History Of Modern Philosophy
by
Richard Falckenberg

Part 11 out of 13



the spirit of Reid, by James McCosh (a native of Scotland, but since 1868
in America; _The Intuitions of the Mind_, 3d ed., 1872; _The Laws of
Discursive Thought_, new ed., 1891; _First and Fundamental Truths_, 1889);
while in Noah Porter (died 1892; _The Human Intellect_, new ed., 1876; _The
Elements of Moral Science_, 1885) it appears modified by elements from
German thinking.

Jeremy Bentham[1] (1748-1832) is noteworthy for his attempt to revive
Epicureanism in modern form. Virtue is the surest means to pleasure, and
pleasure the only self-evident good. Every man strives after happiness, but
not every one in the right way. The honest man calculates correctly, the
criminal falsely; hence a careful calculation of the value of the various
pleasures, and a prudent use of the means to happiness, is the first
condition of virtue; in this the easily attainable minor joys, whose
summation amounts to a considerable quantum, must not be neglected. The
value of a pleasure is measured by its intensity, duration, certainty,
propinquity, fecundity in the production of further pleasure, purity or
freedom from admixture of consequent pain, and extent to the greatest
possible number of persons. Every virtuous action results in a balance of
pleasure. Inflict no evil on thyself or others from which a balance of good
will not result. The end of morality is the "greatest happiness of the
greatest number," in the production of which each has first to care for
his own welfare: whoever injures himself more than he serves others acts
immorally, for he diminishes the sum of happiness in the world; the
interest of the individual coincides with the interest of society. The two
classes of virtues are prudence and benevolence. The latter is a natural,
though not a disinterested affection: happiness enjoyed with others is
greater than happiness enjoyed alone. Love is a pleasure-giving extension
of the individual; we serve others to be served by them.

[Footnote 1: Bentham: _Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation_, 1789; new ed., 1823, reprinted 1876; _Deontology_, 1834,
edited by Bowring, who also edited the _Works_, 1838-43. _The Principles
of Civil and Criminal Legislation_, edited in French from Bentham's
manuscripts by his pupil Etienne Dumont (1801, 2d ed., 1820; English by
Hildreth, 5th ed., 1887), was translated into German with notes by F.E.
Beneke, 1830.]

Associationalism has been reasserted by James Mill (1773-1836; _Analysis of
the Phenomena of the Human Mind_, 1829), whose influence lives on in the
work of his greater son. The latter, John Stuart Mill,[1] was born in
London 1806, and was from 1823 to 1858 a secretary in the India House;
after the death of his wife he lived (with the exception of two years of
service as a Member of Parliament) at Avignon; his death occurred in
1873. Mill's _System of Logic_ appeared in 1843, 9th ed., 1875; his
_Utilitarianism_, 1863, new ed., 1871; _An Examination of Sir William
Hamilton's Philosophy_, 1865, 5th ed., 1878; his notes to the new edition
of his father's work, _Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind_, 2d
ed., 1878, also deserve notice. With the phenomenalism of Hume and the
(somewhat corrected) associational psychology of his father as a basis,
Mill makes experience the sole source of knowledge, rejecting _a priori_
and intuitive elements of every sort. Matter he defines as a "permanent
possibility of sensation"; mind is resolved into "a series of feelings with
a background of possibilities of feeling," even though the author is not
unaware of the difficulty involved in the question how a series of feelings
can be aware of itself as a series. Mathematical principles, like all
others, have an experiential origin--the peculiar certitude ascribed to
them by the Kantians is a fiction--and induction is the only fruitful
method of scientific inquiry (even in mental science). The syllogism is
itself a concealed induction.

[Footnote 1: Cf. on Mill. Taine, _Le Positivisme Anglais_, 1864 [English,
by Haye]; the objections of Jevons _(Contemporary Review_, December, 1877
_seq_., reprinted in _Pure Logic and other Minor Works_, 1890; cf. _Mind_,
vol. xvi. pp. 106-110) to Mill's doctrine of the inductive character of
geometry, his treatment of the relation of resemblance, and his exposition
of the four methods of experimental inquiry in their relation to the law of
causation; and the finely conceived essay on utilitarianism, by C.
Hebler, _Philosophische Aufsãtze_, 1869, pp. 35-66. [Also Mill's own
_Autobiography_, 1873: Bain's _John Stuart Mill, a Criticism_, 1882; and
T.H. Green, Lectures on the _Logic, Works_, vol. ii.--TR.]]

When I assert the major premise the inference proper is already made, and
in the conclusion the comprehensive formula for a number of particular
truths which was given in the premise is merely explicated, interpreted.
Because universal judgments are for him merely brief expressions for
aggregates of particular truths, Mill is able to say that all knowledge is
generalization, and at the same time to argue that all inference is from
particulars to particulars. Inference through a general proposition is not
necessary, yet useful as a collateral security, inasmuch as the syllogistic
forms enable us more easily to discover errors committed. The ground of
induction, the uniformity of nature in reference both to the coexistence
and the succession of phenomena, since it wholly depends on induction,
is not unconditionally certain; but it may be accepted as very highly
probable, until some instance of lawless action (in itself conceivable)
shall have been actually proved. Like the law of causation, the principles
of logic are also not _a priori_, but only the highest generalizations from
all previous experience.

Mill's most brilliant achievement is his theory of experimental inquiry,
for which he advances four methods: (1) The Method of Agreement: "If two
or more instances of the phenomenon under investigation have only one
circumstance in common, the circumstance in which alone all the instances
agree is the cause (or effect) of the given phenomenon." (2) The Method of
Difference: "If an instance in which the phenomenon under investigation
occurs, and an instance in which it does not occur, have every circumstance
in common save one, that one occurring only in the former; the circumstance
in which alone the two instances differ, is the effect, or the cause, or an
indispensable part of the cause, of the phenomenon," These two methods (the
method of observation, and the method of artificial experiment) may also be
employed in combination, and the Canon of the Joint Method of Agreement and
Difference runs: "If two or more instances in which the phenomenon occurs
have only one circumstance in common, while two or more instances in
which it does not occur have nothing in common save the absence of that
circumstance, the circumstance in which alone the two sets of instances
differ is the effect, or the cause, or an indispensable part of the
cause, of the phenomenon." (3) The Method of Residues: "Subduct from any
phenomenon such part as is known by previous inductions to be the effect of
certain antecedents, and the residue of the phenomenon is the effect of the
remaining antecedents." (4) The Method of Concomitant Variations: "Whatever
phenomenon varies in any manner whenever another phenomenon varies in some
particular manner, is either a cause or an effect of that phenomenon, or is
connected with it through some fact of causation." When the phenomena are
complex the deductive method must be called in to aid: from the inductively
ascertained laws of the action of single causes this deduces the laws
of their combined action; and, as a final step, the results of such
ratiocination are verified by the proof of their agreement with empirical
facts. To explain a phenomenon means to point out its cause; the
explanation of a law is its reduction to other, more general laws. In all
this, however, we remain within the sphere of phenomena; the essence of
nature always eludes our knowledge.

In the chapter "Of Liberty and Necessity" (book vi. chap, ii.) Mill
emphasizes the position that the necessity to which human actions are
subject must not be conceived, as is commonly done, as irresistible
compulsion, for it denotes nothing more than the uniform order of our
actions and the possibility of predicting them. This does not destroy
the element in the idea of freedom which is legitimate and practically
valuable: we have the power to alter our character; it is formed _by_ us
as well as _for_ us; the desire to mould it is one of the most influential
circumstances in its formation. The principle of morality is the promotion
of the happiness of all sentient beings. Mill differs from Bentham,
however, from whom he derives the principle of utility, in several
important particulars--by his recognition of qualitative as well as of
quantitative differences in pleasures, of the value of the ordinary rules
of morality as intermediate principles, of the social feelings, and of the
disinterested love of virtue. Opponents of the utilitarian theory have
not been slow in availing themselves of the opportunities for attack thus
afforded.[1] A third distinguished representative of the same general
movement is Alexander Bain, the psychologist (born 1818; _The Senses and
the Intellect_, 3d ed., 1868; _The Emotions and the Will_, 3d ed., 1875;
_Mental and Moral Science_, 1868, 3d ed., 1872, part ii., 1872; _Mind and
Body_, 3d ed., 1874).

[Footnote 1: On the relation of Bentham and Mill cf. Höffding, p. 68:
Sidgwick's _Outlines_, chap. iv. § 16; and John Grote's _Examination of the
Utilitarian Philosophy_, 1870, chap. i.]

The system projected by Herbert Spencer (born 1820), the major part of
which has already appeared, falls into five parts: _First Principles_,
1862, 7th ed., 1889; _Principles of Biology_, 1864-67, 4th ed., 1888;
_Principles of Psychology_, 1855, 5th ed., 1890; _Principles of Sociology_
(vol. i. 1876, 3d ed., 1885; part iv. _Ceremonial Institutions_, 1879, 3d
ed., 1888, part v. _Political Institutions_, 1882, 2d ed., 1885, part vi.
_Ecclesiastical Institutions_, 1885, 2d ed., 1886, together constituting
vol. ii.); _Principles of Ethics_ (part i. _The Data of Ethics_, 1879, 5th
ed., 1888; parts ii. and iii. _The Inductions of Ethics_ and _The Ethics of
Individual Life_, constituting with part i. the first volume, 1892; part
iv. _Justice_, 1891). A comprehensive exposition of the system has been
given, with the authority of the author, by F.H. Collins in his _Epitome of
the Synthetic Philosophy_, 1889.[1] The treatise on _Education_, 1861, 23d
ed., 1890, his sociological writings, and his various essays have also
contributed essentially to Mr. Spencer's fame, both at home and abroad. The
_First Principles_ begin with the "Unknowable." Since human opinions, no
matter how false they may seem, have sprung from actual experiences, and,
when they find wide acceptance and are tenaciously adhered to, must have
something in them which appeals to the minds of men, we must assume that
every error contains a kernel of truth, however small it be. No one of
opposing views is to be accepted as wholly true, and none rejected as
entirely false. To discover the incontrovertible fact which lies at their
basis, we must reject the various concrete elements in which they disagree,
and find for the remainder the abstract expression which holds true
throughout its divergent manifestations. No antagonism is older, wider,
more profound, and more important than that between religion and science.
Here too some most general truth, some ultimate fact must lie at the basis.
The ultimate religious ideas are self-contradictory and untenable. No
one of the possible hypotheses concerning the nature and origin of
things--every religion may be defined as an _a priori_ theory of the
universe, the accompanying ethical code being a later growth--is logically
defensible: whether the world is conceived atheistically as self-existent,
or pantheistically as self-created, or theistically (fetichism, polytheism,
or monotheism), as created by an external agency, we are everywhere
confronted by unthinkable conclusions. The idea of a First Cause or of
the absolute (as Mansel, following Hamilton, has proved in his _Limits
of Religious Thought_) is full of contradictions. But however widely the
creeds diverge, they show entire unanimity, from the grossest superstition
up to the most developed theism, in the belief that the existence of the
world is a mystery which ever presses for interpretation, though it can
never be entirely explained. And in the progress of religion from crude
fetichism to the developed theology of our time, the truth, at first but
vaguely perceived, that there is an omnipresent Inscrutable which manifests
itself in all phenomena, ever comes more clearly into view.

[Footnote 1: Cf. also Fiske's _Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy_, 2 vols.,
1874. Numerous critiques and discussions of Spencer's views have been given
in various journals and reviews; among more extended works reference may be
made to Bowne, _The Philösophy of Herbert Spencer_, 1874; Malcolm Guthrie,
_On Mr. Spencer's Formula of Evolution_, 1879, and the same author, _On Mr.
Spencer's Unification of Knowledge_, 1882; and T.H. Green, on Spencer and
Lewes, _Works_, vol. i.--TR.]

Science meets this ultimate religious truth with the conviction, grasped
with increasing clearness as the development proceeds from Protagoras to
Kant, that the reality hidden behind all phenomena must always remain
unknown, that our knowledge can never be absolute. This principle maybe
established inductively from the incomprehensibility of the ultimate
scientific ideas, as well as deductively from the nature of intelligence,
through an analysis of the product and the process of thought. (1) The
ideas space, time, matter, motion, and force, as also the first states of
consciousness, and the thinking substance, the ego as the unity of subject
and object, all represent realities whose nature and origin are entirely
incomprehensible. (2) The subsumption of particular facts under more
general facts leads ultimately to a most general, highest fact, which
cannot be reduced to a more general one, and hence cannot be explained or
comprehended. (3) All thought (as has been shown by Hamilton in his essay
"On the Philosophy of the Unconditioned," and by his follower Mansel)
is the establishment of relations, every thought involving relation,
difference, and (as Spencer adds) likeness. Hence the absolute, the idea
of which excludes every relation, is entirely beyond the reach of an
intelligence which is concerned with relations alone, and which always
consists in discrimination, limitation, and assimilation--it is trebly
unthinkable. Therefore: Religion and Science agree in the supreme truth
that the human understanding is capable of relative knowledge only or of a
knowledge of the relative (Relativity). Nevertheless, according to Spencer,
it is too much to conclude with the thinkers just mentioned, that the
idea of the absolute is a mere expression for inconceivability, and its
existence problematical. The nature of the absolute is unknowable, but
not the existence of a basis for the relative and phenomenal. The
considerations which speak in favor of the relativity of knowledge and its
limitation to phenomena, argue also the existence of a non-relative, whose
phenomenon the relative is; the idea of the relative and the phenomenal
posits _eo ipso_ the existence of the absolute as its correlative, which
manifests itself in phenomena. We have at least an indefinite, though not
a definite, consciousness of the Unknowable as the Unknown Cause, the
Universal Power, and on this is founded our ineradicable belief in
objective reality.

All knowledge is limited to the relative, and consists in increasing
generalization: the apex of this pyramid is formed by philosophy. Common
knowledge is un-unified knowledge; science is partially unified knowledge;
philosophy, which combines the highest generalizations of the sciences into
a supreme one, is completely unified knowledge. The data of philosophy
are--besides an Unknowable Power--the existence of knowable likenesses and
differences among its manifestations, and a resulting segregation of the
manifestations into those of subject and object. Further, derivative data
are space (relations of coexistence), time (relations of irreversible
sequence), matter (coexistent positions that offer resistance), motion
(which involves space, time, and matter), and force, the ultimate of
ultimates, on which all others depend, and from our primordial experiences
of which all the other modes of consciousness are derivable. Similarly the
ultimate primary truth is the _persistence of force_, from which, besides
the indestructibility of matter and the continuity of (actual or potential)
motion, still further truths may be deduced: the persistence of relations
among forces or the uniformity of law, the transformation and equivalence
of (mental and social as well as of physical) forces, the law of the
direction of motion (along the line of least resistance, or the line of
greatest traction, or their resultant), and the unceasing rhythm of
motion. Beyond these analytic truths, however, philosophy demands a law of
universal synthesis. This must be the law of _the continuous redistribution
of matter and motion_, for each single thing, and the whole universe
as well, is involved in a (continuously repeated) double process of
_evolution_ and _dissolution_, the former consisting in the integration of
matter[1] and the dissipation of motion, the latter in the absorption of
motion and the disintegration of matter. The law of evolution, in its
complete development, then runs: "Evolution is an integration of matter and
concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an
indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity;
and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation."
This is inductively supported by illustrations from every region of nature
and all departments of mental and social life; and, further, shown
deducible from the ultimate principle of the persistence of force, through
the mediation of several corollaries to it, viz., the instability of the
homogeneous under the varied incidence of surrounding forces, the
multiplication of effects by action and reaction, and segregation. Finally
the principle of equilibration indicates the impassable limit at which
evolution passes over into dissolution, until the eternal round is again
begun. If it may be said of Hegel himself, that he vainly endeavored to
master the concrete fullness of reality with formal concepts, the criticism
is applicable to Spencer in still greater measure. The barren schemata of
concentration, passage into heterogeneity, adaptation, etc., which are
taken from natural science, and which are insufficient even in their own
field, prove entirely impotent for the mastery of the complex and peculiar
phenomena of spiritual life.

[Footnote 1: Organic growth is the concentration of elements before
diffused; cf. the union of nomadic families into settled tribes.]

Armed with these principles, however, Mr. Spencer advances to the
discussion of the several divisions of "Special Philosophy." Passing over
inorganic nature, he finds his task in the interpretation of the phenomena
of life, mind, and society in terms of matter, motion, and force under the
general evolution formula. This procedure, however, must not be understood
as in any wise materialistic. Such an interpretation would be a
misrepresentation, it is urged, for the strict relativity of the standpoint
limits all conclusions to phenomena, and permits no inference concerning
the nature of the "Unknowable." The _Principles of Biology_ take up the
phenomena of life. Life is defined as the "continuous adjustment of
internal relations to external relations." No attempt is made to explain
its origin, yet (in the words of Mr. Sully) it is clear that the lowest
forms of life are regarded as continuous in their essential nature with
sub-vital processes. The evolution of living organisms, from the lowest to
the highest, with the development of all their parts and functions, results
from the co-operation of various factors, external and internal, whose
action is ultimately reducible to the universal law.

The field of _psychology_ is intimately allied with biology, and yet
istinguished from it. Mental life is a subdivision of life in general, and
may be subsumed under the general definition; but while biological truths
concern the connection between internal phenomena, with but tacit or
occasional recognition of the environment, psychology has to do neither
with the internal connection nor the external connection, but "the
connection between these two connections." Psychology in its subjective
aspect, again, is a field entirely _sui generis_. The substance of mind,
conceived as the underlying substratum of mental states, is unknowable; but
the character of those states of which mind, as we know it, is composed,
is a legitimate subject of inquiry. If this be carefully investigated, it
seems highly probable that the ultimate unit of consciousness is something
"of the same order as that which we call a nervous shock." Mind is
proximately composed of feelings and the relations between feelings;
from these, revived, associated, and integrated, the whole fabric of
consciousness is built up. There is, then, no sharp distinction between the
several phases of mind. If we trace its development objectively, in terms
of the correspondence between inner and outer phenomena, we find a gradual
progress from the less to the more complex, from the lower to the higher,
without a break. Reflex action, instinct, memory, reason, are simply
stages in the process. All is dependent on experience. Even the forms of
knowledge, which are _a priori_ to the individual, are the product
of experience in the race, integrated and transmitted by heredity, and
become organic in the nervous structure. In general the correspondence of
inner and outer in which mental life consists is mediated by the nervous
organism. The structure and functions of this condition consciousness and
furnish the basis for the interpretation of mental evolution in terms of
"evolution at large, regarded as a process of physical transformation."
Nevertheless mental phenomena and bodily phenomena are not identical,
consciousness is not motion. They are both phenomenal modes of the
unknowable, disparate in themselves, and giving no indication of the
ultimate nature of the absolute. Subjective analysis of human consciousness
yields further proof of the unity of mental composition. All mental action
is ultimately reducible to "the continuous differentiation and integration
of states of consciousness." The criterion of truth is the inconceivability
of the negation. Tried by this test, as by all others, realism is superior
to idealism, though in that "transfigured" form which implies objective
existence without implying the possibility of any further knowledge
concerning it,--hence in a form entirely congruous with the conclusion
reached by many other routes.

_Sociology_ deals with super-organic evolution, which involves the
co-ordinated actions of many individuals. To understand the social unit, we
must study primitive man, especially the ideas which he forms of himself,
of other beings, and of the surrounding world. The conception of a mind or
other-self is gradually evolved through observation of natural phenomena
which favor the notion of duality, especially the phenomena of sleep,
dreams, swoons, and death. Belief in the influence of these doubles of the
dead on the fortunes of the living leads to sorcery, prayer, and praise.
Ancestor-worship is the ultimate source of all forms of religion; to it
can be traced even such aberrant developments as fetichism and idolatry,
animal-, plant-, and nature-worship. Thus the primitive man feels himself
related not only to his living fellows, but to multitudes of supernatural
beings about him. The fear of the living becomes the root of the political,
and the fear of the dead the root of the religious, control. A society is
an organic entity. Though differing from an individual organism in many
ways, it yet resembles it in the permanent relations among its component
parts. The Domestic Relations, by which the maintenance of the species is
now secured, have come from various earlier and less developed forms; the
militant type of society is accompanied by a lower, the industrial type
by a higher stage of this development. Ceremonial observance is the most
primitive kind of government, and the kind from which the political and
religious governments have differentiated. Political organization is
necessary in order to co-operation for ends which benefit the society
directly, and the individual only indirectly. The ultimate political force
is the feeling of the community, including as its largest part ancestral
feeling. Many facts combine to obscure this truth, but however much it may
be obscured, public feeling remains the primal source of authority. The
various forms and instruments of government have grown up through processes
in harmony with the general law. The two antithetical types of society are
the militant and the industrial--the former implies compulsory co-operation
under more or less despotic rule, with governmental assumption of functions
belonging to the individual and a minimizing of individual initiative;
in the latter, government is reduced to a minimum and best conducted by
representative agencies, public organizations are largely replaced by
private organizations, the individual is freer and looks less to the state
for protection and for aid. The fundamental conditions of the highest
social development is the cessation of war. The ideas and sentiments at the
basis of Ecclesiastical Institutions have been naturally derived from the
ghost-theory already described. The goal of religious development is the
final rejection of all anthropomorphic conceptions of the First Cause,
until the harmony of religion and science shall be reached in the
veneration of the Unknowable. The remaining parts of Mr. Spencer's
Sociology will treat of Professional Institutions, Industrial Institutions,
Linguistic Progress, Intellectual, Moral, and Aesthetic Progress.

The subject matter of _ethics_ is the conduct termed good or bad. Conduct
is the adjustment of acts to ends. The evolution of conduct is marked by
increasing perfection in the adjustment of acts to the furtherance of
individual life, the life of offspring, and social life. The ascription of
ethical character to the highly evolved conduct of man in relation to
these ends implies the fundamental assumption, that "life is good or bad
according as it does, or does not, bring a surplus of agreeable feeling."
The ideal of moral science is rational deduction: a rational utilitarianism
can be attained only by the recognition of the necessary laws--physical,
biological, psychological, and sociological--which condition the results of
actions; among these the biological laws have been largely neglected in
the past, though they are of the utmost importance as furnishing the link
between life and happiness. The "psychological view," again, explains the
origin of conscience. In the course of development man comes to recognize
the superiority of the higher and more representative feelings as guides
to action; this form of self-restraint, however, is characteristic of the
non-moral restraints as well, of the political, social, and religious
controls. From these the moral control proper has emerged--differing from
them in that it refers to intrinsic instead of extrinsic effects--and the
element of coerciveness in them, transferred, has generated the feeling of
moral compulsion (which, however, "will diminish as fast as moralization
increases").

Such a rational ethics, based on the laws which condition welfare rather
than on a direct estimation of happiness, and premising the relativity of
all pains and pleasures, escapes fundamental objections to the earlier
hedonism (_e.g._, those to the hedonic calculus); and, combining the
valuable elements in the divergent ethical theories, yields satisfactory
principles for the decision of ethical problems. Egoism takes precedence
of altruism; yet it is in turn dependent on this, and the two, on due
consideration, are seen to be co-essential. Entirely divorced from the
other, neither is legitimate, and a compromise is the only possibility;
while in the future advancing evolution will bring the two into complete
harmony. The goal of the whole process will be the ideal man in the ideal
society, the scientific anticipation of which, absolute ethics, promises
guidance for the relative and imperfect ethics of the transition period.

Examination of the actual, not the professed, ideas and sentiments of men
reveals wide variation in moral judgments. This is especially true of the
"pro-ethical" consciousnesses of external authorities, coercions, and
opinions--religious, political, and social--by which the mass of mankind
are governed; and is broadly due to variation in social conditions. Where
the need of external co-operation predominates the ethics of enmity
develops; where internal, peaceful co-operation is the chief social need
the ethics of amity results: and the evolution principle enables us to
infer that, as among certain small tribes in the past, so in the great
cultivated nations of the future, the life of amity will unqualifiedly
prevail. The Ethics of Individual Life shows the application of moral
judgments to all actions which affect individual welfare. The very fact
that some deviations from normal life are now morally disapproved, implies
the existence of both egoistic and altruistic sanctions for the moral
approval of all acts which conduce to normal living and the disapproval of
all minor deviations, though for the most part these have hitherto remained
unconsidered. Doubtless, however, moral control must here be somewhat
indefinite; and even scientific observation and analysis must leave the
production of a perfectly regulated conduct to "the organic adjustment of
constitution to [social] conditions."

The Ethics of Social Life includes justice and beneficence. Human justice
emerges from sub-human or animal justice, whose law (passing over gratis
benefits to offspring) is "that each individual shall receive the benefits
and evils of its own nature and its consequent conduct." This is the law
of human justice, also, but here it is more limited than before by the
non-interference which gregariousness requires, and by the increasing need
for the sacrifice of individuals for the good of the species. The egoistic
sentiment of justice arises from resistance to interference with free
action; the altruistic develops through sympathy under social conditions,
these being maintained meanwhile by a "pro-altruistic" sentiment, into
which dread of retaliation, of social reprobation, of legal punishment, and
of divine vengeance enter as component parts. The idea of justice emerges
gradually from the sentiment of justice: it has two elements, one brute or
positive, with inequality as its ideal, one human or negative, the ideal
of which is equality. In early times the former of these was unduly
appreciated, as in later times the latter, the true conception includes
both, the idea of equality being applied to the limits and the idea of
inequality to the benefits of action. Thus the formula of justice becomes:
"Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the
equal freedom of any other man "--a law which finds its authority in the
facts, that it is an _a priori_ dictum of "consciousness after it has been
subject to the discipline of prolonged social life," and that it is also
deducible from the conditions of the maintenance of life at large and of
social life. From this law follow various particular corollaries or rights,
all of which coincide with ordinary ethical concepts and have legal
enactments corresponding to them. Political rights so-called do not exist;
government is simply a system of appliances for the maintenance of private
rights. Both the nature of the state and its constitution are variable:
the militant type requires centralization and a coercive constitution;
the industrial type implies a wider distribution of political power, but
requires a representation of interests rather than a representation of
individuals. Government develops as a result of war, and its function of
protection against internal aggression arises by differentiation from its
primary function of external defense. These two, then, constitute the
essential duties of the state; when war ceases the first falls away, and
its sole function becomes the maintenance of the conditions under which
each individual may "gain the fullest life compatible with the fullest life
of fellow-citizens." All beyond this, all interference with this life of
the individual, whether by way of assistance, restraint, or education,
proves in the end both unjust and impolitic. The remaining parts of the
_Ethics_ will treat of Negative and Positive Beneficence.

If J.S. Mill and Spencer (the latter of whom, moreover, had announced
evolution as a world-law before the appearance of Darwin), move in a
direction akin to positivism, the same is true, further, of G.H. Lewes
(1817-78; _History of Philosophy_, 5th ed., 1880; _Problems of Life and
Mind_, 1874 _seq_).

Turning to the discussion of particular disciplines, we may mention as
prominent among English logicians,[1] besides Hamilton, Whewell, and Mill,
Whately, Mansel, Thomson, De Morgan, Boole (_An Investigation of the Laws
of Thought_, 1854); W.S. Jevons (_The Principles of Science_, 2d ed.,
1877); Venn (_Symbolic Logic_, 1881; _Empirical Logic_, 1889), Bradley, and
Bosanquet. Among more recent investigators in the field of psychology we
may name Carpenter, Ferrier, Maudsley, Galton, Ward, and Sully (_The Human
Mind_, 1892), and in the field of comparative psychology, Lubbock, Romanes
(_Mental Evolution in Animals_, 1883; _Mental Evolution in Man_, 1889), and
Morgan (_Animal Life and Intelligence_, 1891). Among ethical writers the
following, besides Spencer and Green, hold a foremost place: H. Sidgwick
_(The Methods of Ethics_, 4th ed., 1890), Leslie Stephen _(The Science of
Ethics_, 1882), and James Martineau _(Types of Ethical Theory_, 3d ed.,
1891). The quarterly review _Mind_ (vols. i.-xvi. 1876-91, edited by G.
Croom Robertson; new series from 1892, edited by G.F. Stout) has since its
foundation played an important part in the development of English thought.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Nedich, _Die Lehre von der Quantifikation des Prädikats_
in vol. iii. of Wundt's _Philosophische Studien_; L. Liard, _Les
Logiciens Anglais Contemporains_, 1878; Al. Riehl in vol. i. of the
_Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie_, 1877 [cf. also
appendix A to the English translation of Ueberweg's _Logic_.--TR.].]

German idealism, for which S.T. Coleridge (died 1834) and Thomas Carlyle
(died 1881) endeavored to secure an entrance into England, for a long
time gained ground there but slowly. Later years, however, have brought
increasing interest in German speculation, and much of recent thinking
shows the influence of Kantian and Hegelian principles. As pioneer of this
movement we may name J.H. Stirling _(The Secret of Hegel_, 1865); and as
its most prominent representatives John Caird _(An Introduction to the
Philosophy of Religion_, 1880), Edward Caird _(The Critical Philosophy of
Immanuel Kant_, 1889; _The Evolution of Religion_, 1893), both in Glasgow,
and T.H. Green (1836-82; professor at Oxford; _Prolegomena to Ethics_,
3d ed., 1887; _Works_, edited by Nettleship, 3 vols., 1885-88).[1] In
opposition to the hereditary empiricism of English philosophy--which
appears in Spencer and Lewes, as it did in Locke, Berkeley, and Hume,
though in somewhat altered form--Green maintains that all experience is
constituted by intelligible relations. Knowledge, therefore, is possible
only for a correlating self-consciousness; while nature, as a system of
relations, is likewise dependent on a spiritual principle, of which it is
the expression. Thus the central conception of Green's philosophy becomes,
"that the universe is a single eternal activity or energy, of which it is
the essence to be self-conscious, that is, to be itself and not itself
in one" (Nettleship). To this universal consciousness we are related as
manifestations or "communications" under the limitations of our physical
organization. As such we are free, that is, self-determined, determined by
nothing from without. The moral ideal is self-realization or perfection,
the progressive reproduction of the divine self-consciousness. This is
possible only in terms of a development of persons, for as a self-conscious
personality the divine spirit can reproduce itself in persons alone; and,
since "social life is to personality what language is to thought,"
the realization of the moral ideal implies life in common. The nearer
determination of the ideal is to be sought in the manifestations of the
eternal spirit as they have been given in the moral history of individuals
and nations. This shows what has already been implied in the relation of
morality to personality and society, that moral good must first of all be
a common good, one in which the permanent well-being of self includes the
well-being of others also. This is the germ of morality, the development of
which yields, first, a gradual extension of the area of common good, and
secondly, a fuller and more concrete determination of its content. Further
representatives of this movement are W. Wallace, Adamson, Bradley; A. Seth
is an ex-member.

[Footnote 1: Cf. on Green the Memoir by Nettleship in vol. iii. of the
_Works_.]

The first and greatest of American philosophical thinkers was the
Calvinistic theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703-58; treatise on the _Freedom
of Will_, 1754; _Works_, 10 vols., edited by Dwight, 1830). Edwards's
deterministic doctrine found numerous adherents (among them his son, who
bore his father's name, died 1801) as well as strenuous opponents (Tappan,
Whedon, Hazard among later names), and essentially contributed to
the development of philosophical thought in the United States. For a
considerable period this crystallized for the most part around elements
derived from British thinkers, especially from Locke and the Scottish
School. In 1829 James Marsh called attention to German speculation [1] by
his American edition of Coleridge's _Aids to Reflection_, with an important
introduction from his own hand. Later W.E. Channing (1780-1842), the head
of the Unitarian movement, attracted many young and brilliant minds, the
most noted of whom, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), became a leader among
the New England transcendentalists. Metaphysical idealism has, perhaps, met
with less resistance in America than in England. Kant and Hegel have been
eagerly studied (G.S. Morris, died 1889; C.C. Everett; J. Watson in Canada;
Josiah Royce, _The Spirit of Modern Philosophy_, 1892; and others); and
_The Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, edited by W.T. Harris, has since
1867 furnished a rallying point for idealistic interests. The influence
of Lotze has also been considerable (B.P. Bowne in Boston). Sympathy
with German speculation, however, has not destroyed the naturally close
connection with the work of writers who use the English tongue. Thus
Spencer's writings have had a wide currency, and his system numbers many
disciples, though these are less numerous among students of philosophy by
profession (John Fiske, _Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy_, 1874).

[Footnote 1: Cf. Porter, _op. cit._]

In the latest decades the broadening of the national life, the increasing
acquaintance with foreign thought, and the rapid development of university
work have greatly enlarged and deepened the interest in philosophical
pursuits. This is manifested most clearly in the field of psychology,
including especially the "new" or "physiological" psychology, and the
history of philosophy, though indications of pregnant thought in other
departments, as ethics and the philosophy of religion, and even of
independent construction, are not wanting. Among psychologists of the day
we may mention G.S. Hall, editor of _The American Journal of Psychology_
(1887 seq.), G.T. Ladd (_Elements of Physiological Psychology_, 1887),
and William James (_Principles of Psychology_, 1890). _The International
Journal of Ethics_ (Philadelphia, 1890 seq.), edited by S. Burns Weston, is
"devoted to the advancement of ethical knowledge and practice"; among the
foreign members of its editorial committee are Jodl and Von Gizycki. The
weekly journal of popular philosophy, _The Open Court_, published in
Chicago, has for its object the reconciliation of religion and science; the
quarterly, _The Monist_ (1890 seq.), published by the same company under
the direction of Paul Carus (_The Soul of Man_, 1891), the establishment of
a monistic view of the world. Several journals, among them the _Educational
Review_ (1891 seq., edited by N.M. Butler), point to a growing interest in
pedagogical inquiry. _The American Philosophical Review_ (1892 seq.,
edited by J.G. Schurman, _The Ethical Import of Darwinism_, 1887) is a
comprehensive exponent of American philosophic thought.


%4. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Holland.%

In _Sweden_ an empirical period represented by Leopold (died 1829) and Th.
Thorild (died 1808), and based upon Locke and Rousseau, was followed, after
the introduction of Kant by D. Boëthius, 1794, by a drift toward idealism.
This was represented in an extreme form by B. Höijer (died 1812), a
contemporary and admirer of Fichte, who defended the right of philosophical
construction, and more moderately by Christofer Jacob Böstrom (1797-1866),
the most important systematic thinker of his country. As predecessors of
Böstrom we may mention Biberg (died 1827), E.G. Geijer (died 1846), and S.
Grubbe (died 1853), like him professors in Upsala, and of his pupils,
S. Ribbing, known in Germany by his peculiar conception of the Platonic
doctrine of ideas (German translation, 1863-64), the moralist Sahlin
(1877), the historian, of Swedish philosophy[1] (1873 seq.) A. Nyblaeus of
Lund, and H. Edfeldt of Upsala, the editor of Böstrom's works (1883).

[Footnote 1: Cf. Höffding, _Die Philosophie in Schweden_ in the
_Philosophische Monatshefte_, vol. xv. 1879, p. 193 seq.]

Böstrom's philosophy is a system of self-activity and personalism which
recalls Leibnitz and Krause. The absolute or being is characterized as a
concrete, systematically articulated, self-conscious unity, which dwells
with its entire content in each of its moments, and whose members both bear
the character of the whole and are immanent in one another, standing in
relations of organic inter-determination. The antithesis between unity and
plurality is only apparent, present only for the divisive view of finite
consciousness. God is infinite, fully determinate personality (for
determination is not limitation), a system of self-dependent living beings,
differing in degree, in which we, as to our true being, are eternally and
unchangeably contained. Every being is a definite, eternal, and living
thought of God; thinking beings with their states and activities alone
exist; all that is real is spiritual, personal. Besides this true,
suprasensible world of Ideas, which is elevated above space, time, motion,
change, and development, and which has not arisen by creation or a process
of production, there exists for man, but only for him--man is formally
perfect, it is true, but materially imperfect (since he represents the real
from a limited standpoint)--a sensuous world of phenomena as the sphere of
his activity. To this he himself belongs, and in it he is spontaneously to
develop the suprasensible content which is eternally given him (i.e., his
true nature), namely, to raise it from the merely potential condition of
obscure presentiment to clear, conscious actuality. Freedom is the power
to overcome our imperfection by means of our true nature, to realize our
suprasensible capacities, to become for ourselves what we are in ourselves
(in God). The ethics of Böstrom is distinguished from the Kantian ethics,
to which it is related, chiefly by the fact that it seeks to bring
sensibility into a more than merely negative relation to reason. Society
is an eternal, and also a personal, Idea in God. The most perfect form
of government is constitutional monarchy; the ideal goal of history, the
establishment of a system of states embracing all mankind.

J. Borelius of Lund is an Hegelian, but differs from the master in regard
to the doctrine of the contradiction. The Hegelian philosophy has adherents
in _Norway_ also, as G.V. Lyng (died 1884; _System of Fundamental Ideas_),
M.J. Monrad (_Tendencies of Modern Thought_, 1874, German translation,
1879), both professors in Christiania, and Monrad's pupil G. Kent (_Hegel's
Doctrine of the Nature of Experience_, 1891).

The _Danish_ philosophy of the nineteenth century has been described
by Höffding in the second volume of the _Archiv für Geschichte der
Philosophie_, 1888. He begins with the representatives of the speculative
movement: Steffens (see above), Niels Treschow (1751-1833), Hans Christian
Oersted (1777-1851; _Spirit in Nature_, German translation, Munich,
1850-51), and Frederik Christian Sibbern (1785-1872). A change was brought
about by the philosophers of religion Sören Kierkegaard (1813-55) and
Rasmus Nielsen (1809-84; _Philosophy of Religion_, 1869), who opposed
speculative idealism with a strict dualism of knowledge and faith, and were
in turn opposed by Georg Brandes (born 1842) and Hans Bröchner (1820-75).
Among younger investigators the Copenhagen professors, Harald Höffding[1]
(born 1843) and Kristian Kroman[2] (born 1846) stand in the first rank.

[Footnote 1: Höffding: _The Foundations of Human Ethics_, 1876, German
translation, 1880; _Outlines of Psychology_, 1882, English translation by
Lowndes, 1891, from the German translation, 1887; _Ethics_, 1887, German
translation by Bendixen, 1888.]

[Footnote 2: Kroman: _Our Knowledge of Nature_, German translation, 1883;
_A Brief Logic and Psychology_, German translation by Bendixen, 1890.]

Land (_Mind_, vol. iii. 1878) and G. von Antal (1888) have written on
philosophy in _Holland_. Down to the middle of the nineteenth century the
field was occupied by an idealism based upon the ancients, in particular
upon Plato: Franz Hemsterhuis (1721-90; _Works_, new ed., 1846-50), and the
philologists Wyttenbach and Van Heusde. Then Cornelius Wilhelm Opzoomer[3]
(1821-92; professor in Utrecht) brought in a new movement. Opzoomer
favors empiricism. He starts from Mill and Comte, but goes beyond them in
important points, and assigns faith a field of its own beside knowledge.
In opposition to apriorism he seeks to show that experience is capable of
yielding universal and necessary truths; that space, time, and causality
are received along with the content of thought; that mathematics itself is
based upon experience; and that the method of natural science, especially
deduction, must be applied to the mental sciences. The philosophy of mind
considers man as an individual being, in his connection with others, in
relation to a higher being, and in his development; accordingly it
divides into psychology (which includes logic, aesthetics, and ethology),
sociology, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of history.
Central to Opzoomer's system is his doctrine of the five sources of
knowledge: Sensation, the feeling of pleasure and pain, aesthetic, moral,
and religious feeling. If we build on the foundation of the first three
alone, we end in materialism; if we leave the last unused, we reach
positivism; if we make religious feeling the sole judge of truth, mysticism
is the outcome. The criteria of science are utility and progress. These are
still wanting in the mental sciences, in which the often answered but never
decided questions continually recur, because we have neither derived the
principles chosen as the basis of the deduction from an exact knowledge
of the phenomena nor tested the results by experience. The causes of this
defective condition can only be removed by imitating the study of nature:
we must learn that no conclusions can be reached except from facts, and
that we are to strive after knowledge of phenomena and their laws alone. We
have no right to assume an "essence" of things beside and in addition to
phenomena, which reveals itself in them or hides behind them. Pupils of
Opzoomer are his successor in his Utrecht chair, Van der Wyck, and Pierson.
We may also mention J.P.N. Land, who has done good service in editing
the works of Spinoza and of Geulincx, and the philosopher of religion
Rauwenhoff (1888).

[Footnote 1: Opzoomer: _The Method of Science_, a Handbook of Logic, German
translation by Schwindt, 1852; _Religion_, German translation by Mook,
1869.]

On the system of the Hungarian philosopher Cyrill Horváth (died 1884 at
Pesth) see the essay by E. Nemes in the _Zeitschrift für Philosophie_,
vol. lxxxviii, 1886. Since 1889 a review, _Problems of Philosophy and
Psychology_, has appeared at Moscow in Russian, under the direction of
Professor N. von Grot.




CHAPTER XVI.

GERMAN PHILOSOPHY SINCE THE DEATH OF HEGEL.

With Hegel the glorious dynasty which, with a strong hand, had guided the
fate of German philosophy since the conclusion of the preceding century
disappears. From his death (1831) we may date the second period of
post-Kantian philosophy,[1] which is markedly and unfavorably distinguished
from the first by a decline in the power of speculative creation and by
a division of effort. If previous to this the philosophical public,
comprising all the cultured, had been eagerly occupied with problems in
common, and had followed with unanimous interest the work of those who were
laboring at them, during the last fifty years the interest of wider circles
in philosophical questions has grown much less active; almost every
thinker goes his own way, giving heed only to congenial voices; the inner
connection of the schools has been broken down; the touch with thinkers of
different views has been lost. The latest decades have been the first
to bring a change for the better, in so far as new rallying points of
philosophical interest have been created by the neo-Kantian movement, by
the systems of Lotze and Von Hartmann, by the impulse toward the philosophy
of nature proceeding from Darwinism, by energetic labors in the field of
practical philosophy, and by new methods of investigation in psychology.

[Footnote 1: On philosophy since 1831 cf. vol. iii. of J.E. Erdmann's
_History_; Ueberweg, _Grundriss_, part iii. §§ 37-49 (English translation,
vol. ii. pp. 292-516); Lange, _History of Materialism_; B. Erdmann, _Die
Philosophie der Gegenwart_ in the _Deutsche Rundschau_, vols. xix., xx.,
1879, June and July numbers; (A. Krohn,) _Streifzüge durch die Philosophie
der Gegenwart_ in the _Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische
Kritik_, vols. lxxxvii., lxxxix., 1885-86; (Burt, _History of Modern
Philosophy_, 1892), also the third volume of Windelband's _Geschichte der
neueren Philosophie_, when it appears.]


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

A decade after the philosophy of Hegel had entered on its supremacy a
division in the school was called forth by Strauss's _Life of Jesus_(1835).
The differences were brought to light by the discussion of religious
problems, in regard to which Hegel had not expressed himself with
sufficient distinctness. The relation of knowledge and faith, as he had
defined it, admitted of variant interpretations and deductions, and this in
favor of Church doctrine as well as in opposition to it. Philosophy has the
same content as religion, but in a different form, _i.e._, not in the form
of representation, but in the form of the concept--it transforms dogma into
speculative truth. The conservative Hegelians hold fast to the identity of
content in the two modes of cognition; the liberals, to the alteration
in form, which, they assert, brings an alteration in content with it.
According to Hegel the lower stage is "sublated" in the higher, _i.e._,
conserved as well as negated. The orthodox members of the school emphasize
the conservation of religious doctrines, their justification from the side
of the philosopher; the progressists, their negation, their overcoming by
the speculative concept. The general question, whether the ecclesiastical
meaning of a dogma is retained or to be abandoned in its transformation
into a philosopheme, divides into three special questions, the
anthropological, the soteriogical, and the theological. These are: whether
on Hegelian principles immortality is to be conceived as a continuance
of individual existence on the art of particular spirits, or only as the
eternity of the universal reason; whether by the God-man the person of
Christ is to be understood, or, on the other hand, the human species, the
Idea of Humanity; whether personality belongs to the Godhead before the
creation of the world, or whether it first attains to self-consciousness
in human spirits, whether Hegel was a theist or a pantheist, whether he
teaches the transcendence or the immanence of God. The Old Hegelians defend
the orthodox interpretation; the Young Hegelians oppose it. The former,
Göschel, Gabler, Hinrichs, Schaller (died 1868; _History of the Philosophy
of Nature since Bacon_, 1841 _seq_.), J.E. Erdmann in Halle (1805-92; _Body
and Soul_, 1837; _Psychological Letters_, 1851, 6th ed., 1882; _Earnest
Sport_, 1871, 4th ed., 1890), form, according to Strauss's parliamentary
comparison carried out by Michelet, the "right"; the latter, Strauss,
Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and A. Ruge, who, with Echtermeyer, edited the
_Hallesche_, afterward _Deutsche, Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst_,
1838-42, the "left." Between them, and forming the "center," stand Karl
Rosenkranz[1] in Königsberg (1805-79), C.L. Michelet in Berlin (p. 16;
_Hegel, the Unrefuted World-philosopher_, 1870; _System of Philosophy_,
1876 _seq_.), and the theologians Marheineke (a pupil of Daub at
Heidelberg) and W. Vatke (_Philosophy of Religion_, edited by Preiss,
1888). Contrasted with these is the group of semi- or pseudo-Hegelians (p.
596), who declare themselves in accord with the theistic doctrines of the
right, but admit that the left represents Hegel's own opinion, or at least
the correct deductions from his position.

[Footnote 1: K. Rosenkranz: _Psychology_, 1837, 3d ed., 1863; _Science
of the Logical Idea_, 1858; _Studies_, 1839 _seq_., _New Studies_, 1875
_seq_.; _Aesthetics of the Ugly_, 1853; several works on the history of
poetry.]

The following should also be mentioned as Hegelians: the philosopher of
history, Von Cieszkowski, the pedagogical writer, Thaulow (at Kiel, died
1883), the philosopher of religion and of law, A. Lasson at Berlin, the
aesthetic writers Hotho, Friedrich Theodor Vischer[1] (1807-87), and Max
Schasler (_Critical History of Aesthetics_, 1872; _Aesthetics_, 1886),
the historians of philosophy, Schwegler (died 1857; _History of Greek
Philosophy_, 1859, 4th ed., 1886, edited by Karl Köstlin, whose
_Aesthetics_ appeared 1869), Eduard Zeller[2] of Berlin (born 1814),
and Kuno Fischer (born 1824; 1856-72 professor at Jena, since then at
Heidelberg; _Logic and Metaphysics_, 2d ed., 1865). While Weissenborn (died
1874) is influenced by Schleiermacher also, and Zeller and Fischer strive
back toward Kant, Johannes Volkelt[3] in Würzburg (born 1848), who started
from Hegel and advanced through Schopenhauer and Hartmann, has of late
years established an independent noëtical position and has done good
service by his energetic opposition to positivism _(Das Denken als
Hülfvorstellungs--Thätigkeit und als Aupassungsvorgang_ in the _Zeitschrift
für Philosophic_, vols. xcvi., xcvii., 1889-90).

[Footnote 1: Vischer: _Aesthetics_, 1846-58; _Critical Excursions_, 1844
_seq_.; several _Hefte "Altes and Neues_". The diary in the second part of
the novel _Auch Einer_ develops an original pantheistic view of the world.]

[Footnote 2: Zeller: _The Philosophy of the Greeks in its Historical
Development_, 5 vols., 3d ed., vol. i. 5th ed. (English translation, 1868
_seq_.); three collections of _Addresses and Essays_, 1865, 1877, 1884.]

[Footnote 3: Volkelt: _The Phantasy in Dreams_, 1875; _Kant's Theory of
Knowledge_, 1879; _On the Possibility of Metaphysics_, inaugural address at
Basle, 1884; _Experience and Thought, Critical Foundation of the Theory of
Knowledge_, 1886; _Lectures Introductory to the Philosophy of the Present
Time_ (delivered in Frankfort on the Main), 1892.]

The leaders of the Hegelian left require more detailed consideration. In
David Friedrich Strauss[1] (1808-74, born and died at Ludwigsburg) the
philosophy of religion becomes a historical criticism of the Bible and of
dogmatics. The biblical narratives are, in great part, not history (this
has been the common error alike of the super-naturalistic and of the
rationalistic interpreters), but myths, that is, suprasensible facts
presented in the form of history and in symbolic language. It is evident
from the contradictions in the narratives and the impossibility of miracles
that we are not here concerned with actual events. The myths possess
(speculative, absolute) truth, but no (historical) reality. They are
unintentional creations of the popular imagination; the spirit of the
community speaks in the authors of the Gospels, using the historical factor
(the life-history of Jesus) with mythical embellishments as an investiture
for a supra-historical, eternal truth (the speculative Idea of
incarnation). The God become man, in which the infinite and the finite, the
divine nature and the human, are united, is the human race. The Idea of
incarnation manifests itself in a multitude of examples which supplement
one another, instead of pouring forth its whole fullness in a single one.
The (real) Idea of the race is to be substituted for a single individual
as the subject of the predicates (resurrection, ascension, etc.) which the
Church ascribes to Christ. The Son of God is _Humanity_.

[Footnote 1: Strauss: _The Life of Jesus_, 1835-36, 4th ed., 1840 [English
translation by George Eliot, 2d. ed., 1893]; the same "for the German
People," 1864 [English translation, 1865]; _Christian Dogmatics_, 1840-41;
_Voltaire_, 1870; _Collected Writings_, 12 vols., edited by Zeller,
1876-78. On Strauss cf. Zeller, 1874 [English, 1874], and Hausrath,
1876-78.]

In his second principal work Strauss criticises the dogmas of Christianity
as sharply as he had criticised the Gospel narrative in the first one. The
historical development of these has of itself effected their destruction:
the history of dogma is the objective criticism of dogma. Christianity and
philosophy, theism and pantheism, dualism and immanence, are irreconcilable
opposites. To be able to know we must cease to believe. Dogma is the
product of the unphilosophical, uncultured consciousness; belief in
revelation, only for those who have not yet risen to reason. In the
transformation of religious representations into philosophical Ideas
nothing specifically representative is left; the form of representation
must be actually overcome. The Christian contraposition of the present
world and that which is beyond is explained by the fact that the
sensuo-rational spirit of man, so long as it does not philosophically know
itself as the unity of the infinite and the finite, but only feels itself
as finite, sensuo-empirical consciousness, projects the infinite, which
it has in itself, as though this were something foreign, looks on it
as something beyond the world. This separation of faith is entirely
unphilosophical; it is the mission of the philosopher to reduce all that is
beyond the world to the present. Thus for him immortality is not something
to come, but the spirit's own power to rise above the finite to the Idea.
And like future existence, so the transcendent God also disappears. The
absolute is the universal unity of the world, which posits and sublates the
individual as its modes. God is the being in all existence, the life in
all that lives, the thought in all that think: he does not stand as an
individual person beside and above other persons, but is the infinite which
personifies itself and attains to consciousness in human spirits, and this
from eternity; before there was a humanity of earth there were spirits on
other stars, in whom God reflected himself.

Three decades later Strauss again created a sensation by his confession
of materialism and atheism, _The Old Faith and the New_, 1872 (since the
second edition, "With a Postscript as Preface"),[1] in which he continues
the conflict against religious dualism. The question "Are we"--the
cultured men of the day--"still Christians?" is answered in the negative.
Christianity is a cult of poverty, despising the world, and antagonistic to
labor and culture; but we have learned to esteem science and art, riches
and acquisition, as the chief levers of culture and of human progress.
Christianity dualistically tears apart body and soul, time and eternity,
the world and God; we need no Creator, for the life-process has neither
beginning nor end. The world is framed for the highest reason, it is true,
but it has not been framed by a highest reason. Our highest Idea is the
All, which is conformed to law, and instinct with life and reason, and
our feeling toward the universe--the consciousness of dependence on its
laws--exercises no less of ethical influence, is no less full of reverence,
and no less exposed to injury from an irreverent pessimism, than the
feeling of the devout of the old type toward their God. Hence the answer
to the second question "Have we still a religion?" maybe couched in the
affirmative. The new faith does not need a _cultus_ and a Church. Since the
dry services of the free congregations offer nothing for the fancy and the
spirit, the edification of the heart must be accomplished in other ways--by
participation in the interests of humanity, in the national life, and,
not last, by aesthetic enjoyment. Thus in his last work, which in two
appendices reaches a discussion of the great German poets and musicians,
the old man returns to a thought to which he had given earlier expression,
that the religious _cultus_ should be replaced by the _cultus_ of genius.

[Footnote 1: English translation by Mathilde Blind, 1873.]

As Strauss went over from Hegelianism to pantheism, so Ludwig Feuerbach[1]
(1804-72), a son of the great jurist, Anselm Feuerbach, after he had for
a short time moved in the same direction, took the opposite, the
individualistic course, only, like Strauss, to end at last in materialism.
"My first thought," as he himself describes the course of his development,
"was God; my second, reason; my third and last, man." As theology has been
overcome by Hegel's philosophy of reason, so this in turn must give place
to the philosophy of man. "The new philosophy makes man, including nature
as his basis, the highest and sole subject of philosophy, and,
consequently, anthropology the universal science." Only that which is
immediately self-evident is true and divine. But only that which is
sensible is evident (_sonnenklar)_; it is only where sensibility begins
that all doubt and conflict cease. Sensible beings alone are true, real
beings; existence in space and time is alone existence; truth, reality,
and sensibility are identical. While the old philosophy took for its
starting point the principle, "I am an abstract, a merely thinking being;
the body does not belong to my essence," the new philosophy, on the other
hand, begins with the principle, "I am a real, a sensible being; the body
in its totality is my ego, my essence itself." Feuerbach, however, uses
the concept of sensibility in so wide and vague a sense that,
supported--or deceived--by the ambiguity of the word sensation, he
includes under it even the most elevated and sacred feelings. Even the
objects of art are seen, heard, and felt; even the souls of other men are
sensed. In the sensations the deepest and highest truths are concealed. Not
only the external, but the internal also, not only flesh, but spirit, not
only the thing, but the ego, not only the finite, the phenomenal, but also
the true divine essence is an object of the senses. Sensation proves the
existence of objects outside our head--there is no other proof of being
than love, than sensation in general. Everything is perceivable by the
senses, if not directly, yet indirectly, if not with the vulgar, untrained
senses, yet with the "cultivated senses," if not with the eye of the
anatomist or chemist, yet with that of the philosopher. All our ideas
spring from the senses, but their production requires communication and
converse between man and man. The higher concepts cannot be derived from
the individual Ego without a sensuously given Thou; the highest object of
sense is man; man does not reach concepts and reason in general by himself,
but only as one of two. The nature of man is contained in community alone;
only in life with others and for others does he attain his destiny and
happiness. The conscience is the ego putting itself in the place of another
who has been injured. Man with man, the unity of I and Thou, is God, and
God is love.

[Footnote 1: Feuerbach was born at Landshut, studied at Heidelberg and
Berlin, habilitated, 1828, at Erlangen, and lived, 1836-60, in the village
of Bruckberg, not far from Bayreuth, and from 1860 until his death in
Rechenberg, a suburb of Nuremberg. _Collected Works_ in 10 vols., 1846-66.
The chief works are entitled: _P. Bayle_, 1838, 2d ed., 1844; _Philosophy
and Christianity_, 1839; _The Essence of Christianity_, 1841, 4th ed., 1883
[English translation by George Eliot, 1854]; _Principles of the Philosophy
of the Future_, 1843; _The Essence of Religion_, 1845; _Theogony_, 1857;
_God, Freedom, and Immortality_, 1866. Karl Grün, 1874, C.N. Starcke, 1885,
and W. Bolin, 1891, treat of Feuerbach.]

To the philosophy of religion Feuerbach assigns the task of giving a
psychological explanation of the genesis of religion, instead of showing
reason in religion. In bidding us believe in miracles dogma is a
prohibition to think. Hence the philosopher is not to justify it, but to
uncover the illusion to which it owes its origin. Speculative theology is
an intoxicated philosophy; it is time to become sober, and to recognize
that philosophy and religion are diametrically opposed to each other,
that they are related to each other as health to disease, as thought to
phantasy. Religion arises from the fact that man objectifies his own true
essence, and opposes it to himself as a personal being, without coming to a
consciousness of this divestment of self, of the identity of the divine
and human nature. Hence the Hegelian principles, that the absolute is
self-consciousness, that in man God knows himself, must be reversed:
self-consciousness is the absolute; in his God man knows himself only. The
Godhead is our own universal nature, freed from its individual limitations,
intuited and worshiped as another, independent being, distinct from us.
God is self objectified, the inner nature of man expressed; man is
the beginning, the middle, and the end of religion. All theology is
anthropology, for all religion is a self-deification of man. In religion
man makes a division in his own nature, posits himself as double, first as
limited (as a human individual), then as unlimited, raised to infinity (as
God); and this deified self he worships in order to obtain from it the
satisfaction of his needs, which the course of the world leaves unmet. Thus
religion grows out of egoism: its basis is the difference between our will
and our power; its aim, to set us free from the dependence which we feel
before nature. (Like culture, religion seeks to make nature an intelligible
and compliant being, only that in this it makes use of the supernatural
instruments faith, prayer, and magic; it is only gradually that men learn
to attack the evils by natural means.) That which man himself is not, but
wishes to be, that he represents to himself in his gods as existing; they
are the wishes of man's heart transformed into real beings, his longing
after happiness satisfied by the fancy. The same holds true of all dogmas:
as God is the affirmation of our wishes, so the world beyond is the present
embellished and idealized by the fancy. Instead of "God is merciful, is
love, is omnipotent, he performs miracles and hears prayers," the statement
must be reversed: mercy, love, omnipotence, to perform miracles, and to
hear prayers, is divine. In the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's supper
Feuerbach sees the truth that water and food are indispensable and divine.
As Feuerbach, following out this naturalistic tendency, reached the extreme
of materialism, the influence of his philosophy--whose different phases
there is no occasion to trace out in detail--had already passed its
culmination. From his later writings little more has found its way into
public notice than the pun, that man is (_ist_) what he eats (_isst_).

The remaining members of the Hegelian left may be treated more briefly.
Bruno Bauer[1] (died in 1882; his principal work is the _Critique of the
Synoptics_, in three volumes, 1841-42, which had been preceded, in 1840, by
a _Critique of the Evangelical History of John_) at first belonged on the
right of the school, but soon went over to the extreme left. He explains
the Gospel narratives as creations with a purpose (_Tendenzdichtungen_),
as intentional, but not deceitful, inventions, from which, despite their
unreality, history may well be learned, inasmuch as they reflect the spirit
of the time in which they were constructed. His own publications and those
of his brother Edgar are much more radical after the year 1844. In these
the brothers advocate the standpoint of "pure or absolute criticism," which
extends itself to all things and events for or against which sides are
taken from any quarter, and calmly watches how everything destroys
itself. As soon as anything is admitted, it is no longer true. Nothing is
absolutely valid, all is vain; it is only the criticising, all-destroying
ego, free from all ethical ties, that possesses truth.

[Footnote 1: Not to be confused with the head of the Tübingen School,
Ferdinand Christian Baur (died 1860).]

One further step was possible beyond Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, that from
the community to the particular, selfish individual, from the criticising,
therefore thinking, ego, to the ego of sensuous enjoyment. This step was
taken in that curious book _The Individual and his Property_, which Kaspar
Schmidt, who died in 1856 at Berlin, published in 1845 (2d ed., 1882),
under the pseudonym of Max Stirner. The Individual of whom the title speaks
is the egoist. For me nothing is higher than myself; I use men and use up
the world for my own pleasure. I seek to be and have all that I can be
and have; I have a right to all that is within my power. Morality is a
delusion, justice, like all Ideas, a phantom. Those who believe in ideals,
and worship such generalities as self-consciousness, man, society, are
still deep in the mire of prejudice and superstition, and have banished the
old orthodox phantom of the Deity only to replace it by a new one. Nothing
whatever is to be respected.

* * * * *

Among the opponents of the Hegelian philosophy the members of the "theistic
school," who have above been designated as semi-Hegelians, approximate it
most closely. These endeavor, in part retaining the dialectic method, to
blend the immanence of the absolute, which philosophy cannot give up and
concerning which Hegel had erred only by way of over-emphasis, with the
transcendence of God demanded by Christian consciousness, to establish a
theism which shall contain pantheism as a moment in itself. God is present
in all creatures, yet distinct from them; he is intramundane as well as
extramundane; he is self-conscious personality, free creative spirit,
is this from all eternity, and does not first become such through the
world-development. He does not need the world for his perfection, but out
of his goodness creates it. Philosophy must begin with the living Godhead
instead of beginning, like Hegel's Logic, with the empty concept of being.
For the categories--as Schelling had already objected--express necessary
forms or general laws only, to which all reality must conform, but which
are never capable of generating reality; the content which appears in them
and which obeys them, can only be created by a Deity, and only empirically
cognized. This is the standpoint of Christian Hermann Weisse[1] in Leipsic
(1801-66), Karl Philipp Fischer[2] in Erlangen (1807-85), Immanuel Hermann
Fichte[3] (1797-1879; 1842-65 professor in Tübingen), and the follower of
Schleiermacher, Julius Braniss in Breslau (1792-1873). The following hold
similar views, influenced, like Weisse and K. Ph. Fischer, by Schelling:
Jacob Sengler of Freiburg (1799-1878; _The Idea of God_, 1845 _seq_.),
Leopold Schmid of Giessen (1808-69; cf. p. 516, note), Johannes Huber
(died 1879), Moritz Carrière[4] (born 1817), both in Munich, K. Steffensen
of Basle (1816-88; _Collected Essays_, 1890), and Karl Heyder in Erlangen
(1812-86; _The Doctrine of Ideas_, vol. i. 1874). Chalybaeus at Kiel (died
1862), and Friedrich Harms at Berlin (died 1880; _Metaphysics_,
posthumously edited by H. Wiese, 1885), who, like Fortlage and I.H. Fichte,
start from the system of the elder Fichte, should also be mentioned as
sympathizing with the opinions of those who have been named.

[Footnote 1: Weisse: _System of Aesthetics_, 1830; _The Idea of the
Godhead_, 1833; _Philosophical Dogmatics_, 1855. His pupil Rudolf Seydel
has published several of his posthumous works; H. Lotze also acknowledges
that he owes much to Weisse. Rud. Seydel in Leipsic (born 1835), _Logic_,
1866; _Ethics_, 1874; cf. p. 17.]

[Footnote 2: K. Ph. Fischer: _The Idea of the Godhead_, 1839; _Outlines of
the System of Philosophy_, 1848 _seq_.; _The Untruth of Sensationalism and
Materialism_, 1853.]

[Footnote 3: I.H. Fichte: _System of Ethics_, 1850-53, the first volume of
which gives a history of moral philosophy since 1750; _Anthropology_, 1856,
3d ed., 1876; _Psychology_, 1864.]

[Footnote 4: Carrière: _Aesthetics_, 1859, 3d ed., 1885; _The Moral Order
of the World_, 1877, 2d ed., 1891; _Art in connection with the Development
of Culture_, 5 vols., 1863-73.]

The same may be said, further, of Hermann Ulrici[1] of Halle (1806-84),
for many years the editor of the _Zeitschrift für Philosophie und
philosophische Kritik_, founded in 1837 by the younger Fichte and now
edited by the author of this _History_, which, as the organ of the theistic
school, opposed, first, the pantheism of the Young Hegelians, and then the
revived materialism so loudly proclaimed after the middle of the
century. This _Zeitschrift_ of Fichte and Ulrici, following the altered
circumstances of the time, has experienced a change of aim, so that it now
seeks to serve idealistic efforts of every shade; while the _Philosophische
Monatshefte_ (founded by Bergmann in 1868, edited subsequently by
Schaarschmidt, and now) edited by P. Natorp of Marburg, favors
neo-Kantianism, and the _Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche
Philosophie_ (begun in 1877, and) edited by R. Avenarius of Zurich,
especially cultivates those parts of philosophy which are open to exact
treatment.

[Footnote 1: Ulrici: _On Shakespeare's Dramatic Art_, 1839, 3d ed., 1868
[English, 1876]; _Faith and Knowledge_, 1858; _God and Nature_, 1861, 2d
ed., 1866; _God and Man_, in two volumes, _Body and Soul_, 1866, 2d ed.,
1874, and _Natural Law_, 1872; various treatises on Logic--in which
consciousness is based on the distinguishing activity, and the categories
conceived as functional modes of this--on Spiritualism, etc.]

The appearance of _materialism_ was the consequence of the flagging of
the philosophic spirit, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the
dissatisfaction of the representatives of natural science with the
constructions of the Schelling-Hegelian school. If the German naturalist is
especially exposed to the danger of judging all reality from the section
of it with which he is familiar, from the world of material substances and
mechanical motions, the reason lies in the fact that he does not find it
easy, like the Englishman for example, to let the scientific and the
philosophico-religious views of the world go on side by side as two
entirely heterogeneous modes of looking at things. The metaphysical impulse
to generalization and unification spurs him on to break down the boundary
between the two spheres, and, since the physical view of things has become
part of his flesh and blood, psychical phenomena are for him nothing but
brain-vibrations, and the freedom of the will and all religious ideas,
nothing but illusions. The materialistic controversy broke out most
actively at the convention of naturalists at Göttingen in 1854, when
Rudolph Wagner in his address "On the Creation of Man and the Substance
of the Soul" declared, in opposition to Karl Vogt, that there is no
physiological reason for denying the descent of man from one pair and an
immaterial immortal soul. Vogt's answer was entitled "Collier Faith and
Science." Among others Schaller (_Body and Soul_, 1855), J.B. Meyer in a
treatise with the same title, 1856, and the Jena physicist, Karl Snell,[1]
took part in the controversy by way of criticism and mediation. A much
finer nature than the famous leaders of materialism--Moleschott (_The
Circle of Life_, 1852, in answer to Liebig's _Chemical Letters_), and Louis
Büchner, with whose _Force and Matter_ (1855, 16th ed., 1888; English
translation by Collingwood, 4th ed., 1884) the gymnasiast of to-day still
satisfies his freethinking needs--is H. Czolbe (1819-73; _New Exposition of
Sensationalism_, 1855; _The Limits and Origin of Human Knowledge_, 1865),
who, on ethical grounds, demands the exclusion of everything suprasensible
and contentment with the given world of phenomena, but holds that, besides
matter and motion, eternal, purposive forms and original sensations in a
world-soul are necessary to explain organic and psychical phenomena.

[Footnote 1: Snell (1806-86): _The Materialistic Question_, 1858; _The
Creation of Man_, 1863. R. Seydel has edited _Lectures on the Descent of
Man_, 1888, from Snell's posthumous writings.]


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

The speculative impulse, especially in the soul of the German people,
is ineradicable. It has neither allowed itself to be discouraged by the
collapse of the Hegelian edifice, nor to be led astray by the clamor of the
apostles of empiricism, nor to be intimidated by the papal proclamation of
the infallibility of Thomas Aquinas.[1] Manifold attempts have been made
at a new conception of the world, and with varying success. Of the earlier
theories[2] only two have been able to gather a circle of adherents--the
dualistic theism of Günther (1783-1863), and the organic view of the world
of Trendelenburg (1802-72).

[Footnote 2: In 1879 a summons was sent forth from Rome for the revival and
dissemination of the Thomistic system as the only true philosophy (cf. R.
Eucken, _Die Philosophic des Thomas von Aquino und die Kultur der
Neuzeit_, 1886). This movement is supported by the journals, _Jahrbuch für
Philosophie und spekulative Theologie_, edited by Professor E. Commer
of Münster, 1886 _seq_., and _Philosophisches Jahrbuch_, edited, at the
instance and with the support of the Görres Society, by Professor Const.
Gutberlet of Fulda, 1888 _seq_. While the text-books of Hagemann, Stoeckl,
Gutberlet, Pesch, Commer, C.M. Schneider, and others also follow Scholastic
lines, B. Bolzano (died 1848), M. Deutinger (died 1864) and his pupil
Neudecker, Oischinger, Michelis, and W. Rosenkrantz (1821-74; _Science of
Knowledge_, 1866-68), who was influenced by Schelling, have taken a freer
course.]

[Footnote 2: Trahndorff, gymnasial professor in Berlin (1782-1863),
_Aesthetics_, 1827 (cf. E. von Hartmann in the _Philosophische
Monatshefte_, vol. xxii. 1886, p. 59 _seq_., and J. von Billewicz, in the
same, vol. xxi. 1885, p. 561 _seq_.); J.F. Reiff in Tübingen: _System of
the Determinations of the Will_, 1842; K. Chr. Planck (died 1880): _The
Ages of the World_, 1850 _seq_.; _Testament of a German_, edited by Karl
Köstlin, 1881; F. Röse (1815-59), _On the Method of the Knowledge of
the Absolute_, 1841; _Psychology as Introduction to the Philosophy of
Individuality_, 1856. Emanuel Sharer follows Röse. Friedrich Rohmer
(died 1856): _Science of God, Science of Man_, in _Friedrich Rohmer's
Wissenschaft und Leben_, edited by Bluntschli and Rud. Seele, 6 vols.,
1871-92.]

Anton Günther (engaged in authorship from 1827; _Collected Writings_, 1881;
_Anti-Savarese_, edited with an appendix by P. Knoodt), who in 1857
was compelled to retract his views, invokes the spirit of Descartes in
opposition to the Hegelian pantheism. In agreement with Descartes,
Günther starts from self-consciousness (in the ego being and thought are
identical), and brings not only the Creator and the created world, but also
nature (to which the soul is to be regarded as belonging) and spirit into
a relation of exclusive opposition, yet holds that in man nature (body and
soul) and spirit are united, and that they interact without prejudice to
their qualitative difference. J.H. Pabst (died in 1838 in Vienna), Theodor
Weber of Breslau, Knoodt of Bonn (died 1889), V. Knauer of Vienna and
others are Güntherians.

Adolf Trendelenburg[1] of Berlin, the acute critic of Hegel and Herbart,
in his own thinking goes back to the philosophy of the past, especially to
that of Aristotle. Motion and purpose are for him fundamental facts, which
are common to both being and thinking, which mediate between the two, and
make the agreement of knowledge and reality possible. The ethical is a
higher stage of the organic. Space, time, and the categories are forms of
thought as well as of being; the logical form must not be separated from
the content, nor the concept from intuition. We must not fail to mention
that Trendelenburg introduced a peculiar and fruitful method of treating
the history of philosophy, viz., the historical investigation of particular
concepts, in which Teichmüller of Dorpat (1832-88; _Studies in the History
of Concepts_, 1874; _New Studies in the History of Concepts_, 1876-79;
_The Immortality of the Soul_, 2d ed., 1879; _The Nature of Love_, 1880;
_Literary Quarrels in the Fourth Century before Christ_, 1881 and 1884),
and Eucken of Jena (cf. pp. 17 and 623) have followed his example. Kym in
Zurich (born 1822; _Metaphysical Investigations_, 1875; _The Problem of
Evil_, 1878) is a pupil of Trendelenburg.

[Footnote 1: Trendelenburg: _Logical Investigations_, 1840, 3d ed., 1870;
_Historical Contributions to Philosophy_, 3 vols., 1846, 1855, 1867;
_Natural Law on the Basis of Ethics_, 1860, 2d ed., 1868. On Trendelenburg
cf. Eucken in the _Philosophische Monatshefte_, 1884.]

Of more recent systematic attempts the following appear worthy of
mention: Von Kirchmann (1802-84; from 1868 editor of the _Philosophische
Bibliothek_), _The Philosophy of Knowledge_, 1865; _Aesthetics_, 1868; _On
the Principles of Realism_, 1875; _Catechism of Philosophy_ 2d ed., 1881;
E. Dühring (born 1833), _Natural Dialectic_, 1865; _The Value of Life_,
1865, 3d ed, 1881; _Critical History of the Principles of Mechanics_,
1873, 2d ed., 1877; _Course of Philosophy_, 1875 (cf. on Dühring, Helene
Druskowitz, 1889); J. Baumann of Göttingen (born 1837), _Philosophy as
Orientation concerning the World_, 1872; _Handbook of Ethics_, 1879;
_Elements of Philosophy_, 1891; L. Noiré, _The Monistic Idea_, 1875, and
many other works; Frohschammer of Munich (born 1821), _The Phantasy as
the Fundamental Principle of the World-process_, 1877; _On the Genesis
of Humanity, and its Spiritual Development in Religion, Morality and
Language_, 1883; _On the Organization and Culture of Human Society_, 1885.

In the first rank of the thinkers who have made their appearance since
Hegel and Herbart stand Fechner and Lotze, both masters in the use of exact
methods, yet at the same time with their whole souls devoted to the highest
questions, and superior to their contemporaries in breadth of view as in
the importance and range of their leading ideas--Fechner a dreamer and
sober investigator by turns, Lotze with gentle hand reconciling the
antitheses in life and science.

Gustav Theodor Fechner[1] (1801-87; professor at Leipsic) opposes the
abstract separation of God and the world, which has found a place in
natural inquiry and in theology alike, and brings the two into the same
relation of correspondence and reciprocal reference as the soul and the
body. The spirit gives cohesion to the manifold of material parts, and
needs them as a basis and material for its unifying activity. As our
ego connects the manifold of our activities and states in the unity of
consciousness, so the divine spirit is the supreme unity of consciousness
for all being and becoming. In the spirit of God everything is as in ours,
only expanded and enhanced. Our sensations and feelings, our thoughts and
resolutions are His also, only that He, whose body all nature is, and to
whom not only that which takes place in spirits is open, but also that
which goes on between them, perceives more, feels deeper, thinks higher,
and wills better things than we. According to the analogy of the human
organism, both the heavenly bodies and plants are to be conceived as beings
endowed with souls, although they lack nerves, a brain, and voluntary
motion. How could the earth bring forth living beings, if it were itself
dead? Shall not the flower itself rejoice in the color and fragrance which
it produces, and with which it refreshes us? Though its psychical life may
not exceed that of an infant, its sensations, at all events, since they do
not form the basis of a higher activity, are superior in force and richness
to those of the animal. Thus the human soul stands intermediate in the
scale of psychical life: beneath and about us are the souls of plants and
animals, above us the spirits of the earth and stars, which, sharing in and
encompassing the deeds and destinies of their inhabitants, are in
their turn embraced by the consciousness of the universal spirit. The
omnipresence of the divine spirit affords at the same time the means of
escaping from the desolate "night view" of modern science, which looks upon
the world outside the perceiving individual as dark and silent. No, light
and sound are not merely subjective phenomena within us, but extend around
us with objective reality--as sensations of the divine spirit, to which
everything that vibrates resounds and shines.

[Footnote 1: _Nanna, or on the Psychical Life of Plants_, 1848;
_Zend-Avesta, or on the Things of Heaven and the World Beyond_, 1851;
_Physical and Philosophical Atomism_, 1855; _The Three Motives and Grounds
of Belief_, 1863; _The Day View_, 1879; _Elements of Aesthetics_, 1876;
_Elements of Psycho-physics_, 1860; _In the Cause of Psycho-physics_, 1877;
_Review of the Chief Points in Psycho-physics_, 1882; _Book of the Life
after Death_, 1836, 3d ed., 1887; _On the Highest Good_, 1846; _Four
Paradoxes_, 1846; _On the Question of the. Soul_, 1861; _Minor Works by Dr.
Mises_ (Fechner's pseudonym), 1875. On Fechner cf. J. E. Kuntze, Leipsic,
1892.]

The door of the world beyond also opens to the key of analogy. Similar
laws unite the here with the hereafter. As intuition prepares the way for
memory, and lives on in it, so the life of earth merges in the future life,
and continues active in it, elevated to a higher plane. Fechner treats the
problem of evil in a way peculiar to himself. We must not consider the
fact of evil apart from the effort to remove it. It is the spur to all
activity--without evil, no labor and no progress.

Fechner's "psycho-physics," a science which was founded by him in
continuation of the investigations of Bernoulli, Euler, and especially
of E.H. Weber, wears an entirely different aspect from that of his
metaphysics (the "day view," moreover does not claim to be knowledge,
but belief--though a belief which is historically, practically, and
theoretically well-grounded). This aims to be an exact science of the
relations between body and mind, and to reach indirectly what Herbart
failed to reach by direct methods, that is, a measurement of psychical
magnitudes, using in this attempt the least observable differences in
sensations as the unit of measure. Weber's law of the dependence of the
intensity of the sensation on the strength of the stimulus--the increase
in the intensity of the sensation remains the same when the relative
increase of the stimulus (or the relation of the stimuli) remains
constant;[1] so that, _e.g._, in the case of light, an increase from a
stimulus of intensity 1 to one of intensity 100, gives just the same
increase in the intensity of the sensation as an increase from a stimulus
of intensity 2 (or 3) to a stimulus of 200 (or 300)--is much more generally
valid than its discoverer supposed; it holds good for all the senses. In
the case of the pressure sense of the skin, with an original weight of 15
grams (laid upon the hand when at rest and supported), in order to produce
a sensation perceptibly greater we must add not 1 gram, but 5, and with an
original weight of 30 grams, not 5, but 10. Equal additions to the weights
are not enough to produce a sensation of pressure whose intensity shall
render it capable of being distinguished with certainty, but the greater
the original weights the larger the increments must be; while the
intensities of the sensations form an arithmetical, those of the stimuli
form a geometrical, series; the change in sensation is proportional to the
relative change of the stimulus. Sensations of tone show the same
proportion (3:4) as those of pressure; the sensibility of the muscle sense
is finer (when weights are raised the proportion is 15:16), as also that
of vision (the relative brightness of two lights whose difference of
intensity is just perceptible is 100:101). In addition to the
investigations on the threshold of difference there are others on the
threshold of stimulation (the point at which a sensation becomes just
perceptible), on attention, on methods of measurement, on errors, etc.
Moreover, Fechner does not fail to connect his psycho-physics, the
presuppositions and results of which have recently been questioned in
several quarters,[2] with his metaphysical conclusions. Both are pervaded
by the fundamental view that body and spirit belong together (consequently
that everything is endowed with a soul, and that nothing is without a
material basis), nay, that they are the same essence, only seen from
different sides. Body is the (manifold) phenomenon for others, while spirit
is the (unitary) self-phenomenon, in which, however, the inner aspect is
the truer one. That which appears to us as the external world of matter,
is nothing but a universal consciousness which overlaps and influences our
individual consciousness. This is Spinozism idealistically interpreted. In
aesthetics Fechner shows himself an extreme representative of the principle
of association.

[Footnote 1: Fechner teaches: The sensation increases and diminishes in
proportion to the logarithm of the stimulus and of the psycho-physical
nervous activity, the latter being directly proportional to the external
stimulus. Others, on the contrary, find a direct dependence between nervous
activity and sensation, and a logarithmic proportion between the external
stimulus and the nervous activity.]

[Footnote 2: So by Helmholtz; Hering _(Fechners psychophysisches Gesetz_,
1875); P. Langer _(Grundlagen der Psychophysik_, 1876); G.E. Müller in
Göttingen _(Zur Grundlegung der Psychophysik_, 1878); F.A. Müller _(Das
Axiom der Psychophysik_, 1882); A. Elsas _(Ueber die Psychophysik_, 1886);
O. Liebmann _(Aphorismen zur Psychologie, Zeitschrift für Philosophie_,
vol. ci.--Wundt has published a number of papers from his psycho-physical
laboratory in his _Philosophische Studien_, 1881 _seq_. Cf. also Hugo
Münsterberg, _Neue Grundlegung der Psychophysik_ in _Heft_ iii. of his
_Beiträge zur experimentellen Psychologie_, 1889 _seq_). [Further,
Delboeuf, in French, and a growing literature in English as A. Seth,
_Encyclopedia Britannica_, vol. xxiv. 469-471; Ladd, _Elements of
Physiological Psychology_, part ii. chap, v.; James, _Principles of
Psychology_, vol. i. p. 533 _seq_.; and numerous articles as Ward,
_Mind_, vol. i.; Jastrow, _American Journal of Psychology_, vols. i. and
iii.--TR.]]

The most important of the thinkers mentioned in the title of this section
is Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817-81: born at Bautzen; a student of medicine,
and of philosophy under Weisse, in Leipsic; 1844-81 professor in Göttingen;
died in Berlin). Like Fechner, gifted rather with a talent for the fine and
the suggestive than for the large and the rigorous, with a greater reserve
than the former before the mystical and peculiar, as acute, cautious, and
thorough as he was full of taste and loftiness of spirit, Lotze has proved
that the classic philosophers did not die out with Hegel and Herbart. His
_Microcosmus_ (3 vols., 1856-64, 4th ed., 1884 _seq_; English translation
by Hamilton and Jones, 3d ed., 1888), which is more than an anthropology,
as it is modestly entitled, and _History of Aesthetics in Germany_, 1868,
which also gives more than the title betrays, enjoy a deserved popularity.
These works were preceded by the _Medical Psychology_, 1852, and a polemic
treatise against I.H. Fichte, 1857, as well as by a _Pathology_ and a
_Physiology_, and followed by the _System of Philosophy_, which remained
incomplete (part i. _Logic_, 1874, 2d ed., 1881, English translation
edited by Bosanquet, 2d ed., 1888; part ii. _Metaphysics_, 1879, English
translation edited by Bosanquet, 2d ed., 1887). Lotze's _Minor Treatises_
have been published by Peipers in three volumes (1885-91); and Rehnisch has
edited eight sets of dictata from his lectures, 1871-84.[1] Since these
"Outlines," all of which we now have in new editions, make a convenient
introduction to the Lotzean system, and are, or should be, in the
possession of all, a brief survey may here suffice.

[Footnote 1: _Outlines of Psychology, Practical Philosophy, Philosophy of
Religion, Philosophy of Nature, Logic and the Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
Metaphysics, Aesthetics_, and the _History of Philosophy since Kant_, all
of which may be emphatically commended to students, especially the one
first mentioned, and, in spite of its subjective position, the last.
[English translations of these _Outlines_ except the fourth and the
last, by Ladd, 1884 _seq_.] On Lotze cf. the obituaries by J. Baumann
(_Philosophische Monatshefte_, vol. xvii.), H. Sommer (_Im Neuen Reich_),
A. Krohn (_Zeitschrift für Philosophie_, vol. lxxxi. pp. 56-93), R.
Falckenberg (Augsburg _Allgemeine Zeitung_, 1881, No. 233), and Rehnisch
(_National Zeitung_ and the _Revue Philosophique_, vol. xii.). The last of
these was reprinted in the appendix to the _Grundzüge der Aesthetik_, 1884,
which contains, further, a chronological table of Lotze's works, essays,
and critiques, as well as of his lectures. Hugo Sommer has zealously
devoted himself to the popularization of the Lotzean system. Cf., further,
Fritz Koegel, _Lotzes Aesthetik_, Göttingen, 1886, and the article by
Koppelmann referred to above, p. 330.]

The subject of metaphysics is reality. Things which are, events which
happen, relations which exist, representative contents and truths which
are valid, are real. Events happening and relations existing presuppose
existing things as the subjects in and between which they happen and exist.
The being of things is neither their being perceived (for when we say that
a thing is we mean that it continues to be, even when we do not perceive
it), nor a pure, unrelated position, its position in general, but _to be is
to stand in relations_. Further, the _what_ or essence of the things which
enter into these relations cannot be conceived as passive quality, but
only abstractly, as a rule or a law which determines the connection and
succession of a series of qualities. The nature of water, for example, is
the unintuitable somewhat which contains the ground of the change of ice,
first into the liquid condition, and then into steam, when the temperature
increases, and conversely, of the possibility of changing steam back
into water and ice under opposite conditions. And when we speak of an
unchangeable identity of the thing with itself, as a result of which it
remains the same essence amid the change of its phenomena, we mean only the
consistency with which it keeps within the closed series of forms a1, a2,
a3, without ever going over into the series b1, b2. The relations, however,
in which things stand, cannot pass to and fro between things like threads
or little spirits, but are states in things themselves, and the change
of the former always implies a change in these inner states. To stand in
relations means to _exchange actions_. In order to experience such effects
from others and to exercise them upon others, things must neither be wholly
incomparable (as red, hard, sweet) and mutually indifferent, nor yet
absolutely independent; if the independence of individual beings were
complete the process of action would be entirely inconceivable. The
difficulty in the concept of causality--how does being _a_ come to produce
in itself a different state _a_ because another being _b_ enters into the
state [Greek: _b_]?--is removed only when we look on the things as
modes, states, parts of a single comprehensive being, of an infinite,
unconditioned substance, in so far as there is then only an action of
the absolute on itself. Nevertheless the assumption that, in virtue of
the unity and consistency of the absolute or of its impulse to
self-preservation, state [Greek: _b_] in being _b_ follows state
[Greek: _a_] in being _a_ as an accommodation or compensation follows a
disturbance, is not a full explanation of the process of action, does
not remove the difficulty as to how one state can give rise to another.
Metaphysics is, in general, unable to show how reality is made, but only to
remove certain contradictions which stand in the way of the conceivability
of these notions. The so far empty concept of an absolute looks to the
philosophy of religion for its content; the conception of the Godhead as
infinite personality (it is a person in a far higher sense than we) is
first produced when we add to the ontological postulate of a comprehensive
substance the ethical postulate of a supreme good or a universal
world-Idea.

By "thing" we understand the permanent unit-subject of changing states. But
the fact of consciousness furnishes the only guaranty that the different
states _a, [Greek: b], y_, are in reality states of one being, and not so
many different things alternating with one another. Only a conscious
being, which itself effects the distinction between itself and the states
occurring in it, and in memory and recollection feels and knows itself as
their identical subject, is actually a subject which has states. Hence,
if things are to be real, we must attribute to them a nature in essence
related to that of our soul. Reality is existence for self. All beings
are spiritual, and only spiritual beings possess true reality. Thus Lotze
combines the monadology of Leibnitz with the pantheism of Spinoza, just
as he understands how to reconcile the mechanical view of natural science
(which is valid also for the explanation of organic life) with the
teleology and the ethical idealism of Fichte. The sole mission of the
world of forms is to aid in the realization of the ideal purposes of the
absolute, of the world of values.

The ideality of space, which Kant had based on insufficient grounds, is
maintained by Lotze also, only that he makes things stand in "intellectual"
relations, which the knowing subject translates into spatial language. The
same character of subjectivity belongs not only to our sensations, but
also to our ideas concerning the connection of things. Representations are
results, not copies, of the external stimuli; cognition comes under the
general concept of the interaction of real elements, and depends, like
every effect, as much upon the nature of the being that experiences the
effect as upon the nature of the one which exerts it, or rather, more upon
the former than upon the latter. If, nevertheless, it claims objective
reality, truth must not be interpreted as the correspondence of thought and
its object (the cognitive image can never be like the thing itself), nor
the mission of cognition, made to consist in copying a world already
finished and closed apart from the realm of spirits, to which mental
representation is added as something accessory. Light and sound are not
therefore illusions because they are not true copies of the waves of ether
and of air from which they spring, but they are the end which nature has
sought to attain through these motions, an end, however, which it cannot
attain alone, but only by acting upon spiritual subjects; the beauty and
splendor of colors and tones are that which of right ought to be in the
world; without the new world of representations awakened in spirits by the
action of external stimuli, the world would lack its essential culmination.
The purpose of things is to be known, experienced, and enjoyed by spirits.
The truth of cognition consists in the fact that it opens up the meaning
and destination of the world. That which ought to be is the ground of that
which is; that which is exists in order to the realization of values in
it; the good is the only real. It is true that we are not permitted to
penetrate farther than to the general conviction that the Idea of the good
is the ground and end of the world; the question, how the world has arisen
from this supreme Idea as from the absolute and why just this world with
its determinate forms and laws has arisen, is unanswerable. We understand
the meaning of the play, but we do not see the machinery by which it is
produced at work behind the stage. In ethics Lotze emphasizes with Fechner
the inseparability of the good and pleasure: it is impossible to state in
what the worth or goodness of a good is to consist, if it be conceived out
of all relation to a spirit capable of finding enjoyment in it.

If Lotze's philosophy harmoniously combines Herbartian and Fichteo-Hegelian
elements, Eduard von Hartmann (born 1842; until 1864 a soldier, now a man
of letters in Berlin) aims at a synthesis of Schopenhauer and Hegel; with
the pessimism of the former he unites the evolutionism of the latter, and
while the one conceives the nature of the world-ground as irrational will,
and the other as the logical Idea, he follows the example of Schelling
in his later days by making will and representation equally legitimate
attributes of his absolute, the Unconscious. His principal theoretical
work, _The Philosophy of the Unconscious_, 1869 (10th ed., 1891; English
translation by Coupland, 1884), was followed in 1879 by his chief ethical
one, _The Moral Consciousness_ (2d ed., 1886, in the _Selected Works_); the
two works on the philosophy of religion, _The Religious Consciousness of
Humanity in the Stages of its Development_, 1881, and _The Religion of
Spirit_, 1882, together form the third chief work (_The Self-Disintegration
of Christianity and the Religion of the Future_, 1874, and _The Crisis of
Christianity in Modern Theology_, 1880, are to be regarded as forerunners
of this); the fourth is the _Aesthetics_ (part i. _German Aesthetics since
Kant_, 1886; part ii. _Philosophy of the Beautiful_, 1887). The _Collected
Studies and Essays_, 1876, were preceded by two treatises on the philosophy
of nature, _Truth and Error in Darwinism_, 1875, and _The Unconscious
from the Standpoint of Physiology and the Theory of Descent_, published
anonymously in 1872, in the latter of which, disguised as a Darwinian,
he criticises his own philosophy. Of his more recent publications we may
mention the _Philosophical Questions of the Day_, 1885; _Modern Problems_,
1886; and the controversial treatise _Lotzes Philosophy_, 1888.[1]

[Footnote 1: On Hartmann cf. Volkelt in _Nord und Süd_, July, 1881; the
same, _Das Unbewusste und der Pessimismus_, 1873; Vaihinger, _Hartmann_,
_Dühring und Lange_, 1876; R. Koeber, _Das philosophische System Ed.
v, Hartmann_, 1884; O. Pfleiderer, critique of the _Phänomenologie des
sittlichen Bewusstseins (Im neuen Reich)_, 1879; L. von Golther, _Der
moderne Pessimismus_, 1878; J. Huber, _Der Pessimismus_, 1876; Weygoldt,
_Kritik des philosophischen Pessimismus der neuesten Zeit_, 1875; M.
Venetianer, _Der Allgeist_, 1874; A Taubert (Hartmann's first wife),
_Der Pessimismus und seine Gegner_, 1873; O. Plümacher, _Der Kampf ums
Unbewusste_ (with a chronological table of Hartmann literature appended),
1881; the same, _Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart_, 1884;
Krohn, _Streifzüge_ (see above); Seydel (see above). During the year
1882 four publications appeared under the title _Der Pessimismus und die
Sittenlehre_, by Bacmeister, Christ, Rehmke, and H. Sommer (2d ed., 1883).
[English translation of _Truth and Error in Darwinism_ in the _Journal
of Speculative Philosophy_, vols. xi.-xiii., and of _The Religion of the
Future_, by Dare, 1886; cf. also Sully's _Pessimism_, chap. v.--TR.]]

In polemical relation, on the one hand, to the naïve realism of life,
and, on the other, to the subjective idealism of Kant, or rather of
the neo-Kantians, the logical conclusion of which would be absolute
illusionism, Hartmann founds his "transcendental realism," which mediates
between these two points of view (the existence and true nature of the
world outside our representations is knowable, if only indirectly; the
forms of knowledge, in spite of their subjective origin, have a more
than subjective, a transcendental, significance) by pointing out that
sense-impressions, which are accompanied by the feeling of compulsion and
are different from one another, cannot be explained from the ego, but only
by the action of things in themselves external to us, _i.e._, independent
of consciousness, and themselves distinct from one another. The causality
of things in themselves is the bridge which enables us to cross the gulf
between the immanent world of representations and the transcendent world of
being. The causality of things in themselves proves their reality, their
difference at different times, their changeability and their temporal
character; change, however, demands something permanent, existence, an
existing, unchangeable, supra-temporal, and non-spatial substance (whether
a special substance for each thing in itself or a common one for all, is
left for the present undetermined). My action upon the thing in itself
assures me of its causal conditionality or necessity; the various
affections of the same sense, that there are many things in themselves; the
peculiar form of change shown by some bodies, that these, like my body, are
united with a soul. Thus it is evident that, besides the concept of cause,
a series of other categories must be applied to the thing in itself, hence
applied transcendentally.

The "speculative results" obtained by Hartmann on an "inductive" basis
are as follows: The _per se (Ansich)_ of the empirical world is the
Unconscious. The two attributes of this absolute are the active,
groundless, alogical, infinite will, and the passive, finite representation
(Idea); the former is the ground of the _that_ of the world, the latter
the ground of its purposive _what_ and _how_. Without the will the
representation, which in itself is without energy, could not become real,
and without the representation (of an end) the will, which in itself is
without reason, could not become a definite willing (relative or immanent
dualism of the attributes, a necessary moment in absolute monism). The
empirical preponderance of pain over pleasure, which can be shown by
calculation,[1] proves that the world is evil, that its non-existence were
better than its existence; the purposiveness everywhere perceptible in
nature and the progress of history toward a final goal (it is true, a
negative one) proves, nevertheless, that it is the best world that was
possible (reconciliation of eudemonistic pessimism with evolutionistic
optimism). The creation of the world begins when the blind will to live
groundlessly and fortuitously passes over from essence to phenomenon, from
potency to act, from supra-existence to existence, and, in irrational
striving after existence, draws to itself the only content which is capable
of realization, the logical Idea. This latter seeks to make good the
error committed by the will by bringing consciousness into the field as
a combatant against the insatiable, ever yearning, never satisfied will,
which one day will force the will back into latency, into the (antemundane)
blessed state of not-willing. The goal of the world-development is
deliverance from the misery of existence, the peace of non-existence, the
return from the will and representation, become spatial and temporal, to
the original, harmonious equilibrium of the two functions, which has been
disturbed by the origin of the world or to the antemundane identity of the
absolute. The task of the logical element is to teach consciousness more
and more to penetrate the illusion of the will--in its three stages of
childlike (Greek) expectation of happiness to be attained here, youthful
(Christian) expectation of happiness to be attained hereafter, and
adult expectation of happiness to be attained in the future of the
world-development--and, finally, to teach it to know, in senile longing
after rest, that only the doing away with this miserable willing, and,
consequently, with earthly existence (through the resolve of the majority
of mankind) can give the sole attainable blessedness, freedom from pain.
The world-process is the incarnation, the suffering, and the redemption
of the absolute; the moral task of man is not personal renunciation and
cowardly retirement, but to make the purposes of the Unconscious his own,
with complete resignation to life and its sufferings to labor energetically
in the world-process, and, by the vigorous promotion of consciousness, to
hasten the fulfillment of the redemptive purpose; the condition of morality
is insight into the fruitlessness of all striving after pleasure and into
the essential unity of all individual beings with one another and with the
universal spirit, which exists in the individuals, but at the same time
subsists above them. "To know one's self as of divine nature, this does
away with all divergence between selfwill and universal will, with all
estrangement between man and God, with all undivine, that is, merely
natural, conduct."

[Footnote 1: Cf. Volkelt, _Ueber die Lust als höchsten Werthmassstab_
(in the _Zeitschrift für Philosophie_, vol. lxxxviii.), 1886, and O.
Pfleiderer, _Philosophy of Religion_, vol. ii. p. 249 _seq_.]

Religion, which, in common with philosophy, has for its basis the
metaphysical need for, or the mystical feeling of, the unity of the human
individual and the world-ground, needs transformation, since in its
traditional forms it is opposed to modern culture, and the merging of
religion (as a need of the heart) in metaphysics is impossible. The
religion of the future, for which the way has already been prepared by the
speculative Protestantism of the present, is _concrete monism_ (the divine
unity is transcendent as well as immanent in the plurality of the beings of
earth, every moral man a God-man), which includes in itself the abstract
monism (pantheism) of the Indian religions and the Judeo-Christian (mono-)
theism as subordinate moments. (The original henotheism and its decline
into polytheism, demonism, and fetichism was followed by--Egyptian and
Persian, as well as Greek, Roman, and German--naturalism, and then by
supernaturalism in its monistic and its theistic form. The chief defect of
the Christian religion is the transcendental-eudemonistic heteronomy of its
ethics.) The _Religion of Spirit_ divides into three parts. The psychology
of religion considers the religious function in its subjective aspect,
faith as a combined act of representation, feeling, and will, in which one
of these three elements may predominate--though feeling forms the inmost
kernel of the theoretical and practical activities as well--and, as
the objective correlate of faith, grace (revealing, redeeming, and
sanctifying), which elevates man above peripheral and phenomenal dependence
on the world, and frees him from it, through his becoming conscious of his
central and metaphysical dependence upon God. The metaphysics of religion
(in theological, anthropological, and cosmological sections) proves
by induction from the facts of religion the existence, omnipotence,
spirituality, omniscience, righteousness, and holiness of the All-one,
which coincides with the moral order of the world. Further, it proves the
need and the capacity of man for redemption from guilt and evil--here three
spheres of the individual will are distinguished, one beneath God, one
contrary to God, and one conformable to God, or a natural, an evil, and a
moral sphere--and, preserving alike the absoluteness of God and the reality
of the world, shows that it is not so much man as God himself, who, as the
bearer of all the suffering of the world, is the subject of redemption.
The ethics of religion discusses the subjective and objective processes of
redemption, namely, repentance and amendment on the part of the individual
and the ecclesiastical _cultus_ of the future, which is to despise symbols
and art.

It is to Hartmann's credit, though the fact has not been sufficiently
appreciated by professional thinkers, that in a time averse to speculation
he has devoted his energies to the highest problems of metaphysics, and in
their elaboration has approached his task with scientific earnestness and
a comprehensive and thorough consideration of previous results. Thus
the critique of ethical standpoints in the historical part of the
_Phenomenology of the Moral Consciousness_, especially, contains much that
is worthy of consideration; and his fundamental metaphysical idea, that the
absolute is to be conceived as the unity of will and reason, also deserves
in general a more lively assent than has been accorded to it, while his
rejection of an infinite consciousness has justly met with contradiction.
It has been impossible here to go into his discussions in the philosophy of
nature--they cannot be described in brief--on matter (atomic forces), on
the mechanical and teleological views of life and its development, on
instinct, on sexual love, etc., which he very skillfully uses in support of
his metaphysical principle.


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

%(a) Neo-Kantianism, Positivism, and Kindred Phenomena.%--The Kantian
philosophy has created two epochs: one at the time of its appearance, and
a second two generations after the death of its author. The new Kantian
movement, which is one of the most prominent characteristics of the
philosophy of the present time, took its beginning a quarter of a century
ago. It is true that even before 1865 individual thinkers like Ernst
Reinhold of Jena (died 1855), the admirer of Fries, J.B. Meyer of Bonn,
K.A. von Reichlin-Meldegg, and others had sought a point of departure for
their views in Kant; that K. Fischer's work on Kant (1860) had given a
lively impulse to the renewed study of the critical philosophy; nay, that
the cry "Back to Kant" had been expressly raised by Fortlage (as early as
1832 in his treatise _The Gaps in the Hegelian System_), and by Zeller
(p. 589). But the movement first became general after F.A. Lange in his
_History of Materialism_ had energetically advocated the Kantian doctrine
according to his special conception of it, after Helmholtz[1] (born 1821)
had called attention to the agreement of the results of physiology with
those of the Critique of Reason, and at the same time Liebmann's youthful
work, _Kant and the Epigones_, in which every chapter ended with the
inexorable refrain, "therefore we must go back to Kant," had given the
strongest expression to the longing of the time.

[Footnote 1: Helmholtz: _On Human Vision_, 1855; _Physiological Optics_,
1867; _Sensations of Tone_, 1863, 4th ed., 1877 [English translation by
Ellis, 2d ed., 1885].]

Otto Liebmann (cf. also the chapter on "The Metamorphoses of the A Priori"
in his _Analysis of Reality_) sees the fundamental truth of criticism in
the irrefutable proof that, space, time, and the categories are functions
of the intellect, and that subject and object are necessary correlates,
inseparable factors of the empirical world, and finds Kant's fundamental
error, which the Epigones have not corrected, but made still worse, in the
non-concept of the thing in itself, which must be expelled from the Kantian
philosophy as a remnant of dogmatism, as a drop of alien blood, and as an
illegitimate invader which has debased it.

According to Friedrich Albert Lange[1] (1828-75; during the last years
of his life professor at Marburg), materialism, which is unfruitful and
untenable as a principle, a system, and a view of the world, but useful
and indispensable as a method and a maxim of investigation, must be
supplemented by formal idealism, which, rejecting all science from mere
reason limits knowledge to the sensuous, to that which can be experienced,
yet at the same time conceives the formal element in the sense world as the
product of the organization of man, and hence makes objects conform to our
representations. Above the sensuous world of experience and of mechanical
becoming, however, the speculative impulse to construction, rounding off
the fragmentary truth of the sciences into a unified picture of the whole
truth, rears the ideal world of that which ought to be. Notwithstanding
their indefeasible certitude, the Ideas possess no scientific truth, though
they have a moral value which makes them more than mere fabrics of the
brain: man is framed not merely for the knowledge of truth, but also for
the realization of values. But since the significance of the Ideas is
only practical, and since determinations of value are not grounds
of explanation, science and metaphysics or "concept poetry"
(_Begriffsdichtung_) must be kept strictly separate.

[Footnote 1: F.A. Lange: _Logical Studies_, 1877. Cf. M. Heinze in the
_Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophic_, 1877, and
Vaihinger in the work cited above, p. 610 note.]

Friedrich Paulsen of Berlin (born in 1846; cf. pp. 330, 332, note) sees in
the Kantian philosophy the foundation for the philosophy of the future. A
profounder Wolff (the self-dominion of the reason), a Prussian Hume (the
categories of the understanding are not world-categories; rejection of
anthropomorphic metaphysics), and a German Rousseau (the primacy of the
will, consideration of the demands of the heart; the good will alone, not
deeds nor culture, constitutes the worth of man; freedom, the rights of
man) in one person, Kant has withdrawn from scientific discussion the
question concerning the dependence of reality on values or the good,
which is theoretically insoluble but practically to be answered in the
affirmative, and given it over to faith. Kant is in so far a positivist
that he limits the mission of knowledge to the reduction of the
temporo-spatial relations of phenomena to rules, and declares the
teleological power of values to be undemonstrable. But science is able
to prove this much, that the belief in a suprasensible world, in the
indestructibility of that which alone has worth, and in the freedom of
the intelligible character, which the will demands, is not scientifically
impossible. Since, according to formal rationalism, the whole order of
nature is a creation of the understanding, and hence atomism and mechanism
are only forms of representation, valid, no doubt, for our peripheral point
of view, but not absolutely valid, since, further, the empirical view of
the world apart from the Idea of the divine unity of the world (which, it
is true, is incapable of theoretical realization) would lack completion,
the immediate conviction of the heart in regard to the power of the good is
in no danger of attack from the side of science, although this can do no
further service for faith than to remove the obstacles which oppose it. The
will, not the intellect, determines the view of the world; but this is only
a belief, and in the world of representation, the intelligible world, with
which the will brings us into relation, can come before us only in the form
of symbols.--While Albrecht Krause (_The Laws of the Human Heart, a Formal
Logic of Pure Feeling_, 1876) and A. Classen (_Physiology of the Sense of
Sight_, 1877) are strict followers of Kant, J. Volkelt (_Analysis of the
Fundamental Principles of Kant's Theory of Knowledge_, 1879) has traced the
often deplored inconsistencies and contradictions in Kant down to their
roots, and has shown that in Kant's thinking, which has hitherto been
conceived as too simple and transparent, but which, in fact, is extremely
complicated and struggling in the dark, a number of entirely heterogeneous
principles of thought (skeptical, subjectivistic, metaphysico-work,
rationalistic, _a priori_, and practical motives) are at which, conflicting
with and crippling one another, make the attainment of harmonious results
impossible. Benno Erdmann (p. 330) and Hans Vaihinger (pp. 323 note, 331)
have given Kant's principal works careful philological interpretation.

Among the various differences of opinion which exist within the neo-Kantian
ranks, the most important relates to the question, whether the individual
ego or a transcendental consciousness is to be looked upon as the executor
of the _a priori_ functions. In agreement with Schopenhauer and with Lotze,
who makes the subjectivity of space, time, and the pure concepts parallel
with that of the sense qualities, Lange teaches that the human individual
is so organized that he must apprehend that which is sensuously given under
these forms. Others, on the contrary, urge that the individual soul with
its organization is itself a phenomenon, and consequently cannot be the
bearer of that which precedes phenomena--space, time, and the categories
as "conditions" of experience are functions of a pure consciousness to be
presupposed. The antithesis of subject and object, the soul and the world,
first arises in the sphere of phenomena. The empirical subject, like the
world of objects, is itself a product of the _a priori_ forms, hence not
that which produces them. To the transcendental group belong Hermann
Cohen[1] in Marburg, A. Stadler[2], Natorp, Lasswitz (p.17), E. König (p.
17), Koppelmann (p. 330), Staudinger (p. 331). Fritz Schultze of Dresden is
also to be counted among the neo-Kantians (_Philosophy of Natural Science_,
1882; _Kant and Darwin_, 1875; _The Fundamental Thoughts of Materialism_,
1881; _The Fundamental Thoughts of Spiritualism_, 1883; _Comparative
Psychology_, i. 1, 1892).

[Footnote 1: Cohen: _Kant's Theory of Experience_, 1871, 2d ed., 1886;
_Kant's Foundation of Ethics_, 1877; _Kant's Foundation of Aesthetics_,
1889.]

[Footnote 2: Stadler: _Kant's Teleology_, 1874; _The Principles of the Pure
Theory of Knowledge in the Kantian Philosophy_, 1876; _Kant's Theory of
Matter_, 1883.]

The German positivists[1]:--E. Laas of Strasburg (1837-85), A. Riehl
of Freiburg in Baden (born 1844), and R. Avenarius of Zurich (born
1843)--develop their sensationalistic theory of knowledge in critical
connection with Kant. Ernst Laas defines positivism (founded by Protagoras,
advocated in modern times by Hume and J.S. Mill, and hostile to Platonic
idealism) as that philosophy which recognizes no other foundations than
positive facts (_i.e._, perceptions), and requires every opinion to exhibit
the experiences on which it rests. Its basis is constituted by three
articles of belief: (1) The correlative facts, subject and object, exist
and arise only in connection (objects are directly known only as the
contents of a consciousness, _cui objecta sunt_, subjects only as centers
of relation, as the scene or foundation of a representative content, _cui
subjecta sunt_: outside my thoughts body does not exist as body, nor I
myself as soul). (2) The variability of the objects of perception. (3)
Sensationalism--all specific differences in consciousness must be conceived
as differences in degree, all higher mental processes and states, including
thought, as the perceptions and experiences, transformed according to
law, of beings which feel, have wants, possess memory, and are capable of
spontaneous motion. The subject coincides with its feeling of pleasure and
pain, from which sensation is distinguished by its objective content. The
illusions of metaphysics are scientifically untenable and practically
unnecessary. Various yearnings, wants, presentiments, hopes, and fancies,
it is true, lead beyond the sphere of that which can be checked by sense
and experience, but for none of their positions can any sufficient proof be
adduced. As physics has discarded transcendent causes and learned how to
get along with immanent causes, so ethics also must endeavor to establish
the worth of moral good without excursions into the suprasensible. The
ethical obligations arise naturally from human relations, from earthly
needs. The third volume of Laas's work differs from the earlier ones by
conceding the rank of facts to the principles of logic as well as to
perception. Aloys Riehl opposes the theory of knowledge (which starts from
the fundamental fact of sensation) as scientific philosophy to metaphysics
as unscientific, and banishes the doctrine of the practical ideals from the
realm of science into the region of religion and art. Richard Avenarius
defends the principle of "pure experience." Sensation, which is all that is
left as objectively given after the removal of the subjective additions,
constitutes the content, and motion the form of being.

[Footnote 1: Laas: _Idealism and Positivism_, 1879-84. Riehl:
_Philosophical Criticism_, 1876-87; Address _On Scientific and Unscientific
Philosophy_, 1883. Avenarius (p. 598): _Philosophy as Thought concerning
the World according to the Principle of Least Work_, 1876; _Critique of
Pure Experience_, vol. i. 1888, vol. ii. 1890; _Man's Concept of the
World_, 1891. C. Göring (died 1879; _System of Critical Philosophy_, 1875)
may also be placed here.]

With the neo-Kantians and the positivists there is associated, thirdly, a
coherent group of noëtical thinkers, who, rejecting extramental elements of
every kind, look on all conceivable being as merely a conscious content.
This monism of consciousness is advocated by W. Schuppe of Greifswald (born
1836; _Noëtical Logic_, 1878), J. Rehmke, also of Greifswald (_The World as
Percept and Concept_, 1880; "The Question of the Soul" in vol. ii. of the
_Zeitschrift für Psychologie_, 1891), A. von Leclair (_Contributions to
a_ _Monistic Theory of Knowledge_, 1882), and R. von Schubert-Soldern
(_Foundations of a Theory of Knowledge_, 1884; _On the Transcendence
of Object and Subject_, 1882; _Foundations for an Ethics_, 1887). J.
Bergmann[1] in Marburg (born 1840) occupies a kindred position.

[Footnote 1: Bergmann: _Outlines of a Theory of Consciousness_, 1870; _Pure
Logic_, 1879; _Being and Knowing_, 1880; _The Fundamental Problems of
Logic_, 1882; _On the Right_, 1883; _Lectures on Metaphysics_, 1886; _On
the Beautiful_, 1887; _History of Philosophy_, vol. i., _Pre-Kantian
Philosophy_, 1892.]

It is the same scientific spirit of the time, which in the fifties led many
who were weary of the idealistic speculations over to materialism, that now
secures such wide dissemination and so widespread favor for the endeavors
of the neo-Kantians and the positivists or neo-Baconians, who desire to see
metaphysics stricken from the list of the sciences and replaced by noëtics,
and the theory of the world relegated to faith. The philosophy of the
present, like the pre-Socratic philosophy and the philosophy of the early
modern period, wears the badge of physics. The world is conceived from the
standpoint of nature, psychical phenomena are in part neglected, in part
see their inconvenient claims reduced to a minimum, while it is but rarely
that we find an appreciation of their independence and co-ordinate value,
not to speak of their superior position. The power which natural science
has gained over philosophy dates essentially from a series of famous
discoveries and theories, by which science has opened up entirely new and
wide outlooks, and whose title to be considered in the formation of a
general view of reality is incontestable. To mention only the most
prominent, the following have all posited important and far-reaching
problems for philosophy as well as for science: Johannes Müller's (Müller
died 1858) theory of the specific energies of the senses, which Helmholtz
made use of as an empirical confirmation of the Kantian apriorism; the law
of the conservation of energy discovered by Robert Mayer (1842, 1850;
Helmholtz, 1847, 1862), and, in particular, the law of the transformation
of heat into motion, which invited an examination of all the forces active
in the world to test their mutual convertibility; the extension of
mechanism to the vital processes, favored even by Lotze; the renewed
conflict between atomism and dynamism; further, the Darwinian theory[1]
(1859), which makes organic species develop from one another by natural
selection in the struggle for existence (through inheritance and
adaptation); finally, the meta-geometrical speculations[2] of Gauss (1828),
Riemann (_On the Hypotheses which lie at the Basis of Geometry_, 1854,
published in 1867), Helmholtz (1868), B. Erdmann (_The Axioms of Geometry_,
1877). G. Cantor, and others, which look on our Euclidean space of three
dimensions as a special case of the unintuitable yet thinkable analytic
concept of a space of _n_ dimensions. The circumstance that these theories
are still largely hypothetical in their own field appears to have stirred
up rather than moderated the zeal for carrying them over into other
departments and for applying them to the world as a whole. Thus,
especially, the Darwinians[3] have undauntedly attempted to utilize the
biological hypothesis of the master as a philosophical principle of the
world, and to bring the mental sciences under the point of view of the
mechanical theory of development, though thus far with more daring and
noise than success. The finely conceived ethics of Höffding (p. 585) is an
exception to the rule which is the object of this remark.

[Footnote 1: A critical exposition of the modern doctrine of development
and of the causes used to explain it is given by Otto Hamann,
_Entwickelungslehre und Darwinismus_, Jena, 1892. Cf. also, O. Liebmann,
_Analysis der Wirklichkeit_; and Ed. von Hartmann (above, p. 610). [Among
the numerous works in English the reader may be referred to the article
"Evolution," by Huxley and Sully, _Encyclopedia Britannica_, 9th ed., vol.
viii.; Wallace's _Darwinism_, 1889; Romanes, _Darwin and after Darwin_,
i. _The Darwinian Theory_, 1892; and Conn's _Evolution of To-day_,
1886.--TR.]]

[Footnote 2: Cf. Liebmann, _Analysis der Wirklichkeit_, 2d ed., pp. 53-59.


 


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