[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.
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.