[Footnote 1: Fechner teaches: The sensation increases and diminishes in proportion to the logarithm of the stimulus and of the psycho-physical nervous activity, the latter being directly proportional to the external stimulus. Others, on the contrary, find a direct dependence between nervous activity and sensation, and a logarithmic proportion between the external stimulus and the nervous activity.]
[Footnote 2: So by Helmholtz; Hering (Fechners psychophysisches Gesetz, 1875); P. Langer (Grundlagen der Psychophysik, 1876); G.E. Müller in Göttingen (Zur Grundlegung der Psychophysik, 1878); F.A. Müller (Das Axiom der Psychophysik, 1882); A. Elsas (Ueber die Psychophysik, 1886); O. Liebmann (Aphorismen zur Psychologie, Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. ci.—Wundt has published a number of papers from his psycho-physical laboratory in his Philosophische Studien, 1881 seq. Cf. also Hugo Münsterberg, Neue Grundlegung der Psychophysik in Heft iii. of his Beiträge zur experimentellen Psychologie, 1889 seq). [Further, Delboeuf, in French, and a growing literature in English as A. Seth, Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. xxiv. 469-471; Ladd, Elements of Physiological Psychology, part ii. chap, v.; James, Principles of Psychology, vol. i. p. 533 seq.; and numerous articles as Ward, Mind, vol. i.; Jastrow, American Journal of Psychology, vols. i. and iii.—TR.]]
The most important of the thinkers mentioned in the title of this section is Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817-81: born at Bautzen; a student of medicine, and of philosophy under Weisse, in Leipsic; 1844-81 professor in Göttingen; died in Berlin). Like Fechner, gifted rather with a talent for the fine and the suggestive than for the large and the rigorous, with a greater reserve than the former before the mystical and peculiar, as acute, cautious, and thorough as he was full of taste and loftiness of spirit, Lotze has proved that the classic philosophers did not die out with Hegel and Herbart. His Microcosmus (3 vols., 1856-64, 4th ed., 1884 seq; English translation by Hamilton and Jones, 3d ed., 1888), which is more than an anthropology, as it is modestly entitled, and History of Aesthetics in Germany, 1868, which also gives more than the title betrays, enjoy a deserved popularity. These works were preceded by the Medical Psychology, 1852, and a polemic treatise against I.H. Fichte, 1857, as well as by a Pathology and a Physiology, and followed by the System of Philosophy, which remained incomplete (part i. Logic, 1874, 2d ed., 1881, English translation edited by Bosanquet, 2d ed., 1888; part ii. Metaphysics, 1879, English translation edited by Bosanquet, 2d ed., 1887). Lotze's Minor Treatises have been published by Peipers in three volumes (1885-91); and Rehnisch has edited eight sets of dictata from his lectures, 1871-84.[1] Since these "Outlines," all of which we now have in new editions, make a convenient introduction to the Lotzean system, and are, or should be, in the possession of all, a brief survey may here suffice.
[Footnote 1: Outlines of Psychology, Practical Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Nature, Logic and the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Metaphysics, Aesthetics, and the History of Philosophy since Kant, all of which may be emphatically commended to students, especially the one first mentioned, and, in spite of its subjective position, the last. [English translations of these Outlines except the fourth and the last, by Ladd, 1884 seq.] On Lotze cf. the obituaries by J. Baumann (Philosophische Monatshefte, vol. xvii.), H. Sommer (Im Neuen Reich), A. Krohn (Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. lxxxi. pp. 56-93), R. Falckenberg (Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, 1881, No. 233), and Rehnisch (National Zeitung and the Revue Philosophique, vol. xii.). The last of these was reprinted in the appendix to the Grundzüge der Aesthetik, 1884, which contains, further, a chronological table of Lotze's works, essays, and critiques, as well as of his lectures. Hugo Sommer has zealously devoted himself to the popularization of the Lotzean system. Cf., further, Fritz Koegel, Lotzes Aesthetik, Göttingen, 1886, and the article by Koppelmann referred to above, p. 330.]
The subject of metaphysics is reality. Things which are, events which happen, relations which exist, representative contents and truths which are valid, are real. Events happening and relations existing presuppose existing things as the subjects in and between which they happen and exist. The being of things is neither their being perceived (for when we say that a thing is we mean that it continues to be, even when we do not perceive it), nor a pure, unrelated position, its position in general, but to be is to stand in relations. Further, the what or essence of the things which enter into these relations cannot be conceived as passive quality, but only abstractly, as a rule or a law which determines the connection and succession of a series of qualities. The nature of water, for example, is the unintuitable somewhat which contains the ground of the change of ice, first into the liquid condition, and then into steam, when the temperature increases, and conversely, of the possibility of changing steam back into water and ice under opposite conditions. And when we speak of an unchangeable identity of the thing with itself, as a result of which it remains the same essence amid the change of its phenomena, we mean only the consistency with which it keeps within the closed series of forms a1, a2, a3, without ever going over into the series b1, b2. The relations, however, in which things stand, cannot pass to and fro between things like threads or little spirits, but are states in things themselves, and the change of the former always implies a change in these inner states. To stand in relations means to exchange actions. In order to experience such effects from others and to exercise them upon others, things must neither be wholly incomparable (as red, hard, sweet) and mutually indifferent, nor yet absolutely independent; if the independence of individual beings were complete the process of action would be entirely inconceivable. The difficulty in the concept of causality—how does being a come to produce in itself a different state a because another being b enters into the state [Greek: b]?—is removed only when we look on the things as modes, states, parts of a single comprehensive being, of an infinite, unconditioned substance, in so far as there is then only an action of the absolute on itself. Nevertheless the assumption that, in virtue of the unity and consistency of the absolute or of its impulse to self-preservation, state [Greek: b] in being b follows state [Greek: a] in being a as an accommodation or compensation follows a disturbance, is not a full explanation of the process of action, does not remove the difficulty as to how one state can give rise to another. Metaphysics is, in general, unable to show how reality is made, but only to remove certain contradictions which stand in the way of the conceivability of these notions. The so far empty concept of an absolute looks to the philosophy of religion for its content; the conception of the Godhead as infinite personality (it is a person in a far higher sense than we) is first produced when we add to the ontological postulate of a comprehensive substance the ethical postulate of a supreme good or a universal world-Idea.
By "thing" we understand the permanent unit-subject of changing states. But the fact of consciousness furnishes the only guaranty that the different states a, [Greek: b], y, are in reality states of one being, and not so many different things alternating with one another. Only a conscious being, which itself effects the distinction between itself and the states occurring in it, and in memory and recollection feels and knows itself as their identical subject, is actually a subject which has states. Hence, if things are to be real, we must attribute to them a nature in essence related to that of our soul. Reality is existence for self. All beings are spiritual, and only spiritual beings possess true reality. Thus Lotze combines the monadology of Leibnitz with the pantheism of Spinoza, just as he understands how to reconcile the mechanical view of natural science (which is valid also for the explanation of organic life) with the teleology and the ethical idealism of Fichte. The sole mission of the world of forms is to aid in the realization of the ideal purposes of the absolute, of the world of values.
The ideality of space, which Kant had based on insufficient grounds, is maintained by Lotze also, only that he makes things stand in "intellectual" relations, which the knowing subject translates into spatial language. The same character of subjectivity belongs not only to our sensations, but also to our ideas concerning the connection of things. Representations are results, not copies, of the external stimuli; cognition comes under the general concept of the interaction of real elements, and depends, like every effect, as much upon the nature of the being that experiences the effect as upon the nature of the one which exerts it, or rather, more upon the former than upon the latter. If, nevertheless, it claims objective reality, truth must not be interpreted as the correspondence of thought and its object (the cognitive image can never be like the thing itself), nor the mission of cognition, made to consist in copying a world already finished and closed apart from the realm of spirits, to which mental representation is added as something accessory. Light and sound are not therefore illusions because they are not true copies of the waves of ether and of air from which they spring, but they are the end which nature has sought to attain through these motions, an end, however, which it cannot attain alone, but only by acting upon spiritual subjects; the beauty and splendor of colors and tones are that which of right ought to be in the world; without the new world of representations awakened in spirits by the action of external stimuli, the world would lack its essential culmination. The purpose of things is to be known, experienced, and enjoyed by spirits. The truth of cognition consists in the fact that it opens up the meaning and destination of the world. That which ought to be is the ground of that which is; that which is exists in order to the realization of values in it; the good is the only real. It is true that we are not permitted to penetrate farther than to the general conviction that the Idea of the good is the ground and end of the world; the question, how the world has arisen from this supreme Idea as from the absolute and why just this world with its determinate forms and laws has arisen, is unanswerable. We understand the meaning of the play, but we do not see the machinery by which it is produced at work behind the stage. In ethics Lotze emphasizes with Fechner the inseparability of the good and pleasure: it is impossible to state in what the worth or goodness of a good is to consist, if it be conceived out of all relation to a spirit capable of finding enjoyment in it.
If Lotze's philosophy harmoniously combines Herbartian and Fichteo-Hegelian elements, Eduard von Hartmann (born 1842; until 1864 a soldier, now a man of letters in Berlin) aims at a synthesis of Schopenhauer and Hegel; with the pessimism of the former he unites the evolutionism of the latter, and while the one conceives the nature of the world-ground as irrational will, and the other as the logical Idea, he follows the example of Schelling in his later days by making will and representation equally legitimate attributes of his absolute, the Unconscious. His principal theoretical work, The Philosophy of the Unconscious, 1869 (10th ed., 1891; English translation by Coupland, 1884), was followed in 1879 by his chief ethical one, The Moral Consciousness (2d ed., 1886, in the Selected Works); the two works on the philosophy of religion, The Religious Consciousness of Humanity in the Stages of its Development, 1881, and The Religion of Spirit, 1882, together form the third chief work (The Self-Disintegration of Christianity and the Religion of the Future, 1874, and The Crisis of Christianity in Modern Theology, 1880, are to be regarded as forerunners of this); the fourth is the Aesthetics (part i. German Aesthetics since Kant, 1886; part ii. Philosophy of the Beautiful, 1887). The Collected Studies and Essays, 1876, were preceded by two treatises on the philosophy of nature, Truth and Error in Darwinism, 1875, and The Unconscious from the Standpoint of Physiology and the Theory of Descent, published anonymously in 1872, in the latter of which, disguised as a Darwinian, he criticises his own philosophy. Of his more recent publications we may mention the Philosophical Questions of the Day, 1885; Modern Problems, 1886; and the controversial treatise Lotzes Philosophy, 1888.[1]
[Footnote 1: On Hartmann cf. Volkelt in Nord und Süd, July, 1881; the same, Das Unbewusste und der Pessimismus, 1873; Vaihinger, Hartmann, Dühring und Lange, 1876; R. Koeber, Das philosophische System Ed. v, Hartmann, 1884; O. Pfleiderer, critique of the Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins (Im neuen Reich), 1879; L. von Golther, Der moderne Pessimismus, 1878; J. Huber, Der Pessimismus, 1876; Weygoldt, Kritik des philosophischen Pessimismus der neuesten Zeit, 1875; M. Venetianer, Der Allgeist, 1874; A Taubert (Hartmann's first wife), Der Pessimismus und seine Gegner, 1873; O. Plümacher, Der Kampf ums Unbewusste (with a chronological table of Hartmann literature appended), 1881; the same, Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, 1884; Krohn, Streifzüge (see above); Seydel (see above). During the year 1882 four publications appeared under the title Der Pessimismus und die Sittenlehre, by Bacmeister, Christ, Rehmke, and H. Sommer (2d ed., 1883). [English translation of Truth and Error in Darwinism in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vols. xi.-xiii., and of The Religion of the Future, by Dare, 1886; cf. also Sully's Pessimism, chap. v.—TR.]]
In polemical relation, on the one hand, to the naïve realism of life, and, on the other, to the subjective idealism of Kant, or rather of the neo-Kantians, the logical conclusion of which would be absolute illusionism, Hartmann founds his "transcendental realism," which mediates between these two points of view (the existence and true nature of the world outside our representations is knowable, if only indirectly; the forms of knowledge, in spite of their subjective origin, have a more than subjective, a transcendental, significance) by pointing out that sense-impressions, which are accompanied by the feeling of compulsion and are different from one another, cannot be explained from the ego, but only by the action of things in themselves external to us, i.e., independent of consciousness, and themselves distinct from one another. The causality of things in themselves is the bridge which enables us to cross the gulf between the immanent world of representations and the transcendent world of being. The causality of things in themselves proves their reality, their difference at different times, their changeability and their temporal character; change, however, demands something permanent, existence, an existing, unchangeable, supra-temporal, and non-spatial substance (whether a special substance for each thing in itself or a common one for all, is left for the present undetermined). My action upon the thing in itself assures me of its causal conditionality or necessity; the various affections of the same sense, that there are many things in themselves; the peculiar form of change shown by some bodies, that these, like my body, are united with a soul. Thus it is evident that, besides the concept of cause, a series of other categories must be applied to the thing in itself, hence applied transcendentally.
The "speculative results" obtained by Hartmann on an "inductive" basis are as follows: The per se (Ansich) of the empirical world is the Unconscious. The two attributes of this absolute are the active, groundless, alogical, infinite will, and the passive, finite representation (Idea); the former is the ground of the that of the world, the latter the ground of its purposive what and how. Without the will the representation, which in itself is without energy, could not become real, and without the representation (of an end) the will, which in itself is without reason, could not become a definite willing (relative or immanent dualism of the attributes, a necessary moment in absolute monism). The empirical preponderance of pain over pleasure, which can be shown by calculation,[1] proves that the world is evil, that its non-existence were better than its existence; the purposiveness everywhere perceptible in nature and the progress of history toward a final goal (it is true, a negative one) proves, nevertheless, that it is the best world that was possible (reconciliation of eudemonistic pessimism with evolutionistic optimism). The creation of the world begins when the blind will to live groundlessly and fortuitously passes over from essence to phenomenon, from potency to act, from supra-existence to existence, and, in irrational striving after existence, draws to itself the only content which is capable of realization, the logical Idea. This latter seeks to make good the error committed by the will by bringing consciousness into the field as a combatant against the insatiable, ever yearning, never satisfied will, which one day will force the will back into latency, into the (antemundane) blessed state of not-willing. The goal of the world-development is deliverance from the misery of existence, the peace of non-existence, the return from the will and representation, become spatial and temporal, to the original, harmonious equilibrium of the two functions, which has been disturbed by the origin of the world or to the antemundane identity of the absolute. The task of the logical element is to teach consciousness more and more to penetrate the illusion of the will—in its three stages of childlike (Greek) expectation of happiness to be attained here, youthful (Christian) expectation of happiness to be attained hereafter, and adult expectation of happiness to be attained in the future of the world-development—and, finally, to teach it to know, in senile longing after rest, that only the doing away with this miserable willing, and, consequently, with earthly existence (through the resolve of the majority of mankind) can give the sole attainable blessedness, freedom from pain. The world-process is the incarnation, the suffering, and the redemption of the absolute; the moral task of man is not personal renunciation and cowardly retirement, but to make the purposes of the Unconscious his own, with complete resignation to life and its sufferings to labor energetically in the world-process, and, by the vigorous promotion of consciousness, to hasten the fulfillment of the redemptive purpose; the condition of morality is insight into the fruitlessness of all striving after pleasure and into the essential unity of all individual beings with one another and with the universal spirit, which exists in the individuals, but at the same time subsists above them. "To know one's self as of divine nature, this does away with all divergence between selfwill and universal will, with all estrangement between man and God, with all undivine, that is, merely natural, conduct."
[Footnote 1: Cf. Volkelt, Ueber die Lust als höchsten Werthmassstab (in the Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. lxxxviii.), 1886, and O. Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, vol. ii. p. 249 seq.]
Religion, which, in common with philosophy, has for its basis the metaphysical need for, or the mystical feeling of, the unity of the human individual and the world-ground, needs transformation, since in its traditional forms it is opposed to modern culture, and the merging of religion (as a need of the heart) in metaphysics is impossible. The religion of the future, for which the way has already been prepared by the speculative Protestantism of the present, is concrete monism (the divine unity is transcendent as well as immanent in the plurality of the beings of earth, every moral man a God-man), which includes in itself the abstract monism (pantheism) of the Indian religions and the Judeo-Christian (mono-) theism as subordinate moments. (The original henotheism and its decline into polytheism, demonism, and fetichism was followed by—Egyptian and Persian, as well as Greek, Roman, and German—naturalism, and then by supernaturalism in its monistic and its theistic form. The chief defect of the Christian religion is the transcendental-eudemonistic heteronomy of its ethics.) The Religion of Spirit divides into three parts. The psychology of religion considers the religious function in its subjective aspect, faith as a combined act of representation, feeling, and will, in which one of these three elements may predominate—though feeling forms the inmost kernel of the theoretical and practical activities as well—and, as the objective correlate of faith, grace (revealing, redeeming, and sanctifying), which elevates man above peripheral and phenomenal dependence on the world, and frees him from it, through his becoming conscious of his central and metaphysical dependence upon God. The metaphysics of religion (in theological, anthropological, and cosmological sections) proves by induction from the facts of religion the existence, omnipotence, spirituality, omniscience, righteousness, and holiness of the All-one, which coincides with the moral order of the world. Further, it proves the need and the capacity of man for redemption from guilt and evil—here three spheres of the individual will are distinguished, one beneath God, one contrary to God, and one conformable to God, or a natural, an evil, and a moral sphere—and, preserving alike the absoluteness of God and the reality of the world, shows that it is not so much man as God himself, who, as the bearer of all the suffering of the world, is the subject of redemption. The ethics of religion discusses the subjective and objective processes of redemption, namely, repentance and amendment on the part of the individual and the ecclesiastical cultus of the future, which is to despise symbols and art.
It is to Hartmann's credit, though the fact has not been sufficiently appreciated by professional thinkers, that in a time averse to speculation he has devoted his energies to the highest problems of metaphysics, and in their elaboration has approached his task with scientific earnestness and a comprehensive and thorough consideration of previous results. Thus the critique of ethical standpoints in the historical part of the Phenomenology of the Moral Consciousness, especially, contains much that is worthy of consideration; and his fundamental metaphysical idea, that the absolute is to be conceived as the unity of will and reason, also deserves in general a more lively assent than has been accorded to it, while his rejection of an infinite consciousness has justly met with contradiction. It has been impossible here to go into his discussions in the philosophy of nature—they cannot be described in brief—on matter (atomic forces), on the mechanical and teleological views of life and its development, on instinct, on sexual love, etc., which he very skillfully uses in support of his metaphysical principle.
%3. From the Revival of the Kantian Philosophy to the Present Time.%
%(a) Neo-Kantianism, Positivism, and Kindred Phenomena.%—The Kantian philosophy has created two epochs: one at the time of its appearance, and a second two generations after the death of its author. The new Kantian movement, which is one of the most prominent characteristics of the philosophy of the present time, took its beginning a quarter of a century ago. It is true that even before 1865 individual thinkers like Ernst Reinhold of Jena (died 1855), the admirer of Fries, J.B. Meyer of Bonn, K.A. von Reichlin-Meldegg, and others had sought a point of departure for their views in Kant; that K. Fischer's work on Kant (1860) had given a lively impulse to the renewed study of the critical philosophy; nay, that the cry "Back to Kant" had been expressly raised by Fortlage (as early as 1832 in his treatise The Gaps in the Hegelian System), and by Zeller (p. 589). But the movement first became general after F.A. Lange in his History of Materialism had energetically advocated the Kantian doctrine according to his special conception of it, after Helmholtz[1] (born 1821) had called attention to the agreement of the results of physiology with those of the Critique of Reason, and at the same time Liebmann's youthful work, Kant and the Epigones, in which every chapter ended with the inexorable refrain, "therefore we must go back to Kant," had given the strongest expression to the longing of the time.
[Footnote 1: Helmholtz: On Human Vision, 1855; Physiological Optics, 1867; Sensations of Tone, 1863, 4th ed., 1877 [English translation by Ellis, 2d ed., 1885].]
Otto Liebmann (cf. also the chapter on "The Metamorphoses of the A Priori" in his Analysis of Reality) sees the fundamental truth of criticism in the irrefutable proof that, space, time, and the categories are functions of the intellect, and that subject and object are necessary correlates, inseparable factors of the empirical world, and finds Kant's fundamental error, which the Epigones have not corrected, but made still worse, in the non-concept of the thing in itself, which must be expelled from the Kantian philosophy as a remnant of dogmatism, as a drop of alien blood, and as an illegitimate invader which has debased it.
According to Friedrich Albert Lange[1] (1828-75; during the last years of his life professor at Marburg), materialism, which is unfruitful and untenable as a principle, a system, and a view of the world, but useful and indispensable as a method and a maxim of investigation, must be supplemented by formal idealism, which, rejecting all science from mere reason limits knowledge to the sensuous, to that which can be experienced, yet at the same time conceives the formal element in the sense world as the product of the organization of man, and hence makes objects conform to our representations. Above the sensuous world of experience and of mechanical becoming, however, the speculative impulse to construction, rounding off the fragmentary truth of the sciences into a unified picture of the whole truth, rears the ideal world of that which ought to be. Notwithstanding their indefeasible certitude, the Ideas possess no scientific truth, though they have a moral value which makes them more than mere fabrics of the brain: man is framed not merely for the knowledge of truth, but also for the realization of values. But since the significance of the Ideas is only practical, and since determinations of value are not grounds of explanation, science and metaphysics or "concept poetry" (Begriffsdichtung) must be kept strictly separate.
[Footnote 1: F.A. Lange: Logical Studies, 1877. Cf. M. Heinze in the Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophic, 1877, and Vaihinger in the work cited above, p. 610 note.]
Friedrich Paulsen of Berlin (born in 1846; cf. pp. 330, 332, note) sees in the Kantian philosophy the foundation for the philosophy of the future. A profounder Wolff (the self-dominion of the reason), a Prussian Hume (the categories of the understanding are not world-categories; rejection of anthropomorphic metaphysics), and a German Rousseau (the primacy of the will, consideration of the demands of the heart; the good will alone, not deeds nor culture, constitutes the worth of man; freedom, the rights of man) in one person, Kant has withdrawn from scientific discussion the question concerning the dependence of reality on values or the good, which is theoretically insoluble but practically to be answered in the affirmative, and given it over to faith. Kant is in so far a positivist that he limits the mission of knowledge to the reduction of the temporo-spatial relations of phenomena to rules, and declares the teleological power of values to be undemonstrable. But science is able to prove this much, that the belief in a suprasensible world, in the indestructibility of that which alone has worth, and in the freedom of the intelligible character, which the will demands, is not scientifically impossible. Since, according to formal rationalism, the whole order of nature is a creation of the understanding, and hence atomism and mechanism are only forms of representation, valid, no doubt, for our peripheral point of view, but not absolutely valid, since, further, the empirical view of the world apart from the Idea of the divine unity of the world (which, it is true, is incapable of theoretical realization) would lack completion, the immediate conviction of the heart in regard to the power of the good is in no danger of attack from the side of science, although this can do no further service for faith than to remove the obstacles which oppose it. The will, not the intellect, determines the view of the world; but this is only a belief, and in the world of representation, the intelligible world, with which the will brings us into relation, can come before us only in the form of symbols.—While Albrecht Krause (The Laws of the Human Heart, a Formal Logic of Pure Feeling, 1876) and A. Classen (Physiology of the Sense of Sight, 1877) are strict followers of Kant, J. Volkelt (Analysis of the Fundamental Principles of Kant's Theory of Knowledge, 1879) has traced the often deplored inconsistencies and contradictions in Kant down to their roots, and has shown that in Kant's thinking, which has hitherto been conceived as too simple and transparent, but which, in fact, is extremely complicated and struggling in the dark, a number of entirely heterogeneous principles of thought (skeptical, subjectivistic, metaphysico-work, rationalistic, a priori, and practical motives) are at which, conflicting with and crippling one another, make the attainment of harmonious results impossible. Benno Erdmann (p. 330) and Hans Vaihinger (pp. 323 note, 331) have given Kant's principal works careful philological interpretation.
Among the various differences of opinion which exist within the neo-Kantian ranks, the most important relates to the question, whether the individual ego or a transcendental consciousness is to be looked upon as the executor of the a priori functions. In agreement with Schopenhauer and with Lotze, who makes the subjectivity of space, time, and the pure concepts parallel with that of the sense qualities, Lange teaches that the human individual is so organized that he must apprehend that which is sensuously given under these forms. Others, on the contrary, urge that the individual soul with its organization is itself a phenomenon, and consequently cannot be the bearer of that which precedes phenomena—space, time, and the categories as "conditions" of experience are functions of a pure consciousness to be presupposed. The antithesis of subject and object, the soul and the world, first arises in the sphere of phenomena. The empirical subject, like the world of objects, is itself a product of the a priori forms, hence not that which produces them. To the transcendental group belong Hermann Cohen[1] in Marburg, A. Stadler[2], Natorp, Lasswitz (p.17), E. König (p. 17), Koppelmann (p. 330), Staudinger (p. 331). Fritz Schultze of Dresden is also to be counted among the neo-Kantians (Philosophy of Natural Science, 1882; Kant and Darwin, 1875; The Fundamental Thoughts of Materialism, 1881; The Fundamental Thoughts of Spiritualism, 1883; Comparative Psychology, i. 1, 1892).
[Footnote 1: Cohen: Kant's Theory of Experience, 1871, 2d ed., 1886; Kant's Foundation of Ethics, 1877; Kant's Foundation of Aesthetics, 1889.]
[Footnote 2: Stadler: Kant's Teleology, 1874; The Principles of the Pure
Theory of Knowledge in the Kantian Philosophy, 1876; Kant's Theory of
Matter, 1883.]
The German positivists[1]:—E. Laas of Strasburg (1837-85), A. Riehl of Freiburg in Baden (born 1844), and R. Avenarius of Zurich (born 1843)—develop their sensationalistic theory of knowledge in critical connection with Kant. Ernst Laas defines positivism (founded by Protagoras, advocated in modern times by Hume and J.S. Mill, and hostile to Platonic idealism) as that philosophy which recognizes no other foundations than positive facts (i.e., perceptions), and requires every opinion to exhibit the experiences on which it rests. Its basis is constituted by three articles of belief: (1) The correlative facts, subject and object, exist and arise only in connection (objects are directly known only as the contents of a consciousness, cui objecta sunt, subjects only as centers of relation, as the scene or foundation of a representative content, cui subjecta sunt: outside my thoughts body does not exist as body, nor I myself as soul). (2) The variability of the objects of perception. (3) Sensationalism—all specific differences in consciousness must be conceived as differences in degree, all higher mental processes and states, including thought, as the perceptions and experiences, transformed according to law, of beings which feel, have wants, possess memory, and are capable of spontaneous motion. The subject coincides with its feeling of pleasure and pain, from which sensation is distinguished by its objective content. The illusions of metaphysics are scientifically untenable and practically unnecessary. Various yearnings, wants, presentiments, hopes, and fancies, it is true, lead beyond the sphere of that which can be checked by sense and experience, but for none of their positions can any sufficient proof be adduced. As physics has discarded transcendent causes and learned how to get along with immanent causes, so ethics also must endeavor to establish the worth of moral good without excursions into the suprasensible. The ethical obligations arise naturally from human relations, from earthly needs. The third volume of Laas's work differs from the earlier ones by conceding the rank of facts to the principles of logic as well as to perception. Aloys Riehl opposes the theory of knowledge (which starts from the fundamental fact of sensation) as scientific philosophy to metaphysics as unscientific, and banishes the doctrine of the practical ideals from the realm of science into the region of religion and art. Richard Avenarius defends the principle of "pure experience." Sensation, which is all that is left as objectively given after the removal of the subjective additions, constitutes the content, and motion the form of being.
[Footnote 1: Laas: Idealism and Positivism, 1879-84. Riehl: Philosophical Criticism, 1876-87; Address On Scientific and Unscientific Philosophy, 1883. Avenarius (p. 598): Philosophy as Thought concerning the World according to the Principle of Least Work, 1876; Critique of Pure Experience, vol. i. 1888, vol. ii. 1890; Man's Concept of the World, 1891. C. Göring (died 1879; System of Critical Philosophy, 1875) may also be placed here.]
With the neo-Kantians and the positivists there is associated, thirdly, a coherent group of noëtical thinkers, who, rejecting extramental elements of every kind, look on all conceivable being as merely a conscious content. This monism of consciousness is advocated by W. Schuppe of Greifswald (born 1836; Noëtical Logic, 1878), J. Rehmke, also of Greifswald (The World as Percept and Concept, 1880; "The Question of the Soul" in vol. ii. of the Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 1891), A. von Leclair (Contributions to a Monistic Theory of Knowledge, 1882), and R. von Schubert-Soldern (Foundations of a Theory of Knowledge, 1884; On the Transcendence of Object and Subject, 1882; Foundations for an Ethics, 1887). J. Bergmann[1] in Marburg (born 1840) occupies a kindred position.
[Footnote 1: Bergmann: Outlines of a Theory of Consciousness, 1870; Pure
Logic, 1879; Being and Knowing, 1880; The Fundamental Problems of
Logic, 1882; On the Right, 1883; Lectures on Metaphysics, 1886; On
the Beautiful, 1887; History of Philosophy, vol. i., Pre-Kantian
Philosophy, 1892.]
It is the same scientific spirit of the time, which in the fifties led many who were weary of the idealistic speculations over to materialism, that now secures such wide dissemination and so widespread favor for the endeavors of the neo-Kantians and the positivists or neo-Baconians, who desire to see metaphysics stricken from the list of the sciences and replaced by noëtics, and the theory of the world relegated to faith. The philosophy of the present, like the pre-Socratic philosophy and the philosophy of the early modern period, wears the badge of physics. The world is conceived from the standpoint of nature, psychical phenomena are in part neglected, in part see their inconvenient claims reduced to a minimum, while it is but rarely that we find an appreciation of their independence and co-ordinate value, not to speak of their superior position. The power which natural science has gained over philosophy dates essentially from a series of famous discoveries and theories, by which science has opened up entirely new and wide outlooks, and whose title to be considered in the formation of a general view of reality is incontestable. To mention only the most prominent, the following have all posited important and far-reaching problems for philosophy as well as for science: Johannes Müller's (Müller died 1858) theory of the specific energies of the senses, which Helmholtz made use of as an empirical confirmation of the Kantian apriorism; the law of the conservation of energy discovered by Robert Mayer (1842, 1850; Helmholtz, 1847, 1862), and, in particular, the law of the transformation of heat into motion, which invited an examination of all the forces active in the world to test their mutual convertibility; the extension of mechanism to the vital processes, favored even by Lotze; the renewed conflict between atomism and dynamism; further, the Darwinian theory[1] (1859), which makes organic species develop from one another by natural selection in the struggle for existence (through inheritance and adaptation); finally, the meta-geometrical speculations[2] of Gauss (1828), Riemann (On the Hypotheses which lie at the Basis of Geometry, 1854, published in 1867), Helmholtz (1868), B. Erdmann (The Axioms of Geometry, 1877). G. Cantor, and others, which look on our Euclidean space of three dimensions as a special case of the unintuitable yet thinkable analytic concept of a space of n dimensions. The circumstance that these theories are still largely hypothetical in their own field appears to have stirred up rather than moderated the zeal for carrying them over into other departments and for applying them to the world as a whole. Thus, especially, the Darwinians[3] have undauntedly attempted to utilize the biological hypothesis of the master as a philosophical principle of the world, and to bring the mental sciences under the point of view of the mechanical theory of development, though thus far with more daring and noise than success. The finely conceived ethics of Höffding (p. 585) is an exception to the rule which is the object of this remark.
[Footnote 1: A critical exposition of the modern doctrine of development and of the causes used to explain it is given by Otto Hamann, Entwickelungslehre und Darwinismus, Jena, 1892. Cf. also, O. Liebmann, Analysis der Wirklichkeit; and Ed. von Hartmann (above, p. 610). [Among the numerous works in English the reader may be referred to the article "Evolution," by Huxley and Sully, Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed., vol. viii.; Wallace's Darwinism, 1889; Romanes, Darwin and after Darwin, i. The Darwinian Theory, 1892; and Conn's Evolution of To-day, 1886.—TR.]]
[Footnote 2: Cf. Liebmann, Analysis der Wirklichkeit, 2d ed., pp. 53-59. G. Frege (Begriffsschrift, 1879; The Foundations of Arithmetic, 1884; Function and Concept, 1891; "On Sense and Meaning" in the Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. c. 1892) has also chosen the region intermediate between mathematics and philosophy for his field of work. We note, further, E.G. Husserl, Philosophy of Arithmetic, vol. i., 1891.]
[Footnote 3: Ernst Haeckel of Jena (born 1834; General Morphology, 1866; Natural History of Creation, 1868 [English, 1875] I Anthropogeny, 1874; Aims and Methods of the Development History of To-day, 1875; Popular Lectures, 1878 seq.—English, 1883), G. Jäger, A. Schleicher (The Darwinian Theory and the Science of Language, 1865), Ernst Krause (Carus Sterne, the editor of Kosmos) O. Caspari, Carneri (Morals and Darwinism, 1871), O. Schmidt, Du Prel, Paul Rée (The Origin of the Moral Feelings, 1877; The Genesis of Conscience, 1885; The Illusion of Free Will, 1885); G.H. Schneider (The Animal Will, 1880; The Human Will, 1882; The Good and III of the Human Race, 1883).]
Besides the theory of knowledge, in the elaboration of which the most eminent naturalists[1] participate with acuteness and success, psychology and the practical disciplines also betray the influence of the scientific spirit. While sociology and ethics, following the English model, seek an empirical basis and begin to make philosophical use of statistical results (E.F. Schäffle, Frame and Life of the Social Body, new ed., 1885; A. von Oettingen, Moral Statistic in its Significance for a Social Ethics, 3d ed., 1882), psychology endeavors to attain exact results in regard to psychical life and its relation to its physical basis—besides Fechner and the Herbartians, W. Wundt and A. Horwicz should be mentioned here. Wundt and, of late, Haeckel go back to the Spinozistic parallelism of material and psychical existence, only that the latter emphasizes merely the inseparability (Nichtohneeinander) of the two sides (the cell-body and the cell-soul) with a real difference between them and a metaphysical preponderance of the material side, while the former emphasizes the essential unity of body and soul, and the higher reality of the spiritual side.
[Footnote 1: Helmholtz, Virchow (born 1821), Zöllner (1834-82; On the Nature of Comets, 1872), and Du Bois-Reymond (born 1818), who, in his lectures On the Limits of the Knowledge of Nature, 1872, and The Seven World-riddles, 1880 (both together in 1882, and reprinted in the first series of his Addresses, 1886), looks on the origin of life, the purposive order of nature, and thought as problems soluble in the future, but declares, on the other hand, that the nature of matter (atoms) and force (actio in distant), the origin of motion, the genesis of consciousness (of sensation, together with pleasure and pain) from the knowable conditions of psychical life, and the freedom of the will, are absolute limits to our knowledge of nature.]
%(b) Idealistic Reaction against the Scientific Spirit.%—In opposition to the preponderance of natural science and the empirico-skeptical tendency of the philosophy of the day conditioned by it, an idealistic counter-movement is making itself increasingly felt as the years go on. Wilhelm Dilthey[1] abandons metaphysics as a basis, it is true, but (with the assent of Gierke, Preussische Jahrbücher, vol. liii. 1884) declares against the transfer of the method of natural science to the mental sciences, which require a special foundation. In spite of his critical rejection of metaphysics, Wilhelm Windelband in Strasburg (born 1848; Preludes, 1884) is, like Dilthey, to be counted among the idealists. In opposition to the individualism of the positivists, the folk-psychologists—at their head Steinthal and Lazarus (p. 536); Gustav Glogau[2] in Kiel (born 1844) is an adherent of the same movement—defend the power of the universal over individual spirits. The spirit of the people is not a phrase, an empty name, but a real force, not the sum of the individuals belonging to the people, but an encompassing and controlling power, which brings forth in the whole body processes (e.g., language) which could not occur in individuals as such. It is only as a member of society that anyone becomes truly man; the community is the subject of the higher life of spirit.
[Footnote 1: Dilthey: Introduction to the Mental Sciences, part i., 1883; Poetic Creation in the Zeller Aufsätze, 1887; "Contributions to the Solution of the Question of the Origin of our Belief in the Reality of the External World, and its Validity," Sitzungsberichte of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, 1890; "Conception and Analysis of Man in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries" in the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, vols. iv., v., 1891-92.]
[Footnote 2: Glogau: Sketch of the Fundamental Philosophical Sciences (part i., The Form and the Laws of Motion of the Spirit, 1880; part ii., The Nature and the Fundamental Forms of Conscious Spirit, 1888); Outlines of Psychology; 1884.]
If folk-psychology, whose title but imperfectly expresses the comprehensive endeavor to construct a psychology of society or of the universal spirit, is, as it were, an empirical confirmation of Hegel's theory of Objective Spirit, Rudolf Eucken[1] (born 1846), pressing on in the Fichtean manner from the secondary facts of consciousness to an original real-life, endeavors to solve the question of a universal becoming, of an all-pervasive force, of a supporting unity ("totality") in the life of spirit (neither in a purely noëtical nor a purely metaphysical, but) in a noölogical way, and demands that the fundamental science or doctrine of principles direct its attention not to cognition by itself, but to the activity of psychical life as a whole.
[Footnote 1: Eucken: The Unity of Spiritual Life in the Consciousness and Deeds of Humanity, 1888; Prolegomena to this, 1885. A detailed analysis of the latter by Falckenberg is given in the Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. xc, 1887; cf. above, pp. 17 and 610.]
We have elsewhere discussed the more recent attempts to establish a metaphysic which shall be empirically well grounded and shall cautiously rise from facts.[1] In regard to the possibility of metaphysics three parties are to be distinguished: On the left, the positivists, the neo-Kantians, and the monists of consciousness, who deny it out of hand. On the right, a series of philosophers—e.g., adherents of Hegel, Herbart, and Schopenhauer—who, without making any concessions to the modern theory of knowledge, hold fast to the possibility of a speculative metaphysics of the old type. In the center, a group of thinkers who are willing to renounce neither a solid noëtical foundation nor the attainment of metaphysical conclusions—so Eduard von Hartmann, Wundt,[2] Eucken, Volkelt (pp. 590, 617). Otto Liebmann (born 1840; On the Analysis of Reality, 1876, 2d ed., 1880; Thoughts and Facts, Heft i. 1882) demands a sharp separation between the certain and the uncertain and an exact estimation of the degree of probability which theories possess; puts the principles of metaphysics under the rubric of logical hypothesis; and, in his Climax of the Theories, 1884, calls attention to the fact that experiential science, in addition to axioms necessarily or apodictically certain and empeiremes possessing actual or assertory certainty, needs, further, a number of "interpolation maxims," which form an attribute of our type of intellectual organization (i.e., principles, according to the standard of which we supplement the fragmentary and discrete series of single perceptions and isolated observations by the interpolation of the needed intermediate links, so that they form a connected experience). The most important of these maxims are the principles of real identity, of the continuity of existence, of causality, and of the continuity of becoming. Experience is a gift of the understanding; the premises, as a rule, latent in ordinary consciousness, on whose anticipatory application our experience is based throughout, assert something absolutely incapable of being experienced. If, in order to the production of a "pure experience," we eliminate all subjective additions of the understanding contained in experiential thought (all that cannot be present at the moment or locally at hand, in short, all that cannot be the direct object and content of actual observation), this breaks up into an unordered, unconnected aggregate of discontinuous perceptual fragments; in order that a complete and articulated condition of experience may result, these fragments (the purely factual content of observation, the incoherent matter of perception) must be supplemented and connected by very much that is not observed.
[Footnote 1: R. Falckenberg, Ueber die gegenwärtige Lage der deutschen
Philosophie, inaugural address at Erlangen, Leipsic, 1890.]
[Footnote 2: Wundt: Essays, 1885, including "Philosophy and Science"; System of Philosophy, 1889. On the latter cf. Volkelt's paper in the Philosophische Monatshefte, vol. xxvii. 1891; and on the Essays a notice by the same author in the same review, vol. xxiii. 1887.]
Further, a reaction against crude naturalism is observable in the practical field, though political economists (Roscher) and jurists take a more active part in it than the philosophers. Personally R. von Jhering (1818-92; Purpose in Law, 2 vols., 1877-83, 2d ed., 1884-86) stands on idealistic ground, although, rejecting the nativistic and formalistic theory, he is in principle an adherent of "realism," of the principle of interest and social utility (the moral is that Which is permanently useful to society).
Finally, similar motives underlie the growing interest in the history of philosophy. The idealistic impulse seeks the nourishment which the un-metaphysical present denies to it from the great works of the past, and hopes, by keeping alive the classical achievements of previous times, to enhance the consciousness of the urgency and irrepressibleness of the highest questions, and to awaken courage for renewed attempts at their solution. Thus the study of history enters the service of systematic philosophy.
%(c) The Special Philosophical Sciences.%—The more the courage to attack the central problems of philosophy has been paralyzed by the neo-Kantian theory of knowledge and the coming-in of the positivistic spirit, the more lively has been the work of the last decades in the special departments: the transfer of the center of gravity from metaphysics to the particular sciences is the most prominent characteristic of the philosophy of the time. Logic sees century-old convictions shattered and new foundations arising. Psychology has entered into competition with physiology in regard to the discovery of the laws of the psychical functions which depend on bodily processes, while metaphysical questions are forced into the background and there is a growing distrust of the reliability of inner observation. The philosophy of religion is favored with undiminished interest and aesthetics, after long neglect, with a renewal of attention; the philosophy of history is about to reconquer its former rights. There is, moreover, an especially lively interest in ethics; and the investigation of the history of philosophy is more widely extended than ever before. We will close our sketch with a short survey of the particular disciplines.
In the department of logic the following should be mentioned as classical achievements: the works of Christoph Sigwart of Tübingen (vol. i. 1873, 2d ed., 1889; vol. ii. 1878), of Lotze (p. 605), and of Wundt (vol. i. Erkenntnisslehre, 1880; vol. ii. Methodenlehre, 1883). Besides these, Bergmann (p. 620), Schuppe (p. 619), and Benno Erdmann (Logik, vol. i. 1892) deserve notice.
In psychology the following writers have made themselves prominent: Wilhelm Wundt at Leipsic (born 1832), Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, 1874, 3d ed., 1887; A. Horwicz, Psychologische Analysen auf physiologischer Grundlage, 1872 seq.; Franz Brentano in Vienna (born 1838), Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte, vol. i. 1874; Carl Stumpf of Munich (born 1848), Ueber den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung, 1873, Tonpsychologie, vol. i. 1883, vol. ii. 1890; Theodor Lipps of Breslau (born 1851), Grundthatsachen des Seelenlebens, 1883. The following may be mentioned in the same connection: J.H. Witte, Das Wesen der Seele, 1888; H. Münsterberg, Die Willenshandlung, 1888, Beiträge zur experimentellen Psychologie, 1889 seq,; Goswin K. Uphues at Halle, Wahrnehmung und Empfindung, 1888, Ueber die Erinnerung, 1889; H. Schmidkunz, Psychologie der Suggestion, 1892; H. Ebbinghaus, the co-editor of the Zeitschrift für Psychologie una Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, 1890 seq.; H. Spitta; Max Dessoir, Der Hautsinn, in the Archiv für Anatomie una Physiologie, 1892. The following works are psychological contributions to the theory of knowledge: E.L. Fischer, Theorie der Gesichtswahrnehmung, 1891; Hermann Schwarz, Das Wahrnehmungsproblem, 1892. Finally we may add A. Dorner in Königsberg, Das menschliche Erkennen, 1887; and E.L. Fischer, Die Grundfragen der Erkenntnisstheorie, 1887.
The literature of moral philosophy has been substantially enriched by Wundt, Ethik, 1886, 2d ed., 1892; and Friedrich Paulsen, System der Ethik, 1889, 2d ed., 1891. We may mention, further, Baumann (p. 601); Schuppe, Grundzüge der Ethik und Rechtsphilosophie, 1882; Witte, Freiheit des Willens, 1882; G. Class in Erlangen, Ideale und Güter, 1886; Richard Wallaschek, Ideen zur praktischen Philosophic, 1886; F. Tönnies in Kiel, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 1887; A. Döring, Philosophische Güterlehre, 1888; Th. Ziegler, Sittliches Sein und Werden, 2d ed., 1890; G. Simmel, Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft, vol. i. 1892.
Of the newer works in the field of aesthetics, in addition to A.
Zeising's Aesthetische Forschungen, 1855, C. Hermann's Aesthetik,
1875, and Hartmann's Philosophie des Schönen, 1887, we may mention the
Einleitung in die Aesthetik of Karl Groos, 1892, and the following by
Lipps: Der Streit über die Tragödie, 1890; Aesthetische Faktoren der
Raumanschauung, 1891; the essay Psychologie der Komik (Philosophische
Monatshefte, vols. xxiv.-xxv. 1888-89), and Aesthetische
Litteraturberichte, (in the same review, vol. xxvi. 1890 seq.).
Among the writers and works on the philosophy of history we may note
Conrad Hermann in Leipsic (born 1819), Philosophie der Geschichte, 1870;
Bernheim, Geschichtsforschung und Geschichtsphilosophie, 1880; Karl
Fischer, Ist eine Philosophie der Geschichte wissenschaftlich erforderlich
bezw. möglich? Dillenburg Programme, 1889; Hinneberg, Die philosophischen
Grundlagen der Geschichtswissenschaft in Sybel's Historische
Zeitschrift, vol. lxiii. 1889; A. Dippe, Das Geschichtsstudium mit
seinen Zielen und Fragen, 1891; Georg Simmel, Die Probleme der
Geschichtsphilosophie, 1892.
In the philosophy of religion, which is discussed especially by the theologians, a neo-Kantian and a neo-Hegelian tendency confront each other. The former, dividing in its turn, is represented, on the one hand, by the Ritschlian school—W. Herrmann in Marburg (Die Metaphysik in der Theologie, 1876, Die Religion im Verhältniss zum Welterkennen und zur Sittlichkeit, 1889), J. Kaftan in Berlin (Das Wesen der christlichen Religion, 1881)—and, on the other, by R.A. Lipsius in Jena (born 1830; Dogmatik, 1876, 2d ed., 1879; Philosophie und Religion, 1885). The latter is represented by A.E. Biedermann of Zurich (1819-85; Christliche Dogmatik, 1868; 2d ed., 1884-85), a pupil of W. Vatke, and by Otto Pfleiderer of Berlin (born 1839; Religionsphilosophie, 1879; 2d ed., 1883-4). The neo-Kantians base religion exclusively on the practical side of human nature, especially on the moral law, derive it from the contrast between external dependence on nature and the inner freedom or supernatural destination of the spirit, and wish it preserved from all intermixture with metaphysics. According to the neo-Hegelians, on the contrary, the theoretical element in religion is no less essential; and is capable of being purified, of being elevated from the form of representation, which is full of contradictions, into the adequate form of pure thought, capable, therefore, of reconciliation with philosophy. Hugo Delff (Ueber den Weg zum Wissen und zur Gewissheit zu gelangen, 1882; Die Hauptprobleme der Philosophie und Religion, 1886) follows Jacobi's course.
Among the numerous works on the history of philosophy, besides the masterpieces of Zeller, J.E. Erdmann, and Kuno Fischer, the following are especially worthy of attention:
Cl. Bäumker in Breslau, Das Problem der Materie in der griechischen Philosophie, 1890; H. Bonitz, Platonische Studien, 3d ed., 1886, Aristotelische Studien, 1862 seq., Index Aristotelicus, 1870, Kleine Schriften; P. Deussen (born 1845), Das System der Vedanta, 1883, H. Diels in Berlin, Doxographi Graeci, 1879; Eucken in Jena (p. 17), Die Methode der aristotelischen Forschung, 1872, Address Ueber den Werth der Geschichte der Philosophie, 1874; J. Freudenthal in Breslau (born 1839, pp. 63, 118), Hellenistische Studien, 3 Hefte, 1879, Ueber die Theologie des Xenophanes, 1886; M. Heinze in Leipsic, Die Lehre vom Logos in der griechischen Philosophie, 1872; G. Freiherr von Hertling in Munich (born 1843), Materie und Form und die Definition der Seele bei Aristoteles, 1871, Albertus Magnus, 1880; H. Heussler in Basle (p. 65 note), Der Rationalismus des XVII. Jahrhunderts in seinen Beziehungen zur Eniwickelungslehre, 1885; Fr. Jodl in Prague (born 1849; pp. 16, 221 note); A. Krohn (1840-89), Sokrates und Xenophon, 1874, Der platonische Staat, 1876, Die platonische Frage, 1878—on Krohn, an obituary by Falckenberg in the Biographisches Jahrbuch für Alterthumskunde, Jahrg. 12, 1889; P. Natorp (pp. 88 note, 598), Forschungen zur Geschichte des Erkenntnissproblems im Alterthum, 1884; Edmund Pfleiderer in Tübingen (born 1842; p. 113 note[1]), Empirismus und Skepsis im D. Humes Philosophie, 1874, Die Philosophie des Heraklit im Lichte der Mysterienidee, 1886; K. von Prantl (1820-88), Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande, 4 vols., 1855-70; Carl Schaarschmidt (pp. 88 note, 117-118); Johannes Sarisberiensis, 1862, Die Sammlung der platonischen Schriften, 1866; L. Schmidt in Marburg (born 1824), Die Ethik der alten Griechen, 1881; Gustav Schneider, Die platonische Metaphysik, 1884; H. Siebeck in Giessen, Untersuchungen zur Philosophie der Griechen, 1873, 2d ed., 1888, Geschichte der Psychologie, part i. 1880-84; Chr. von Sigwart (born 1830; pp. 17, 118); Heinrich von Stein in Rostock (born 1833), Sieben Bücher zur Geschichte des Platonismus, 1862-75; Ludwig Stein in Berne, editor of the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, founded in 1877, Die Psychologie der Stoa, I. Metaphysisch-Anthropologischer Theil, 1886, II. Erkenntnisstheorie, 1888, Leibniz und Spinoza, 1890; L. Strümpell, Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie, 1854, 1861; Susemihl in Greifswald, Die Politik des Aristoteles, Greek and German with notes, 1879, further, a series of essays on Plato and Aristotle; Teichmüller (p. 601); Trendelenburg (pp. 600-601), Aristotelis de Anima, 2d ed., by Belger. 1887; Th. Waitz, Aristotelis Organon, 1844-46; J. Walter in Königsberg, Die Lehre von der praktischen Vernunft in der griechischen Philosophie, 1874, Geschichte der Aesthetik im Alterthum, 1892; Tob. Wildauer in Innsbruck, Die Psychologie des Willens bei Sokrates, Platon, und Aristoteles, 1877, 1879; W. Windelbund in Strasburg (pp. 15-16), Geschichte der alten Philosophie, 1888; Theob. Ziegler in Strasburg, Geschichte der christlichen Ethik, 1886, 2d ed., with index, 1892; Rob. Zimmermann (pp. 19 note, 331, 536), Studien und Kritiken, 1870.
%4. Retrospect.%
In order to avoid the appearance of arbitrary construction we have been sparing with references of a philosophico-historical character. In conclusion, looking back at the period passed over, we may give expression to some convictions concerning the guiding threads in the development of modern philosophy, though these here claim only the rights of subjective opinion.
A mirror of modern culture, and conscious of its sharp antithesis to Scholasticism, modern philosophy in its pre-Kantian period is pre-eminently characterized by naturalism. Nature, as a system of masses moved according to law, forms not only the favorite object of investigation, but also the standard by which psychical reality is judged and explained. The two directions in which this naturalism expresses itself, the mechanical view of the world, which endeavors to understand the universe from the standpoint of nature and all becoming from the standpoint of motion,[1] and the intellectualistic view, which seeks to understand the mind from the standpoint of knowledge, are most intimately connected. Where the general view of the All takes form and color from nature, a content and a mission can come to the mind from no other source than the external world; whether we (empirically) make it take up the material of representation from without or (rationalistically) make it create an ideal reproduction of the content of external reality from within, it is always the function of knowledge, conceived as the reproduction of a completed reality, which, since it brings us into contact with nature, advances into the foreground and determines the nature of psychical activity. As is conceivable, along with dogmatic faith in the power of the reason to possess itself of the reality before it and to reconstrue it in the system of science, and with triumphant references to the mathematical method as a guaranty for the absolute certainty of philosophical knowledge, the noëtical question emerges as to the means by which, and the limits within which, human knowledge is able to do justice to this great problem. Descartes gave out the programme for all these various tendencies—the mechanical explanation of nature, the absolute separation of body and soul (despiritualization of matter), thought the essence of the mind, the demand for certain knowledge, armed against every doubt, and the question as to the origin of ideas. Its execution by his successors shows not only a lateral extension in the most various directions (the dualistic view of the world held by the occasionalists, the monistic or pantheistic view of Spinoza, the pluralistic or individualistic view of Leibnitz; similarly the antithesis between the sensationalism of Locke and Condillac and the rationalism of Spinoza and Leibnitz), but also a progressive deepening of problems, mediated by party strife which puts every energy to the strain. What a tremendous step from the empiricism of Bacon to the skepticism of Hume, from the innate ideas of Descartes to the potential a priori of Leibnitz! From the moment when the negative and positive culminations of the pre-Kantian movement in thought—Hume and Leibnitz—came together in one mind, the conditions of the Kantian reform were given, just as the preparation for the Socratic reform had been given in the skepticism of the Sophists and the [Greek: nous] principle of Anaxagoras.
[Footnote 1: Even for Leibnitz the mind is a machine (automaton spirituale), and psychical action a movement of ideas.]
Kant, who dominates the second period of modern philosophy down to the present time, is related to his predecessors in a twofold way. In his criticism he completes the noëtical tendency, and at the same time overcomes naturalism, by limiting the mechanical explanation (and with it certain knowledge, it is true) to phenomena and opposing moralism to intellectualism. Nature must be conceived from the standpoint of the spirit (as its product, for all conformity to law takes its origin in the spirit), the spirit from the standpoint of the will. Metaphysics, as the theory of the a priori conditions of experience, is raised to the rank of a science, while the suprasensible is removed from the region of proof and refutation and based upon the rock of moral will. In the positive side of the Kantian philosophy—the spirit the law-giver of nature, the will the essence of spirit and the key to true reality—we find its kernel, that in it which is forever valid. The conclusions on the absolute worth of the moral disposition, on the ultimate moral aim of the world, on the intelligible character, and on radical evil, reveal the energy with which Kant took up the mission of furnishing the life-forces opened up by Christianity—which the Middle Ages had hidden rather than conserved under the crust of Aristotelian conceptions entirely alien to them, and the pre-Kantian period of modern times had almost wholly ignored—an entrance into philosophy, and of transforming and enriching the modern view of the world from this standpoint. Kant's position is as opposite and superior to the specifically modern, to the naturalistic temper of the new period, as Plato stands out, a stranger and a prophet of the future, above the level of Greek modes of thought. More fortunate, however, than Plato, he found disciples who followed further in the direction pointed out by that face of the Janus-head of his philosophy which looked toward the future: the ethelism of Fichte and the historicism of Hegel have their roots in Kant's doctrine of the practical reason. These are acquisitions which must never be given up, which must ever be reconquered in face of attack from forces hostile to spirit and to morals. In life, as in science, we must ever anew "win" ethical idealism "in order to possess it." As yet the reconciliation of the historical and the scientific, the Christian and the modern spirit is not effected. For the inbred naturalism of the modern period has not only asserted itself, amalgamated with Kantian elements, in the realistic metaphysics and mechanical psychology of Herbart and in the system of Schopenhauer, as a lateral current by the side of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, but, under the influence of the new and powerful development of the natural sciences, has once more confidently risen against the traditions of the idealistic school, although now it is tempered by criticism and concedes to the practical ideals at least a refuge in faith. The conviction that the rule of neo-Kantianism is provisional does not rest merely on the mutability of human affairs. The widespread active study of the philosophy of the great Königsberger gives ground for the hope that also those elements in it from which the systems of the idealists have proceeded as necessary consequences will again find attention and appreciation. The perception of the fact that the naturalistico-mechanical view represents only a part, a subordinate part, of the truth will lead to the further truth, that the lower can only be explained by the higher. We shall also learn more and more to distinguish between the permanent import of the position of fundamental idealism and the particular form which the constructive thinkers have given it; the latter may fall before legitimate assaults, but the former will not be affected by them. The revival of the Fichteo-Hegelian idealism by means of a method which shall do justice to the demands of the time by a closer adherence to experience, by making general use of both the natural and the mental sciences, and by an exact and cautious mode of argument—this seems to us to be the task of the future. The most important of the post-Hegelian systems, the system of Lotze, shows that the scientific spirit does not resist reconciliation with idealistic convictions in regard to the highest questions, and the consideration which it on all sides enjoys, that there exists a strong yearning in this direction. But when a deeply founded need of the time becomes active, it also rouses forces which dedicate themselves to its service and which are equal to the work.
* * * * *
Abbt
Absolute, the
Fichte on
Schelling on
F. Krause on
Schleiermacher on
Hegel on
Fortlage on
Spencer on
Böstrom on
Strauss on
Feuerbach on
the theistic school on
Lotze on
Hartmann on
See also
God
the Unconditioned
Achillini
Adamson, R.
Aesthetics
of Home (Lord Kames)
of Burke
of Baumgarten
of Herder
of Kant
of Schiller
of Schelling
of Hegel
of J.F. Fries
of Herbart
of Schopenhauer
Agnosticism, of Spencer
Agricola, R.
Agrippa of Nettesheim
Ahrens, H.
Alexandrists
Allihn
Althusius
Anderson
Angiulli, A.
Annet, P.
Antal, G. von
Antinomies, the
of Kant
his antinomy of aesthetic judgment
and of teleological judgment
Apelt, E.F.
A priori, the
in Kant
in Kant and the post-Kantians
nature, in Schelling
in J.F. Fries
Beneke on
Herbart on
J.S. Mill on
Spencer's doctrine of the racial origin of
Opzoomer on
Cf. Ideas
Aquinas, Thomas
Ardigò, R.
Aristotelians, the
opponents of
Arnauld
Arnoldt, E.
Associationalism
of Hartley and Priestley
of Hume
of the Mills
of Bain
Ast, G.A.F.
Atomism
in modern physics
in Gassendi and Descartes
in Boyle
Leibnitz on
Attributes
in Descartes
Spinoza's doctrine of
Auerbach
Augustine
Avenarius, R.
Averroists
Baader, F. (von),
and Schelling
system of
Bach, J.
Bacmeister
Bacon, Francis
a beginner of modern philosophy,
doctrine of,
in relation to Locke
Bacon, Roger
Bahnsen, J.
Bain, Alexander
Baku
Barclay
Bardili
Bartholomaei
Barzellotti, G.
Basedow
Bauer, Bruno
Bauer, Edgar
Baumann, J.
Baumeister
Baumgarten, Alex.
Baumgarten, Siegmund
Bäumker, Cl.
Baur, F.C.
Bayle, P.,
doctrine of,
and Leibnitz
Beattie, J.
Beck, Sigismund
Beckers, H.,
Bekker, Balthasar, III
Belger
Bellarmin
Beneke, F.E.
Benoit, G. von
Bentham, J.
Bentley, Richard
Berger, J.E. von
Bergmann, J.
Berkeley, George,
position in modern philosophy,
view of mind and matter,
relation to Locke on perception,
on knowledge,
his system,
relation to Hume,
relation to Scottish School,
relation to Condillac,
his idealism criticised by Kant,
referred to
Bernard, Claude
Bernheim
Bessarion
Bezold, F. von,
Biberg
Biedermann, A.E.
Biedermann, Fr. K.
Bilfinger
Billewicz, J. von,
Biran, Maine de
Blignières
Bluntschli
Bodin(us)
Body and Mind, see Mind and Body
Boëthius, D.
Böhme, Jacob,
system of,
and Schelling
Böhmer
Böhringer, A.
Bolin, W.
Bolingbroke
Bolzano, B.
Bonald, Victor de
Bonatelli, F.
Bonitz, H.
Bonnet
Bontekoe
Boole, G.
Borelius, J.
Borelli
Borgeaud
Bosanquet, B.
Böstrom, C.J.
Botta, V.
Bouillier
Bourdin
Bourignon, Antoinette
Bowen, F.
Bowne, B.P.
Boyle, R.
Bradley, F.H.
Brahé, Tycho
Brandes, G.
Brandis, C.A.
Braniss, J.
Brasch, M.
Brentano, F.
Bröchner, H.
Brockerhoff
Brown, Thomas
Browne, Peter
Browne, Sir Thomas
Brucker
Bruder
Brunnhofer
Bruno, Giordano
system of
and Spinoza,
and Schelling
Brütt, M.
Buchanan, George
Büchner, L.
Buckle
Budde
Buffon
Burckhardt
Burdach, K.F.
Burgersdijck
Burke, Edmund
Burt, B.C.
Busch, O.
Butler, Joseph
Butler, N.M.
Cabanis
Caesalpin
Caird, Edward
Caird, John
Cairns
Calker, F.V.
Camerer
Campanella, Thomas
system of
Campe
Cantoni
Cantor, G.
Caporali, E.
Cardanus, Hieronymus
Carlyle, Thomas
Carneri
Caro, E.
Carpenter, W.B.
Carrière, M.
Cartesians, the
Locke's relation to
Leibnitz's relation to
Carus, F.A.
Carus, K.G.
Carus, P.
Caspari, O.
Categories, the, Kant on
Hegel's doctrine of
Caterus
Causation
Spinoza's view of
Locke on
Hume's skeptical analysis of
Kant on
Schopenhauer on
Lotze on
Hartmann on
See also Sufficient Reason, Teleology
Cesca, Giovanni
Chalybaeus
Chandler, Samuel
Channing, W.E.
Character, the Intelligible
in Kant
in Schelling
in Schopenhauer
Charron, Pierre
Christ, P.
Chubb, Thomas
Cieszkowski, A. von
Clarke, Samuel
ethics of
Class, G.
Classen, A.
Clauberg
Cogito ergo sum
the Cartesian
Cohen, H.
Colecchi, A.
Coleridge, S.T.
Collard, Royer
Collier, Arthur
Collins, Anthony
Collins, F.H.
Collins, W.L.
Combachius
Comenius
Commer, E.
Common Sense, Scottish doctrine of
Comte, Auguste
Condillac
doctrine of
Condorcet
Conn, H.W.
Conybeare, J.
Copernicus, N.
Cordemoy
Cosmological Argument, the
in Locke
in Rousseau
in Leibnitz
in Kant
Cotes, Roger
Cousin, Victor
Cremonini
Crescas, Chasdai
Creuz, K. von
Critique of Reason, the
meaning of
the neo-Kantians on
its central position in modern thought
Crousaz
Crusius, C.A.
Cudworth, Ralph
ethics of
Cumberland, Richard
Czolbe, H.
D'Alembert Damiron Danzel Darjes Darwin, Charles Darwin, Erasmus Daub, K. Da Vinci, Leonardo Deism naturalism of in Herbert in English thinkers of XVIII. century in Hume in Rousseau of Reimarus in Lessing Kant's relation to See also Faith, Faith and Reason, Religion, Theology Delboeuf Delff, H. De Morgan, A.
Denifle Des Bosses Descartes, René system of and occasionalism and Spinoza and Locke and Leibnitz See also Spinoza Desdouits Dessoir, M. Deter Determinism in Hobbes in Spinoza of the early associationalists of Hume in Leibnitz of Schleiermacher of Herbart of Schopenhauer of J.S. Mill of Jonathan Edwards See also Character, the Intelligible; Freedom of the Will Deussen, P. Deutinger, M. De Wette Dewey, J. Diderot, Denis Diels, H. Dieterich, K. Digby, Everard Dillman Dilthey, W. doctrine of, Dippe, A. Döring, A. Dorner, A. Doubt the Cartesian in Bayle Rousseau's reverential Drobisch, M.W. Droz Druskowitz, Helene Du Bois-Reymond, E Dühring, E. Dumont, E. Duncan, G.M. Durdik