent our own parts. Not until the third (the religious) period, in which he reveals himself as "providence," will God be; in the past (the tragical) period, in which the divine power was felt as "fate," and in the present (the mechanical) period, in which he appears as the "plan of nature," God is not, but is only becoming.

[Footnote 1: With this transformation of the antithesis between knowledge and volition into a mere difference in degree, Schelling sinks back to the standpoint of Leibnitz. In all the idealistic thinkers who start from Kant we find the endeavor to overcome the Critical dualism of understanding and will, as also that between intellect and sensibility. Schiller brings the contrary impulses of the ego into ultimate harmonious union in artistic activity. Fichte traces them back to a common ground; Schelling combines both these methods by extolling art as a restoration of the original identity. Hegel reduces volition to thought, Schopenhauer makes intellect proceed from will.]

An interesting supplement to the Fichtean philosophy is furnished by the third, the aesthetic, part of the transcendental idealism, which makes use of Kant's theory of the beautiful in a way similar to that in which the philosophy of nature had availed itself of his theory of the organic. Art is the higher third in which the opposition between theoretical and practical action, the antithesis of subject and object, is removed; in which cognition and action, conscious and unconscious activity, freedom and necessity, the impulse of genius and reflective deliberation are united. The beautiful, as the manifestation of the infinite in the finite, shows the problem of philosophy, the identity of the real and the ideal, solved in sensuous appearance. Art is the true organon and warrant of philosophy; she opens up to philosophy the holy of holies, is for philosophy the supreme thing, the revelation of all mysteries. Poesy and philosophy (the aesthetic intuition of the artist and the intellectual intuition of the thinker) are most intimately related; they were united in the old mythology--why should not this repeat itself in the future?

%2. System of Identity.%

The assertion which had already been made in the first period that "nature and spirit are fundamentally the same," is intensified in the second into the proposition, "The ground of nature and spirit, the absolute, is the identity of the real and the ideal," and in this form is elevated into a principle. As the absolute is no longer employed as a mere ground of explanation, but is itself made the object of philosophy, the doctrine of identity is added to the two co-ordinate disciplines, the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit, as a higher third, which serves as a basis for them, and in Schelling's exposition of which several phases must be distinguished.[1]

[Footnote 1: The philosophy of identity is given in the following treatises: Exposition of my System of Philosophy, 1801; Further Expositions of the System of Philosophy, 1802; Bruno, or on the Divine and Natural Principle of Things, 1803; Lectures on the Method of Academical Study, 1803; Aphorisms by way of Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature, Aphorisms on the Philosophy of Nature (both in the Jahrbücher für Medizin), 1806. Besides these the following also bear on this doctrine: the additions to the second edition of the Ideas, 1803, and the Exposition, against Fichte, 1806.]

Following Spinoza, whom he at first imitated even in the geometrical method of proof, Schelling teaches that there are two kinds of knowledge, the philosophical knowledge of the reason and the confused knowledge of the imagination, and, as objects of these, two forms of existence, the infinite, undivided existence of the absolute, and the finite existence of individual things, split up into multiplicity and becoming. The manifold and self-developing things of the phenomenal world owe their existence to isolating thought alone; they possess as such no true reality, and speculation proves them void. While things appear particular to inadequate representation, the philosopher views them sub specie aeterni, in their per se, in their totality, in the identity, as Ideas. To construe things is to present them as they are in God. But in God all things are one; in the absolute all is absolute, eternal, infinitude itself. (Accord-to Hegel's parody, the absolute is the night, in which all cows are black.)

The world-ground appears as nature and spirit; yet in itself it is neither the one nor the other, but the unity of both which is raised above all contrariety, the indifference of objective and subjective. Although amid the finitude of the things of the world the self-identity of the absolute breaks up into a plurality of self-developing individual existences, yet even in the phenomenal world of individuals the unity of the ground is not entirely lost: each particular existence is a definite expression of the absolute, and to it as such the character of identity belongs, though in a diminished degree and mingled with difference (Bruno's "monads"). The world-ground is absolute, the individual thing is relative, identity and totality; nothing exists which is merely objective or merely subjective; everything is both, only that one or other of these two factors always predominates. This Schelling terms quantitative difference: the phenomena of nature, like the phenomena of spirit, are a unity of the real and the ideal, only that in the former there is a preponderance of the real, in the latter a preponderance of the ideal.

At first Schelling, in Neoplatonic fashion, maintained the existence of another intermediate region between the spheres of the infinite and the finite: absolute knowing or the self-knowledge of the identity. In this, as the "form" of the absolute, the objective and the subjective are not absolutely one, as they are in the being or "essence" of the absolute, but ideally (potentially) opposed, though one realiter. Later he does away with this distinction also, as existing for reflection alone, not for rational intuition, and outbids his earlier determinations concerning the simplicity of the absolute with the principle, that it is not only the unity of opposites, but also the unity of the unity and the opposition or the identity of the identity, in which fanciful description the dialogue Bruno pours itself forth. A further alteration is brought in by characterizing the absolute as the identity of the finite and the infinite, and by equating the finite with the real or being, the infinite with the ideal or knowing. With this there is joined a philosophical interpretation of the Trinity akin to Lessing's. In the absolute or eternal the finite and the infinite are alike absolute. God the Father is the eternal, or the unity of the finite and the infinite; the Son is the finite in God (before the falling away); the Spirit is the infinite or the return of the finite into the eternal.

In the construction of the real series Schelling proceeds still more schematically and analogically than in the Naturphilosophie of the first period, the contents of which are here essentially reproduced. With this is closely connected his endeavor, in correspondence with the principles of the theory of identity, to show in every phenomenon the operation of all three moments of the absolute. In each natural product all three "potencies" or stages, gravity A(^1), light A(^2), and organization A(^3), are present, only in subordination to one of their number. Since the third potency is never lacking, all is organic; that which appears to us as inorganic matter is only the residuum left over from organization, that which could become neither plant nor animal. New here is the cohesion-series of Steffens (the phenomenon of magnetism), in which nitrogen forms the south pole, carbon the north pole, and iron the point of indifference, while oxygen, hydrogen, and water represent the east pole, west pole, and indifference point in electrical polarity. In the organic world plants represent the carbon pole, animals the nitrogen pole; the former is the north pole, the latter the south. Moreover, the points of indifference reappear: the plant corresponds to water, the animal to iron. Schelling was far outdone in fantastic analogies of this kind by his pupils, especially by Oken, who in his Sketch of the Philosophy of Nature, 1805, compares the sense of hearing, for example, to the parabola, to a metal, to a bone, to the bird, to the mouse, and to the horse. As nature was the imaging of the infinite (unity or essence) into the finite (plurality or form), so spirit is the taking up of the finite into the infinite. In the spiritual realm also all three divine original potencies are every, where active, though in such a way that one is dominant. In intuition (sensation, consciousness, intuition, each in turn thrice divided) the infinite and the eternal are subordinated to the finite; in thought or understanding (concept, judgment, inference, each in three kinds) the finite and the eternal are subordinated to the infinite; in reason (which comprehends all under the form of the absolute) the finite and the infinite are subordinated to the eternal. Intuition is finite cognition, thought infinite cognition, reason eternal cognition. The forms of the understanding do not suffice for the knowledge of reason; common logic with its law of contradiction has no binding authority for speculation, which starts with the equalization of opposites. In the Aphorisms by way of Introduction science, religion, and art figure as stages of the ideal all, in correspondence with the potencies of the real all--matter, motion, and organization. Nature culminates in man, history in the state. Reason, philosophy, is the re-establishment of identity, the return of the absolute to itself.

Unconditioned knowledge, as Schelling maintains in his encyclopedia, i.e., his Lectures on the Method of Academical Study, is the presupposition of all particular knowledge. The function of universities is to maintain intact the connection between particular knowledge and absolute knowledge. The three higher faculties correspond to the three potencies in the absolute: Natural Science and Medicine to the real or finite; History and Law to the ideal or infinite; Theology to the eternal or the copula. There is further a faculty of arts, the so-called Philosophical Faculty, which imparts whatever in philosophy is teachable. The two lectures on theology (viii. and ix.) are especially important. There are two forms of religion, one of which discovers God in nature, while the other finds him in history; the former culminates in the Greek religion, the latter in the Christian, and with the founding of this the third period of history (which Schelling had previously postponed into the future), the period of providence begins. In Christianity mythology is based on religion, not religion on mythology, as was the case in heathenism. The speculative kernel of Christianity is the incarnation of God, already taught by the Indian sages; this, however, is not to be understood as a single event in time, but as eternal. It has been a hindrance to the development of Christianity that the Bible, whose value is far below that of the sacred books of India, has been more highly prized than that which the patristic thinking succeeded in making out of its meager contents.

If, finally, we compare Schelling's system of identity with its model, the system of Spinoza, two essential differences become apparent. Although both thinkers start from a principiant equal valuation of the two phenomenal manifestations of the absolute, nature and spirit, Spinoza tends to posit thought in dependence on extension (the soul represents what the body is), while in Schelling, conversely, the Fichtean preference of spirit is still potent (the state and art stand nearer to the absolute identity than the organism, although, principiantly considered, the greatest possible approximation to the equilibrium of the real and the ideal is as much attained in the one as in the other). The second difference lies in the fact that the idea of development is entirely lacking in Spinoza, while in Schelling it is everywhere dominant. It reminds one of Lessing and Herder, who also attempted to combine Spinozistic and Leibnitzian elements.

%3a. Doctrine of Freedom.%

The system of identity had, with Spinoza, distinguished two worlds, the real world of absolute identity and the imagined world of differentiated and changeable individual things; it had traced back the latter to the former as its ground, but had not deduced it from the former. Whence, then, the imagination which, instead of the unchangeable unity, shows us the changing manifold? Whence the imperfections of the finite, whence evil? The pantheism of Spinoza is inseparably connected with determinism, which denies evil without explaining it. Evil and finitude demand explanation, not denial, and this without the abandonment of pantheism. But explanation by what? By the absolute, for besides the absolute there is naught. How, then, must the pantheistic doctrine of the absolute be transformed in order that the fact of evil and the separate existence of the finite may become comprehensible? To this task are devoted the Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom (Philosophical Works, vol. i., 1809, with which should be compared the Memorial of Jacobi, 1812, and the Answer to Eschenmayer, 1813).

As early as in the Bruno, the problem occasionally emerges why matters do not rest with the original infinite unity of the absolute, why the finite breaks away from the identical primal ground. The possibility of the separation, it is answered, lies in the fact that the finite is like the infinite realiter, and yet, ideally, is different from it; the actuality of the coming forth, however, lies in the non-deducible self-will of the finite. Then after Eschenmayer[1] (Philosophy in its Transition to Not-philosophy, 1803) had characterized the procession of the Ideas out of the Godhead as an impenetrable mystery for thought, before which philosophy must yield to faith, Schelling, in the essay Religion and Philosophy, 1804, goes more deeply into the problem. The origin of the sense-world is conceivable only as a breaking away, a spring, a falling away, which consists in the soul's grasping itself in its selfhood, in its subordination of the infinite in itself to the finite, and in its thus ceasing to be in God. The procession of the world from the infinite is a free act, a fact which can only be described, not deduced as necessary. The counterpart of this attainment of independence on the part of things or creation is history as the return of the world to its source. They are related to each other as the fall to redemption. Both the dismission of the world and its reception back, together with the intervening development, are, however, events needed by God himself in order to become actual God: He develops through the world. (A similar thought was not unknown in the Middle Ages: if God is to give a complete revelation of himself he must make known his grace; and this presupposes sin. As the occasion of divine grace, the fall is a happy, saving fault; without it God could not have revealed himself as gracious, as forgiving, hence not completely.) Schelling's study of Jacob Böhme, to which he was led by Baader, essentially contributed to the concentration of his thought on this point. The Exposition of the True Relation, etc., already distinctly betrays the influence of this mystic. In correspondence with Böhme's doctrine that God is living God only through his inclusion of negation in himself, it is here maintained: A being can manifest itself only when it is not merely one, but has another, an opposition (the many), in itself, whereby it is revealed to itself as unity. With the addition of certain Kantian ideas, in particular the idea of transcendental freedom and the intelligible character, Schelling's theosophy now assumes the following form:

The only way to guard against the determinism and the lifeless God of Spinoza is to assume something in God which is not God himself, to distinguish between God as existent and that which is merely the ground of his existence or "nature in God." In God also the perfect proceeds from the imperfect, he too develops and realizes himself. The actual, perfect God, who is intelligence, wisdom, goodness, is preceded by something which is merely the possibility of all this, an obscure, unconscious impulse toward self-representation. For in the last analysis there is no being but willing; to willing alone belong the predicates of the primal being, groundlessness, eternity, independence of time, self-affirmation. This "ground of existence" is an obscure "longing" to give birth to self, an unconscious impulse to become conscious; the goal of this longing is the "understanding," the Logos, the Word, wherein God becomes revealed to self. By the self-subordination of this longing to the understanding as its matter and instrument, God becomes actual God, becomes spirit and love. The operation of the light understanding on the dark nature-will consists in a separation of forces, whence the visible world proceeds. Whatever in the latter is perfect, rational, harmonious, and purposive is the work of the understanding; the irrational remainder, on the other hand, conflict and lawlessness, abortion, sickness and death, originates in the dark ground. Each thing has two principles in it: its self-will it receives from nature in God, yet, at the same time, as coming from the divine understanding, it is the instrument of the universal will. In God the light and dark principles stand in indissoluble unity, in man they are separable. The freedom of man's will makes him independent of both principles; going over from truth to falsehood, he may strive to make his selfhood supreme and to reduce the spiritual in him to the level of a means, or--with divine assistance--continuing in the center, he may endeavor to subordinate the particular will to the will of love. Good consists in overcoming resistance, for in every case a thing can be revealed only through its opposite. If man yields to temptation it is his own guilty choice. Evil is not merely defect, privation, but something positive, selfhood breaking away, the reversal of the rightful order between the particular and the universal will. The possibility of a separation of the two wills lies in the divine ground (it is "permitted" in order that by overmastering the self-will the will of love may approve itself), the actuality of evil is the free act of the creature. Freedom is to be conceived, in the Kantian sense, as equally far removed from chance or caprice and from compulsion: Man chooses his own non-temporal, intelligible nature; he predestinates himself in the first creation, i.e., from eternity, and is responsible for his actions in the sense-world, which are the necessary results of that free primal act.

[Footnote 1: K. Ad. Eschenmayer was originally a physician, then, 1811-36, professor of philosophy in Tübingen, and died in 1852 at Kirchheim unter Teck.]

As in nature and in the individual, so also in the history of mankind, the two original grounds of things do battle with one another. The golden age of innocence, of happy indecision and unconsciousness concerning sin, when neither good nor evil yet was, was followed by a period of the omnipotence of nature, in which the dark ground of existence ruled alone, although it did not make itself felt as actual evil until, in Christianity, the spiritual light was born in personal form. The subsequent conflict of good against evil, in which God reveals himself as spirit, leads toward a state wherein evil will be reduced to the position of a potency and everything subordinated to spirit, and thus the complete identity of the ground of existence and the existing God be brought about.

Besides this after-reconciliation of the two divine moments, Schelling recognizes another, original unity of the two. The not yet unfolded unity of the beginning (God as Alpha) he terms indifference or groundlessness; the more valuable unity of the end, attained by unfolding (God as Omega) is called identity or spirit. In the former the contraries are not yet present; in the latter they are present no longer. The groundless divides into two equally eternal beginnings, nature and light, or longing and understanding, in order that the two may become one in love, and thereby the absolute develop into the personal God. In this way Schelling endeavors to overcome the antithesis between naturalism and theism, between dualism and pantheism, and to remove the difficulties which arise for pantheism from the fact of evil, as well as from the concepts of personality and of freedom.

In the two moments of the absolute (nature in God--personal spirit) we recognize at once the antithesis of the real and ideal which was given in the philosophy of identity. The chief difference between the mystical period and the preceding one consists in the fact that the absolute itself is now made to develop (from indifference to identity, from the neither-nor to the as-well-as of the antithesis), and that there is conceded to the sense-world a reality which is more than apparent, more than merely present for imagination. That which facilitated this rapid, almost unceasing change of position for Schelling, and which at the same time concealed the fact from him, was, above all, the ambiguous and variable meaning of his leading concepts. The "objective," for example, now signifies unconscious being, becoming, and production, now represented reality, now the real, in so far as it is not represented, but only is. "God" sometimes means the whole absolute, sometimes only the infinite, spiritual moment in the absolute. Scarcely a single term is sharply defined, much less consistently used in a single meaning.

%3b. Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation.%

Once again Schelling is ready with a new statement of the problem. Philosophy is the science of the existent. In this, however, a distinction is to be made between the what (quid sit) and the that (quod sit), or between essence and existence. The apprehension of the essence, of the concept, is the work of reason, but this does not go as far as actual being. Rational philosophy cognizes only the universal, the possible, the necessary truths (whose contradictory is unthinkable), but not the particular and factual. This philosophy can only assert: If anything exists it must conform to these laws; existence is not given with the what. Hegel has ignored this distinction between the logical and the actual, has confused the rational and the real. Even the system of identity was merely rational, i.e., negative, philosophy, to which there must be added, as a second part, a positive or existential philosophy, which does not, like the former, rise to the highest principle, to God, but starts from this supreme Idea and shows its actuality.

The content of this phase of Schelling's thought[1] was so unfruitful, and its influence so small, that brief hints concerning it must here suffice. First of all, the doctrine of the divine potencies and of creation is repeated in altered form, and then there is given a philosophy of the history of religion as a reflection of the theogonic process in human consciousness.

[Footnote 1: On Schelling's negative and positive philosophy, published in the four volumes of the second division of the Works, cf. Karl Groos, Die reine Vernunftwissenschaft, systematische Darstellung von Schellings negativer Philosophie, 1889; Konstantin Frantz, Schellings positive Philosophie, in three parts, 1879-80; Ed. von Hartmann, Gesammelte Studien und Aufsätze, 1876, p. 650 seq.; Ad. Planck, Schellings nachgelassene Werke, 1858; also the essay by Heyder, referred to above].

The potencies are now called the infinite ability to be (inactive will, subject), pure being (being without potentiality, object), and spirit, which is free from the one-sidednesses of mere potentiality and of mere being, and master of itself (subject-object); to these is added, further--not as a fourth, but as that which has the three predicates and is wholly in each--the absolute proper, as the cause and support of these attributes. The original unity of the three forms is dissolved, as the first raises itself out of the condition of a mere potency and withdraws itself from pure being in order to exist for itself; the tension extends itself to the two others--the second now comes out from its selflessness, subdues the first, and so leads the third back to unity. In creation the three potencies stand related as the unlimited Can-be, the limiting Must-be, and the Ought-to-be, or operate as material, formal, and final causes, all held in undivided combination by the soul. It was not until the end of creation that they became personalities. Man, in whom the potencies come to rest, can divide their unity again; his fall calls forth a new tension, and thereby the world becomes a world outside of God. History, the process o progressive reconciliation between the God-estranged world and God, passes through two periods--heathenism, in which the second person works as a natural potency, and Christianity, in which it works with freedom. In the discussion of these positive philosophy becomes a philosophy of mythology and revelation. The irresistible force of mythological ideas is explained by the fact that the gods are not creations of the fancy, but real powers, namely, these potencies, which form the substance of human conciousness.

The history of religion has for its starting-point the relative monotheism of humanity in its original unity, and for its goal the absolute monotheism of Christianity. With the separation into nations polytheism arises. This is partly simultaneous polytheism (a plurality of gods under a chief god), partly successive polytheism (an actual plurality of divinities, changing dynasties of several chief gods), and develops from star worship or Sabeism up to the religion of the Greeks. The Greek mysteries form the transition from mythology to revelation. While in the mythological process one or other of the divine potencies (Ground, Son, Spirit) was always predominant, in Christianity they return into unity. The true monotheism of revelation shows God as an articulated unity, in which the opposites are contained, as being overcome. The person of Christ constitutes the content of Christianity, who, in his incarnation and sacrificial death, yields up the independence out of God which had come to him through the fall of man. The three periods in the development of the Church (real, substantial unity--ideality or freedom--the reconciliation of the two) were foreshadowed in the chief apostles: Peter, with his leaning toward the past, represents the Papal Church; Paul the thinker the Protestant Church; and the gentle John the Church of the future.

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XII. SCHELLING'S CO-WORKERS

In his period of vigorous creation Schelling was the center of an animated philosophical activity. Each phase of his philosophy found a circle of enthusiastic fellow-laborers, whom we must hesitate to term disciples because of their independence and of their reaction on Schelling himself. Only G.M. Klein (1776-1820, professor in Würzburg), Stutzmann (died 1816 in Erlangen; Philosophy of the Universe, 1806; Philosophy of History, 1808), and the historians of philosophy Ast and Rixner can be called disciples of Schelling. Prominent among his co-workers in the philosophy of nature were Steffens, Oken, Schubert, and Carus; besides these the physiologist Burdach, the pathologist Kieser, the plant physiologist Nees von Esenbeck, and the medical thinker Schelver (Philosophy of Medicine, 1809) deserve mention. Besides Hegel, J.J. Wagner and Friedrich Krause distinguished themselves as independent founders of systems of identity; Troxler, Suabedissen, and Berger are also to be assigned to this group. Baader and Schleiermacher were competitors of Schelling in the philosophy of religion, and Solger in aesthetics. Finally Fr. J. Stahl (died 1861; Philosophy of Right, 1830 seq..), was also influenced by Schelling. There is a wide divergence in Schelling's school, as J.E. Erdmann accurately remarks, between the naturalistic pantheist Oken and the mystical theosophist Baader, in whom elements which had been united in Schelling appear divided.

%1. The Philosophers of Nature.%

Henrik Steffens[1] (a Norwegian, 1773-1845; professor in Halle, Breslau, and Berlin) makes individual development the goal of nature--which is first completely attained in man and in his peculiarity or talent--and holds that the catastrophes of the spirit are reflected in the history of the earth. Lorenz Oken[2] (1779-1851; professor in Jena 1807-27, then in Munich and Zurich) identifies God and the universe, which comes to self-consciousness in man, the most perfect animal; teaches the development of organisms from an original slime (a mass of organic elements, infusoria, or cells); and looks on the animal kingdom as man anatomized, in that the animal world contains in isolated development that which man possesses collected in minute organs--the worm is the feeling animal, the insect the light animal, the snail the touch animal, the bird the hearing animal, the fish the smelling animal, the amphibian the taste animal, the mammal the animal of all senses.

[Footnote 1: Steffens, Contributions to the Inner Natural History of the Earth, 1801; Caricatures of the Holiest, 1819-21; Anthropology, 1822.]

[Footnote 2: Oken: On the Significance of the Bones of the Skull, 1807; Text-book of the Philosophy of Nature, 1809-11, 2d ed. 1831, 3d ed. 1843; the journal Isis, from 1817. On Oken cf. C. Güttler, 1885.]

While in Steffens geological interests predominate, and in Oken biological interests, Schubert, Carus, and Ennemoser are the psychologists of the school. Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert[1] (1780-1860; professor in Erlangen and Munich) brings the human soul into intimate relation with the world-soul, whose phantasy gives form to all that is corporeal, and delights to dwell on the abnormal and mysterious phenomena of the inner life, the border-land between the physical and the psychical, on the unconscious and the half-conscious, on presentiments and clairvoyance, as from another direction also Schelling's philosophy was brought into perilous connection with somnambulism. A second predominantly contemplative thinker was Karl Gustav Carus[2] (1789-1869; at his death in Dresden physician to the king; Lectures on Psychology, 1831; Psyche, 1846; Physis, 1851), greatly distinguished for his services to comparative anatomy. Carus endows the cell with unconscious psychical life,--a memory for the past shows itself in the inheritance of dispositions and talents, just as the formation of milk in the breasts of the pregnant and the formation of lungs in the embryo betray a prevision of the future,--and points out that with the higher development of organic and spiritual life the antitheses constantly become more articulate: individual differences are greater among men than among women, among adults than among children, among Europeans than among negroes.

[Footnote 1: G.H. Schubert: Views of the Dark Side of Natural Science, 1808; The Primeval World and the Fixed Stars, 1822; History of the Soul, 1830 (in briefer form, Text-book of the Science of Man and of the Soul, 1838).]

[Footnote 2: Not to be confused with Friedrich August Carus (1770-1807; professor in Leipsic), whose History of Psychology, 1808, forms the third part of his posthumous works.]

%2. The Philosophers of Identity.%

It has been said of the Dane Johann Erich von Berger (1772-1833; from 1814 professor in Kiel; Universal Outlines of Science, 1817-27) that he adopted a middle course between Fichte and Schelling. The same may be asserted of Karl Ferdinand Solger (1780-1819; at his death professor in Berlin; Erwin, Four Dialogues on Beauty and Art, 1815; Lectures on Aesthetics, edited by Heyse, 1829), who points out the womb of the beautiful in the fancy, and introduces into aesthetics the concept of irony, that spirit of sadness at the vanity of the finite, though this is needed by the Idea in order to its manifestation.

In Johann Jacob Wagner[1] (1775-1841; professor in Würzburg) and in J.P.V. Troxler[2] (1780-1866) we find, as in Steffens, a fourfold division instead of Schelling's triads. Both Wagner and Troxler find an exact correspondence between the laws of the universe and those of the human mind. Wagner (in conformity to the categories essence and form, opposition and reconciliation) makes all becoming and cognition advance from unity to quadruplicity, and finds the four stages of knowledge in representation, perception, judgment, and Idea. Troxler shares with Fries the anthropological standpoint, (philosophy is anthropology, knowledge of the world is self-knowledge), and distinguishes, besides the emotional nature or the unity of human nature, four constituents thereof, spirit, higher soul, lower soul (body, Leib), and body (Körper), and four corresponding kinds of knowledge, in reverse order, sensuous perception, experience, reason, and spiritual intuition, of which the middle two are mediate or reflective in character, while the first and last are intuitive. For D. Th. A. Suabedissen also (1773-1835; professor in Marburg; Examination of Man, 1815-18) philosophy is the science of man, and self-knowledge its starting point.

[Footnote 1: J.J. Wagner: Ideal Philosophy, 1804; Mathematical Philosophy, 1811; Organon of Human Knowledge, 1830, in three parts, System of the World, of Knowledge, and of Language. On Wagner cf. L. Rabus, 1862.]

[Footnote 2: Troxler: Glances into the Nature of Man, 1812; Metaphysics, 1828; Logic, 1830.]

The relatively limited reputation enjoyed in his own time and to-day by Friedrich Krause[1] (born in Eisenberg 1781; habilitated in Jena 1802; lived privately in Dresden; became a Privatdocent in Göttingen from 1824; and died at Munich 1832; Prototype of Humanity, 1812, and numerous other works) has been due, on the one hand, to the appearance of his more gifted contemporary Hegel, and, on the other, to his peculiar terminology. He not only Germanized all foreign words in a spirit of exaggerated purism, but also coined new verbal roots, (Mäl, Ant, Or, Om) and from these formed the most extraordinary combinations (Vereinselbganzweseninnesein, Oromlebselbstschauen). His most important pupil, Ahrens (professor in Leipsic, died 1874; Course of Philosophy, 1836-38; Natural Right, 1852), helped Krause's doctrine to gain recognition in France and Belgium by his fine translations into French; while it was introduced into Spain by J.S. del Rio of Madrid (died 1869).--Since the finite is a negative, the infinite a positive concept, and hence the knowledge of the infinite primal, the principle of philosophy is the absolute, and philosophy itself knowledge of God or the theory of essence. The Subjective Analytic Course leads from the self-viewing of the ego up to the vision of God; the Synthetic Course starts from the fundamental Idea, God, and deduces from this the partial Ideas, or presents the world as the revelation of God. For his attempted reconciliation of theism and pantheism Krause invented the name panentheism, meaning thereby that God neither is the world nor stands outside the world, but has the world in himself and extends beyond it. He is absolute identity, nature and reason are relative identity, viz., the identity of the real and ideal, the former with the character of reality, the latter with the character of ideality. Or, the absolute considered from the side of its wholeness (infinity) is nature, considered from the side of its selfhood (unconditionality) is reason; God is the common root of both. Above nature and reason is humanity, which combines in itself the highest products of both, the most perfect animal body and self-consciousness. The humanity of earth, the humanity known to us, is but a very small portion of the humanity of the universe, which in the multitude of its members, which cannot be increased, constitutes the divine state. Krause's most important work is his philosophy of right and of history, with its marks of a highly keyed idealism. He treats human right as an effluence of divine right; besides the state or legal union, he recognizes many other associations--the science and the art union, the religious society, the league of virtue or ethical union. His philosophy of history (General Theory of Life, edited by Von Leonhardi, 1843) follows the Fichteo-Hegelian rhythm, unity, division, and reunion, and correlates the several ages with these. The first stage is germinal life; the second, youth; the third, maturity. The culmination is followed by a reverse movement from counter-maturity, through counter-youth, to counter-childhood, whereupon the development recommences--without cessation. It is to be regretted that this noble-minded man joined to his warm-hearted disposition, broad outlook, and rigorous method a heated fancy, which, crippling the operation of these advantageous qualities, led his thought quite too far away from reality. Ahrens, Von Leonhardi, Lindemann, and Roeder may be mentioned as followers of Krause.

[Footnote 1: On Krause cf. P. Hohlfeld, Die Krausesche Philosophic, 1879; B. Martin, 1881; R. Eucken, Zur Erinnerung an Krause, Festrede, 1881. From his posthumous works Hohlfeld and Wünsche have published the Lectures on Aesthetics, the System of Aesthetics (both 1882), and numerous other treatises.]

%3. The Philosophers of Religion.%

Franz (von) Baader, the son of a physician, was born in Munich in 1765, resided there as superintendent of mines, and, from 1826, as professor of speculative dogmatics, and died there also in 1841. His works, which consisted only of a series of brief treatises, were collected (16 vols., 1851-60) by his most important adherent, Franz Hoffman[1] (at his death in 1881 professor in Würzburg). Baader may be characterized as a mediaeval thinker who has worked through the critical philosophy, and who, a believing, yet liberal Catholic, endeavors to solve with the instruments of modern speculation the old Scholastic problem of the reconciliation of faith and knowledge. His themes are, on the one hand, the development of God, and, on the other, the fall and redemption, which mean for him, however, not merely inner phenomena, but world-events. He is in sympathy with the Neoplatonists, with Augustine, with Thomas Aquinas, with Eckhart, with Paracelsus, above all, with Jacob Böhme, and Böhme's follower Louis Claude St. Martin (1743-1804), but does not overlook the value of the modern German philosophy. With Kant he begins the inquiry with the problem of knowledge; with Fichte he finds in self-consciousness the essence, and not merely a property, of spirit; with Hegel he looks on God or the absolute spirit not only as the object, but also as the subject of knowledge. He rejects, however, the autonomy of the will and the spontaneity of thought; and though he criticises the Cartesian separation between the thought of the creator and that of the creature, he as little approves the pantheistic identification of the two--human cognition participates in the divine, without constituting a part of it.

[Footnote 1: Besides Hoffman, Lutterbeck and Hamberger have described and expounded Baader's system. See also Baumann's paper in the Philosophische Monatshefte, vol. xiv., 1878, p. 321 seq.]

In accordance with its three principal objects, "God, Nature, and Man," philosophy divides into fundamental science (logic or the theory of knowledge and theology), the philosophy of nature (cosmology or the theory of creation and physics), and the philosophy of spirit (ethics and sociology). In all its parts it must receive religious treatment. Without God we cannot know God. In our cognition of God he is at once knower and known; our being and all being is a being known by him; our self-consciousness is a consciousness of being known by God: cogitor, ergo cogito et sum; my being and thinking are based on my being thought by God. Conscience is a joint knowing with God's knowing (conscientia). The relation between the known and the knower is threefold. Cognition is incomplete and lacks the free co-operation of the knower when God merely pervades (durchwohnt) the creature, as is the case with the devil's timorous and reluctant knowledge of God. A higher stage is reached when the known is present to the knower and dwells with him (beiwohnt). Cognition becomes really free and perfect when God dwells in (inwohnt) the creature, in which case the finite reason yields itself freely and in admiration to the divine reason, lets the latter speak in itself, and feels its rule, not as foreign, but as its own. (Baader maintains a like threefoldness in the practical sphere: the creature is either the object or, rather, the passive recipient, or the organ, or the representative of the divine action, i.e., in the first case, God alone works; in the second, he co-operates with the creature; in the third, the creature works with the forces and in the name of God. Joyful obedience, conscious of its grounds, is the highest freedom). Knowing and loving, thought and volition, knowledge and faith, philosophy and dogma are as little to be abstractly divided as thing and self, being and thought, object and subject. True freedom and genuine speculation are neither blind traditional belief nor doubting, God-estranged thinking, but the free recognition of authority, and self-attained conviction of the truth of the Church doctrine.

Baader distinguishes a twofold creation of the world and a double process of development (an esoteric and an exoteric revelation) of God himself. The creation of the ideal world, as a free act of love, is a non-deducible fact; the theogonic process, on the contrary, is a necessary event by which God becomes a unity returning from division to itself, and so a living God. The eternal self-generation of God is a twofold birth: in the immanent or logical process the unsearchable will (Father) gives birth to the comprehensible will (Son) to unite with it as Spirit; the place of this self-revelation is wisdom or the Idea. In the emanent or real process, since desire or nature is added to the Idea and is overcome by it, these three moments become actual persons. In the creation of the--at first immaterial--world, in which God unites, not with his essence, but with his image only, the same two powers, desire and wisdom, operate as the principles of matter and form. The materialization of the world is a consequence of the fall. Evil consists in the elevation of selfhood, which springs from desire, into self-seeking. Lucifer fell because of pride, and man, yielding to Lucifer's temptation, from baseness, by falling in love with nature beneath him. By the creation of matter God has out of pity preserved the world, which was corrupted by the fall, from the descent into hell, and at the same time has given man occasion for moral endeavor. The appearance of Christ, the personification of the moral law, is the beginning of reconciliation, which man appropriates through the sacrament. Nature participates in the redemption, as in the corruption.

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was born in 1768 at Breslau, and died in 1834 in Berlin, where he had become preacher at Trinity church in 1809, professor of theology in 1810, member of the philosophical section of the Academy in 1811, and its secretary in 1814. Reared in the Moravian schools at Niesky and Barby, he studied at Halle; and, between 1794 and 1804, was a preacher in Landsberg on the Warthe, in Berlin (at the Charité Hospital), and in Stolpe, then professor in Halle. He first attracted attention by the often republished Discourses on Religion addressed to the Educated among those who despise it, 1799 (critical edition by Pünjer, 1879), which was followed in the succeeding year by the Monologues, and the anonymous Confidential Letters on Lucinde (Lucinde was the work of his friend Fr. Schlegel). Besides several collections of sermons, mention must further be made of his Outlines of a Critique of Previous Ethics, 1803; The Celebration of Christmas, 1806; and his chief theological work, The Christian Faith, 1822, new edition 1830. In the third (the philosophical) division of his Collected Works (1835-64) the second and third volumes contain the essays on the history of philosophy, on ethical, and on academic subjects; vols. vi. to ix., the Lectures on Psychology, Esthetics, the Theory of the State, and Education, edited by George, Lommatsch, Brandis, and Platz; and the first part of vol. iv., the History of Philosophy (to Spinoza), edited by Ritter. The Monologues and The Celebration of Christmas have appeared in Reclam's Bibliothek.

Schleiermacher's philosophy is a rendezvous for the most diverse systems. Side by side with ideas from Kant, Fichte, and Schelling we meet Platonic, Spinozistic, and Leibnitzian elements; even Jacobi and the Romanticists have contributed their mite. Schleiermacher is an eclectic, but one who, amid the fusion of the most diverse ideas, knows how to make his own individuality felt. In spite of manifold echoes of the philosophemes of earlier and of contemporary thinkers, his system is not a conglomeration of unrelated lines of thought, but resembles a plant, which in its own way works over and assimilates the nutritive elements taken up from the soil. Schleiermacher is attractive rather than impressive; he is less a discoverer than a critic and systematizer. His fine critical sense works in the service of a positive aim, subserves a harmonizing tendency; he takes no pleasure in breaking to pieces, but in adjusting, limiting, and combining. There is no one of the given views which entirely satisfies him, none which simply repels him; each contains elements which seem to him worthy of transformation and adoption. When he finds himself confronted by a sharp conflict of opinion, he seeks by careful mediation to construct a whole out of the two "half truths," though this, it is true, does not always give a result more satisfactory than the partial views which he wishes to reconcile. A single example may be given of this conciliatory tendency: space, time, and the categories are not only subjective forms of knowledge, but at the same time objective forms of reality. "Not only" is the watchword of his philosophy, which became the prototype of the numberless "ideal realisms" with which Germany was flooded after Hegel's death. If the skeptical and eclectic movements, which constantly make their appearance together, are elsewhere divided among different thinkers, they here come together in one mind in the form of a mediating criticism, which, although it argues logically, is yet in the end always guided by the invisible cords of a feeling of justice in matters scientific. In its weaker portions Schleiermacher's philosophy is marked by lack of grasp, pettiness, and sportiveness. It lacks courage and force, and the rare delicacy of the thought is not entirely able to compensate for this defect. In its fear of one-sidedness it takes refuge in the arms of an often faint-hearted policy of reconciliation.

We shall not discuss the specifically theological achievements of this many-sided man, nor his great services in behalf of the philological knowledge of the history of philosophy--through his translation of Plato, 1804-28, and a series of valuable essays on Greek thinkers--but shall confine our attention to the leading principles of his theory of knowledge, of religion, and of ethics.

The Dialectic[1] (edited by Jonas, 1839), treats in a transcendental part and a technical or formal part of the concept and the forms of knowledge. Knowledge is thought. What distinguishes that thought which we call knowledge from that other thought which does not deserve this honorable title, from mere opinion? Two criteria: its agreement with the thought of other thinkers (its universality and necessity), and its agreement with the being which is thought in it. That thought alone is knowledge which is represented as necessarily valid for all who are capable of thought, and as corresponding to a being or reproducing it. These two agreements (among thinkers, and of thought with the being which is thought) are the criteria of knowledge--let us turn now to its factors. These are essentially the two brought forward by Kant, sensibility and understanding; Schleiermacher calls them the organic function and the intellectual function. The organic activity of the senses furnishes us, in sensations, the unordered, manifold material of knowledge, which is formed and unified by the activity of reason. If we except two concepts which limit our knowledge, chaos and God--absolute formlessness or chaos is an idea just as incapable of realization as absolute unity or deity--every actual cognition is a product of both factors, of the sensuous organization and of reason. But these two do not play equal parts in every cognitive act. When the organic function is predominant we have perception; when the intellectual function predominates we have thought in the strict sense. A perfect balance of the two would be intuition, which, however, constitutes the goal of knowledge, never fully to be realized. These two kinds of knowledge, therefore, are not specifically, but only relatively, different: in all perception reason is also active, and in all thought sensibility, only to a less degree than the opposite function. Moreover, perception and thought, or sensibility and reason, are by no means to relate to different objects. They have the same object, only that the organic activity represents it as an indefinite, chaotic manifold, while the activity of reason (whose work consists in discrimination and combination), represents it as a well-ordered multiplicity and unity. It is the same being which is represented by perception in the form of an "image," and by thought in the form of a "concept." In the former case we have the world as chaos; in the latter, we have it as cosmos. Inasmuch as the two factors in knowledge represent the same object in relatively different ways, it may be said of them that they are opposed to each other, and yet identical. The same is true of the two modes of being which Schleiermacher posits as real and ideal over against the two factors in thought. The real is that which corresponds to the organic function, the ideal that which corresponds to the activity of reason. These forms of being also are opposed, and yet identical. Our self-consciousness gives clear proof of the fact that thought and being can be identical; in it, as thinking being, we have the identity of the real and the ideal, of being and thought immediately given. As the ego, in which the subject of thought and the object of thought are one, is the undivided ground of its several activities, so God is the primal unity, which lies at the basis of the totality of the world. As in Schelling, the absolute is described as self-identical, absolute unity, exalted above the antithesis of real and ideal, nay, above all antitheses. God is the negation of opposites, the world the totality of them. If there were an adequate knowledge of the absolute identity it would be an absolute knowledge. This is denied, however, to us men, who are never able to rise above the opposition of sensuous and intellectual cognition. The unity of thought and being is presupposed in all thinking, but can never actually be thought. As an Idea this identity is indispensable, but to think it definitely, either by conception or judgment, is impossible. The concepts supreme power (God or creative nature) and supreme cause (fate or providence) do not attain to that which we seek to think in them: that which has in it no opposition is an idea incapable of realization by man, but, nevertheless, a necessary ideal, the presupposition of all cognition (and volition), and the ground of all certitude. All knowledge must be related to the absolute unity and be accompanied by it. Since, then, the absolute identity cannot be presented, but ever sought for only, and absolute knowledge exists only as an ideal, dialectic is not so much a science as a technique of thought and proof, an introduction to philosophic thinking or (since knowledge is thought in common) to discussion in conformity with the rules of the art. With this the name dialectic returns to its original Platonic meaning.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Quaebicker, Ueber Schleiermachers erkeuntnisstheoretische Grundansicht, 1871, and the Inquiries by Bruno Weiss in the Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vols. lxxiii.-lxxv., 1878-79.]

The popular ideas of God ill stand examination by the standard furnished by the principle of identity. The plurality of attributes which we are accustomed to ascribe to God agree but poorly with his unity free from all contrariety. In reality God does not possess these manifold attributes; they first arise in the religious consciousness, in which his unconditioned and undivided working is variously reflected and, as it were, divided. They are only the various reflections of his undivided nature in the mind of the observer. In God ability and performance, intelligence and will, his thought of self and his thought of the world coincide in one. Even the concept of personality must not be ascribed to God, since it is a limitation of the infinite and belongs to mythology; while the idea of life, on the contrary, is allowable as a protection against atheism and fatalism. When Schleiermacher, further, equates the activity of God and the causality of nature he ranges himself on the pantheistic side in regard to the question of the "immanence or transcendence of God," without being willing to acknowledge it. It sounds Spinozistic enough when he says: God never was without the world, he exists neither before nor outside it, we know him only in us and in things. Besides that which he actually brings forth, God could not produce anything further, and just as little does he miraculously interfere in the course of the world as regulated by natural law. Everything takes place necessarily, and man is distinguished above other beings neither by freedom (if by freedom we understand anything more than inner necessitation) nor by eternal existence. Like all individual beings, so we are but changing states in the life of the universe, which, as they have arisen, will disappear again. The common representations of immortality, with their hope of future compensation, are far from pious. The true immortality of religion is this--amid finitude to become one with the infinite, and in one moment to be eternal.

Schleiermacher's optimism well harmonizes with this view of the relation between God and the world. If the universe is the phenomenon of the divine activity, then considered as a whole it is perfect; whatever of imperfection we find in it, is merely the inevitable result of finitude. The bad is merely the less perfect; everything is as good as it can be; the world is the best possible; everything is in its right place; even the meanest thing is indispensable; even the mistakes of men are to be treated with consideration. All is good and divine. In this way Schleiermacher weds ideas from Spinoza to Leibnitzian conceptions. From the former he appropriates pantheism, from the latter optimism and the concept of individuality; he shares determinism with both: all events, even the decisions of the will, are subject to the law of necessity.

In the philosophy of religion Schleiermacher created a new epoch by his separation between religion and related departments with which it had often been identified before his time, as it has been since. In its origin and essence religion is not a matter of knowing, further, not a matter of willing, but a matter of the heart. It lies quite outside the sphere of speculation and of practice, coincides neither with metaphysics nor with ethics, is not knowledge and not volition, but an intermediate third: it has its own province in the emotional nature, where it reigns without limitation; its essence is intuition and feeling in undivided unity. In feeling is revealed the presence of the infinite; in feeling we become immediately aware of the Deity. The absolute, which in cognition and volition we only presuppose and demand, but never attain, is actually given in feeling alone as the relative identity and the common ground of cognition and volition. Religion is piety, an affective, not an objective, consciousness. And if certain religious ideas and actions ally themselves with the pious state of mind, these are not essential constituents of religion, but derivative elements, which possess a religious significance only in so far as they immediately develop from piety and exert an influence upon it. That which makes an act religious is always feeling as a point of indifference between knowing and doing, between receptive and forthgoing activity, as the center and junction of all the powers of the soul, as the very focus of personality. And as feeling in general is the middle point in the life of the soul, so, again, the religious feeling is the root of all genuine feeling. What sort of a feeling, then, is piety? Schleiermacher answers: A feeling of absolute dependence. Dependence on what? On the universe, on God. Religion grows out of the longing after the infinite, it is the sense and taste for the All, the direction toward the eternal, the impulse toward the absolute unity, immediate experience of the world harmony; like art, religion is the immediate apprehension of a whole. In and before God all that is individual disappears, the religious man sees one and the same thing in all that is particular. To represent all events in the world as actions of a God, to see God in all and all in God, to feel one's self one with the eternal,--this is religion. As we look on all being within us and without as proceeding from the world-ground, as determined by an ultimate cause, we feel ourselves dependent on the divine causality. Like all that is finite, we also are the effect of the absolute Power. While we stand in a relation of interaction with the individual parts of the world, and feel ourselves partially free in relation to them, we can only receive effects from God without answering them; even our self-activity we have from him. Nevertheless the feeling of dependence is not to be depressing, not humbling merely, but the joyous sense of an exaltation and broadening of life. In our devotion to the universe we participate in the life of the universe; by leaning on the infinite we supplement our finitude--religion makes up for the needy condition of man by bringing him into relation with the absolute, and teaching him to know and to feel himself a part of the whole.

From this elevating influence of religion, which Schleiermacher eloquently depicts, it is at once evident that his definition of it as a feeling of absolute dependence is only half correct. It needs to be supplemented by the feeling of freedom, which exalts us by the consciousness of the oneness of the human reason and the divine. It is only to this side of religion, neglected by Schleiermacher, that we can ascribe its inspiring influence, which he in vain endeavors to derive from the feeling of dependence. Power can never spring from humility as such. This defect, however, does not detract from Schleiermacher's merit in assigning to religion a special field of spiritual activity. While Kant treats religion as an appendix to ethics, and Hegel, with a one-sidedness which is still worse, reduces it to an undeveloped form of knowledge, Schleiermacher recognizes that it is not a mere concomitant phenomenon--whether an incidental result or a preliminary stage--of morality or cognition, but something independent, co-ordinate with volition and cognition, and of equal legitimacy. The proof that religion has its habitation in feeling is the more deserving of thanks since it by no means induced Schleiermacher to overlook the connection of the God-consciousness with self-consciousness and the consciousness of the world. Schleiermacher's theory, moreover, may be held correct without ignoring the relatively legitimate elements in the views of religion which he attacked. With the view that religion has its seat in feeling, it is quite possible to combine a recognition of the fact that it has its origin in the will, and its basis in morals, and that, further, it has the significance of being (to use Schopenhauer's words) the "metaphysics of the people."

Although religion and piety be made synonymous, it must still be admitted that in a being capable of knowing and willing as well as of feeling, this devout frame will have results in the spheres of cognition and action. In regard to cultus Schleiermacher maintains that a religious observance which does not spring from one's own feeling and find an echo therein is superstitious, and demands that religious feeling, like a sacred melody, accompany all human action, that everything be done with religion, nothing from religion. Instead of expressing itself in single specifically religious actions, the religious feeling should uniformly pervade the whole life. Let a private room be the temple where the voice of the priest is raised. Dogmas, again, are descriptions of pious excitation, and take their origin in man's reflection on his religious feelings, in his endeavor to explain them, in his expression of them in ideas and words. The concepts and principles of theology are valid only as descriptions and presentations of feelings, not as cognitions; by their unavoidable anthropomorphic character alone they are completely unfitted for science. The dogmatic system is an envelopment which religion accepts with a smile. He who treats religious doctrines as science falls into empty mythology. Principles of faith and principles of knowledge are in no way related to one another, neither by way of opposition nor by way of agreement; they never come into contact. A theology in the sense of an actual science of God is impossible. Further, out of its dogmas the Church constructs prescriptive symbols, a step which must be deplored. It is to be hoped that some time religion will no longer have need of the Church. In view of the present condition of affairs it must be said that the more religious a man is the more secular he must become, and that the cultured man opposes the Church in order to promote religion.

So-called natural religion is nothing more than an abstraction of thought; in reality positive religions alone exist. Because of the infinity of God and the finitude of man, the one, universal, eternal religion can only manifest itself in the form of particular historical religions, which are termed revealed because founded by religious heroes, creative personalities, in whom an especially lively religious feeling is aroused by a new view of the universe, and determines (not, like artistic inspiration, single moments, but) their whole existence. Three stages are to be distinguished in the development of religion, according as the world is represented as an unordered unity (chaos), or as an indeterminate manifold of forces and elements (plurality without unity), or, finally, as an organized plurality dominated by unity (system)--fetichism with fatalism, polytheism, mono- (including pan-) theism. Among the religions of the third stadium Islam is physical or aesthetic in spirit; Judaism and Christianity, on the other hand, ethical or teleological. The Christian religion is the most perfect, because it gives the central place to the concept of redemption and reconciliation (hence to that which is essential to religion) instead of to the Jewish idea of retribution.

The concept of individuality became of the highest importance for Schleiermacher's ethics, as well as for his philosophy of religion; and by his high appreciation of it he ranges himself with Leibnitz, Herder, Goethe, and Novalis. Now two sides may be distinguished both in regard to that which the individual is and to that which he ought to accomplish. Like every particular being, man is an abbreviated, concentrated presentation of the universe; he contains everything in himself, contains all, that is, in a not yet unfolded, germinal manner, awaiting development in life in time, but yet in a form peculiar to him, which is never repeated elsewhere. This yields a twofold moral task. The individual ought to rouse into actuality the infinite fullness of content which he possesses as possibility, as slumbering germs, should harmoniously develop his capacities; yet in this he must not look upon the unique form which has been bestowed upon him as worthless. He is not to feel himself a mere specimen, an unimportant repetition of the type, but as a particular, and in this particularity a significant, expression of the absolute, whose omission would cause a gap in the world. It is surprising that the majority of the thinkers who have defended the value of individuality lay far less stress upon the micro-cosmical nature of the individual and the development of his capacities in all directions than on care for his peculiar qualities. So also Schleiermacher. Yet he gradually returned from the extreme individualism--the Monologues affect one almost repellently by the impulse which they give to vain self-reflection--which he at first defended.

In the Ethics (edited by Kirchmann, 1870; earlier editions by Schweizer, 1835, and Twesten, 1841) Schleiermacher brings the well-nigh forgotten concept of goods again into honor. The three points of view from which ethics is to be discussed, and each of which presents the whole ethical field in its own peculiar way--the good, virtue, duty--are related as resultant, force, and law of motion. Every union of reason and nature produced by the action of the former on the latter is called a good; the sum of these unities, the highest good. According as reason uses nature as an instrument in formation or as a symbol in cognition her action is formative or indicative; it is, further, either common or peculiar. On the crossing of these (fluctuating) distinctions of identical and individual organization and symbolization is based the division of the theory of goods:

SPHERES. RELATIONS. GOODS. Ident. Organ.: Intercourse. Right. The State. Individ. Organ.: Property. Free Sociability. Class, House, Friendship. Ident. Symbol.: Knowledge. Faith. School and University. Individ. Symbol.: Feeling. Revelation. The Church (Art).

The four ethical communities, each of which represents the organic union of opposites--rulers and subjects, host and guests, teachers and pupils or scholars and the public, the clergy and the laity--have for their foundation the family and the unity of the nation. Virtue (the personal unification of reason and sensibility) is either disposition or skill, and in each case either cognitive or presentative; this yields the cardinal virtues wisdom, love, discretion, and perseverance. The division of duties into duties of right, duties of love, duties of vocation, and duties of conscience rests on the distinction between community in production and appropriation, each of which may be universal or individual. The most general laws of duty (duty is the Idea of the good in an imperative form) run: Act at every instant with all thy moral power, and aiming at thy whole moral problem; act with all virtues and in view of all goods, further, Always do that action which is most advantageous for the whole sphere of morality, in which two different factors are included: Always do that toward which thou findest thyself inwardly moved, and that to which thou findest thyself required from without. Instead of following further the wearisome schematism of Schleiermacher's ethics, we may notice, finally, a fundamental thought which our philosopher also discussed by itself: The sharp contraposition of natural and moral law, advocated by Kant, is unjustifiable; the moral law is itself a law of nature, viz., of rational will. It is true neither that the moral law is a mere "ought" nor that the law of nature is a mere "being," a universally followed "must." For, on the one hand, ethics has to do with the law which human action really follows, and, on the other, there are violations of rule in nature also. Immorality, the imperfect mastery of the sensuous impulses by rational will, has an analogue in the abnormalities--deformities and diseases--in nature, which show that here also the higher (organic) principles are not completely successful in controlling the lower processes. The higher law everywhere suffers disturbances, from the resistance of the lower forces, which cannot be entirely conquered. It is Schleiermacher's determinism which leads him, in view of the parallelism of the two legislations, to overlook their essential distinction.

Adherents of Schleiermacher are Vorländer (died 1867), George (died 1874), the theologian, Richard Rothe (died 1867; cf. Nippold, 1873 seq.), and the historians of philosophy, Brandis (died 1867) and H. Ritter (died 1869).[1]

[Footnote 1: W. Dilthey (born 1834), the successor of Lotze in Berlin, is publishing a life of Schleiermacher (vol. i. 1867-70). Cf. also Dilthey's briefer account in the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, and Haym's Romantische Schule, 1870. Further, Aus Schleiermachers Leben, in Briefen, 4 vols., 1858-63.]

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XIII. HEGEL

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born at Stuttgart on August 27, 1770. He attended the gymnasium of his native city, and, from 1788, the Tübingen seminary as a student of theology; while in 1793-1800 he resided as a private tutor in Berne and Frankfort-on-the-Main. In the latter city the plan of his future system was already maturing. A manuscript outline divides philosophy, following the ancient division, logic, physics, and ethics, into three parts, the first of which (the fundamental science, the doctrine of the categories and of method, combining logic and metaphysics) considers the absolute as pure Idea, while the second considers it as nature, and the third as real (ethical) spirit. Hegel habilitated in 1801 at Jena, with a Latin dissertation On the Orbits of the Planets, in which, ignorant of the discovery of Ceres, he maintained that on rational grounds--assuming that the number-series given in Plato's Timaeus is the true order of nature--no additional planet could exist between Mars and Jupiter. This dissertation gives, further, a deduction of Kepler's laws. The essay on the Difference between the Systems of Fichte and Schelling had appeared even previous to this. In company with Schelling he edited in 1802-03 the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie. The article on "Faith and Knowledge" published in this journal characterizes the standpoint of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte as that of reflection, for which finite and infinite, being and thought form an antithesis, while true speculation grasps these in their identity. In the night before the battle of Jena Hegel finished the revision of his Phenomenology of Spirit, which was published in 1807. The extraordinary professorship given him in 1805 he was forced to resign on account of financial considerations; then he was for a year a newspaper editor in Bamberg, and in 1808 went as a gymnasial rector to Nuremberg, where he instructed the higher classes in philosophy. His lectures there are printed in the eighteenth volume of his works, under the title Propaedeutic. In the Nuremberg period fell his marriage and the publication of the Logic (vol. i. 1812, vol. ii. 1816). In 1816 he was called as professor of philosophy to Heidelberg (where the Encyclopedia appeared, 1817), and two years later to Berlin. The Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, 1821, is the only major work which was written in Berlin. The Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik, founded in 1827 as an organ of the school, contained a few critiques, but for the rest he devoted his whole strength to his lectures. He fell a victim to the cholera on November 14, 1831. The collected edition of his works in eighteen volumes (1832-45) contains in vols. ii.-viii. the four major works which had been published by Hegel himself (the Encyclopaedia with additions from the Lectures); in vols. i., xvi., and xvii. the minor treatises; in vols. ix.-xv. the Lectures, edited by Cans, Hotho, Marheineke, and Michelet. The Letters from and to Hegel have been added as a nineteenth volume, under the editorship of Karl Hegel, 1887.[1]

[Footnote 1: Hegel's Life has been written by Karl Rosenkranz (1844), who has also defended the master (Apologie Hegels, 1858) against R. Haym (Hegel und seine Zeit, 1857), and extolled him as the national philosopher of Germany (1870; English by G.S. Hall). Cf., further, the neat popular exposition by Karl Köstlin, 1870, and the essays by Ed. von Hartmann, Ueber die dialektische Methode, 1868, and Hegels Panlogismus (1870, incorporated in the Gesammelte Studien und Aufsätze, 1876). [The English reader may consult E. Caird's Hegel in Blackwood's Philosophical Classics, 1883; Harris's Hegel's Logic, Morris's Hegel's Philosophy of the State and of History, and Kedney's Hegel's Aesthetics in Griggs's Philosophical Classics; and Wallace's translation of the "Logic"--from the Encyclopaedia--with Prolegomena, 1874, 2d. ed., Translation, 1892, Prolegomena to follow. Stirling's Secret of Hegel, 2 vols., London, 1865, includes a translation of a part of the Logic, and numerous translations from different works of the master are to be found in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. The Lectures on the Philosophy of History have been translated by J. Sibree, M.A., in Bohn's Library, 1860, and E.S. Haldane is issuing a translation of those on the History of Philosophy, vol. i., 1892.--TR.]]

We may preface our exposition of the parts of the system by some remarks on Hegel's standpoint in general and his scientific method.

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

In Hegel there revives in full vigor the intellectualism which from the first had lain in the blood of German philosophy, and which Kant's moralism had only temporarily restrained. The primary of practical reason is discarded, and theory is extolled as the ground, center, and aim of human, nay, of all existence.

Leibnitz and Hegel are the classical representatives of the intellectualistic view of the world. In the former the subjective psychological point of view is dominant, in the latter, the objective cosmical position: Leibnitz argues from the representative nature of the soul to an analogous constitution of all elements of the universe; from the general mission of all that is real, to be a manifestation of reason, Hegel deduces that of the individual spirit, to realize a determinate series of stages of thought. The true reality is reason; all being is the embodiment of a pregnant thought, all becoming a movement of the concept, the world a development of thought. The absolute or the logical Idea exists first as a system of antemundane concepts, then it descends into the unconscious sphere of nature, awakens to self-consciousness in man, realizes its content in social institutions, in order, finally, in art, religion, and science to return to itself enriched and completed, i.e., to attain a higher absoluteness than that of the beginning. Philosophy is the highest product and the goal of the world-process. As will, intuition, representation, and feeling are lower forms of thought, so ethics, art, and religion are preliminary stages in philosophy; for it first succeeds in that which these vainly attempt, in presenting the concept adequately, in conceptual form.

If we develop that which is contained as a constituent factor or by implication in the intellectualistic thesis, "All being is thought realized, all becoming a development of thought," we reach the following definitions: (i) The object of philosophy is formed by the Ideas of things. Its aim is to search out the concept, the purpose, the significance of phenomena, and to assign to these their corresponding positions in the world and in the system of knowledge. It is chiefly interested in discovering where in the scale of values a thing belongs according to its meaning and its destination; the procedure is teleological, valuing, aesthetic. Instead of a causal explanation of phenomena we are given an ideal interpretation of them. (So Lotze accurately describes the character of German idealism.) (2) If all that is real is a manifestation of reason and each thing a stage, a modification of thought, then thought and being are identical. (3) If the world is thought in becoming, and philosophy has to set forth this process, philosophy is a theory of development. If each thing realizes a thought, then all that is real is rational; and if the world-process attains its highest stadium in philosophy, and this in turn its completion in the system of absolute idealism, then all that is rational is real. Reason or the Idea is not merely a demand, a longed for ideal, but a world-power which accomplishes its own realization. "The rational is real and the real is rational" (Preface to the Philosophy of Right). Or to sum it up--Hegel's philosophy is idealism, a system of identity, and an optimistic doctrine of development. What, then, distinguishes Hegel from other idealists, philosophers of identity, and teachers of development? What in particular distinguishes him from his predecessor Schelling?

In Schelling nature is the subject and art the conclusion of the development; his idealism has a physical and aesthetical character, as Fichte's an ethical character. In Hegel, however, the concept is the subject and goal of the development, his philosophy is, in the words of Haym, a "Logisierung" of the world, a logical idealism.

The theory of identity is that system which looks upon nature and spirit as one in essence and as phenomenal modes of an absolute which is above them both. But while Schelling treats the real and the ideal as having equal rights, Hegel restores the Fichtean subordination of nature to spirit, without, however, sharing Fichte's contempt for nature. Nature is neither co-ordinate with spirit nor a mere instrument for spirit, but a transition stage in the development of the absolute, viz., the Idea in its other-being (Anderssein). It is spirit itself that becomes nature in order to become actual, conscious spirit; before the absolute became nature it was already spirit, not, indeed, "for itself" (für sich), yet "in itself" (an sich), it was Idea or reason. The ideal is not merely the morning which follows the night of reality, but also the evening which precedes it. The absolute (the concept) develops from in-itself (Ansich) through out-of-self (Aussersich) or other-being to for-itself (Fürsich); it exists first as reason (system of logical concepts), then as nature, finally as living spirit. Thus Hegel's philosophy of identity is distinguished from Schelling's by two factors: it subordinates nature to spirit, and conceives the absolute of the beginning not as the indifference of the real and ideal, but as ideal, as a realm of eternal thoughts.

The assertion that Hegel represents a synthesis of Fichte and Schelling is therefore justified. This is true, further, for the character of Hegel's thought as a whole, in so far as it follows a middle course between the world-estranged, rigid abstractness of Fichte's thinking and Schelling's artistico-fanciful intuition, sharing with the former its logical stringency as well as its dominant interest in the philosophy of spirit, and with the latter its wide outlook and its sense for the worth and the richness of that which is individual.

We have characterized Hegel's system, thirdly, as a philosophy of development. The point of distinction here is that Hegel carries out with logical consecutiveness and up to the point of obstinacy the principle of development which Fichte had discovered, and which Schelling also had occasionally employed,--the threefold rhythm thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Here we come to Hegel's dialectic method. He reached this as the true method of speculation through a comparison of the two forms of philosophy which he found dominant at the beginning of his career--the Illumination culminating in Kant, on the one hand, and, on the other, the doctrine of identity defended by Schelling and his circle--neither of which entirely satisfied him.

In regard to the main question he feels himself one with Schelling: philosophy is to be metaphysics, the science of the absolute and its immanence in the world, the doctrine of the identity of opposites, of the, per se of things, not merely of their phenomenon. But the form which Schelling had given it seems to him unscientific, unsystematic, for Schelling had based philosophical knowledge on the intuition of genius--and science from intuition is impossible. The philosophy of the Illumination impresses him, on the other hand, by the formal strictness of its inquiry; he agrees with it that philosophy must be science from concepts. Only not from abstract concepts. Kant and the Illumination stand on the platform of reflection, for which the antithesis of thought and being, finite and infinite remains insoluble, and, consequently, the absolute transcendent, and the true essence of things unknowable. Hegel wishes to combine the advantages of both sides, the depth of content of the one, and the scientific form of the other.

The intuition with which Schelling works is immediate cognition, directed to the concrete and particular. The concept of the philosophy of reflection is mediate cognition, moving in the sphere of the abstract and universal. Is it not feasible to do away with the (unscientific) immediateness of the one, and the (non-intuitive, content-lacking) abstractness of the other, to combine the concrete with the mediate or conceptual, and in this way to realize the Kantian ideal of an intuitive understanding? A concrete concept would be one which sought the universal not without the particular, but in it; which should not find the infinite beyond the finite, nor the absolute at an unattainable distance above the world, nor the essence hidden behind the phenomenon, but manifesting itself therein. If the philosophy of reflection, in the abstract lifelessness of its concepts, looked on opposites as incapable of sublation, and Schelling regarded them as immediately identical, if the former denied the identity of opposites, and the latter maintained it primordially given (in the absolute indifference which is to be grasped by intuition), the concrete concept secures the identity of opposites through self-mediation, their passing over into it; it teaches us to know the identity as the result of a process. First immediate unity, then divergence of opposites, and, finally, reconciliation of opposites--this is the universal law of all development.

The conflict between the philosophy of reflection and the philosophy of intuition, which Hegel endeavors to terminate by a speculation at once conceptual and concrete, concerns (1) the organ of thought, (2) the object of thought, (3) the nature and logical dignity of the contradiction.

The organ of the true philosophy is neither the abstract reflective understanding, which finds itself shut up within the limits of the phenomenal, nor mystical intuition, which expects by a quick leap to gain the summit of knowledge concerning the absolute, but reason as the faculty of concrete concepts. That concept is concrete which does not assume an attitude of cold repulsion toward its contrary, but seeks self-mediation with the latter, and moves from thesis through antithesis, and with it, to synthesis. Reason neither fixes the opposites nor denies them, but has them become identical. The unity of opposites is neither impossible nor present from the first, but the result of a development.

The object of philosophy is not the phenomenal world or the relative, but the absolute, and this not as passive substance, but as living subject, which divides into distinctions, and returns from them to identity, which develops through the opposites. The absolute is a process, and all that is real the manifestation of this process. If science is to correspond to reality, it also must be a process. Philosophy is thought-movement (dialectic); it is a system of concepts, each of which passes over into its successor, puts its successor forth from itself, just as it has been generated by its predecessor.

All reality is development, and the motive force in this development (of the world as well as of science) is opposition, contradiction. Without this there would be no movement and no life. Thus all reality is full of contradiction, and yet rational. The contradiction is not that which is entirely alogical, but it is a spur to further thinking. It must not be annulled, but "sublated" _(aufgehoben), i.e., at once negated and conserved. This is effected by thinking the contradictory concepts together in a third higher, more comprehensive, and richer concept, whose moments they then form. As sublated moments they contradict each other no longer; the opposition or contradiction is overcome. But the synthesis is still not a final one; the play begins anew; again an opposition makes its appearance, which in turn seeks to be overcome, etc. Each separate concept is one-sided, defective, represents only a part of the truth, needs to be supplemented by its contrary, and, by its union with this, its complement, yields a higher concept, which comes nearer to the whole truth, but still does not quite reach it. Even the last and richest concept--the absolute Idea--is by itself alone not the full truth; the result implies the whole development through which it has been attained. It is only at the end of such a dialectic of concepts that philosophy reaches complete correspondence with the living reality, which it has to comprehend; and the speculative progress of thought is no capricious sporting with concepts on the part of the thinking subject, but the adequate expression of the movement of the matter itself. Since the world and its ground is development, it can only be known through a development of concepts. The law which this follows, in little as in great, is the advance from position to opposition, and thence to combination. The most comprehensive example of this triad--Idea, Nature, Spirit--gives the division of the system; the second--Subjective, Objective, Absolute Spirit--determines the articulation of the third part.

%2. The System.%

Hegel began with a Phenomenology by way of introduction, in which (not to start, like the school of Schelling, with absolute knowledge "as though shot from a pistol") he describes the genesis of philosophical cognition with an attractive mingling of psychological and philosophico-historical points of view. He makes spirit--the universal world-spirit as well as the individual consciousness, which repeats in brief the stages in the development of humanity--pass through six stadia, of which the first three (consciousness, self-consciousness, reason) correspond to the progress of the intermediate part of the Doctrine of Subjective Spirit, which is entitled Phänomenologie, and the others (ethical spirit, religion, and absolute knowledge) give an abbreviated presentation of that which the Doctrine of Objective and Absolute Spirit develops in richer articulation.

%(a) Logic% considers the Idea in the abstract element of thought, only as it is thought, and not yet as it is intuited, nor as it thinks itself; its content is the truth as it is without a veil in and for itself, or God in his eternal essence before the creation of the world. Unlike common logic, which is merely formal, separating form and content, speculative logic, which is at the same time ontology or metaphysics, treats the categories as real relations, the forms of thought as forms of reality: as thought and thing are the same, so logic is the theory of thought and of being in one. Its three principal divisions are entitled Being, Essence, the Concept. The first of these discusses quality, quantity, and measure or qualitative quantum. The second considers essence as such, appearance, and (essence appearing or) actuality, and this last, in turn, in the moments, substantiality, causality, and reciprocity. The third part is divided into the sections, subjectivity (concept, judgment, syllogism), objectivity (mechanism, chemism, teleology), and the Idea (life, cognition, the absolute Idea).

As a specimen of the way in which Hegel makes the concept pass over into its opposite and unite with this in a synthesis, it will be sufficient to cite the famous beginning of the Logic. How must the absolute first be thought, how first defined? Evidently as that which is absolutely without presupposition. The most general concept which remains after abstracting from every determinate content of thought, and from which no further abstraction is possible, the most indeterminate and immediate concept, is pure being. As without quality and content it is equivalent to nothing. In thinking pure being we have rather cogitated nothing; but this in turn cannot be retained as final, but passes back into being, for in being thought it exists as a something thought. Pure being and pure nothing are the same, although we mean different things by them; both are absolute indeterminateness. The transition from being to nothing and from nothing to being is becoming. Becoming is the unity, and hence the truth of both. When the boy is "becoming" a youth he is, and at the same time is not, a youth. Being and not-being are so mediated and sublated in becoming that they are no longer contradictory. In a similar way it is further shown that quality and quantity are reciprocally dependent and united in measure (which may be popularly illustrated thus: progressively diminishing heat becomes cold, distances cannot be measured in bushels); that essence and phenomenon are mutually inseparable, inasmuch as the latter is always the appearance of an essence, and the former is essence only as it manifests itself in the phenomenon, etc.

The significance of the Hegelian logic depends less on its ingenious and valuable explanations of particulars than on the fundamental idea, that the categories do not form an unordered heap, but a great organically connected whole, in which each member occupies its determinate position, and is related to every other by gradations of kinship and subordination. This purpose to construct a globus of the pure concepts was itself a mighty feat, which is assured of the continued admiration of posterity notwithstanding the failure in execution. He who shall one day take it up again will draw many a lesson from Hegel's unsuccessful attempt. Before all, the connections between the concepts are too manifold and complex for the monotonous transitions of this dialectic method (which Chalybaeus wittily called articular disease) to be capable of doing them justice. Again, the productive force of thought must not be neglected, and to it, rather than to the mobility of the categories themselves, the matter of the transition from one to the other must be transferred.

%(b) The Philosophy of Nature% shows the Idea in its other-being. Out of the realm of logical shades, wherein the souls of all reality dwell, we move into the sphere of external, sensuous existence, in which the concepts take on material form. Why does the Idea externalize itself? In order to become actual. But the actuality of nature is imperfect, unsuited to the Idea, and only the precondition of a better actuality, the actuality of spirit, which has been the aim from the beginning: reason becomes nature in order to become spirit; the Idea goes forth from itself in order--enriched--to return to itself again. Only the man who once has been in a foreign land knows his home aright.

The relation of natural objects to one another and their action upon one another is an external one: they are governed by mechanical necessity, and the contingency of influences from without arrests and disturbs their development, so that while reason is everywhere discernible in nature, it is not reason alone; and much that is illogical, contrary to purpose, lawless, painful, and unhealthy, points to the fact that the essence of nature consists in externality. This inadequacy in the realization of the Idea, however, is gradually removed by development, until, in "life," the way is prepared for the birth of spirit.

As Hegel in his philosophy of nature--which falls into three parts, mechanics, physics, and organics--follows Schelling pretty closely, and, moreover, does not show his power, it does not seem necessary to dwell longer upon it. In the next section, also, in view of the fact that its models, the constructive psychologies of Fichte and Schelling, have already been discussed in detail, a statement of the divisions and connections must suffice.

%(c) The Doctrine of Subjective Spirit% makes freedom (being with or in self) the essence and destination of spirit, and shows how spirit realizes this predisposition in increasing independence of nature. The subject of anthropology is spirit as the (natural, sensitive, and actual) "soul" of a body; here are discussed the distinctions of race, nation, sex, age, sleeping and waking, disposition and temperament, together with talents and mental diseases, in short, whatever belongs to spirit in its union with a body. Phenomenology is the science of the "ego," i.e., of spirit, in so far as it opposes itself to nature as the non-ego, and passes through the stages of (mere) consciousness, self-consciousness, and (the synthesis of the two) reason. Psychology (better pneumatology) considers "spirit" in its reconciliation with objectivity under the following divisions: Theoretical Intelligence as intuition (sensation, attention, intuition), as representation (passive memory, phantasy, memory), and (as conceiving, judging, reasoning) thought; Practical Intelligence as feeling, impulse (passion and caprice), and happiness; finally, the unity of the knowing and willing spirit, free spirit or rational will, which in turn realizes itself in right, ethics, and history.

%(d) The Doctrine of Objective Spirit%, comprehending ethics, the philosophy of right, of the state, and of history, is Hegel's most brilliant achievement. It divides as follows: (1) Right (property, contract, punishment); (2) Morality (purpose, intention and welfare, good and evil); (3) Social Morality: (a) the family; (b) civil society; (c) the state (internal and external polity, and the history of the world). In right the will or freedom attains to outer actuality, in morality it attains to inner actuality, in social morality to objective and subjective actuality at once, hence to complete actuality.

Right, as it were a second, higher nature, because a necessity posited and acknowledged by spirit, is originally a sum of prohibitions; wherever it seems to command the negative has only received a positive expression. Private right contains two things--the warrant to be a person, and the injunction to respect other persons as such. Property is the external sphere which the will gives to itself; without property no personality. Through punishment (retaliation) right is restored against un-right (Unrecht), and the latter shown to be a nullity. The criminal is treated according to the same maxim as that of his action--that coercion is allowable.

In the stadium of morality the good exists in the form of a requirement which can never be perfectly fulfilled, as a mere imperative; there remains an irrepressible opposition between the moral law and the individual will, between intention and execution. Here the judge of good and evil is the conscience, which is not secure against error. That which is objectively evil may seem good and a duty to subjective conviction. (According to Fichte this was impossible).

On account of the conflict between duty and will, which is at this stage irrepressible, Hegel is unable to consider morality, the sphere of the subjective disposition, supreme. He thinks he knows a higher sphere, wherein legality and morality become one: "social morality" (Sittlichkeit). This sphere takes its name from Sitte, that custom ruling in the community which is felt by the individual not as a command from without, but as his own nature. Here the good appears as the spirit of the family and of the people, pervading individuals as its substance. Marriage is neither a merely legal nor a merely sentimental relation, but an "ethical" (sittliches) institution. While love rules in the family, in civil society each aims at the satisfaction of his private wants, and yet, in working for himself, subserves the good of the whole. Class distinctions are based on the division of labor demanded by the variant needs of men (the agricultural, industrial, and thinking classes). Class and party honor is, in Hegel's view, among the most essential supports of general morality. Strange to say, he brings the administration of justice and the police into the same sphere.

The state, the unity of the family and civil society, is the completed actualization of freedom. Its organs are the political powers (which are to be divided, but not to be made independent): the legislative power determines the universal, the executive subsumes the particular thereunder, the power of the prince combines both into personal unity. In the will of the prince the state becomes subject. The perfect form of the state is constitutional monarchy, its establishment the goal of history, which Hegel, like Kant, considers chiefly from the political standpoint.

History is the development of the rational state; the world-spirit the guiding force in this development; its instruments the spirits of the nations and great men. A particular people is the expression of but one determinate moment of the universal spirit; and when it has fulfilled its commission it loses its legal warrant, and yields up its dominion to another, now the only authorized one: the history of the world is the judgment of the world, which is held over the nations. The world-historical characters, also, are only the instruments of a higher power, the purposes of which they execute while imagining that they are acting in their own interests--their own deed is hidden from them, and is neither their purpose nor their object. This should be called the cunning of reason, that it makes the passions work in its service.

History is progress in the consciousness of freedom. At first one only knows himself free, then several, finally all. This gives three chief periods, or rather four world-kingdoms,--Oriental despotism, the Greek (democratic) and the Roman (aristocratic) republic, and the Germanic monarchy,--in which humanity passes through its several ages. Like the sun, history moves from east to west. China and India have not advanced beyond the preliminary stages of the state; the Chinese kingdom is a family state, India a society of classes stiffened into castes. The Persian despotism is the first true state, and this in the form of a conquering military state. In the youth and manhood of humanity the sovereignty of the people replaces the sovereignty of one; but not all have yet the consciousness of freedom, the slaves have no share in the government. The principle of the Greek world, with its fresh life and delight in beauty, is individuality; hence the plurality of small states, in which Sparta is an anticipation of the Roman spirit. The Roman Republic is internally characterized by the constitutional struggle between the patricians and the plebeians, and externally by the policy of world conquest. Out of the repellent relations between the universal and the individual, which oppose one another as the abstract state and abstract personality, the unhappy imperial period develops. In the Roman Empire and Judaism the conditions were given for the appearance of Christianity. This brings with it the idea of humanity: every man is free as man, as a rational being. In the beginning this emancipation was religious; through the Germans it became political as well. The remaining divisions cannot here be detailed. Their captions run: The Elements of the Germanic Spirit (the Migrations; Mohammedanism; the Frankish Empire of Charlemagne); the Middle Ages (the Feudal System and the Hierarchy; the Crusades; the Transition from Feudal Rule to Monarchy, or the Cities); Modern Times (the Reformation; its Effect on Political Development; Illumination and Revolution).

The philosophy of history[1] is Hegel's most brilliant and most lasting achievement. His view of the state as the absolute end, the complete realization of the good, is dominated, no doubt, by the antique ideal, which cannot take root again in the humanity of modern times. But his splendid endeavor to "comprehend" history, to bring to light the laws of historical development and the interaction between the different spheres of national life, will remain an example for all time. The leading ideas of his philosophy of history have so rapidly found their way into the general scientific consciousness that the view of history which obtained in the period of the Illumination is well nigh incomprehensible to the investigator of to-day.

[Footnote 1: A well-chosen collection of aphorisms from the philosophy of history is given by M. Schasler under the title Hegel: Populäre Gedanken aus seinen Werken, 2d. ed., 1873.]

%(e) Absolute Spirit% is the unity of subjective and objective spirit. As such, spirit becomes perfectly free (from all contradictions) and reconciled with itself. The break between subject and object, representation and thing, thought and being, infinite and finite is done away with, and the infinite recognized as the essence of the finite. The knowledge of the reconciliation of the highest opposites or of the infinite in the finite presents itself in three forms: in the form of intuition (art), of feeling and representation (religion), of thought (philosophy).

(1) Aesthetics.--The beautiful is the absolute (the infinite in the finite) in sensuous existence, the Idea in limited manifestation. According to the relation of these moments, according as the outer form or the inner content predominates, or a balance of the two occurs, we have the symbolic form of art, in which the phenomenon predominates and the Idea is merely suggested; or the classical form, in which Idea and intuition, or spiritual content and sensuous form, completely balance and pervade each other, in which the former of them is ceaselessly taken up into the latter; or the romantic form, in which the phenomenon retires, and the Idea, the inwardness of the spirit predominates. Classical art, in which form and content are perfectly conformed to each other, is the most beautiful, but romantic art is, nevertheless, higher and more significant.

Oriental, including Egyptian and Hebrew, art was symbolic; Greek art, classical; Christian art is romantic, bringing into art entirely new sentiments of a knightly and a religious sort--love, loyalty and honor, grief and repentance--and understanding how by careful treatment to ennoble even the petty and contingent. The sublime belongs to symbolic art; the Roman satire is the dissolution of the classical, and humor the dissolution of the romantic, ideal.

Architecture is predominantly symbolic; sculpture permits the purest expression of the classical ideal; painting, music, and poetry bear a romantic character. This does not exclude the recurrence of these three stages within each art--in architecture, for example, as monumental (the obelisk), useful (house and temple), and Gothic (the cathedral) architecture. As the plastic arts reached their culmination among the Hellenes, so the romantic arts culminate among the Christian nations. In poetry, as the most perfect and universal (or the totality of) art, uniting in itself the two contraries, the symbolic and the classical, the lyric is a repetition of the architectonic-musical, the epic, of the plastic-pictorial, the drama, the union of the lyric and the epic.

(2) Philosophy of Religion.--The withdrawal from outer sensibility into the inner spirit, begun in romantic art, especially in poetry, is completed in religion. In religion the nations have recorded the way in which they represent the substance of the world; in it the unity of the infinite and the finite is felt, and represented through imagination. Religion is not merely a feeling of piety, but a thought of the absolute, only not in the form of thinking. Religion and philosophy are materially the same, both have God or the truth for their object, they differ only in form--religion contains in an empirical, symbolic form the same speculative content which philosophy presents in the adequate form of the concept. Religion is developing knowledge as it gradually conquers imperfection. It appears first as definite religion in two stadia, natural religion and the religion of spiritual individuality, and finally attains the complete realization of its concept in the absolute religion of Christianity.

Natural religion, in its lowest stage magic, develops in three forms--as the religion of measure (Chinese), of phantasy (Indian or Brahmanical), and of being in self (Buddhistic). In the Persian (Zoroastrian) religion of light, the Syrian religion of pain, and the Egyptian religion of enigma, is prepared the way for the transformation into the religion of freedom. The Greek solves the riddle of the Sphinx by apprehending himself as subject, as man.

The religion of spiritual individuality or free subjectivity passes through three stadia: the Jewish religion of sublimity (unity), the Greek religion of beauty (necessity), the Roman religion of purposiveness (of the understanding). In contrast to the Jewish religion of slavish obedience, which by miracle makes known the power of the one God and the nullity of nature, which has been "created" by his will, and the prosaic severity of the Roman, which, in Jupiter and Fortuna, worships only the world-dominion of the Roman people, the more cheerful art-religion of the Hellenes reverences in the beautiful forms of the gods, the powers which man is aware of in himself--wisdom, bravery, and beauty.

The Christian or revealed religion is the religion of truth, of freedom, of spirit. Its content is the unity of the divine nature and the human, God as knowing himself in being known of man+; the knowledge of God is God's self-knowledge. Its fundamental truths are the Trinity (signifying that God differentiates and sublates the difference in love), the incarnation (as a figure of the essential unity of the infinite and finite spirit), the fall, and Christ's atoning death (this signifies that the realization of the unity between man and God presupposes the overcoming of naturality and selfishness).

(3) Philosophy.--Finally the task remains of clothing the absolute content given in religion in the form adequate to it, in the form of the concept. In philosophy absolute spirit attains the highest stage, its perfect self-knowledge. It is the self-thinking Idea.

Here we must not look for further detailed explanations: philosophy is just the course which has been traversed. Its systematic exposition is encyclopaedia; the consideration of its own actualization, the history of philosophy, which, as a "philosophical" discipline, has to show the conformity to law and the rationality of this historical development, to show the more than mere succession, the genetic succession, of systems, as well as their connection with the history of culture. Each system is the product and expression of its time, and as the self-reflection of each successive stage in culture cannot appear before this has reached its maturity and is about to be overcome. Not until the approach of the twilight does the owl of Minerva begin its flight.

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X. FICHTE

XI. SCHELLING

XII. SCHELLING'S CO-WORKERS

XIII. HEGEL