ALVMNVS BOOK FYND

Seven Theistic Philosophers

Seven Theistic Philosophers

An Historico-Critical Study

BY

JAMES LINDSAY,

M.A., D.D., B.Sc., F.R.S.E., &c.,

AUTHOR OF

A PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM OF THEISTIC IDEALISM, 'STUDIES IN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY,' ETC.

William Blackwood & Sons

Edinburgh and London

1920

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PREFACE.

THE modern world, in its awakened interest in Per- sonality, alike in God and in man, owes a greater debt to the " Seven Theistic Philosophers " treated of in this work, than has been at all realised. They belong, for most philosophical students, to the " illus- trious unknown." But no enlightened theist can afford to be indifferent to their historic place, work, and influence. They belong to that School of Spec- ulative Theology, or Theistic School of Philosophers, whose wrk and influence in the mid -nineteenth century will be found described in the text. Prof. Flint, in his ' Theism,' named the chief thinkers of this philosophic group, but gave no exposition or criticism of their " profound theories " (p. 433). Dr Merz, in his massive work on the ' History of Euro- pean Thought in the Nineteenth Century/ makes but a passing mention of only three of them. Since they have never been dealt with by any British writer, it seemed to me that some account of them

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VI PREFACE.

was long past due, for the credit of British philoso- phical knowledge and interest. I have only sought to present the quintessence of their thought, but the account is as extended as the interest of most English readers seemed likely to require. The study here presented is an historico-critical one, and this has made it of more vital interest, because it has afforded me opportunity to bring the discussion at many points into critical contact with the discus- sions of to-day. It has in many ways not been an easy or auspicious time in which to do the work, but this has not deterred me from its execution. The sources have, of course, had to be all German, by which I do not mean merely works of these philosophers themselves, but a large number of German works that seemed likely to have a bearing on one or another of them. In the case of most of these works, the help derived has been infinitesimal, but there have been one or two exceptions. What- ever the defects of the work may be, I am sanguine enough to believe that there are many who will be grateful for it, and for such it has been written.

JAMES LINDSAY.

ANNICK LODGE, IRVINE, SCOTLAND, 29th March 1920.

CONTENTS.

CHAP. PAGE

I. IMMANUEL HERMANN PICHTE 1

II. CHRISTIAN HERMANN WEISSE 27

III. KARL PHILIPP FISCHER 50

IV. HEINRICH MORITZ CHALYBAUS .... 69 V. FRANZ HOFFMANN 79

VI. HERMANN ULRICI 90

VII. FRIEDRICH ADOLF TRENDELENBURG . . .110

VIII. CONCLUSION 122

INDEX OF AUTHORS AND SUBJECTS . 135

SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHEKS.

CHAPTER I.

I. H. FICHTE.

I. H. FICHTE (1797-1879) was the recognised head and leader of the School of Speculative Theology or the Theistic School, mentioned in our Preface. This School, in the mid-nineteenth century, sought with conspicuous ability to defend the interests of Christian speculation against Hegelian pantheism, and to bring to validity the idea of personality in all parts of philosophy. I propose to confine myself to the main members of the philosophic group, without now considering the services to theistic philosophy of Protestant speculative theo- logians like Rothe and I. A. Dorner, or of Catholic speculative theologians like Sengler, Deutinger, Gunther, and others, though the work of all of them is interesting and valuable.

A

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it is an egregious mistake to suppose, as is often done, that this group of philosophers were mere critics of Hegel ; their critical assaults were, it is true, in conjunction with other causes, instru- mental in overthrowing the sway of Hegelianism in Germany ; but their most significant work was — not the attempt to get away from Hegel's abstract idealism but — to win the true idealism, and to formulate Theism as a thoroughgoing philosophical system or World -View. For they had no idea of treating Theism as the paltry magnitude it has often become in the hands of philosophical and theological thinkers of our time. And, for my own part, I should not have thought it worth while now to treat of them because of their assaults on Hegel, since enough has been done in that direction for all time, one might almost say; and besides, the years have brought me a heightened sense of admiration of Hegel's philosophical power and ability, albeit I stand no nearer an acceptance of his system.

Fichte's earliest efforts were directed against pantheism in general, and the views embodied in them he distinguished later as "concrete theism." We shall see that what he contended for was a theism with an essentially physico - teleological grounding. By 1829 he wrote energetically and specifically against the Hegelian form of pantheism, and sought to show its untenableness in every

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part of the system, in view of the deliverances of the religious consciousness. In the 'Zeitschrift ftir Philosophic,' Fichte wrote : " The fundamental fallacy of Hegel's philosophy consists in his identifying abstract human thought with absolute thought, a purely arbitrary and groundless hypo- thesis." Among Fichte's allies were C. H. Weisse, who is generally regarded as the most profound thinker of the group, J. Sengler, K. Ph. Fischer, H. M. Chalybaus, Fr. Hoffmann, H. Ulrici, A. Tren- delenburg, J. U. Wirth, and others. But they were not without influences received from Baader and Schelling, as we shall see. I. H. Fichte constituted it his own life -task to demonstrate Theism to be the final solving word of all world -riddles, and the inescapable end of all inquiry. As he puts it in the Vorwort of his work on ' Theistic World- View,' "It is the ultimate solution of all world- problems, the unavoidable goal of investigation, silently effective in that which externally denies it." There are those works in which Fichte treated of the theistic world -view and its justification — viz., the ' Ontology ' (1836), c Speculative Theology ' (1846), and 'The Theistic View of the World ' (1873) — and sought with great comprehensiveness to find proper grounding for the idea of the person- ality of God, no less than for his Being-in-and-for Himself, and His comprehensibility to man. For he can speak of " the speculative comprehensiveness

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of God." But Fichte also published important works on ' Anthropology ' (1856), and ' Psychology ' (1864), whereby he became the psychologist, and also the anthropologist, of the whole theistic system, a far more significant achievement than if he had merely led the way as an incisive critic of Hegel. Moreover, he was, as Dr Merz in a footnote remarks, " the first among German philosophers of the nine- teenth century to take in hand a historical and systematic study of Ethics " — no small merit in itself. And Paulsen, in a footnote of his 'Ethics' (by Thilly, p. 179), remarks that in its first or historico-critical part, Fichte has given " an elaborate and thorough exposition of the history of Ethics and jurisprudence in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies." In this 'System of Ethics' (1850-53), it may be remarked, Fichte, who seeks to unite morals and religion, said ; " Religion is conscious morality, a morality which, in virtue of that consciousness, is mindful of its origin from God." Fichte already strongly emphasised, too, the social question, saying that "the whole future of the world lies in the social question, not in the political."

But my concern now is with his speculative theism, not with his ethics. So long ago as 1897 I wrote : " I. H. Fichte was able, in treating of speculative theism, to postulate a rational and immanent, yet independent Creator, and to speak of personality as the only real existence, the one true

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reality (das allein wahrhaft existirende) " (' Recent Advances in Theistic Philosophy of Religion," p. 288). Yet it is less the aim of Fichte to propound a new system of his own, than to make insistence on the fact that the objective, universally valid world - system is already contained in the Divine thought. Thus, in his view, it is less something absolutely new that we come to or discover by our own thought, than that, by the highest self-renunciation, we follow the thoughts of that Divine world-system, in our own understanding. This was, I think, a mistaken view on the part of Fichte. Human minds are so diversified and varied in their modes of approach, that there will always be need and room for our different theistic systems or presentations. These may be idealistic, or may assume realistic forms. He himself says that "philosophy never loses the character of human, finite inquiry" ('Anthropology/ p. 14 of the 3rd or 1876 edn.). Fichte himself did not even act on his own view of the matter. ' He supposed himself to find his point of departure in the later form of his father's doctrine of science or knowledge. But, besides Hegel's immanent teleology, the Leibnizian- Herbartian doctrine of monads earlier exercised a decisive influence upon him. This was certainly not a finding of the original objective Divine thought. Also, an insistence on the need for the highest forms of speculative activity would have

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been more in place, in this connection, than the inculcation of self-renunciation.

Fichte is not wrong in speaking, in his work on ' Speculative Theology,' of his own metaphysics, as a union of Hegel and Herbart, but without their one-sidedness ; but this again was not finding the original Divine thought. He claimed for Herbart, that he had for ever secured, in behoof of psychology, the principle of individuality. Fichte has, however, in methodological respects wholly freed himself from Hegel. Fichte reached, through his study of Kant, the insight that not by the dialectical method could philosophical truth be won ; that this is opened up to the spirit only through experience, with the self -observation that should accompany it. This constituted one of the most essential divergences of Fichte from his friend and associate, the deep-thinking Weisse, whose dialectic method, whereby a knowledge of God was to be spun out of pure concepts, Fichte was unable to accept. Weisse followed a more deductive method than Fichte, who thought it can never be the problem of theistic speculation to deduce the finite from the absolute, or even to determine the mode of its first coming into existence. Weisse thought Fichte laid a too exclusive stress on immortality, in the contest with materialism, and should have laid like stress on creational idea. Fichte had, as we shall see, his own conception of creation, and held

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every pantheistic philosophy to be quite incom- patible with the idea of creation. He related Weisse's view only to the past, and regarded it as pure Scholasticism, preferring as his own point of departure the anthropological and anthropocentric starting-point of Kant. In this case, Fichte will be generally regarded as having shown the more correct judgment.

When it comes to his work on ' Speculative Theology,' however, Fichte follows not self- observation as his immediate point of departure, as in the case of the doctrine of knowledge, but seeks the world-view to which experience is guide. He begins with the finite, whose reality he must prove by reason of the pantheistic atmosphere that existed, as that which has the ground of its existence in and through another. The finite being knows he has a Ground beyond himself, and he seeks a primal Ground, an eternal Ground, but, not as before or outside him, does he conceive this Ground, but as present in and to him. He seeks in the ' Speculative Theology/ in short, to maintain a moral idea of God, and to base our comprehension of God, man, and the universe, on the moral and religious facts of human nature. And in his work on 'Theistic World-View,' Fichte says (p. 3) that "the idea of the unconditioned, rising irrepressible in the back- ground of our consciousness, is the first ground- premiss from which all thought is set in action and

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driven on over all conditioned and presented reality, to find rest only in the certainty of an Infinite and All-conditioning." And, in the same work, he urges, as a universal fact of the world, an inner drawing of beings to one another, a harmonious fitting of all finite things into one another.

But his speculative theology finds the finite not merely finite, or only a quantitatively deter- mined personality, but views it as at the same time qualitatively determined, and permanent in the midst of change. And the finites — as what he calls primary positions or monads — constitute a perpetually existing system, in which they are complementary one of another, for such an inner active relation amongst them must be presupposed. The one Absolute is real and effective in them all. For Fichte's universe is a reason - system, perfect unity realised through means and ends. But this Absolute, as unity, is not only immanent in the world, but transcends it. Not as mere unity, however, but as comprehending, in its specific range or grasp, world - order and world - law, must this Absolute be grasped. The Absolute is not only purpose-positing but purpose-preserving. All space and time distinctions fall together in this Absolute, in whom they are overthrown or transcended, but this can only be thought of in an infinitely ideal manner. The Absolute is to be conceived as infinite and all-present Thought, but at the same time as world-creative Thought.

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Fichte expends a good deal of discussion on whether the Absolute is a mere World- Soul, with " unconscious " and " instinctive " action. He believes himself to have reached not only an all- consciousness of the Absolute, but a self - con- sciousness of the same. It is a difficulty, however, that he and others hold the Divine self -consciousness to be effective only through the world-idea — or the ideal world — for then the world -idea cannot be derived from self - conscious Deity. This was an influence that ran back to Bohme — whom Baader so largely followed — and it was indeed Bohme's main defect that he ranked nature so highly as to make it a necessary condition of God's self-con- sciousness. Bohme says of God and Nature that "there is nothing prior, and either is without beginning, and each is a cause of the other, and an eternal bond" (J. R. Earle's work on 'Bohme,' p. 143). Has it ever really been shown, one must ask, that God must first think something; different

O

from Himself ? I believe not ; the Divine self - consciousness had no need of any Anstoss from the outside, in order to its rise, as we shall see later, since he is the Absolute Being, and is the Unity of the modes of existence — the subjective and the objective, the ideal and the real.

Weisse, whom we shall presently consider, made God the Father the primary essence or foundation, Who thinks Himself ; this does not yet go beyond Deism, if communicability be supposed wanting.

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Fichte finds, at any rate, the climax of his thought in the conception of God as Absolute Spirit and the Absolute Personality. Thus Fichte, like those other philosophers, K. Ph. Fischer and Weisse, runs the concept of God up to absoluteness, so that it completes itself, whereas, the world of Hegel and of Schelling was only in process, but not perfected. These first-named philosophers held that God is eternally in Himself perfect, and that absolutely, apart from the existing world. Fichte thought that the world -creation did not affect the Divine essence, it was so wrought in freedom; and that the idea of God remained the same, apart from all world-reference. The " many ness " of the world is, to Fichte, only the inner manifoldness of the unified act of positing by the Absolute. But Fichte thinks the world is not redeemed by thought, as Hegel supposed, without there being a residue, for Fichte finds more than an objectified thought in the creature.

Besides thought, Fichte thinks, there must have been much more a creative power of will in God's fashioning the creature. He thinks the purest or most sublimated in God is thought, but will is the deepest, and the prius of thought itself. This absurd Voluntarism Fichte had obviously carried over from his father's system. The primacy of idea or reason is much more to be maintained, as I have shown elsewhere ("Rationalism and Volun-

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tarism " in 'The Monist,' 1918). Over against the position of Fichte here, I should like to place some words of Leibniz : " Propterea intellectus Dei est regio veritatum aeternarum aut idearum unde dependent, et sine ipsis nihil realitatis foret in possibilitatibus, et nihil non modo existeret, sed nihil etiam possibile foret." Nay, I should like to cite Fichte against himself, when he says in the small work, 'On the Question of the Soul, a Philosophical Confession,' as against bare will or blind Schopenhauerian impulse, that "intelligence ever remains as a distinctive agent, a hidden principle, nay, as the Alpha and the Omega, the starting-point and the aim of the mind's whole development." Consciousness is to him a " rational power from the very first."

Fichte goes on to distinguish a real or objective side and an ideal or subjective aspect — nature and spirit — in the Divine essence. But these two aspects he supposes to be harmonised or combined in a higher principle of volition or of love. Bohme also, I may observe, had an ideal or spirit side and a real or nature side in his conception of God, so that Fichte's postulation is not entirely novel. But we should still have to inquire whether spirit came to proper independence in Bohme's treatment. This objective or real side of the Divine Life is to be taken as its first moment; it is the sphere of potential life. There is, in Fichte's thought, some

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consideration of the most original ground of Being at all, but it does not seem very satisfactory, influenced as it too much ib by the Ungrund of Bohme and the " Indifference " of Schelling. Dr H. L. Martensen's fine study of Bohme is worthy of remembrance in this connection.

The reality of God, Fichte's objective life or "real side," is found in the " eternal universe " of monads, which form " nature in God," and whose infinity and absolute unity He is. In this conception of what he calls the primary positions or monads, which are inner determinations of Divine self-conscious will, Fichte finds not only the essential foundation of his speculative theology and the basis for his philosophy of religion, but a means of warding off pantheistic and deistic modes of representation. Theory of knowledge may, in Fichte's view, ground a know- ledge of the truth, and prove the agreement of being and knowing. But it still remains for metaphysics to inquire into the primal Being and Ground, beyond all individual beings and particular grounds. Fichte further holds that such an inquiry already involves the presupposition of the existence of such a Primal Being and Ground. The preservation of the monadistic universe means to him an eternal new- creating on the part of God — a life-process of self- generation by the Deity. In this, Fichte had really taken up a Baader- Hoffmann conception, as we shall see later.

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But it would be interesting to know how, in this talk of life and of process, Fichte meant to keep the concept of time out of the matter. At one time he speaks as though time and space were forms of the specification of all the real, whether absolute or finite. Empiric time, he yet elsewhere says, does not exist for God, and has no truth or reality ; but though he speaks of "true" time and "true" space, Fichte does not work out his time conceptions, in connection with his descriptions of process, any too consistently or satisfactorily. But he holds to the objectivity of time and space, though, in the out- working, space and time relations tend to become mere subjective appearances in his hands. And the sense -world is to him a mere phenomenon. In that case, all empiric reality would become a mere Schein of the Absolute, and all talk of life and process in the Absolute would be at an end. Fichte was afraid of falling into pantheism — which he aimed to ex- clude— if he made process in the being of the Absolute a purely temporal real. Yet the demand of the religious consciousness is at once for the reality of the Absolute and the reality of the empiric being.

Fichte holds that the Divine essence is subject to no development, but does not think that that is to posit a dead lack of variety, and a rigid unchangeableness in God. And yet he also speaks of God's eternity as all-duration, and as in some

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sense without change. It is not easy to harmonise these insistences with all Fichte has advanced about the self-generation of the Deity. Time is bound up with change, but change cannot remain only change — with no unchangeable being. These positions as to change can, I think, be quite har- monised, in ethical ideas of God, whose immutability does not consist in unethical fixedness, without adopting the crude proposals of some philosophical and theological writers to resolve progress under Deity into a progress of Deity, for which there is no real or proper warrant. We know how great are the difficulties that attach to the time-problem ; Fichte seems to me to have been keenly conscious of them ; he was, I think, influenced a good deal by Baader, who, in seeking to combat pantheism, which draws the Deity into the temporal course, placed God in eternity.

One of his German critics appears to think that, to do so, lands Fichte in insuperable difficulty. I do not think so. We may regard time and eternity as opposites or incommensurables, but we are not entitled to treat them as contradictory or exclusive. They are no more exclusive, I think, than God and man are exclusive. Rothe was right when he said that "the words temporal and eternal do not in any way exclude each other." The temporal stands in the eternal, and presupposes it, which the critic fails to realise. Timelessness and univer-

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sality are just the lack of a good deal of our phil- osophy. And even timelessness is but the negative idea of eternity ; the positive idea of it is not yet ours. If God in His absoluteness were conceived as existing above all world-oppositions, there would be no way of explaining His self-communications to man and the world, which are not to be doubted. But, though immanent in the world, God is yet above the space and time forms of the finite world, and His unified action is not split by them ; although He may not enter into the forms of space and time, it does not follow that what goes on under these forms has no reality for Him. But not even for us are they ultimate, as we learn to view the world sub specie aeternitatis ; while as yet all things are for us quantitatively determined in the finite world. The full significance of the temporal is found only under the eternal aspect, so that there is here a heightening, and not a lessening, of the value of temporal reality. The temporal is thus no mere appearance for God. There is no need, there- fore, so to conceive the timeless being of the Eternal as to preclude His every entrance into time. This, without losing Himself in the time-relations. Certainly " the finite is within God," and has a real value for Him, but I could not bring myself to say, with Laurie, that " God leads a finite life — a life in Time" (' Synthetica,' ii. p. 142).

But at least Fichte appears to me to deserve not

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a little speculative credit for the way in which, at that period, he sought to grapple with the problem. If I do not dwell further on the time and eternity problems and relations, that is because I have else- where dealt with them in a way that appears to me less open to objection than any views propounded on the subject by any one of these philosophical thinkers (in my 'Philosophical System of Theistic Idealism,' ch. iv.). There I have shown how the eternal may enter into relations with time, may penetrate and exalt it; and how the time-process is not to be treated as unreal, since it has more than merely temporal character and import, but is yet not the ultimate reality, being grounded in the eternal. We shall have the time question again, presently, in connection with Weisse and with Fischer.

Corresponding to the "real" side in the Divine essence is, for Fichte, the "ideal" side, the original ego, the unifying moment of the Divine Spirit, whereby what was real and living exists in self- conscious unity. For Fichte postulates that the real and the ideal universes form a unity. What Fichte calls the second moment in the Divine Being or Essence, is the All-consciousness of God. This corresponds to the real infinity of His self-generating Life. But God not only lives in all the universe, but knows Himself therein. So we are brought up to the Divine self -intuition or self -consciousness. This Divine Self-consciousness is taken by Fichte

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to be the third moment, as he terms it, in the Divine Being or essence, and by it the Divine self-generation and self -knowing first became perfected. But it cannot be said that Fichte always keeps this self- consciousness in rigid distinctness from the All- consciousness. For the creation of the world, Fichte postulates in God a peculiar form of will, which he calls will ad extra, in distinction from will ad intra, by which latter he means the will whereby God realises in Himself His own thought of the in- finite universe. But the distinction in the activity of the divine attributes, as ad intra and ad extra, though it may be of speculative service, is not, in my judgment, of any special value. For, if we except aseity, all the divine attributes or qualities, conceived in any living form, are active in relation to God and in relation to the world. The distinction of the attributes as metaphysical and moral is, method- ologically, a more fruitful one.

Fichte rightly asserts, as against pantheism, that God had no need of the willed and finite world in order to His own perfection or reality. He even declares, none too reflectively, that the world could as well not have been. The difficulty is to keep such an unqualified statement from running up too far in a Deistic direction. Creation does not, he thinks, follow from the idea of God, and cannot be proved in an a priori manner or as having arisen from dialectical necessity. But Fichte does not

B

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realise the need to keep creation free from being arbitrary or accidental, or due to anything but God Himself. The world's creation is the free, self-deter- mined act of the Divine Will, but in the light, it should have been said, of what has just been pointed out. And in respect of our knowledge of the world, Fichte wrote in the ' Zeitschrift fiir Philosophic,' that "objectivity can only be known by being re- cognised as originally rational, since the laws of reason which govern our mind show themselves to be exactly the same as the objective reason existing in it — i.e., external objects."

Between his theory of Nature as in God, and his theory of the particular creation of finite being, in which it is distinguished from the eternally real universe, Fichte was able to overcome pantheism. But one cannot think his method always happy. His two wills for God become a proposition diffi- cult of acceptance when we find that it carries, for him, two consciousnesses in God. He distinguishes God's eternal All-Consciousness, in which is no before and after, from God's knowledge of the World-all, with which it is not identical, and for which past, present, and future do exist, though these are comprehended in, and carried over into, the eternal All-Consciousness of God. It has been said by an able German critic, A. Drews, a follower of Hartmann, that such a double consciousness in God as Fichte postulated is a justifiable and even

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necessary result in every consequent theism ('Die deutsche Spekulation seit Kant,' vol. i. pp. 378- 379).

Now, the internal complexity of consciousness is not to be doubted, but while a distinction between the absolute and the relative may exist as internal in the All-consciousness, such a cleavage as is pos- tulated in the theory of a double consciousness in God cannot, I think, be held as justified. The All- Consciousness must be held to be one, and the double-consciousness theory, in any such pronounced form at least, does not appear to me a characteristic of theism. A distinction within consciousness is not a separation of consciousness. To separate the ''relative consciousness" of God — His objective activities — from the absolute consciousness, as some thinkers have proposed, is, in fact, to set up the absoluteness of the relative, which should always be grounded in the absolute. I cannot admit that God's consciousness of the relative means a " relative consciousness " in Him, for that would be to fasten a finite consciousness to an infinite being. The two forms of consciousness in God I take to be un- necessary. What is required is to recognise the outer or relative form of consciousness as already inherent in the nature of consciousness ; the absolute consciousness is consciousness of the outer or rel- ative, as the relative that it is. Besides, the outer or relative, to wit, all being or reality, is, as

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dependent, internal to the absolute rather than external, as it is to us. No consciousness of relation annuls or cancels God's consciousness of absolute being. Fichte, in postulating a double-consciousness in God, seems to me to have relaxed his hold of the personality of God, for which in its unity he had so strongly contended. Personality rests on con- sciousness, has consciousness for its indispensable presupposition. Personality must be unitary in its root-significance, and its consciousness one, however its complex nature may admit diverse modes of expression.

Fichte grounds philosophy in experience. He thinks that, the better we know the world, the more do we know of its original Ground. He opines that this setting out from experience will be the inauguration of a new epoch. It is, then, from the world-fact Fichte sets out, and for the solution of its inner contradictions he is led to seek a purpose-positing Will. He laid new and de- served stress on teleological conception, the world- order being to him one of purpose — the purpose of the thinking and willing Absolute. In the 'Zeitschrift fiir Philosophic/ Fichte wrote that " a reciprocal relation between the end and the means cannot exist apart from consciousness imagin- ing and realising this relation. Now, such relation to an end is universally found in the actual world ; thus, the Absolute in the realisation of the world

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must be an Absolute that imagines the world and consciously penetrates it." The World- Whole, in Fichte's view, is, like all experience, teleological throughout. God is, for him, working everywhere in the world, as the real and absolute background of nature's laws. Nor is the world of phenomena and their appearances or developments to be viewed as anywhere outside the Divine working. Fichte is, of course, justified in so postulating a real immanence for God in the world, though it is another question whether, in working out the correlative positions of God and man, he has always sufficiently preserved the Divine independence and self-possession which he theoretically maintained. It may be doubted whether, on a strict view, his theism has always been able to emancipate itself perfectly from pantheistic associations.

Fichte holds a purposeful connection in the fact of the world to have been "eternally real in the nature of God," and so in His All- Consciousness. But I think one may doubt whether, in this talk of what is "eternally real in the nature of God," he is in very strict consistency with his own attribution of creation to the will of God, and whether, in speaking of what is so " eternally real " in that nature, he is making creation really the free work of Divine love. And if the world, and all that concerns it, is already so " eternally real " in God, it becomes a question whether human

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freedom is so provided for as it should be in a real theism. Yet he proclaims that the foundation of man is not a " universal world -spirit," in the pantheistic sense. In this he was clearly right, for it is only in a theistic world-view that the fulfilment or perfection of personality can be posited as transcendent - positive end. Pantheism, I must observe, cannot really recognise realities within the world-process, but must run everything back into identity with God. It conduces not to life-affirma- tion, but rather tends to denial of the will to live. Pantheism, says Fichte (in the ' Zur Seelenfrage '), " is wholly incapable of laying the foundations of a true objective psychology." Fichte yet, in his work on 'Theistic World-View/ says, quite con- sistently, that "the more a being fulfils its end in reference to the all, the higher does it advance its own well-being," for that is in reference to the moral system.

On the question of the soul, Fichte holds that the soul is at once " the real ground of our individ- uality, and the great formative principle." And the main , object of psychology is, in his view, to show what " within the consciousness " is the work of the soul itself, and what is contributed by experience. In controversy with Lotze on the question of the seat of the soul, while Lotze was inclined to place it in a fixed portion of the brain, Fichte, opposed to dualistic interpretation of the

IMMANUEL HERMANN FICHTE. 23

human constitution, claimed for its seat the whole nervous system, and assumed at the same time what he termed an invisible pneumatic body, inseparable from the soul, and through which the soul, as a dynamical but not physical existent, could maintain communication with the body. It was a con- troversial time, and Rud. Wagner, the great physi- ologist, had issued in 1857 his small treatise 'The Controversy about the Soul' ('Der Kampf um die Seele'). His position was that physiology could only go half-way, in explanations that concerned the assumption of an immaterial soul, and that other means must be used for a great region beyond this. He claimed to speak thus in the interest of religion and morality, and was bitterly opposed by Vogt, who, at a scientific assembly in 1854, where Wagner stated his dualistic view of nature, as mechanism and spiritualism, contemptuously called it "book-keeping by double entry."

Man alone is, for Fichte, minted for individuality, and, as such, immortal. He postulated a real connection of the human spirit with the Divine spirit in prayer and pious inspiration. It was by the attribution of feeling and love, besides know- ledge and will, to the Deity, that Fichte reached his "concrete" or "ethical" theism. To him, it is confirmed by all experience that God is Love. He thinks optimism susceptible of empirical proof. But such an optimism can only be grounded, I think,

24 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

in the inward man, its inner perceptions of the character and purpose of God, its personal attitude, in short, to life, not in a survey of and outlook upon the world, which, by itself, would probably make such optimism less possible than ever. Yet many higher considerations make such an optimistic faith reasonable and possible, albeit it cannot be un- attended with pain and difficulty. Even these dis- appear in the quest and vision of the eternal God. In his ' Anthropology,' Fichte favoured the doctrine (pp. 347-352) of a non - corporeal soul, although thinking that the soul is never to be found without its corresponding body. The relations of body and soul are fully discussed in its chapters. His view of life was that it meant the self-sustentation of the organism. He posits an active organic force, mere mechanism being unable to explain the fact of organic life.

It must be said that Fichte has not received any very skilful or adequate appreciation from the accredited historians of philosophy. This is not surprising, for it has been too much their way to sacrifice theistic systems and values, with a strange lack of sense of proportion, to all kinds of pan- theistic, positivistic, and materialistic thought. Prof. Campbell Fraser says of pantheism, that "its history is in a manner the history of philosophy " > yes, in the manner in which the historians have, with blind custom, written it. But it should

IMMANUEL HERMANN FICHTE. 25

never be forgotten that, in the history of philosophy, theistic world- view has the longest list of names attached to it. It should be said, however, that in the ' Ueberweg-Heinze-Oesterreich ' ' History of Philosophy' (vol. iv., Berlin, 1916), distinctly im- proved notices of Fichte and Weisse appear.

But to return to Fichte ; historians notwithstand- ing, there are abounding proofs in German philo- sophical literature of the high esteem in which not only Fichte, but all the members of this philo- sophical group, were held, and Fichte has not gone without high and deserved praise for his speculative power and insight, even from philosophers not belonging to his own School. C. Schwarz, for instance, singles out Fichte and Weisse for particular and appreciative treatment (' Zur Geschichte der neuesten Theologie,' pp. 310-324). They have known — as Hoffding has not — that it is a conspicuous merit in Fichte that, as a philosopher, he keeps to a purely speculative standpoint, and eschews every- thing of theological or supranaturalistic character. Hence we find Rothe, in his ' Dogmatik ' (footnote, p. 83), disclaiming sympathy with Fichte on this score, as was to be expected from the more theo- logical standpoint of the former. Fichte's services to philosophy must be judged by what he did for the^formulation of theistic world-view, as philosophy stood in his own time. Dull indeed would be the critical insight that should fail to accord his system

26 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

a high place from this point of view. If in his own time he was criticised, now, for his trans- cendentalism, and now for his dualism ; the world to-day discards these forgotten criticisms, and forms its own appreciative estimate of his work. His sub- sequent influence on philosophical thought has been very considerable, as is known by those who take the trouble to know the course it has really followed outside as well as inside Germany.

27

CHAPTER II.

C. H. WEISSE.

C. H. WEISSE (1801-1866), to whom I now turn, was the most powerful representative of this group of philosophers. He was more permeated with the Hegelian spirit, and more in command of the fundamental truths of that system than any of the theistic philosophers of his period, having been for a time an adherent of that system, from which he only gradually and slowly broke away. There have been those, among capable German thinkers, who have regarded Weisse as not behind Hegel and Schelling in intellectual power, and as the superior of both in philosophical and theological learning; and it may at any rate be doubted if there has been any speculative mind since Hegel more worthy to rank with his, than Weisse. Lotze, of course, has been more popular and better known, which is quite a different matter. And Lotze frankly owned that the circle of ideas which had been his, and which he had never felt any desire

28 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

to change, had been primarily derived from Weisse. That, of course, must not be taken to mean either that Lotze was not greatly influenced by Leibniz, or that Lotze has not advanced at points to im- portant positions of his own, beyond the insight of Weisse.

Weisse formed a connecting link between Hegel and Lotze. It has even been claimed by R. Seydel for Weisse that he had more influence on philo- sophical development after Hegel than any other thinker. But that seems true only in a restricted sense, and the direction which Weisse's philosophical energies took, together with the heaviness of his style, was not the most favourable to his services for philosophy being duly remembered. One could almost wish that Weisse had concerned himself a little less in his philosophical work with theological matters, and the reconciliation of philosophy and theology, and of faith and knowledge.

As a critic, Weisse thought the Hegelian system both contradicted the facts of reality and left the needs of the heart and of feeling unsatisfied. He thought it left the world a mere system of ob- jectified thoughts ; there was always a dark residue belonging to another than the stuifless shadow- world of the absolute idea, so that Hegel never got beyond mere rationalism. Weisse did valuable but greatly neglected work in 'Metaphysics' (1835), and in 'Aesthetics' (1830), the latter warmly praised, and

CHRISTIAN HERMANN WEISSE. 29

largely followed, by Lotze, who, however, super- added the idea of worth or value. Weisse was a contributor to Fichte's " Zeitschrif t," in which his essays on Bonnie (1845-6) contained the just state- ment that Bohme "is not a speculative philosopher, but a religious seer pointing the way to speculative philosophy." Bohme was a bold and vigorous thinker, whose speculation was mainly concerned with God, whom He sought in the differences and contrasts wherein He manifests His nature. But his speculative mysticism is lacking in system, as might be expected. In the Vorrede of his 'Meta- physics,' Weisse said — "The formal truth and the material untruth of Hegel's philosophy, the solid excellence of its method, and the wretched baldness of its results, obtrude themselves with equal evidence upon my spirit."

In his book on ' The Idea of the Godhead ' (1833), which is a purely philosophical work, Weisse sought to derive in a dialectical manner the absolute per- sonality of God from the idea of truth and perfection. Leibniz, I may point out, had, long before, in his own way based the being of God upon the reality of eternal truth and infinite per- fection. Weisse's great three - volumed work on 'Philosophical Dogmatics' (1855-1862) was as rich in theological learning as it was powerful in spec- ulative thought. Indeed, Erdmann remarks that " its extensive and intensive wealth of matter " was

30 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

such that it " frightened away many readers." He would prove no disunion to exist between dogma, rightly understood, and true philosophy. The work contained, in fact, the whole system of Weisse in outline. But it did not adopt the pure dialectical method of the self-development of the notion, but took more account of religious experience, which it would treat in a speculative manner. Weisse's movement is thus away from abstract idealism, and into his deductive method he manages to weave much that is empirical, with fruitful results, a fact that was too often overlooked. The concept of God is for Weisse no immediate or presupposi- tionless one ; it is not given through experience as such. The concept of absolute spirit he takes to be first fully realised in the trinity of reason, feeling or phantasy, and will. Scientific knowledge must bring to consciousness, out of pure reason- speculation and universal philosophic world- view, those knowledge - determinations which justify it, and attribute to it objective validity.

I do not propose to concern myself here with what Weisse advances as to the so-called proofs for the being of God : I only remark what is a striking feature in Weisse, the emphasis with which he insists that the original possibility of God — " in whose possibility is included every other possi- bility"— is the sole content of thought-necessity. In this thought of the possibility of God he finds

CHRISTIAN HERMANN WEISSE. 31

the absolute of pure reason; it is for him the truth of pure thought-necessity. Thus for Weisse's ontology the concept of the possible may be said to count for more than that of being. He holds that the logical and mathematical laws of the possible are valid for Deity, who moves freely within these, just as the artistic genius is free within the laws of his art. The category of the possible is important, I may remark, because of the way it relates the ideal to the actual. Thus, in the case of the Godhead, the logical Absolute furnishes, for Weisse, only the forms of the possi- bility of being or existence, as a last background. The real and personal life of God, however, rests on inner freedom, phantasy, and will. The concept of freedom is here the spring or fountain for the outworking of Weisse's doctrine, But no abstract necessity of reason can give more than empty forms of possibility, says Weisse, and for knowledge of the real, experience is everywhere necessary. But the fundamental error of the Hegelian philosophy is, in his view, its thinking to advance from the concept over to being itself. He thinks Hegel has only given us a negative prius — a negative Absolute — while claiming to have given a positive one.

This thought of the original possibility of God, or of the negative Absolute — may be said to be the basal thought of Weisse's system. It recalls

32 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

for me Leibniz, who laid great stress on the possibility of God, with this difference, however, that Leibniz always went further than the abstract possibility in which Weisse rests, and said that God, if He be possible, exists. And this, again, reminds one of the saying of Aquinas, "Deus est actualitas totius possibilitatis." But if that original possibility should ever become actuality, Weisse holds that it can only be thought as doing so as the self-conscious Primal Subject, or the Primal Personality. With fine speculative power and ability, Weisse shows how the absolute idea, the possibility of pure being or existence, is in a peculiar sense the prius of tl e whole Godhend — the first member (Glied), in fact, of the Divine triunity, which has been known, in all the ages, as the Godhead of the Father. In such ways Weisse reached the positive in his Absolute. The Father is, to Weisse, the primary Essence, the primary Foundation, who thinks Himself. The Son is, to him, Wisdom, and is the intellectual cause of the Divine world of feeling or phantasy. The Spirit is the moral Will or Love, and ethically wills the ideal world. But here, as we shall again find in Fischer, the Son and the Spirit are distinguished only as attributes.

Weisse held that to the divine Reason and its necessary thoughts must be added the divine Heart and the divine Will, and these three he identified

CHRISTIAN HERMANN WEISSE. 33

with the Persons of the Trinity. Weisse did well in the way he brought out the becoming real of the original possibility or thought necessity of God to mean a real thinking absolute subject. But he unfortunately begged the whole question, when he introduced this absolute Thinker under the conditions of subject and object, because he mis- takenly supposed this necessary to the idea of personality. This was to fail to realise that person- ality has its ground within itself, not external to it — in the realisation of the ego, not in the difference of the ego and the non-ego. Such a psychological determination of human thought he had clearly no right to carry over and attach to absolute thought. He failed to see, as some philosophers amongst us still fail to see, that such real oppositions as subjective and objective prove for human thought, do not exist for pure absolute thought, which indeed is Absolute Thought precisely because it is free from these limitations. No good or valid reason, I maintain, has ever been adduced why the Absolute Being should not have, perfectly unified in Himself, subject and object and their relating activity. The notion that self -conscious- ness in God is like finite self -consciousness in its dependence on a not-self outside, is, to use a term of Prof. Pringle-Pattison, who holds this position, an " exploded " one. There can be no self -modifying term to assert itself as a not-self to the Absolute

c

34 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

Consciousness. That consciousness has no non- ego either outside or within its own infinite content, which embraces the totality of all the real. The Ego here, and the non-ego, are only different forms of being contained in the Absolute Ego. The Absolute, if really taken as the Absolute, can in no wise have a non-ego ; for that is possible only to a finite being. We cannot take Him as the Absolute and, at the same time, make Him non - absolute, as is sometimes attempted. This, although it is still useful and necessary in our relative thought, to retain the distinction of subject- consciousness and object -consciousness in speaking of the Absolute Experience; but it cannot be as real oppositions, such as exist in human thought. That is to say, for Dr Pringle - Pattison's co- ordination of the object, there is its clear and necessary subordination, in the case of the Absolute. In its need of a hyper-cosmic principle, the world is certainly less than Being-in-and-of -itself.

An American philosopher has remarked that " it is said that all consciousness involves the distinction of subject and object, and hence is impossible to an isolated and single being." "But this claim mistakes a mental form for an ontological distinc- tion. The object in all consciousness is always only our presentations, and not something ontologi- cally diverse from the mind itself. These presenta- tions may stand for things, but consciousness extends

CHRISTIAN HERMANN WEISSE. 35

only to the presentations. In self -consciousness this is manifestly the case. Here consciousness is a consciousness of our states, thoughts, &c., as our own. The Infinite, then, need not have some- thing other than Himself as His object, but ma,y find the object in His own activities, cosmic or otherwise." But Hegel said substantially the same thing as to God being His own object, that it was God "to distinguish Himself from Himself, to be object to Himself, &c." The failure to recognise all that I have now advanced makes the necessity — once more assumed, in his recent able work on ' The Idea of God,' by Prof. Pringle- Pattison — of the world to the Divine self-conscious- ness, a very ill-founded and unconvincing affair. The Absolute Being sums in Himself the unity of the real and the ideal, and has no need of such means to His self-realisation. It is a gratui- tous anthropomorphism to think otherwise.

It is precisely the objection to Prof. Pringle- Pattison's whole treatment of the Absolute Being or Universal Subject, "just as" (p. 314) the finite is done, that it is perfectly untenable, because, in his own phrase, " ultimately unmeaning." God is, to him, no more separable from the universe than finite subjects have independent subsistence outside the universal life in which they are set. The analogy is to be rejected. He himself recognises, in another connection, that we have no analogy

36 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

in our experience to the Absolute Experience (p. 293). Of it I say, in se est, et per se concipitur. It is he himself who says of Dr Rashdall (p. 389), that it is "ultimately unmeaning to treat the universal " as the particulars are done. Dr Pringle- Pattison is never weary of insisting that the Infinite is " in and through the finite " (pp. 254, 315). What is the value of this insistence ? Not true in any sense that makes it of any more value here than the merest truism. The finite may posit or affirm the absolute or infinite, no doubt, but it does not, as suggested, constitute it; in fact, so little does the finite really posit the absolute or infinite, that it much more has the absolute or infinite for its presupposition. This dependence of the finite he is himself compelled to acknowledge (pp. 250-1). It is in its necessity to the finite that we know the Infinite. It is interesting to recall the terms in which Prof. Pringle-Pattison, earlier, spoke of the position which he now adopts, that "the strange thing would rather seem to be that man should ever forget his position as a finite incident in the plan of things " ; that it is " both absurd and blasphemous to suppose" that "it is reserved for man to bring the Absolute as it were to the birth"; and "that the Absolute exists, so to speak, by the grace of man, and lives only in the breath of his nostrils " ('Two Lectures on Theism/ p. 50). It is no new thing, in the history of philosophy, for a thinker's second thoughts not to be his best.

CHRISTIAN HERMANN WEISSE. 37

No sound theism regards Deity as a being conditioned by environment, "just as" a man is, not even if, in this apotheosis, man be proclaimed "the one perpetual miracle." I reject the talk of a metaphysic of experience in this connection, for it is experience only in a narrow, cramped, and positivistic sense, with deadening effect on specula- tive impulse. A true metaphysic of experience must be interpreted in so large a sense as to include not merely what we know of God through the "objective creation," but God's self-revealings in our mental constitution and our spiritual conscious- ness, wherein are given to us much of the best we know of Him. There are realms of truth and being, the knowledge of which, whether reached as con- ceived, that is, logically discriminated, or as dis- cerned through rational and spiritual intuition, is gained through what are properly experience- forms. No one who has shed a merely positivist cast of thought would talk of " proof " in such a connection, since the truths that so come to us appear as necessary truth. There is no higher " proof " of the truth of a concept than thought- necessity. Not God simply as the World-Subject, but as the free Absolute Personality, not God as creative only, but as the sole self-existent Being, do we thus come to know. But Dr Pringle-Pattison, having started out with the correlation of God as World-Subject and the World-Object, never does, or can, rise above this correlation, or eternal

38 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

dualism, which is to me a most unsatisfactory position. I am certainly of those who reject such a " Siamese-twin " connection, as it has been styled, between God and the world, as one that derogates from the Deity, never allows Him to come to His own as Lord of all being, and dogmatically repre- sents this eternal minorship as an improvement in the idea of God! God is the Absolute Self or Being, self-existent, and distinct from the world- process, as the primary absolutely Given and Real.

It is easy to understand why Weisse will not have the personality of God taken " immediately " as the Absolute, nor the Absolute taken " immediately " as Personality. This is because between the Absolute of pure reason or the infinite possibility of God, on the one hand, and the living, personal God of religious experience, there is, in his view, a great difference. It cannot be denied, I think, that there were thinkers of that time, Rothe, for example, who started at once, and too soon, from the representation that God is the Absolute. It seems to me that this position is reached only through reflection : we must begin, I think, with the pure concept of the Absolute, and only finally do we come to identify the Absolute which we have thought, with the God of religious experience. To me it is by no means unimportant that our thought as pure thought should prove a philosophical working up to our more concrete repre- sentation. Many thinkers, I may add, have debated

CHRISTIAN HERMANN WEISSE. 39

whether the Absolute is a positive or a merely negative conception. If we think the absolutely Unconditioned, negative in a verbal form but not in idea, we shall, I believe, be left in the end with the most positive of all concepts, that, namely, of the absolutely self-determined and all-conditioning Being. But, though we may and must distinguish with Weisse the Absolute of pure thought or reason- possibility from the God of religious experience, yet the former Absolute does most surely come to be taken at last as a personal Absolute, really or ulti- mately identical with the latter. Two Absolutes there cannot be, without the grossest absurdity, yea, the uttermost inconceivability.

Also, for Weisse the Triune God is personal, for what we have seen to be the commonplace and un- satisfactory reason that God cannot be a person without other persons. As if the case were not that of the Absolute Who is the Universal Personality. God is the Absolute Individual, the self-subsistent Being, the infinite plentitude of Being and of Ration- ality, and, as such, is not anthropomorphic, albeit He has all the notes of Personality. And when I speak of Him as the Universal Personality, I do not, of course, mean it in the vulgar quantitative sense, but that He is the metaphysical reason of all beings, and that nothing exists but by Him. I do not follow Weisse in this matter, and I remain unconvinced by recent discussions of any philosophical necessity to

40 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

drag in the doctrine of the Trinity in order to establish the personality of God. Theism, in the philosophical sense, takes God to be a single personal Being. That is its view of the "one form with many names," to use a phrase of ^Eschylus, in the worship of mankind (" Prom. Vinct." 1. 212). But it is to me a perfectly gratuitous assumption that such a Being as God, of infinite internal complexity and distinction, could not be eternally active within His own absolute Being. At any rate, the absoluteness of being is to me the first determination, and it is not yet trinitarian I must not be supposed, in what has already been said, not to hold the simplicity of God's being, its entire freedom from composition of any kind, but I am not unmindful of Rothe's word that there is a way of thinking God as an entirely simple being that brings with it a strong temptation " to form a pantheistic conception of Him as particularising Himself in the world." Weisse also favoured modal and relational forms of Divine manifestation under a trinity of nature, man, and art, and of the ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the good.

Of course, I have not here been denying the value of the doctrine of the Trinity, when it comes to developing the riches of Divine Personality. An eminent Catholic writer has said that "the Three Persons in God are not as human persons, each of whom has a separate being ; but they are the three

CHRISTIAN HERMANN WEISSE. 41

Divine terms or perfections of One infinite and Eternal Life." Or, as an illustrious German thinker once put it, " this one Divine Personality is the unity of the three modes of subsistence which participate in itself." That oneness of personal Life, at any rate, so sums all we know of God as to afford reason for our speaking of the Personality of God. But I would explicitly remark that Weisse, like Fichte, calls in the aid of the world-idea in order to set up the self-consciousness of God, a procedure whose philosophical necessity, I maintain, has not been shown, and which in the end defeats itself, leaving the world -idea no longer the product of free self- conscious Deity. But the pure internal product of the Divine Mind the world-idea must be, and, as such, it cannot be identified with God, a fact which, as we shall see later, Ulrici failed adequately to realise. That inner logical distinction must be clearly kept in mind. It is not my purpose now to set out the lengthy argumentations of Weisse on these and other — theological and mythological — matters : it is enough for my purpose to note that his speculative theism makes its way round to the necessary conception of the unity in the manifoldness of the products of the Divine generation or begetting. But Weisse's whole argumentation rests essentially upon the idea of a process wherein God raises Himself to actuality out of the pure possibility of being. And with all this process of self-realisation

42 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

in God in pre-creational time, there comes to be associated a cosmogonic process later, in time. Crea- tion is, for him, through free resolution of God's will, and consists in a series of acts that begin and continue in time. First of these is the formation of matter, from whose nature Weisse derives the meta- physical necessity of evil, since he conceives matter, so externalised, as having put itself into opposition to the Divine personal Will. But this does not seem to me a position for which there is any proper philosophical warrant or substantiation. Not only so, but Weisse even presupposes a Divine or infinite space, which he takes to be the fundamental form of the life of the inner Divine nature. The Divine Will contains the immediate that of reality ; the divine Nature its what ; and the Divine Will is free and self-conscious. But such a becoming of God, as has just been spoken of, out of potentiality, and by means of developmental process, is obviously philo- sophically objectionable in many ways, to any one at least who, like Weisse, would avoid pantheistic tendency and suggestion. Rothe, too, showed like traces of the influence of pantheistic speculation in his talk of the process of self-generation, wherein Deity passes from potentiality to actuality. For he felt, in fact, the after effects of the Schleiermacherian pantheism. But the Absolute Being stands above time, growth, change, succession, and but for this changeless Absolute we could not even know the flux

CHKISTIAN HERMANN WEISSE. 43

of time — a fact which many present-day philosophers fail to realise.

In striking contrast with the Augustinian view of time, Weisse posited time as eternally in God. He thought infinite time and infinite space to be powers of the Divine Life, for to him the forms of time and space were eternal truths or original forms of the absolute possibility of being. Not powers above God, since Weisse supposed them to be eternally overcome by the Divine eternity and perfection. In the form in which they exist in God, however, they have for him nothing in common with space and time, as we know them. Still the fact remains that number, time, and space, were all three forms taken by Weisse to be real and objective, alike for God and for the world. The immanent presup- positions of space and time were made by Weisse with a view to the Divine creative activity, but his theory does not seem to me to be free of inherent difficulties, although some important German thinkers have found it maieutic or sug- gestive. Instead of so postulating time and space eternally in God, it is surely enough for us to pos- tulate them as possibilities, not in any actual, but merely in a logical sense. I hold eternity to be that which cannot not-l)Q, and that it is a necessary presupposition of time. For it must hold within it the perpetual possibility of time. And there is only one Eternity, which is thus an All, and must,

44 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

I believe, in the last analysis, be identified with God. The problem occurs again in Fischer.

Divine Revelation was, to Weisse's " Philosophical Dogmatics," history, and revelation was for the race, not for that part which lives in the midst of it. But it does not belong to our present task to follow his eindringenden Bemerkungen, as they have been termed, on this subject. He thought the foreknow- ledge of God involved what he calls positive and glaring (klare und helle) determinism, wherein the freedom of created beings was annulled. He failed to realise that such foreknowledge by no means carried with it causal efficiency and will-determin- ation. As I am touching now on the freewill problem, I remark that no thinker of that time thought out the freewill problem more deeply than did Deutinger, of whom I am not to treat. He was greatly influenced by Schelling, the lack in whose speculation he yet clearly perceived, but also by Baader. The freedom of the will was, for him, the central core of personality; without it, he thinks there is no morality; and no being for ones self; and where there is no free ground of determination, there is no personality. Any philosophy, Deutinger shows, that knows no true personality, knows also no revelation. " Revelation emphasises the personal element in God," says an American writer, "and gives it a position not otherwise attainable by it" (J. Bascom, 'Philosophy of Religion/ p. 206).

CHRISTIAN HERMANN WEISSE. 45

On the problem of Immortality, Weisse saw the advantage of the personal Absolute, as securing the real immortality of man. Weisse reserved im- mortality, however, for the regenerate. With his interesting interpretations of eschatological matters we are not here concerned, though I do not mean that they do not belong to theism, but a word may be said on the question of immortality, as developed subsequently to Fichte and Weisse. Lotze made no serious, or at least no successful, attempt to harmonise the ethical and the metaphysical aspects of the subject. He thought we^ should be " content to retain the general idea of a continued life" without "that intimate acquaintance" which had been claimed for it. That he had nothing better

o

to say is not surprising, when writers on the idea of immortality in our own time still fail to ap- preciate the fact that neither the ethics of immor- tality, nor any other ethic, is secured against the fictitious, the illusory, the merely provisory, until metaphysical grounding has been reached. The ethical " argument " for immortality may, of course, be formulated independently of metaphysics, but an "illusory belief in immortality" was precisely what Prof. Sidgwick ('Memoir/ p. 472) held to be current, and this may still be charged, when no metaphysical grounding has been sought or reached (Cf. my ' Philosophical System of Theistic Idealism/ ch. xi.).

46 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

It is to another type of mind than that of either Royce or M'Taggart we should look for appreciation of the metaphysical implications of immortality. Royce makes everything "depend upon the meta- physical interpretation and foundation of the com- munity" (cThe Problem of Christianity,' vol. ii. p. 11). A metaphysician may carry through this "corporate" inquiry, and miss a great deal of the metaphysical implications essential to a satisfying theory of personal immortality. There can be no talk of "proofs" here, any more than in the case of j the being of God, in the old formal logic sense of "proof," but only in a dialectical sense, as de- scribing the way of spirit — an inner way. If there is immortality, it is that of the soul or self as a thinking, willing, and feeling being or essence, whose immortality must have metaphysical aspects or relations, for the ontological sense.

The ethical presentation must lack in depth and solidity of treatment, cannot, in fact, be well founded, so long as the unescapable metaphysical aspects and relations have been shirked or ignored. More sug- gestive than Lotze's are the positions of Feuerbach on immortality. For, even with his absurd tendency to run theology back into anthropology, there has yet not been a more original psychological critic of religion since Hume's time than he. In what has

o

been termed the " rich " and " delicate " psychology of his best period, there is much that is suggestive,

CHKISTIAN HERMANN WEISSE. 47

and not least on the subject of immortality, despite his putting logical reasoning before spiritual reality, and the too great identity that marked his whole system. The need here, for metaphysicians and still more for ethicists, is of a deeply grounded theistic metaphysic, capable of applying to this connection the words of Troeltsch, — " Only the personality which arises, out of man, to beyond him as a mere natural product, through a union of his will and deepest being with God — this alone is raised above the finite, and alone can defy it. Without this support, every individualism evaporates into thin air." This will take us to a higher metaphysical plane than Dr M'Taggart's metaphysic of immor- tality. I find finer and more explicit recognition of the metaphysical aspects, values, and implications, of immortality in theological writing, thirty or more years ago, than in that of to-day ; surely not much of our vaunted development there ! Happily, things have fared better in philosophy, to some real extent at least, especially when philosophy is not taken as limited to our own country.

I think it would be a legitimate criticism to say that, so far as speculative theology is concerned, both Weisse and I. H. Fichte, working after Hegel, were inclined to use too abstract categories. They both recognised the dialectic of Hegel, so far as the supply of the necessary forms was concerned, but they both thought (each in his different way) it

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called for supplementing from the experiential side. Fichte's ' Ontology ' manifested dialectic dependence on Hegel's 'Logic/ but he did not escape Trendel- enburg's sharp criticism for his procedure ('Log. Unter.' I. p. 103). Trendelenburg was inclined to view Weisse's and Fichte's result as a doubtful go- between, in respect of dialectic and experience. Philosophy may, I think, rightly enough, develop all its categories out of the differences of self -conscious- ness, but speculative theology is not concerned with the impossible task of developing the Divine self- consciousness out of abstract categories, but rather with the attempt to deal with the empirico-historical God-consciousness, and the questions that naturally spring therefrom.

This does not mean, of course, that there will not follow, for speculative theology also, a resultant system or systematic unfolding. But, in what I have just said, I should not admit that speculative theology ever need, or should, be less rigidly philoso- phical in its procedure than philosophy of the most rationalist or agnostic or positivist type. In both cases, self -consciousness is in reality, I hold, the first starting-point ; even if, in the former, a consciousness of the Divine should be superadded, self-consciousness is still preserved therein, and indeed in heightened form. Speculative theology, in my view, begins, no less than philosophy in general, with man and the phenomenal world, and reaches God only as the

CHEISTIAN HERMANN WEISSE. 49

result of experience and reflection. This should not be overlooked, if ever speculative theology puts God, as a matter of logical concern, in the forefront of its system. Some of these considerations were too much overlooked, in my judgment, by K-othe, for example. The only difference, then, is that phil- osophy or general speculation does not proceed from the religious consciousness, which, as the more in- clusive, is followed by speculative theology, but they are both, and equally, valid.

Weisse and Fichte both sought to build up an ethical theism in opposition to the pantheistic idealism of Hegel. The immediate influence of Weisse and Fichte was conspicuous, among other ways, on both the ethics and the dogmatics of Rothe, of whom I am not to treat, nor was the influence wholly wanting on Rothe of Chalybaus, of whom J have still to speak. But Rothe had also been in- fluenced by Oetinger and by Baader. Of Weisse's important philosophical influence I have already spoken, in the beginning of this chapter, in connec- tion with Seydel's view of it. His potent influence is not surprising, since, as Pfleiderer, whose ' Phil- osophy of Religion' does so poorly by our group (omitting most of them), remarks elsewhere of Weisse, that " his system is not without the origin- ality of genius, and contains an abundance of profound and fertile thoughts" ('The Development of Theology in Germany since Kant,' p. 145).

50

CHAPTER III.

K. P. FISCHER.

K. PH. FISCHER (1807-1885), another member of this group of philosophers, was largely influenced by Baader, by Oken, and by Schelling; the last- named was his point of departure, rather than Fichte (the elder), as in the case of Fichte the younger, or Hegel as in the case of Weisse. Fischer was an energetic critic of Hegel, and opposed, like Fichte and Weisse, an impersonal logical God, but even his statements of the measure of truth contained in absolute idealism were valuable and interesting. His work on 'The Idea of the Godhead ' (1839) claims to be an attempt to ground and develop Theism in a speculative manner. He does not profess it to be purely philosophical, and without theological tendency, for he thinks philosophical and theological truth must come into essential agree- ment. This, although he was, at the time of his death, professor of philosophy in Erlangen. It might be objected, however, as a German critic has

KARL PHILIPP FISCHER. 51

pointed out, that he makes philosophy dependent on theology, when he goes on to assume Christianity to be the absolute religion, with which the phil- osophy of religion has to do, with the Christian consciousness as its inner presupposition. It must certainly be agreed that it is the business of phil- osophy to take, without presuppositions, appearances as it finds them, and try to explain them, without the warping influence of preconceived notions. At the same time, I should not admit that a speculative thinker was less philosophic because, to bare self- consciousness, as such, he added religious conscious- ness, for in what we may call his religious self- consciousness, his self -consciousness is still present, and, in fact, realises itself more truly than before. For then, in being conscious at the same time of his relation to God, the thinker grows more certain of himself — gains deepened self -consciousness, and is better fitted for philosophic inquiry.

In the work on ' The Idea of the Godhead ' already mentioned, Fischer seeks by use of the historical development to bring out that Theism is no resultant of arbitrary and subjective thinking, but is the scientifically ascertained truth of the history of speculative theology. He lays especial stress on the notion of the absolute Unity or the absolute Idea, as one to which thought, of inner necessity, raises itself. This idea of an absolute unity is a presup- position to which we are thus immediately brought

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by the inward becoming of reason. I may remark that, like Fischer here, Wirth and some others set out from the concept of pure unity. Sengler was one of these, and he leant to metaphysical philosophy, under the influence of Schelling, as Fischer did to theory of knowledge, not without influence from Leibniz. It is with the help of this ideal unity that Fischer hopes to prove that the Being, whom this unity represents, must be personal. Particular specu- lative systems are to Fischer but so many different forms of the absolute Idea. The Absolute can be thought merely as the principle or the unity of the world, as in pantheism. Or, it may be conceived as self-conscious principle or a unity of being-in-and- for-itself, with inner determinations and qualities, as in theism. Fischer reviews the forms of historic pantheism from the abstract pantheism of the Eleatics, through the substantial pantheism of Spinoza, the realistic pantheism of Oken and Schleiermacher, on to the idealistic pantheism of Hegel, in which he finds the highest and most perfect form of pantheism. But he finds the type of unity provided by theism to be the higher one. In this work Fischer says that being presupposes a becoming, that is, self-determination. But I think it might be asked whether being does not before all presuppose self-possession — a self -having — an important point for these discussions, as we shall see later.

KARL PHILIPP FISCHER. 53

Though I do not mean to traverse what Fischer says on the proofs for the Being of God, yet I wish to note that, in connection with the Ontological argument, he looks favourably on the contention that the essentially unescapable need of a Supreme Being is of a kind that carries with it the corre- sponding reality of the same. This maintenance, I may remark, was metaphysically grounded by Fechner in his work, entitled 'The Three Motives and Grounds of Faith/ and explicitly made to enclose the personality of God. The truth of the thought, Fischer says, encloses the reality in itself. It would, he thinks, be an inner contradiction to hold a thought as true, and yet count it unreal. In this work on the Godhead, and in his most notable work still to be spoken of, Fischer holds that the absolute principle of all things cannot be conceived otherwise than as having existence ; human reason were else radically deceptive and illusive; the objective truth of rational knowledge would be done away. Of the whole Kantian scepti- cism on the question of the existence of God, Fischer says that "the conceit of having put a complete end to the scientific investigation of objective truth really involves the haughty presumption of pro- nouncing judgment on the systems of all the phil- osophers who have honestly and truly followed in the footsteps of Plato, as well as a renunciation of that knowledge of the truth which is the end and

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aim of all true culture, and should by no means be regarded as humility and self-restraint/'

In all this, Fischer is contrastive with the non- speculative spirit of a religious writer, who tells us that "if" the ontological argument has "a shadow of validity, it is useless in a religious interest " (G. Galloway, 'Mind,' July 1919, p. 366). Both philosophical and religious writers have shown a singular capacity for forgetting that both the Monologion and the Proslogion of Anselm were as far as possible from purely intellectual per- formances ; what we have in both is, fides quaerens intellectum. The Proslogion, in which the Anselmic form of the ontological argument occurs, is a lifting up of the soul to God, and I am not without doubt whether Anselm's Greatest, conceived by him in such a setting, was to him the purely metaphysical, and morally qualityless, magnitude, which it has commonly been assumed to be. Anselm, however, helped to give this impression, when, in his con- troversy with Gaunilo, he sacrificed the moral to giving his argument supposed scientific form.

The ontological argument, however, is to be reckoned with in its many fine formulations in modern thought, wherein a background of infinite and necessary Being or Reality is seen to be involved in our thought or knowledge ; the appreciation of it, however, depends on speculative insight. Religion will win no respect by a too ready application of the

KARL PHILIPP FISCHER. 55

yardstick of " interest " or value to such high, specu- lative matters. And it should be the last to flout the immanence of God in human ideals. In this connection, one thinker has said, " imperfect as may be the form in which it has often been presented, the principle of this argument is that on which our whole religious consciousness may be said to rest." What, on such a view, becomes of the " uselessness," as a religious "interest," which has been so lightly affirmed ? Anselm, with his quantitativeness, and Descartes, with his predicativeness, busied them- selves too much about establishing existence, instead of pursuing the ideality on which the proof really rests, and rising to assert the actuality of the Being Who is the infinite, prevenient, and necessary ideal of the human spirit. Such an ideal cannot be merely subjective. That Being is Spirit, not mere existence ; is before and beyond all thought and all things ; is, in fact, by underlying presupposition, self -existent Being. Such a Being as this latter cannot be proved, but must, on rational grounds, be assumed, and may be rightfully asserted as the prevenient, but also the actual and infinite ideal of our spirit. But the reality of the idea of God is discernible only as the reality itself is present to the idea in experience, that is to say, religious experience. The validating of the idea of God does not belong to mere thought, as such. " God transcends all conception," said Anselm, and, if so, He cannot be a mere conception

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of the human intellect. Our speculative conceptions of God, which have their place and value, are clearly to be distinguished from the position of those who hold that God is as much a matter of empirical knowledge as any other reality. Anselm compares the mode of thought which makes God a product of the mind with that which conceives Him as existing. He did not offer to prove God's exist- ence, but said that He is, and cannot be conceived not to exist. No more does Hegel allow any formal demonstration of God's existence; to him the idea of God means the unity of thought and existence. An interesting, if not convincing, criticism of them both is given by Kleutgen ('La Phil. Scolastique,' vol. iv. pp. 340-355).

Dr James Ward has spoken very incautiously of what Kant has effected here. Kant missed this aspect of ideality in the proof, and his criticism remained inconclusive against it, although he was right, of course, so far as our voluntary and assertive part — the deplorable " dollar " part — of the argument, is concerned. No wonder Hegel said nothing could be "pettier in knowledge than this," for it was quite unworthy of Kant's genius. These imperfect apprehensions and treatments do not touch the essential worth and validity of the ontological argument itself, as deeper reflection shows: it is still the case that the highest essence, when thought, must be thought as absolute and

KARL PHILIPP FISCHER. 57

self - existing. As Prof. Pringle - Pattison rightly remarks, " the possibilities of thought cannot exceed the actuality of being." And it should be remem- bered that no conception possible to the mind can equal the God-idea in universality, wealth, compass, and ultimateness. His attempted destruction of the ontological argument was Kant's main blow at speculative theology , Hegel's support and defence of it was one of the finest things he did — for which I honour him more than did any member of our philosophic group, in all probability. Right well had Hegel understood that the existence of those non-empirical ideas which are necessary to thought proves that the kingdom of reason is not of this world. It was something for Hegel's time to have vindicated the depth and subtlety of Anselm.

Dr Pringle-Pattison has here delightfully emanci- pated himself, with whatever consistency, from the cramped metaphysics in which we found him, and has gone far in the way of the self -existent Being, Whom he is over -anxious to exclude from his work, so leaving it a torso. Without such absolute and unconditioned Being, known through rational intuition, no rational theory of being is possible. But I have not meant to suggest that the concept of self -existence is already the concept of God, for an agnostic might say there may possibly be many self-existing beings. It is only material for the working out of the judgments of reason towards

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the infinite and necessary existence of God. In this outworking, reason will severely track and trace the deep implications of being or existence up to this great height, quite unheeding of the peremptory voices that would proscribe reason, and dwarf her results to that only which is contained in a hard, positivistic round of thought. And yet we have our own solid, positivistic basis, in that we set out from the perceived fact of being, whence we rise to being as conceived, or logically discriminated. I return to add that the ' Proslogion ' of Anselm itself (c. 14) shows that more of " religious interest " and ethical value was included, in connec- tion with the argument, than is usually remembered or credited to it, though it is so intellectually coercive in its appeal. Indeed, we shall not talk of intellectualism, if the activity of the Absolute itself in the thinking spirit is here remembered, as Baader insisted. One is almost tempted to say that Anselm did in philosophy, what Victor Hugo did in poetry, when he brought to men the shudder of the infinite.

" The self-conscious unity of subjective existence " agrees, in Fischer's view, through the self-existent Primal Spirit, "with the infinity of knowing and working" realised in the objective universe, where the Idea is found "in its absolute truth and totality." In the attempt of Fischer, to which I have referred, at an historical proof of the truth

KARL PHILIPP FISCHER. 59

of theism, a German critic (Drews) has objected that the trouble is that, though the argument appears to be worked out by a real temporal development of things, yet what, in this critic's view, we really come to is the idea in the subjective spirit of the theistic philosopher regarded and treated too much as though it were the idea of God Himself. That is to say, the danger is of the representation being a too subjective one. I do not think the criticism should be too readily accepted: there need be no lack of objectiveness in the historical treatment of the theistic idea, and Fischer is not only a sober and careful inquirer, but an able defender of the objectivity of truth. But it is not always easy to find le mot juste in such matters, and it is better to lean to generosity's side. Fischer is philosophically more sound than his critic when, unlike the latter, he makes finite existence "only the revelation or the spiritual creation, but not the self-realisation of the Absolute Spirit."

Fischer's most notable work was the very large one, entitled ' Outlines of the System of Philosophy/ 4 vols. (1848-1855), which, as encyclopaedia of the philosophical sciences, rightly understood, he carried through with independence and originality. Logic, and the philosophy of nature, are first treated; then anthropology, or, in subjective aspect, the theory of spirit; next ethics, speculatively treated;

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and finally, speculative theology or the phil- osophy of religion. Fischer also wrote on 'Meta- physics' (1834), and on freedom, and the sensual - istic philosophy. He contributed, too, to Fichte's Zeitschrift.

Fischer lays down what he conceives to be the principles of the immanent self-determination of the Divine Personality, though his positions have not been made, at all points, clear. He does not, as we saw Weisse^ did, use the doctrine of the Trinity for his philosophical reconstructions, but only speaks of different principles or qualities or determinations of the Absolute Personality. That does not keep him, of course, from admitting three forms in which we recognise the Divine working, as Primal Being. Primal Will, and Primal Spirit. Through "these three relations " the Absolute Personality is, in his view, known " in its inner principles." The Godhead is in itself the absolute identity of its principles, according to Fischer. The Divine Personality is an absolute Whole, in which God is the universal unity of each and every particular principle. Fischer does not attain, however, to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, with its three independent persons. He takes the divine Son as primary Will, or as the intellectual love of God to Himself. The Spirit he regards as Intelligence or the primary Spirit. But it is merely as attributes that he distinguishes the Son and the Spirit. But I do not pursue these

KARL PHILIPP FISCHER. 61

theological aspects, as it is his work as a theistic philosopher which now concerns us.

There is an inner self - objectifying of God, a grounding of His eternal nature, which funda- mentally conditions His return into Himself. His subjectivity is God's soul or heart. His "heart is His eternal Will," whose unity with itself is His absolute Love, through which God distinguishes Himself from Himself. In His objective relation to Himself, God is, in Fischer's view, the absolute object of His own eternal knowing. A drawback of this whole representation, it must be admitted, is the carrying over, in this trinal way, only the concepts of human personality to God, in a kind of anthropo- morphised manner. This seems a legitimate criticism, even though one holds, with Rothe, that "as we cannot truly understand the idea of man without possessing the true idea of God, so the converse is also true." Still, I think Fischer's representation has its own place and value, albeit not without defects and difficulties. Hence the Divine relations, with regard to Nature, are not in all respects made clear and explicit. His representation is likely to appear to many so difficult that it may bear a little further phrasing in somewhat different terms. The self-objectivisation of God means that eternal return into Himself which, as Drews puts it, " is the termimis ad quern of His immanent self-determination." In the infinite unity of this eternal Will, God returns.

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says Fischer, from every outgoing of His existence, into Himself, that unity " eternally to affirm." This subjective self-affirmation of God is, as Drews says, the eternal mediation of His objective relation to Himself, in which, as I have already remarked, He is the absolute object of His own eternal knowledge. The foregoing positions as to God's self-affirmation are found both in his work on 'The Idea of the Godhead/ and in that with his 'System of Phil- osophy,' but in forms which supplement each other, and are therefore better taken together. But in all such contentions Fischer will have it that God does not "exist abstractly," and the "immanent presup- positions of His absolute truth" are not "abstract determinations" (abstrakte Bestimmungen).

It seems to me a merit, on the part of Fischer — and one for which he has not always received credit at the hands of German thinkers — that, like I. H. Fichte and Weisse, he allows God to have absolute and eternal completeness or perfectness in Himself. This, we saw, neither Hegel nor Schelling attained, and I may add that Hartmann's Unconscious is mere potentiality, and so is Schopenhauer's World -Will. But an unconscious Deity could not be free, in respect of the world, and could not be distinct from it, since he could not know Himself to be active in it. Hartmann's unconscious Absolute is a complete self-contradiction, since it is all -knowing and all- wise, only does not know itself. Hoffding does not

KAKL PHILIPP FISCHER. 63

even desire such completeness for Deity, but appar- ently prefers, in speaking of I. H. Fichte, a God who is developing or evolving to One whom he is pleased to term "ready-made." A not very philosophical term to apply to the ens a se or necessary Being. He does not reflect that such an undeveloped Deity does not fulfil the conception of God at all, at least not to theistic view. Hoffding does not realise that a God of growth, effort, and unrealised ideals, is a God dragged down to the regions of anthropomor- phism, and that a Deity not raised above these limitations will never satisfy the rational nature of man. God is to Fischer not only a self-determined eternal principle in Himself, but is at the same time eternal Ground of the world, in which relation He is the self-conscious Primal Subject, to all the objectivity so grounded by and known to Him. The world of possibility is thus eternal, but this eternal grounding of the world — the mere presupposition of its creation — is not to be confused with its successive and temporal realisation. So far as the world of possibility is concerned, Fischer's emphasis is upon the moment of "essential" Will in God, but when it comes to the creative or temporal realisa- tion, it is His " real " Will that is concerned. This recalls the double Will aspect which we noted in Fichte.

Fischer, like Baader and Fichte, postulates a pre- temporal and supra-temporal eternity for God. But

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he also postulates a beginning of creation and of time, and thus, having already placed Deity in Eternity, he has had ascribed to him the same sort of difficulty, as had Baader and Fichte, in re- lating the Life of the Eternal, in which is no before and after, to the concept of the after. But I think the Absolute as self -originative, and free to objec- tive activity. And the temporal cannot, I insist, be conceived save as with the eternal as its positive ground ; nor is eternity to be thought in terms of time; and it is quite a mistake to treat the matter so abstractly, without reference to the Divine mode of existence (eternity), which does not contradict the human mode of existence (time), else there could be no communion between them. Nor is the idea of an eternal Now, in which so many philosophers think they have the idea of eternal existence, any more adequate than the notion of past and future; for the Now, in a time sense, really presupposes a not-now, in the past and future sense. Fischer's pre- existent God — or God of eternity — could not, according to the same German critic's objection, have any inner life ; this, however, is, to me, to conceive Eternal Deity too abstractly, and to forget that He is, as such, eternal self-realisation, eternal self -related activity, not passivity, nor nothingness. The world- idea, present in God's eternal self-consciousness, can certainly not, in my view, be allowed to precede that self -consciousness. That world-idea must have

KARL PHILIPP FISCHER. 65

included, I presume, possible time, succession, and progress. Fischer thinks God would not be the Absolute Personality were the creation not effected by an act of His free will. Fischer was right in so holding God to be absolutely free and purely self-determined in His creative activity. It has its ethical ground and purpose, in his view, in God's free love and self -revelation. Fischer did well so to emphasise the free character of the Divine love in Creation, and avoid the error of those who made it a necessary step in God's own self-determination, or a means to His own self-conscious perfection. It is enough that the unconditioned Being, whose nature is love, should know the good of love -de- termined being, which is no aimless, accidental affair. It will thus be seen that I. H. Fichte, Weisse, and Fischer, all stood out against the system of the im- personal logical Deity, and against the extreme specu- lative tendencies connected therewith. One great

O

— perhaps the greatest — reason why the personality of God for which they contended was denied, was that, from the crass way in which personality and individuality were conceived — I mean, as connected with earthly environment and sense — men could not endure to have personality attributed to the Abso- lute Being. Can we doubt that this has still to do with the like repugnance — which in this respect one can well sympathise with — of some philosophers in our own time ? But only lack of speculative

E

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imagination could keep one from conceiving Divine Personality, as pure personality in its completeness and integrity, stripped of the accidents and limita- tions of personality in man. All that we can expect of human personality, under material and clogging conditions, imposed by no thought or choice or will of our own, is that it should yield us some power to understand and conceive what Personality, in its highest and perfect realisation, must mean. And this it can very well do, as personality becomes developed in us. But it argues some lack of power to discriminate if we fail to perceive that our self- constituted personality has followed our being con- stituted — - by nature and by others ; whereas the Absolute Personality is a pure and sole self-con- stituting, with nothing before it and nothing beyond it. Rightly conceived, neither finite existences nor anything else can annul or derogate from the abso- luteness of His self-constituting. It is a complete fallacy to suppose that Personality in its idea must include finiteness, must necessarily be anthropo- morphic, due to the haunting error of making personality quantitative.

Though I am not to treat of Sengler, yet his position is in this connection so interesting that it may be briefly referred to. Sengler, we saw, was influenced by Schelling, whose last philosophical standpoint Sengler sought to bring out in his work on 'The Idea of God' (1845). But Sengler, unlike

KAKL PHILIPP FISCHER. 67

many others, was critical of Baader. Setting out, like Fischer, from the concept of unity, he sought to bring it to a determination as self-conscious Primal Spirit. Planting himself thus on the concept of being, Sengler sought then to educe the Absolute Personality. There is no lack of independence in Sengler's work, as he sought to grasp the concept of unity in its full depth. He thought that if the personality of God has not been philosophically established, that is because the being or essence of spirit has not been properly distinguished, as to its chief difference, from nature. He held the being of personality to be determined in and for itself. God must be, independent, and absolutely free of the nature-world. He consists through and in Him- self and His own essential determinations. Other- wise, he would only be Nature-form or Nature-spirit — its highest stuff, but not its very principle. Ideal- ised naturalism, not true idealism, would be the result. God is mere impersonal World-spirit, in his view, so long as He is mere Nature - spirit. The true concept of God, Sengler opines, is to be found in the true concept of spirit. Sengler reaches these positions only through historico - critical inquiry. He made much use of the doctrine of the Trinity for his world-interpretation.

The teachings of Fischer I cannot now further pursue. It only remains to say of Fischer's notable achievement that, though he is less known outside

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Germany than Fichte and Weisse, yet there is evi- dence enough that his influence in Germany on philosophy and higher theology was very consider- able, as a list of influenced writers might easily be given to prove. It must suffice now to say that C. I. Nitzsch, I. A. Dorner, C. Eichhorn, C. Schwarz, would be among them.

CHAPTER IV.

H. M. CHALYBAUS.

H. M. CHALYBAUS (1796-1862), who was professor in Kiel, is another philosopher of this group. He sought to prove the Absolute Personality in his ' Outlines of a System of the Theory of Knowledge ' (1846), with which I am mainly concerned. He was already well known, especially by his work on 'Historical Development of Speculative Philosophy from Kant to Hegel' (1837). At the close of this work, Chalybaus had found Hegel "assuming a pantheistic identity of man and God, in which, at least if strictly and conscientiously carried out, the Deity only attains consciousness by means of human agnition — a solution which indeed perfectly accounts for absolute knowledge in us, but comes up so much the less to the religious representations, and, let us add, to the philosophical idea of the Deity." His other works I need not enumerate, unless perhaps to mention his 'System of Specu- lative Ethics ' (1850), in which he emphasises man's

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freedom of choice as dependent on the Divine law, and his 'Philosophy and Christianity' (1853), in which Chalybaus maintains that the Spirit is proved through the Word, the Word through the Spirit, but the sacred history is an " incredible narration " without the Idea — the new idea of God which Christianity brings.

Philosophy was to him essentially theory of knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre), as it had been to the elder Fichte. Philosophy had its starting-point in self -consciousness, whereas speculative theology had, in his view, God-consciousness for its point of departure (so his 'Fundamental Philosophy,' 1861). My remarks on this position in chap. ii. must suffice. Chalybaus thought philosophy must win anew experience as self -active (in his ' Wissen- schaftslehre'). In his view also, the formal and the material principles in philosophy reciprocally condition each other; and the practical reason he ranked as prior to the theoretic. His conception of philosophy laid stress on striving after truth or wisdom, and not mere theoretic knowledge. His attitude, like that of Tennyson's " Ulysses," was — " To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." But truth for him dwelt, one may say, " in interiore homine," not in the intellect alone. And so he expressly says that so long as man strives, he believes, and so long as he believes, he strives. He distinguished his own position in this respect from

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that of Hegel, who, he thought, had robbed phil- osophy of teleological or ethical character. Human thought was to Chalybaus an after-thinking of the Absolute Thought. His thought is here somewhat near of kin to what we noted in Fichte. The Absolute can only will absolute truth. The Absolute is the all-embracing one— the All-One which, in thinking and willing the All, can at the same time only think and will itself. It comprehends itself as the absolute Truth, and at the same time as the absolute principle. Because it knows itself, it comprehends itself as a self-conscious spirit. The Absolute, as self-conscious, knows all being as its being, but it is an abstract Absolute, in whose being all other being is contained. As will of truth, the Absolute seeks after real truth objective to itself, hence the existence of the real world, to which it is First Subject. To him, therefore, the world was not an emanation from God, not produced from Him, but created by the objective exertion of His power as just indicated. His position recalls that of Glinther, to whom the world was posited by the Absolute, as something essentially different from Him, and not necessary to His existence. But, for Chalybaus, God knows Himself as sole or only God after creation, just as before it. But He then knows Himself as a God Who is no longer alone. Two moments are to be distinguished in the

t Absolute, by means of which the process of raising

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the abstract unity is mediated. This belongs to his important discussion of the "principles" of Ontology. The first is, the substantial or soulish moment, which is the real foundation of the Absolute, and of the objective truth to be created. It is undetermined materia prima, an eternal aether or matter, but is as yet only the negative condition or real possibility of the world, not the productive principle of its creation. Chalybaus says one cannot suppose "an eternal and self- dependent matter ; that would be the principle of materialism and deism — an independence of God on the world's part." But he thinks we should also hesitate "to constitute God mere thought, because that would lead to idealistic pantheism — Acosmism." He thinks " there exists externally a materia prima" but prefers to view it as "the element in absolute Being itself co-existent " with thought or the ideal. But it is real, not, however, " as matter beside God, or in determinate form," that is, not " as a corporeal world," but also " not simply as matter thought." Rather, as "the substantially psychical, as the basis of the Divine Will." These can hardly be called easy conceptions, and Chalybaus has perhaps left something to be desired in the way of clearness. For what do we really know of a soul - aether, with space, time, and number, as its forms, all on an infinite scale ? His materia prima is, all things considered, a

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rather too wonderful presupposition, in my judg- ment. It contains the possibility of all sub- stantiality, causality, corporeality, and soul, which are all comprehended within the range of ontological category. We know what difficulties have attended scientific theories of an aether in the explanation of phenomena, but this philosophical theory of a soul -aether, so wondrously dowered, does not seem to me one easy of acceptance. It only falls short of the " aether " of Euripides, which was "father of men and gods." In this way; however, Chalybaus eschews materialism, matter being the thing determined; he also avoids the futility of a mere thought idealism. His materia prima seems meant to express the realistic side of creation, an endeavour still marked by strange gropings of thought to-day. But if we are to talk of a natura in God, we should need to bring out more clearly, I think, than does Chalybaus that His will harmoniously moves and directs, if one may so speak, His natura, so that passivity shall nowise be ascribed to it. Chalybaus has, however, avoided any idea of matter as drawn from any natura pertaining to God's essence. But the talk of some thinkers of that time about a nature in God which became the basis of the matter of the universe — something not God which was posited in God — was an influence derived from Schelling. When intelligible, it was apt to run

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into a pantheistic form or tendency, but it often remained a mere form of speech, and ultimately unmeaning.

The positive or ideal moment is found rather in the second moment, of which I now come to speak, namely, the Divine thought, which seizes upon the world - thought or possibility, and supplies the necessary impulse to the process of creation, though not of itself capable of effecting the reality of the world. It makes, however, for the concrete unity of the two moments, soul and thought. The purpose of the creative process is the being of objective truth; the process is an act of positive love, which produces the objective truth of the creaturely subjects. This means a plurality of thinking monads. This is a concession to Herbartian realism, which Chalybaus considers in eingehend manner, but less frequently opposes than the idealism of Hegel, to which he ascribed articular disease, in a quaint expression.

Regarding the already mentioned view of Chalybaus, that God knew Himself to be the only God, before the world's creation, some German and other thinkers have regarded such a view as untenable, on the ground that there was no existent being whereby the Divine self -con- sciousness could be enkindled. No better reason has been adduced for this than the anthropomorphic assumption that the world must have existed,

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and that eternally, for this purpose. But that is not to show any valid reason why God must first think something different from Himself. No philosopher, of the galaxy belonging to the time of our group, more emphatically rejected the op- position of subject and object in the Deity than Steudel, who says that God is subject and object in one, as the Fulness of the All. He holds that in God is no such duality or difference, as is found in the human subject. I am not concerned, however, to express agreement with the way in which Steudel further develops his position in these matters. The contention that there cannot be personality without a contra - posited world or object Lotze has overthrown even for the human subject, in which the non-ego does not constitute the ego, but only calls out its powers; but it is infinitely more untenable in the case of the sole self-existing Being of theism. God is not to be thought as so thirled to the world.

Chalybaus rightly perceived that if the Divine self - consciousness first rose in this way, namely, through the thought and real being of the world, the issue would be pantheism. And this leads me to say that the objective existence of the universe is where pantheistic thought fails. Pantheism is the neces- sary and eternal consubstantiality of God and Nature. Pantheism cannot posit a universe con- sciously other than itself. Such a universe, non-

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objective to the Unconditioned Being, remains an ego. Chalybaus was also right in pointing out the difference of the absolute self - consciousness from the becoming human consciousness, that in God there was a knowledge of the not-being of the real world (that is, pre-ereationally), while in man what goes before is a not-knowing of its being. But he enters ground where I am not prepared to follow him, when he makes, not being, but the knowledge of the not-being of the world — its possibility through eternal matter — the reason of its creation, by en- kindling the Divine creative will : this is absurd as making creation rest on a mere abstraction. Creation must be positively motived — by free, ethical love, which is not to say that it can be motived by any desire of addition to His own nature or good by the Infinite Being. Lotze and others have spoken of God becoming enriched by our love to Him in ways that suggest the need for care that we do not attribute susceptibilities to God that might appear to impair or destroy His absoluteness. God's nature as Love does not depend on objective creation for development: His nature is directly self-determined. That, of course, is not to say that God's relation to the finite being is no- wise conditioned, but without self-detriment, by the creaturely attitude towards Him.

Nor, again, should I follow Chalybaus if he really thought that it was from the knowledge of the not-

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being of the world that the Divine self -consciousness originated, since it would be absurd to derive the Divine self -consciousness from any such negative consideration. But Chalybaus did not seem, as we saw, to hold that in creation God became conscious of Himself, and he should have found less ground, I think, to hold it because of its not -being. He seems to me, however, in these abstract reasonings to have lost sight too much of the identity of thought and being in God. He in these positions leads me again to recall Giinther, who distinguished clearly the absolute self - consciousness from the human self - consciousness, and made the absolute self -consciousness an immediate intuition of its own essence, without need of any external medi- ation. Such outer mediation cannot obtain, he holds, in the case of One Who is the All in All. But Giinther I cannot pursue at length now.

One feature in the thought of Chalybaus which deserves attention, since it has place both in his ' Theory of Knowledge ' and in his ' Ethics,' is, that he thinks an existential proof for the existence of God is yielded through reflection on the genesis of the immediate God - consciousness : this proof, through an immediate self -seizure or self -appre- hension of the fact in consciousness, ties it up to existence. The theory is not without its suggestive side, but I do not dwell upon it now. I rather note the stress of Chalybaus on ethical personality

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and ethical categories, in his desire to found an ethical theism. There is also to be noted the fact that he was a contributor to Fichte's ' Zeitschrif t,' which occupied such an important place during that time — and indeed ever since.

I have been occupied mainly with the teaching of Chalybaus, as a theistic philosopher, on God : one important point relative to man, in the course of his discussion, may be noticed. He says those who make the supposition of different human species, instead of races with like rational destination, are seeking "a transformation of men into a physical order." Whereas, as he elsewhere remarks, "man is himself a self, and hence he seeks after certitude of himself, which again he cannot attain without certitude of the Deity."

If we take the subjects here so briefly outlined, in conjunction with the other philosophical work of Chalybaus, we shall find no need in this instance to differ from the judgment of Erdmann, who declared the discussions of Chalybaus to be "pro- found and searching" in respect of religio-ethical questions, but will extend its reference to his treatment of metaphysical and epistemological pro- blems as well. His influence as an historian of philosophy was, however, wider than that which he exerted as an independent philosopher, which is not to say that this latter was by any means incon- siderable.

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CHAPTER V.

F. HOFFMANN.

F. HOFFMANN, who was professor in Wiirzburg when he died in 1881, is a member of our philosophic group, albeit less known out of Germany than most of the others. Of the potent influence of Hoffmann on German philosophical literature, how- ever, there can be no doubt to any one whose knowledge reaches below the surface. Hoffmann was the most distinguished adherent of Baader, whose valuable work and thought he presented with great skill and care. Hoffmann has sought to give Baader's thought a more scientific form, to free it of phantasy, and of anything it might have suffered, philosophically, from Baader's aphoristic style of writing, and the disconnectedness of its form.

Hoffmann's reading, especially in historical direc- tions, was so wide that Erdmann says it may "almost be called fabulous." Baader's thought upon God was serviceably issued by Hoffmann under the title, 'Speculative Development of the

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Eternal Self - Generation of God' (1835). A more ordered and comprehensive presentation of the same theme was Hoffmann's ' Vestibule to the Speculative Theology of Franz Baader ' (1836), though the work is not entirely confined to pure Baaderian positions. "The eternal Self -Generation of God," as Hoffmann calls it, was, in Baader's view, the life of the Absolute as something to be strictly distinguished from the act of Creation, and from the life and existence of the created world itself.

I have noted, earlier, how this Baader-Hoffmann conception of an eternal Self -Generation of the Deity was taken up and fully endorsed by I. H. Fichte. It is the insistence of Baader, however, that, in view of this self -generative process of Deity, the world has nothing to do with the inner life of God, which is in no way dependent upon the world for its own self-realisation. The self -generative conception, however, is one which runs back to Bohme, who describes the process whereby the Deity, from the dark ground of Being within Him, reaches out, by means of will or Drang, to attain self -revelation in the Divine wisdom. Yet "the essence of the deepest Deity" is "without and beyond Nature." Bohme leaves us, however, with more of will-struggle than of intellectual clearness and consistency. Baader, in criticising the current philosophical tendencies of his time in his work, ' Fermenta Cognitionis ' (1822 - 24), recommended

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the study of Bohme. Baader says expressly that while God generates Himself, He knows Him- self, and, knowing Himself, He generates Himself. Though the Ideal world-creation, through love's free act, is something which thus cannot be deduced, yet Baader views the theogonic process in the light of a necessary event, in which God returns to unity. There is here a double strain in Baader's thought, amounting to an esoteric (ideal or immanent or logical) and an exoteric (real or emanant or essen- tial) view of Divine process.

Hoffmann, in the * Vorhalle ' work, says of God, as the absolute Spirit, that " the Spirit " is in the Divine "tri -personality" the means or medium of "His esoteric and exoteric Being." "For what is there merely internal is in Him at the same time internal and external : " the "one -being of the inner and the outer" is the living means or medium. The tri-personal spirit is taken to be comprehended " in the constant movement or shifting of the inner in the outer, and of the outer in the inner," so that it is to be viewed as "identical in both." One recalls in this connection Hegel's nature -view, in which the outer is only a determinate mode of being of the inner, the Kantian dualism of outer and inner being thereby transcended. All the moments alike in the esoteric and the exoteric process, pass, in the spiritual process, " out of their abstractness " into "concreteness," "truth, and livingness." To Baader,

F

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as Hoffmann represents him, the being of the world is different from that of God, and has therefore of necessity a beginning. " As eternal as God is, so eternal is the possibility, the thought, the idea, the archetype, of the world in the spirit of God, but this eternally possible is not at the same time eternally realised." When, however, God seeks to create, the two principles of Nature — or rather will — and intelligence co-operate to this end, the former as the material, and the latter as the formal principle. This idea Baader took over from Bohme, who had made God at once the rational ground (Urgrund) and the efficient cause (Ursache) of the world, and regarded the world, with entire dis- regard of the pantheistic issue, as only " the essen- tial nature of God Himself made creatural." But the idea of the two principles is one which, as is well known, is present in Leibniz, Schelling, and Hartmann, and it is hoped to reach by it a realistic side in idealism. It is obvious that Baader greatly excels Schopenhauer in this matter, in his clear insight into the necessity of thought or intelligence to will or power, while urging the creative power and necessity of will.

Our concern with Hoffmann here, however, is not mainly with the way in which Hoffmann set out the Neo - Schellingian positions of Baader, as it is sometimes put, although in Baader elements that had been conjoined in Schelling really appear

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divided. Our concern rather is with the fact that Hoffmann was associated as one of the group of theistic philosophers now occupying our attention, and furthered the cause in the ' Zeitschrif t,' and other important ways. Hoffmann's own position is well brought out, among other ways, in the Vorrede to Baader's minor writings (1850), where the untenableness of Schelling's personality-pan- theism— in which God is a personal Being, and the universe is at the same time His actuality or realisation — is shown. "If God is personality, the world cannot be His actuality or realisation, because, whilst a person may work and bring works into existence ad extra, he cannot have his own actuality outside Himself; and if the world is the actuality of God, God cannot be personality, because a personal being cannot be constituted by an infinitude of transient unconscious and conscious existences." Another significant state- ment of Hoffmann's position is that given in a footnote near the beginning of the second volume of Baader's works : — " Nothing has given to pan- theism a greater appearance of reasonableness, and consequently of truth, than the idea that every theistic theory proceeds necessarily upon the supposition of a certain contingency of creation, and that the affirmation — Creation is a free act of God, is identical with the affirmation — it is a contingent or accidental act of God. But whoever

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attributes contingency to God subjects Him, only in a manner exactly the opposite of the pantheistic, to blind fate."

Hoffmann, I may observe, doughtily contested Kant's view of the character of formal, a priori knowledge. Hoffmann maintained that if there is such a thing as a priori knowledge, it cannot be merely formal, but must necessarily have deter- minate content, and therefore be knowledge with a content. If mind had not a content of its own, it never could, he says, comprehend a content outside itself. I do not dwell now on this, but remark that his opposition to Kant here was due to the fact that he would oppose empiricism, sensualism, and materialism. As a critic of materialism, Hoffmann said that it hazards the most senseless theories of all kinds; such as time without beginning or end, endless space, an absolutely infinite number of atoms, as if these base infinities were not self - contradictory. And he maintained that it would be hard to find, in any theory of Creation, such a mass of contradictions as were to be found in the theory of materialism.

Baader, in view of his influence, not merely on Hoffmann and certain other members of our philosophic group, but on many thinkers outside it, may well bear some further remark. Baader, too, opposed materialism, as might be expected from one whom E. A. von Schaden called "philosophus

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christianus." He, too, opposed a priori knowledge as a mere formal and subjective principle. Baader found in self - consciousness the essence of spirit, not a mere property of it. Our self -consciousness is to Baader a consciousness of being known by God. For our being — and indeed all being — is a being known by God. He further asserted of Kant's doctrine that we can know nothing of that which lies beyond the world of sense, that the reason of its being so well received as it was, lay mainly in the fact of that constitutional God- blindness, on the part of man, which Kant himself proclaimed. Of the understanding which is averted from the divine, Baader says that, " separated from Unity, it loses the very power to unite and truly to understand; and instead of simply distinguishing in order to unify, and unifying in order to dis- tinguish, all it can do is in separating to confound, and in confounding to separate." And, in the view of Baader, it is really God Himself Who enables us to know God, since God is Reason, and enables us to participate in the Divine act of reason. That is to say, Baader made God the subject of knowledge, and not merely its object. God is to him at once subject and object. But he opposes pantheistic identification of Divine and human thought.

It is, to Baader, a deep-seated error of rational philosophy to think that we can know God, or even rightly about Him, apart from or without God,

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that is, by or from human reason alone. Baader's is a profoundly religious nature; he holds that all thought must begin with God. All problems are, in his view, related to God, as the last ground of all thought and being. Consequently, true phil- osophy must be religious philosophy. And in our knowledge of God, he contends, God is at once knower and known. But our cognition is not com- plete, and takes threefold form. If God merely pervades the creature — dwells through him is Baader's conception — there is not enough of the free co-operative working of the knower. If God dwells with him, a better state of things is reached. But knowledge is only free and perfect when God dwells in the man, so that the Divine reason speaks in him as his own. There is to be no abstract dividing between faith and knowledge, between knowledge and love, or between thought and voli- tion. Religion, in Baader's view, belongs to man as man, and carries with it a certain original cer- titude of Deity springing from the natural and necessary rapports between the Creator and the creature.

In his endeavours to reconcile theism and monism, Baader did a great deal to prepare the way for the panentheism of Krause, with whom he is in many ways contrastive, and whom he may be said to excel in profundity, though not in methodic and system- atic excellence. Baader's treatment of philosophy

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is a broad one, embracing all that concerns God — logic or theory of knowledge and theology : all that concerns Nature — cosmology and physics: all that concerns Man — ethics and sociology. It will be already evident how theocratic his whole phil- osophy was. But, like Kant, he holds man to be practically autonomous. He views him, however^ as working only under the exercise of reason in matters theoretic. Man, as the real image of God, can acquire a wider knowledge of Him. Baader thinks man is in space and time, as a result of the Fall, which has a very important place in his system. He holds moral and physical evil to be indissolubly united, and thinks it absurd to trace the world's evil and misery to physical causes. The true time is eternity, which man must seek. Matter is not the ground of evil, but rather its consequence. Matter, like time, will cease.

Baader's system really attempted a religio-phil- osophical synthesis of Neo-Platonism, Scholastic philosophy, post-Mediaeval Mysticism, and German transcendentalism, largely under the influence of Schelling, whom he, in his turn, greatly influenced. But this statement of a reciprocal relation between them, though it is usually all we get, does not meet the case, and a more exact determination is required, since we are sometimes left with the impression that Baader owed a great deal more to Schelling than was the case. We owe it to Hoffmann more

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than any other, that we know Baader to be far less indebted to Schelling than Schelling was to Baader. Baader, who was ten years older than Schelling, had his own main positions well in hand, there is good reason to believe, while Schelling was still fast bound in pantheism, with its dead and abstract God - concepts, whence he was extricated by the bright persuasive powers of Baader. Baader had no inconsiderable influence on Schelling's philos- ophy of nature, and a greatly determining influence on the upbuilding of Schelling's theosophic teachings. Baader, admittedly a profound speculative thinker, was fortunate not only in having so able an ex- ponent as Hoffmann, but in the excellent represen- tations of Anton Lutterbeck and Jul. Hamberger, who, like Hoffmann, were at the same time both capable thinkers on their own account. A feature common to Baader and Hamberger is the concep- tion of Nature in God as an opposition, and even contradiction, to be overcome, to the Divine glory. Hamberger, in a work entitled ' Physica Sacra ' (1869), deals with the eternal and celestial cor- poreality. In it he speaks of Nature as not only an opposition, but much more a contradiction, to spirit, both of these being powerful forms or energies, capable of the sharpest outward contrast. I may remark that this idea of opposition or war- fare in things is as old as Heraclitus, as the dis- cussions of Bywater, Burnet, and Adam, have finely

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shown. But if we speak of Nature in God, I think we must remember that there can be no real or enduring opposition in God's harmonious unity; that matter is no part of the Divine natura; that spirit is the prius of every natura, and that God, as personal Spirit, is the power above Nature. Because these things are so, there is meaning, I think, in the words of an Eastern poet who says that "all that is not One must ever suffer with the wound of absence."

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CHAPTER VI.

H. ULRICI.

H. ULRICI (1806-1884), professor in Halle, is the next member of this philosophic group to claim our attention. In his contentions for the truth of Theism, he had the materialism of the time, no less than its pantheism, in his view. This did not keep him from severely criticising alike the principle and the method of the Hegelian system. He thought it was not to be blamed for its pantheism, if only that pantheism could be shown accordant with reason. He is like Chalybaus in viewing that system of idealism as one-sided, but is without those leanings to Herbartian realism which we saw to be characteristic of Chalybaus. Ulrici aims at an idealism founded on a realistic basis of his own, based, in his later works, on empiric science. To philosophise is, in his view, to seek principles.

Ulrici was a more independent thinker than is always realised; like Fechner and Lotze, he bore

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his part in leading his age to see that the results, newly won and increasing, of science, were as capable of interpretation in the sense of a theistic idealism, as in that of an atheistic materialism. Among the works, of which Ulrici was the author, were his discussions 'On the Principle and Method of the Hegelian Philosophy' (1841), in which, I may remark, he complains of the way Hegel subsumes Art under Religion, so that every determinate difference between them is done away, and there is posited instead a vague flowing into each other. Also, his 'System of Logic' (1852), in which he stood for the derivation of the categories. He held that thought is activity; that all thought consists in differentiation; and that thought dis- tinguishes itself in itself, and becomes consciousness and self - consciousness. His somewhat neglected work on 'Faith and Knowledge' (1858) aimed to harmonise the interests of philosophy, religion, and science. He says : — " Always in science, knowledge and belief, far from a severe separation, are in the closest connection even in the exactest sciences; a great part of our scientific knowledge really belongs not to knowledge, but to the sphere of belief." Much as we should take this for granted now, it was very important for Ulrici's time. After having dealt with the part played by personality, he argues that scientific faith rests on the preponderating weight, objectively, of reasons. Among his other

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philosophical services, Ulrici was for many years editor of the ' Zeitschrift fiir Philosophie/

But I now come to deal with the thought of his two chief works, which, it should be observed, are closely connected, and approach the same problem from two different sides. In Ulrici 's work on ' God and Nature' (1862), there is outlined a philosophy of nature. He thinks philosophical inquiry into the final grounds of being and event must concern itself with the knowledge of Nature. He therefore sets out from the study of Nature and the results of science, in its principles, fundamental conceptions, and presuppositions. He aims to show, by the result, that God is, to use his own words, "the creative author of Nature, and the absolute pre- supposition of nature -science itself." Mr Balfour has adopted a like position that theism is an assumption "not only tolerated," but "actually required, by science" ('Foundations of Belief,' p. 321). The scientific ideas involved, — atoms, forces, laws, &c. — make the assumption of the Divine existence, for Ulrici, absolutely necessary t He argues to God as the necessary presupposition of science ; the distinguishing creative power of God is necessary, and our distinguishing activity is but a distinguishing after God. On this our know- ledge depends. Ulrici admits the title should rather have been "Nature and God," since the point of departure is, as we have seen, found in the results

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of modern science. He contends that many of the improved hypotheses of science are not necessarily anti-religious, but quite as susceptible of a theistic interpretation. He thinks scepticism is " not a legit- imate result" of scientific research and criticism, but " the product of a subjective spirit and temper " indicative of interest in science "beginning to wane." Ulrici seeks to mediate between theism and pantheism. He lays stress on the need of an Unconditioned as Ground of the conditioned atoms. And nature powers and effects have need of an unconditioned Cause of all events in the world. Ulrici's position is that the Absolute is not condi- tioned by anything else, and so far is the Uncon- ditioned, but yet only because it is itself the positive condition of everything else. Ulrici is in such ways led to consider the proofs of the Divine existence, which I do not now propose to follow. I only note his position that "the proofs for the existence of God coincide with the grounds for the belief in God," are simply "the real grounds of the belief established and expounded in a scientific manner." He maintains that discussion of " the existence and essence of God" must be founded on "a definite and determinate theory of knowledge." Ulrici thinks that modern theology, in so readily abandon- ing, at Kant's bidding, the proofs of the Divine existence, not only renounces its claims to be a science, but uproots the foundations of the religion

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on which it rests. More could be said for this view, at any rate, than is often thought by those who take Kant a deal too finally. It is enough for my present purpose that, in the ways already indicated, Ulrici arrives at the need for a self-conscious Being or the Absolute Spirit. The idea of God, for him, implies not only the possibility of an immediate Divine influence upon the soul, but the fact of such an operation. The Absolute is for Ulrici the uncon- ditioned creative power through which all con- ditioned being is posited, and in this act of positing it, He is necessarily distinguished from it.

When it comes to the working out of the evolu- tionary world -process, Ulrici, like Lotze, recognises both a mechanical and a teleological process as involved. But the primary Cause of things he found, not in the affinity of atoms, like the mate- rialists, but in the principle which produced that affinity. Says Ulrici, — " Everything which is con- ditional presupposes a condition, which, as such, is necessarily unconditioned and absolute." The re- ciprocal conditionality of atoms cannot, he argues, be "in the atoms themselves," or they would be " at once conditioned and unconditioned." " Conse- quently the existence of atoms presupposes some- thing absolute and unconditional, which, as it is the cause of their conditionality, must necessarily be also the cause of their existence."

Ulrici rejects all pantheistic theories of creation,

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wherein the world figures as a self -development, or unfolding, or self -partitioning, of Deity; for him the Absolute is bound to no condition, not even to an already existing stuff. But it is his position, for all that, in one of his writings, that " a universe which remains the same in the eternal change of phenomena is a contradictio in adjecto, for that which changes does not remain the same, and a changing manifestation, without an essence mani- fested in it, and changing with it, is no mani- festation, but an illusion." As for Creation out of nothing, he prefers to say that through something, to wit, God, the not-being of the world disappears as the world is posited. For there is in the absolute Divine Spirit a producing and dis- tinguishing activity. Moritz Carriere, like Ulrici here, rested the Divine self - consciousness on this original distinguishing activity. In our own time we find much made of activity by certain philos- ophers who make nothing of causality : it seems strange to forget that in every activity there is causality.

The first great thought is to Ulrici the positing of the world, as a possibility — a necessary, non - arbitrary act that flows from the " inner necessity " of the spiritual nature of God. I cannot now dwell on the difficulties with which this first thought is beset, as Ulrici expounds it, especially in respect of such an untenable

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abstraction, in the case of God ; in Him thought and realisation, and this as in the second thought, cannot be distinguished in Ulrici's way ; nor is such a negative, undetermined mode of thought (as in this first thought) ascribable to God. The second thought is concerned with the reality of the world — a free, spontaneous resolution, with the plan of the world's realisation, its law, norm, end, and purpose. What Ulrici hoped by separating this thought from the first was to save the freedom of God in creating, but he did not see the difficulty he had created in already insisting on its springing out of "inner necessity." This has the objectionable air of a sort of Divine deter- minism, even ethical necessitation may be presented in such objectionable form. The standpoint of freedom is to be absolutely maintained for God, in respect of Creation. But it does not follow from this freedom of God in creating, that creation is the accidental or contingent thing it has often been taken to be.

Prof. Pringle - Pattison thinks the result of creation being by God's will, rather than grounded in His nature (pp. 303-4), is to make His relation to the world, " external," " almost accidental," " merely incidental," " almost an afterthought." But this profusion of characterisation is grounded in some lack of knowledge and understanding. Neither philosophy nor theology denies the world-idea to

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be eternal — nothing merely " incidental," nor of the nature of an "afterthought." And if there is to be no "externality," no otherness, how is the world to realise any manner of objective existence as God's creation ? We should then have a monistic pantheism incapable of realising altruism at all. The creative act is no more "external" or "almost accidental" than is the free, deliberate act of my will, whose resolution, carried out, is, in fact, the most real and intimate expression of my con- sciousness or mind. This revealing character of will, in its deed, was finely brought out by Schelling. Infinitely less externality is there in the case of immanent creative Deity. That Divine will is no blind, unconscious force, is not " bare " will, but is one with eternal, immanent, and purposeful Reason. It is quite groundless to say that, because the world is willed, the nature of God cannot be expressed in and through it. What else, indeed, has it been willed for ? It would be a complete mistake to put God's will and His nature into any kind of opposition. As pure, absolute Spirit, there can only be perfect equilibrium between them. We cannot say that His will dominates His nature, any more than we can say that His nature dominates His will ; what we can and do say is, that they perfectly and mutually condition each other, so that the absolute harmony of His being is eternally maintained.

G

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We cannot acquiesce in the sureness of Eternal Love, finding expression in creation, being converted into a quasi-pantheistic necessity to create. If we seek in the conception of ethicised Deity, to adjust and correct the notion of contingency or acci- dentalism, no less must we correct and reject the notion of any sort of abstract pantheistic necessity, in speaking of Deity as determined by love. For we know only too well the pantheistic type of thought which makes creation His necessary act, and regards the world as identical with His essence. His unconditioned love knows neither necessity nor compulsion. The love that issues in Creation is a free, spontaneous giving — a love which is the transitive element in the immanent being of God that Rothe declared it to be — and is rightly conceived in terms of spontaneity and freedom, not of necessity. And thus, to the einheitliche view of life and of the world which constitutes theistic world-view, in the fine thought of the poet of the " Paradiso," "all the scattered leaves of the universe are bound by love into a single volume."

" Legato con amore in un volume, Ci6 che per 1'universo si squaderna."

(Canto XXXIII. 86-7).

God is to Ulrici not first God and then world Creator, but as God is He world Creator, and only

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as world Creator is He God. This last statement falls short of true Theism, which allows God Being- in- and -for -Himself, and not for the world only. The personality of God is to be posited before all, although Ulrici fails of that. Prof. Pringle-Pattison, however, gives Ulrici's passage unqualified support. But if the distinction of the world is, as Ulrici maintains, one which is necessary to God, then Ulrici contradicts himself in making God the ground of all freedom; this He cannot be, after having been so put under necessity. For Ulrici creation is eternal, but the world, he holds, is not eternal in itself. Prof. Pringle-Pattison says (p. 310),— "As Ulrici put it, God is known to us as Creator of the world," a statement I accept, but it is not quite accurately put, for Ulrici speaks of what God " is," not of God's being "known." Ulrici's statement that "only as Creator of the world is He God," I repudiate, as making God subservient to the activity of world-making. God's real freedom, the internal perfection of His Being, and His complete self- possession, are to be maintained. And I may remark, in passing, and with a general reference, that phil- osophers who allow themselves to treat slightingly His eternal dignity (gloria Dei) pay the penalty in their own work, since that eternal dignity is "the absolute fundament of worthiness," the sole founda- tion of all true adoration, and the absolute basis of

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all true subjective dignity, honour, and worth. It is as if a new and exalted application were made of the words in Shakespeare's sonnet, —

" I am that I am ! and they that level At my abuses, reckon up their own."

The religious interest calls for clear discrimination of God from the world. Being that exists of and for itself exists necessarily, and does not by world determination become God. There are affinities with pantheism, as well as with theism, in Ulrici's statements. Neither Ulrici nor Dr Pringle-Pattison claims aseity for matter or the world, and their in- culcation that we must not " separate the two ideas " is not justified: the distinction of God from the world is precisely what theistic thought and the religious consciousness have always demanded. And, as Bradley says, "the man who demands a reality more solid than the religious consciousness, knows not what he seeks."

If the world is " not eternal in itself," then it has received Dasein or existence from Another, and ought to be distinguished from Him. When it is said that we must not separate the two ideas, is it a pantheistic identity we are offered ? But if we separate them in thought in order to distinguish them, that is not separation in any absolute sense. No one proposes such a thing, because, for us, these are complementary of each other. If we separate or

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..101

isolate the idea of God, it is that we may view Him as the Unconditioned, but the Unconditioned does not necessarily mean the unrelated. Absoluteness itself carries the possibility of relation. And if we separate the idea of the world, it is to view it in its dependence, as a system of conditioned activities, not to claim for it an independence of the Deity. The world is to be distinguished from God, and is not a mere function of God, as the votaries of an evolv- ing deity assume ; but, while a divine product and dependent manifestation of God, it has an existence, a relative independence, of its own, with a corre- spondingly relative imperfection. If the independ- ence of the world were other than thus relative, and grounded in God, the whole metaphysics of the Absolute would be superfluous. If, however, as Ulrici holds, God is not God but as He creates the world — which He must do eternally — then I agree with those who think His action is, in such case, necessary, and talk of His freedom is vain. Vain, too, is talk of His free, ethical motives of love in creating, which Ulrici emphasises, if His creative action is thus necessary.

I feel bound to say that I think Hegel and Janet — both of whom Prof. Pringle-Pattison criticises — had at least both grasped the fact that creative action, on the part of God, presupposed His in- teriorly perfect being, and full self-possession, in a way that their critic has missed. Elsewhere Dr

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Pringle-Pattison said that in Hegel's hands "the analysis of the structure of thought is, in his own daring phrase, ' the exposition of God as He is, in His eternal essence, before the creation of nature or a single human spirit'" ('Two Lectures on Theism,' p. 20). On this and its connections Dr H. Stirling speaks in ' What is Thought ? ' (pp. 384-386). What Hegel here expressly proposed to do — consider God " in His eternal essence " — is precisely what Prof. Pringle-Pattison disallows throughout his work. So, on the logical position involved, I prefer to stand with Hegel and Janet, rather than with their critic. For, in failing, logically, to regard God "in His eternal essence," before viewing Him as Creator, Prof. Pringle-Pattison fails to ontologise in the right place, and has in consequence lost or neglected some- thing in the Divine attributes. Even now, thought can project itself behind the universe (whereby we have come to know God) and can conceive Him in His selfness — His freedom and independence — as distinct from the world, and as Lord of all being. Certainly we know God only in His manifestations in the world, but does that mean that our knowledge of God must be confined to these ? Certainly not ; for these suggest as well as declare, and, as has been rightly said, "suggest more than they declare." Thus we can pass behind them to the Person- ality expressed in and through them, can know something of God in Himself, not merely in His

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manifestations To deny this were to go flatly in the face of the myriad -voiced religious con- sciousness.

It is a complete fallacy to treat God's nature as subject to modification by His objective deeds, and make Him dependent upon them, "just as " our dependent natures are developed by interaction with external forces. There is only one clear and correct way to think God's nature, and that is as the one self-existent, and absolutely self-determined, Being. I venture to assert, that only as such eternally perfect, and perfectly self-determined Being, is He God. Absolute self-determination means Absolute Personality. But to the full height of this concep- tion— the full- orbed personality of God — Ulrici has not, in my judgment, risen, great as were his services to theistic philosophy. I must make clear in what sense I have spoken of self-determination as applied to God. Rothe, after the manner of Weisse, took this conception, as applied to the Absolute, to involve the distinction of potentiality and actuality. I mean nothing of the sort. There is no ideal or possible state, into which He may, by will or effort, come, as into actuality out of poten- tiality. He knows Himself, but it is as actuality, never potentiality, since He is the eternally per- fect existence. I mean, therefore, by the term that God is determined only from within — by His own being, not by the world or anything outside

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Him. He wills Himself, His own nature. Thus, and thus only, does He determine Himself.

Prof. Pringle-Pattison's defect appears to me to be that his hold of God as a self - communicating Life has prevented his adequate seizure of God's dignity (essentia essendi), His complete self-posses- sion, His self - containment, without world - depend- ence or world - subordinationism. But this is the proper presupposition of His self - communicating Life, so that the self -communicative process may not lead to His losing Himself, pantheistically, in what is different from Himself. To say that the Divine Life is essentially the "process of self -communica- tion " is but a half-truth, unless and until properly grounded in the perfection of His Being, and its independence of objective action or relation, so far as His consciously absolute and self - determined nature is concerned. No theistic philosopher, I venture to assert, fully realises his position who has not the intellectual and moral courage to stand for the infinite egoistic consciousness or perfection, as that whereon Divine or perfect altruism depends. Self -communication, sundered from self-affirmation, were not love at all in any worthy and proper idea of the term, but a self-destructive laying waste of its own powers.

I now pass to Ulrici's work on ' God and Man ' (1866), in which is outlined a psychology of man. It has for aim "to demonstrate," he says, "on the

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basis of firmly established facts, that to the soul as distinguished from the body, to the spirit as distinguished from nature, not simply independence, but supremacy belongs of right and of fact." Force, organism, the body, the soul and psychical forces, are all discussed. Ulrici does not contest the Darwinian theory of descent, but only the Darwinian- Haeckelian purely mechanistic conception, with its exclusion of all governing plan and purpose. On the contrary, Ulrici believes in a universally ruling principle of development, in the inorganic as in the organic region, which is immanent in all things from the beginning, and is in result seen in harmonious form and purpose (vol. i. p. 118 of 2nd or 1874 edn.). I. H. Fichte says he is in full agreement with Ulrici's view, in which the realisation of this principle of development is taken to have constituted the struggle for existence. Ulrici comes at length (vol. i. 2) to treat of the soul — an insoluble centralised union of powers — in its relation to God, ethical and religious questions receiving much attention. It has always seemed to me a significant thing that Ulrici should have contended that the idea of truth is an ethical category, especially in view of the develop- ment so long after, of Rickert's system, in which truth of the logical conscience is subsumed under the ethical (see my Art. on " The Greatest Problem in Value," in ' The Monist/ 1919). In a lengthy and valuable discussion, Ulrici argues that the ethical

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ideas are not derivable from experience; they are not derived through experience, but yet not without experience (vol. ii. pp. 68-131). Another point in Ulrici's ethical position worth noting, is that " man is not born with rights, but only with duties," from which his rights follow. Otherwise, he thinks, the idea of right would have ethical obligation taken from it, That, however, I do not now discuss, as I wish to note his religious position. I may remark, however, that the opposite view was held by Stahl, who contended for an objective order of right, in which rights are not consequent on duty.

Ulrici thinks " the inmost life of the human soul has its root in God Himself, while rooted in the man's own religious and moral feeling." Both in this work, and in the work on 'God and Nature,' Ulrici deals with the immediate manifestation of God to the soul, using the analogy of sense-percep- tion. Lotze, it need hardly be added, does so also, in his ' Mikrokosmos,' and philosophy of religion. Only the subjective ground of faith in God can psychology find in the nature of the human soul, and with this must be connected the objectively given grounds for faith in God. But the objective truth cannot be grasped without a subjective ground of its certainty. The ethical and the religious feelings are not identical, but are closely related, and are com- plementary of each other. The religious feeling is, for Ulrici, the necessary condition of all knowledge

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that will raise us above brute-level. He thinks it "clear that the moral feeling stands in original unity with the religious, and is of one and the same origin." He says that " the religious and the moral feeling, the subjective grounds of religion and morality, are indeed not absolutely identical," but he thinks they hold together as immediately and inseparably as do the metaphysical and the ethical being of God. He views the idea of God as lying implicitly in moral feeling - perception, unmediated by reasonings from nature ('Gott und der Mensch,' vols. i.-ii. pp. 448-450).

It may also be noted that Ulrici does not regard conscience as the voice of God, and thinks freewill impossible if a command of God is imprinted on man's constitution. In this Ulrici seems to me mistaken. No imprinting on man's constitution, making him capable of obedience, takes away the necessity for his acceptance of the true law of life of his own free choice or self-determination. And Ulrici's rejection of conscience as the voice of God calls for explanation, since it is — taken as the voice of God — not the whole truth of the matter, for conscience is the voice of our own inner nature too, and God's voice would be vain, if we had not a faculty of moral perception of our own. Moreover, I do not think that, speaking in a general sense at least, we can say that God is given in conscience ; what is given rather is only right and wrong. It

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works in connection with this rather than as relat- ing the person to God. Schenkel and others have held a high theory that God is immediately given in conscience, so making conscience in an extreme way the peculiar organ of religion, rather than the voice of our moral nature. Kant, too, made it the source of subjective religion, holding it to reveal the law of reason as the law of God. But, as a general theory for mankind, conscience cannot be said to have God for its object, as religion has, but the Tightness or wrongness of the action. But the moral and the religious aspects, though distinct, are not opposed, but are complementary of each other, and conscience is so deep and important a factor of the soul that without it, religion could not be. For, in its final and highest form, conscience carries in itself the ideal of the perfect life. Ulrici's position calls for criticism only where the religious view of conscience is taken, that it is only through God that we come to know what is good, only in His light that we see light, whether we consciously realise this fact or not.

Ulrici is, under any deductions, a noble and capable expounder and defender of philosophical truth, as he saw it. He is less known in Britain than in America, and far less known in Britain than might have been expected from Erdmann's reproach- ful and somewhat narrow-minded references to Ulrici's interest in British thought. An admirable

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philosophical scholar, and a man of rare accomplish- ments, Ulrici is also, in the construction of his system of real -idealism, a far more original and systematic philosopher — besides being an incisive critic — than is sometimes supposed by those whose criticism might be said, in the stock phrase of Hegelians to all criticism, to be external.

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CHAPTER VII.

F. A. TRENDELENBURG.

A. TRENDELENBURG (1802-1872), professor of philos- ophy in the University of Berlin, is the last of our philosophic group whom I shall now mention. Among the many influences exerted upon him were the Kantian Reinhold, Von Berger, and K. F. Becker, author of works on the philosophy of language. Trendelenburg is especially famed for his 'Logical Investigations' (1840, I use the 1862 edn.), a fact which has sometimes been obscured because of the fame he won as a commentator on Aristotle. His ' Elements of the Aristotelian Logic ' (1837) went through several editions. Trendelen- burg was the leader in the revival of Aristotelian studies, and he laid emphasis, in the Preface to his ' Logical Investigations,' on " that organic conception of the universe which has its foundation in Plato and Aristotle, and which, continuing from them, will have to complete itself in a profounder exam- ination of fundamental ideas and through an inter

FRIEDRICH ADOLF TRENDELENBURG. Ill

change with the science of reality." Dr Merz says that when " the exclusively critical task of deciding as to the powers and limits of the human intellect and the nature of scientific knowledge was taken up as a definite problem," it was " partly as a continua- tion and confirmation of Kant's views, partly also in opposition to them. The solution of this problem was very much assisted and influenced by two independent lines of research. The first of these was the analysis of the methods of science, of which John Stuart Mill was the great representa- tive ; the second was the revival of Aristotelian studies, in which Trendelenburg of Berlin was the principal leader" (' History of European Thought/ vol. iii. p. 125).

Philosophy, Trendelenburg says, must take up the problems historically, and unfold them. His ' Historical Contributions to Philosophy ' (3 vols. 1846, 1855, and 1867) proved very notable, his historical work being marked by almost unique learning and scientific objectiveness. Philo'sophy was to him the "science of the Idea." He deeply discussed the ultimate differences of systems, and in the second volume, found these in their attitudes or preferences towards thought (Gedanke) or force (Kraft). In this volume he also has valuable critical comments on Herbart's attitude to supposed contra- dictions in the universal concepts of experience. He devoted, in the first volume, great attention to the

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doctrine and development of the categories. In the third (1867) volume, Trendelenburg says that "an ethical philosophy which would exclude pleasure would be contrary to nature ; and one which would make a principle of it would be contrary to spirit." I may also observe that some critical remarks on Trendelenburg's positions, in this volume, relative to Kant's views on the World-concept and its time rela- tions, will be found in H. Cohen's work, ' Kant's Theorie der Erfahrung," (pp. 260-270), but these need not occupy us here, where we are mainly con- cerned with Trendelenburg's own positions as a theistic philosopher. Certain other works of his were widely studied, and many of the best German thinkers were influenced by him, among whom may be instanced Dilthey, Eucken, Brentano, Teichmiiller, Kym ; and there were many others.

Trendelenburg showed what he considered the inconclusive and unhistorical character of Hegel's dialectic method, and its adaptability to prove any- thing or everything. That is to say, Trendelenburg held Hegel's logical contradictories to be real con- traries. Thus pure Being, ever self -identical, is rest; pure Nothing, also ever self-identical, is also rest. Trendelenburg asks how out of these two admitted abstractions (ruhenden Vorstellungen'), Becoming shall suddenly arise ? Yes, Becoming, this concrete perception, which presides over life and death (' Log. Unter.,' i. p. 38). Of Hegel's making

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pure being signify pure nothing, Trendelenburg said that in it, the pure is the empty, and the empty is the pure. And, after dealing with the "una- voidable dilemma " of the dialectic of pure thought, Trendelenburg concludes, — " Whoever, therefore, sees deeply into the so-called negative movement of dialectic will discover in most cases of its appli- cation something ambiguous" ('Log. Unter./ i. pp. 56-57). Trendelenburg goes on to point out that, in the dialectical process, there is a constant in- fusion of elements really empirical, even saying — " Das Meiste ist von der Erfahrung aufgenommen." Chalybaus, I may remark, in the concluding chapter of his ' Historical Development of Speculative Philosophy/ expressly indicates his sympathy with Trendelenburg in this claim for the place and power of empiricism.

Space, time, and the categories, were, to Trendel- enburg, forms of thought as well as of being. The logical form he would not separate from the content. Besides Hegel, Trendelenburg devoted much atten- tion to Schelling and 'Schopenhauer. Against the platonising Kant and all one-sided Idealism, Tren- delenburg sought to vindicate the rights of reality (Realitdt), real existence (Wirklichkeit), and objects (Gegenstdnde). He stood opposed to Kant's time- space theory as a subjectivist-phenomenalist con- ception. Martineau agrees with him, saying, — "I hold, with Trendelenburg, that the subjectivity of

H.

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space and time — the fundamental characteristic of the critical philosophy — does not prejudice their claim to objectivity, and requires no surrender of the reliance which we inevitably place on the veracity of our own faculties" ('The Study of Religion/ vol. i. p. 73). Trendelenburg and Kuno Fischer, however, were at variance upon the subject. Trendelenburg thought that if one should grant space and time to be subjective conditions, and precedent to perception and experience in us, there would still not be a shred of proof to show that they cannot, at the same time, also be objective forms. It is their being only (nur) subjective forms that he holds ill-grounded, and he thinks space and time are not to be denied to things, because Kant found them in thought. Trendelenburg is opposed, generally, to the eliminating and phenomenalising of the thing- world. Lotze is like him in this emphasis on the realistic side, in modification of the idealistic stress of the elder Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. But this did not keep Lotze from occupying the subjectivist position on space, of which I have just spoken. Trendelenburg thus pursues an empiric -inductive method, rather than a purely speculative one, in matters metaphysical.

Trendelenburg sought a form of activity that should be common at once to thought and being, and this he found in motion, instead of Hegel's thought, motion to him being fundamental and undefinable.

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Movement is the most extended activity in being. What appears as rest, is, more deeply inquired into, seen to be movement. All rest in nature is only the counterpoise of movements. Movement is the funda- mental phenomenon in all Nature. He says, with Aristotle, that he who does not know movement, does not know Nature. But he extends movement to the world of spirit also; spiritual movement is the great organ of knowledge. His "constructive movements," both in our inner thought, genetically developed as constructive movement out of our self- activity, and in external or objective movements of being, cannot here be discussed in all their Hera- clitean aspects and bearings, but it must be noted how fundamentally he posits everywhere the concrete intuition of "constructive movement." I observe, in passing, that some critical remarks on Trendelenburg, having relation to this, will be found in the appendix (pp. 336-337) to the work of E. Laas, ' Kant's Analogien der Erfahrung/ Trendelenburg takes this "constructive movement" to be that which philosophy has in common with mathematics, setting the latter as a speculative science in opposi- tion to the empirical. Speculative method is, it may perhaps be allowed, related to experience as mathe- matics is to the material world. But in respect of the spiritual potency of "constructive movement," Trendelenburg is not always allowed to have sufficiently considered the free potency, over against

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an overweighted objective movement, of the subject as a first posited spiritual substantiality ('Log. Unter.,' i. ch. viii. ; ii. ch. xi.). This view has been taken, for example, by P. Gloatz, in his ' Speculative Theologie/ Erster Band, p. 11. I think, too, the treatment was perhaps not all -sided enough, and moved too much on the lines of contrast merely between machine and organism, but his insistences on purpose were, for that time, admirable in their way and serviceable, and. I shall speak of them presently, but critically. A more comprehensive and systematic use of the idea of potency, although his potencies are too abstractly conceived, is found, for example, in Schelling, for whom possibility is itself something real — a real potency.

Besides much acute criticism of Kant and Herbart, Trendelenburg discusses causality and substance, and, in the first volume of his ' Logical Investigations,' the real categories, in the second, the modal categories. He takes causality, that is, efficient cause, to be as extended as motion itself. From the creative act of motion springs causality, wherein, from the efficient cause, the effect follows. As movement is at the bottom of all thought, he takes causality to be necessary to thought; movement in thought corre- sponds exactly to real movement ; causality is equally necessary to being, since movement, in another form, is at the base of being. His emphasis is on efficient cause as the main category. Dr E.

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Konig, devotes some critical attention to Trendelen- burg's position on the causal problem, on constructive movement, and, as a Kantian, to Trendelenburg's criticism of Kant. Konig thinks that just as little in being as in thought, does all causality mean continuously connected movement ; he takes all cau- sal connections to be cases of mechanical causality. He takes a purely natural science view of causal working, and is more free of speculative postulation than Trendelenburg (c Die Entwickelung des Causal- problems in der Philosophic seit Kant/ vol. ii. 75-84). With substance, Trendelenburg says, is associated the notion of the independent — of what is grounded in itself, and not in another. But he cannot find, in strict sense, place for such a conception in the whole territory of the finite, hence he goes on to speak of the relative and finite use of the term. Substance is, to Trendelenburg, the permanent (angehaltene) pro- duct of causality. He has much to say also of quality and quantity in these connections. As to necessity, Trendelenburg says the " ultimate point " on which all necessity is made to rest, is "a com- munity of thought and being. What is an element of thought must be conversely an immediate element of being. We could call this ultimate point, if the expression were not used in manifold senses, the identity of thought and being." And he adds, later, that Hegel calls the ego universal because the particular objects fall into his consciousness, and he

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calls the man universal, because the man thinks the universal (ii. pp. 178-184).

When he comes to consider the question of End, Trendelenburg gives much attention to final cause, which he treats as an a priori principle on the level of efficient cause. He shows its bearing on the doctrine of organic life, of which the ethical was a higher stage. In fact, he regards his philosophy as "organic world -view," and it has kinship with speculative theism. He says it is a simple and pregnant conclusion that, so far as design is realised in the world, thought as its ground has preceded it. Yet the teleological argument, says an American writer, " instead of showing thought as antecedent, shows it as pervading the whole, and in a process whose apparent mode of operation is that of neces- sity" (E. Mulford, 'The Republic of God,' p. 9).

A blind and unconscious adaptation of means to ends Trendelenburg regards as inconceivable. But this seems hardly in keeping with his view of the universe as itself organic, and the drawback of the intelligence presumed in the teleological argument is, I think it may be allowed, its association with blind agents, and its apparently so remote connection with consciousness. For the Deity is supposed to be at one with the intelligence involved in a sphere where the voluntary and the spontaneous are so jealously excluded by science. But these are mere obiter dicta, and the subject in its full bearings

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cannot here be discussed. The world is reasonable, Trendelenburg says, and reason is real. He distin- guishes real opposition from logical contradiction, and says a contradiction "is the expression of the utterly incompatible, which of itself mocks at all mediation." Realised purpose is only comprehensible through the prius of thought. Trendelenburg saw the practical reason of Kant to rest upon the prac- tical reason of Aristotle, and he did much for teleo- logical thought through his wide and far-reaching influence. To him, the fixed action of the forces of nature, and their conformity to purpose, argue the existence of a Cause which has determined this fixity and conformity (ii. p. 24). Purpose, like motion, is for him fundamental fact, and common to both thinking and being.

He does not regard the Unconditioned as a nega- tive notion. We reach it by a negative process, removing everything that limits it. But the notion itself is positive, the most positive of all notions. This result is in harmony with the view which I have myself taken of the matter, earlier in this work. Trendelenburg says, — "The so-called proofs of the existence of God have worth only as points of view, which cannot be understood without the Absolute. They are indirect proofs, which have for their peculiar function to develop the ground-theme of the Unconditioned." "They indicate what con- fusion (Zwiespalt) must arise, if we do not posit God.

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In this thought they have their constraining power " (ii. p. 427). The restless movement of the spirit, thinks Trendelenburg, finds rest only in the notion of the "Whole"; to this we are led by the organic and ethical view of the world; knowledge is per- fected only in the presupposition of one spirit, whose thought is the source of all being ; this is Idealism, but of a kind that does not block the way to reality (ii. chaps, xxii.-xxiii.). Trendelenburg concludes that there is no pure thought, for there is no life without intuition and the possibility of the same. Else there were no community between thought and things. It is in this significance that motion, the category of which he makes so much, appears. This original activity, constructive movement, is the key to the greatest results of human knowledge. He shows in detailed form its working in the spheres of matter and of spirit.

Both the activity and the influence of Trendelen- burg were great. He was not only member of the Royal Academy, but secretary of the History of Philosophy section, for many years. Royce says that since " Trendelenburg's keen criticism of the dialectic method," "the Hegelian doctrine has re- ceived less and less attention in Germany, although its indirect and unconsciously effective influence has been great" ('Spirit of Modern Philosophy/ p. 479). In our own country, Martineau was much influenced by Trendelenburg ; in America, many — among them

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Noah Porter, F. E. Abbot, G. S. Morris ('Life' by Professor R. M. Wenley) ; in Italy, the distinguished philosopher, F. Bonatelli (who was not without in- fluence from Ulrici also); in Denmark, the cele- brated thinker, S. Kierkegaard. Dr Merz remarks, in a footnote, that Trendelenburg's merits "are being more and more acknowledged in the present day" (op. cit., vol. iv. p. 607). His wholly exceptional strength as an historical philosopher is universally acknowledged, but this was conjoined with great insight, acuteness, and systematic grasp, as an in- dependent philosopher.

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CHAPTER VIII.

CONCLUSION.

BEFORE speaking of these seven theistic philoso- phers, we must glance for a moment at the times in which their work was set. The nineteenth century came in with the speculation of the great quadri- lateral, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel. It went out with the dominance of the empirical sciences. The idealistic philosophy encountered three sources of hostility, all of them of empiric character and tendency.

There was, firstly, Pessimism, developed out of Romanticism, and finding expression in Schopen- hauer (1788-1860), and his quiescence of the will. His influence became specially powerful after his death, and might have been less if Lotze's (1817- 1881) position had been a more defined one. But in Lotze little " wool " was too often the result of much critical " cry."

Then there was, secondly, the Sensualistic An- thropologism of Feuerbach (1804-1872), in which man was the " superlative." He, in reaction from the

CONCLUSION. 123

idealistic dogmatism of the Hegelians, turned, as he supposed, from abstractions to reality, to life, and landed finally in materialism. The influence of the materialistic writers, chief among whom were Vogt, Moleschott, and Biichner, was particularly strong, and endangering to Idealism, in Germany in the forties and after. This natural science temper found expression in Lange's 'History of Material- ism' (1866), in which he took our physical organi- sation as the only theoretic ground of explanation in all human inquiry, yet idealistically invoked, on the practical side, the aid of poetry, and of religion as, vaguely, elevation above the actual. A some- what lame and impotent conclusion for the expen- diture of so great an amount of knowledge and acuteness. The Positivism of Comte (1798-1857), and the sensationalist philosophy of Mill (1806- 1873) are not now quoted, for they had no influence in Germany in the first half at least of the century. Later, Agnosticism and Positivism were effective enough. For then Positivism and Agnosticism "claimed all man's interest and strength for his immediate existence in nature and society, and relegated the world of faith to an unknown Beyond, degrading it even to a tissue of mere illusions " (R. Eucken, ' Hauptprobleme der Religionsphilosophie der Gegenwart,' p. 111). Or, to view the matter more from the philosophical point of view, after the idealism of Hegel had "raised the world to the

124 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

plane of ideas," Positivism came along and "de- stroyed ideas in the facts."

Then, thirdly, there were, in the second half of the century, the exact-sciences, with their demands for nature -inquiry, their presupposition of the un- breakableness of mechanical nature-connection, and their application of Darwinism in the spheres of evolutionary thought and process. Much natural science scepticism had a loosening effect on theistic conviction. The empirical disintegration of person- ality was a natural result of this empirical or positivist reaction. The exclusively empirical view or conception of the world — a somewhat superficial one, it must be said — led to complete forgetfulness of the great idealistic truth that Nature is, after all, but a representation of the ego. Since the human mind " finds reason and order in nature," " it may fairly conclude that nature itself is orderly, that perhaps after all, in some faint way, natural law has points of likeness to legal ordinance, and may denote a lawgiver. This is not science, it is meta- physics once more calling on science to witness " (Whetham's 'Science and the Human Mind," p. 276). I must be content here to indicate these three sources of empiric influence, without expanding or dwelling upon them, or showing what philosophy has done, in the return to idealism, in the way of freeing itself from, and raising itself above, any prejudicial results from these empirical sources of

CONCLUSION. 125

influence. It was just this later bent towards " empirical deduction," says Pfleiderer, that militated against the influence of Weisse, for example, being greater than it was (' Development of Theology in Germany since Kant,' p. 145). But we have already seen what powerful influence our philosophic group exerted in countering deleterious influences of the kind, so far as these had developed in their own time, which was well into the first two-thirds of the century, and we shall glance presently at the con- tinuation and expansion of the philosophic work and influence inaugurated by them. Such continu- ation and expansion were sorely needed, for the times continued to be impregnated with empiricism and scepticism, influences from which our own age is by no means completely free.

Not only had all these members of the mid- nineteenth century School of Speculative Theology, or the Theistic School of Philosophers, rid themselves of subservience to Hegel — which is not to say that any or all of them had escaped influence by the type of idealism that had been so dominant — but every one of them made meritorious contribution to theistic world- view, a fact of great philosophical importance for their period, and after. They had clearly per- ceived that the differences between theistic and pantheistic world- views centred around the concept or idea of personality, in God and in man, and the personality -concept they made the corner-stone of

126 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

their theistic speculation. Yet it is strange to find how very inadequately some leading philosophical writers, in our own time, realise that the personality of God and the personality of man must stand or fall together. So long ago as Lessing, it was said, — " If I am, God is also ; He may be separated from me, but not I from Him." But, as has been, conversely, remarked on this, " if God is not, then I am not ; if He is no person, I can no longer maintain my personality. The man who denies the personality of God, undermines the foundation of His own. Pantheism, in doing this, swallows up God in man and man in God." In a similar spirit to Lessing, W. Archer Butler said, — " ' Cogito ergo sum ' was the well-known postulate of Descartes; to those who can reflect, ' Cogito, ergo Deus est,' will not appear a less cogent conclusion " (' Ancient Philosophy,' vol. i. p. 57). The freedom and the moral strength of man, it cannot be too clearly realised, have their founda- tion in the personality of God.

Theistic world -view, however, has owed not a little, in the sharpening, deepening, defining, and enlarging of its positions, to the influence of pan- theistic world-views, while never abating its claim to occupy the higher ground. Although I have felt obliged to confine myself to these seven philosophers, I must note what a plethora of representatives — many of them theological, both Catholic and Pro- testant— Theism had in their time, some grounding

CONCLUSION. 127

their theistic philosophy in manner speculative, some in mode better termed rational, some ethical, some supernatural, and some inductive, but all com- bining to prove the richness and inexhaustible vitality of Theism, and constituting the greatest movement in favour of the personality of God that modern times have witnessed. These efforts also significantly made for harmony between knowledge and faith, for profounder ethical treatment of the problems, and for their elucidation from many sides or points of view, so advancing the philosophy of theism, and dispensing deepening influences to theology by the way. Yet such are the insularity and the ingratitude observable, in various ways and at different times, in much British philosophy, that Mr Clement Webb, for example, has felt able, in his recent work on ' God and Personality/ to dispense, amid much historical reference, with even a single allusion to this very notable movement. Such a significant omission adds nothing to the competency of the discussion. I find much in his work with which to agree, and not a little to admire, but from his main thesis that we must not speak of the personality of God, but only of personality in God, I am in deep and radical dissent. Living and pro- gressive thought will never again rest in this re- actionary attitude ; his position is as unsatisfactory as all half-way houses are. It is none of the business of a philosopher, when dealing with great

128 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

problems like the freedom and personality of God, to move timidly along, under the shadowing influ- ence of past Confessional monuments or documents, but to allow free and living philosophic thought to solve the problems in its own independent and self- reliant way. Thus it will, in the end, best serve the interests of spiritual religion. No more will the philosopher, who would satisfactorily treat of " God and Personality/' allow his thought to be so com- pletely dominated by Bradley and Bosanquet, since on this point these eminent thinkers are eminently unsatisfactory.

In this connection I take occasion to say, with a broader reference, that, in my considered judgment, the main peril and hindrance to British theistic philosophy to-day lies in the fact that we have systems, often loosely regarded, even by those who ought to know better, simply as theistic, but which in reality consist of a theistic head grafted on to a pantheistic body. As there have always been pantheists who were almost theists, and theists who were almost pantheists, a philosopher should make clear to himself and others whether he is one or the other, if he is to be regarded as a consistent and thoroughgoing thinker. I do not suggest that any, or indeed all, of the seven philosophers here treated, furnished a complete, and, in all respects, satisfying theistic world- view, but they outlined the programme, and went far towards supplying the materials of

CONCLUSION. 129

such a world-view. They would have spurned, as palpably absurd, the suggestion that rigorous philo- sophical thinking must needs take pantheistic form, or be found in pantheistic systems, for it was precisely their merit as thinkers that they perceived, with varying clearness and correctness, the intrinsic philosophical superiority of theistic world-view. If Hegelian pantheism is to be forced upon us, as the only form, and necessary result, of rigorous thinking, we shall be compelled to ask if what a once noted English philosophical writer called " the consummate trimming of Hegel" has no grounds or meaning? The truth is, Theism is the religious and the philo- sophic norm ; pantheism is in some sort a perversion of it.

Pantheism can, of course, be made coherent, con- sistent, even attractive, but it is and remains only denaturalised theism. Its Absolute is merely quan- titative, the Absolute of Theism is qualitative. For the Infinite of pantheism is merely the All, but the Infinite of theism is the Absolute Being, the perfect form of Being, unlimited in its divine perfections — a notion perfectly distinct from that of the mere totality of being. The theistic Absolute knows the totality of all the real to be contained within Him- self. There cannot be anything outside the con- sciousness of the Absolute; whatever is in Him; of that He is conscious. What is first in the theistic Absolute comes last in the God of evolutionary

I

130 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

pantheism, a sufficiently strong contrast, when it has the courage to declare itself. To the former, God is the Absolute Personality from the outset, and is not conceived after the manner of any evolving germ or nucleus analogies, which last make far more impossible demands on reason than any- thing to be found in Theism.

Theistic world -view holds the world to be grounded in God, but also grounded through God, Who lives in it, but is not measured by it. Pan- theistic world -view, on the other hand, oscillates in unclear fashion between a mere appearance-world and a rising of the fundamental essence in the world. But it does not allow this essence to rule over the world as free Absolute Subject or Lord of all being, but leaves Him to exist only in the totality of the world's being. God appears not in His actuality suffused with the warmth of a Personality with living content, but is a mere schema, so far as real self-determination is concerned. Pantheistic thought, in its glorification of the world, tends to suppress God, whose metaphysical attributes it takes to be of no importance for morality. And, in its fundamental presupposition, the identification of God and the world, it makes, as Siebeck shows, the world in its outstanding quality finally incom- prehensible ('Religions -philosophic/ p. 374).

The superiority of theistic world-view is also evidenced in its personal, or "I" and "Thou,"

CONCLUSION. 131

relation, whereby the relative independence of the self is maintained, and an active — not merely con- templative— attitude is engendered. Theistic world- view also stands, in its direction of the whole creation towards an end, for the conservation and perpetuation of values, in a way which pantheism does not, since pantheism excludes the universality of value, or the purposiveness of the whole course of events. Pantheistic world -view concerns itself with reality in general, rather than with what is concretely given. It thus comes into conflict with this latter, which it is prone to make proceed as by necessity from the grounding principle. Theistitf world- view, on the other hand, in its knowledge of the universe, rises from our knowledge of the particular realities to their ultimate ground or reason in God. It " ascends into the empyrean, and communes with the eternal essences." Thus with a great poet —

" In contemplation of created things, By steps we may ascend to God."

Such is the path to unity and totality in our views. Thus is gained a real Creator and Ruler, not a determinationless One, nor a mere necessitated unity of the All. The pantheistic view was set out by Strauss, when he entirely denied the existence of a Divine consciousness separate from the human ; and the copestone was laid on by Feuerbach, when he

132 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

asserted that, in imagining a Deity, man is only deifying his own nature. But it was the superior, idealistic type of pantheism with which our phil- osophers were mainly concerned.

When it is said that philosophical influence passed from the philosophers here treated to Lotze, because of his being a more systematic philosopher, that can be granted only in a very limited sense. It must not be forgotten how much Lotze, whose greatness is not denied, occupied himself with individual problems, rather than with the working out of a system, clear - cut, coherent, self - consistent. His spirit was essentially critical, and to him a system, as such, meant a tyranny over its component parts. His appeal is rather to experience than to system. His philosophy is largely syncretistic, and is acute rather than profound. Nor should it be overlooked how much Lotze owed to our group, to Weisse in particular, and how much he held in common with them — in the Personality of God for example, and, on evolutionary and teleological process with Fichte, Ulrici, and Trendelenburg. It would be a great mistake to suppose that Lotze's discussion of the Personality of God made any less necessary bourdon the discussions of that theme by the thinkers we have treated, or by other theistic thinkers of that time who have not come within the scope of our consideration. Valuable as Lotze's discussion is, it is by no means certain that he felt the difficulties of

CONCLUSION. 133

the subject more than some others did, and he appears not to have realised some of the serious difficulties attendant on his own representations. He also failed to do full justice to personality in man, when he made it a weak imitation or pale semblance of personality in God, for human per- sonality is indeed most real, albeit it may not be compared with personality in God.

He displayed a distinct lack of speculative depth in respect of the doctrine of the Trinity. His system suffers from his display of the same lack in his performances on the territory of the philosophy of religion, which are marked by grave gaps, inade- quacies, and superficialities. Nor can one forget the fatally subjective character of Lotze's theory of knowledge. Scarcely, then, does one find a com- pletely satisfactory theistic world -view in Lotze, any more than in the group of philosophers just considered. Theistic world -view has advanced in many respects since Lotze's time and theirs, while agreeing with him and them in leaving behind the mischievous and untenable procedure of those phil- osophers who identified the actual relation of God to the universe with the mental processes whereby we come to know Him.

The truth is, the personality - philosophy passed not simply into the hands of Lotze, but broadened out into influences like Schwarz, Busse, Wentscher, Eucken, Martineau, James, S. Harris, B. P. Bowne,

134 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

and others. And of theistic world-view, of vital and thoroughgoing character, I will only now say that it is well able to hold its own against all world- theories that philosophically come its way ; it needs only the full possession of its own principles, as grounded in eternal and immutable Reason, to ensure its sway over the mind of the world in its best mani- festations. For, as James said, in what was certainly not one of his "brilliant irresponsibilities," but a sober and well-grounded expectation, we await " that ultimate Weltanschauung of maximum subjective as well as objective richness, which, whatever its other properties may be, will at any rate wear the theistic form" ('Will to Believe,' p. 129).

INDEX.

Abbot, F. E., 121

Absolute, the, 8-10, 13, 20-21, 32,

33-34, 38, 39, 42, 57, 64, 71, 94,

103, 129 Acosmism, 72 Adam, J., 88 ^Eschylus, 40 Aesthetics, 28 Agnosticism, 123 Anselm, 54-57

Anthropology, 4, 5, 7, 24, 59, 122 Anthropomorphism, 35, 39, 61, 66,

74

Aquinas, 32 Aristotle, 110, 119 Art, 40, 91 Aseity, 17, 100 Attributes, the Divine, 17, 32, 60,

102, 130 Augustine, 43

Baader, 3, 9, 12, 14, 44, 49, 50, 58,

63, 64, 67, 79-80, 81-83, 84, 85,

87-88

Balfour, A. J., 92 Bascom, J., 44 Becker, K. F., 110 Being, 12, 17, 40, 53, 55, 57, 67, 82,

94, 100, 103, 112, 113, 114, 115,

129

Berger, v., 110 Bohme. 9, 11, 12, 29, 80, 82 Bonatelli, F., 121 Bosanquet, B., 128 Bowne, B. P., 133 Bradley, F. H., 100, 128 Brentano, 112 Buchner, 123 Burnet, J., 88 Busse, L., 133 Butler, W. A., 126 Bywater, I., 88

Carriere, M., 95

Causality, 116-118

Chalybaus, H. M., 3, 49 ; estimate of, 69, 78 ; system, 69-78 ; works, 69-70

Change, 13-14, 42-43, 95

Cohen, H., 112

Comte, 123

Conscience, 107-108

Consciousness, 20, 34-35 ; the Ab- solute, 18-20, 33-34, 104, 131 ; the religious, 13, 48-49, 51, 100, 103

Cosmology, 87

Creation, 6, 17-18, 37, 42, 64, 65, 71, 74, 83, 84, 96, 98-102, 131

Dante, 98 Darwin, 105, 124 Deism, 12, 17, 72 Descartes, 55, 126 Determinism, 44, 96 Deutinger, 1, 44 Dilthey, W., 112 Dorner, I. A., 1, 68 Drews, A., 18, 59, 61, 62

Earle, J. K, 9

Eichhorn, C., 68

Eleatics, the, 52

Empiricism, 84, 113, 115, 124-125

Erdmann, 29, 78, 79, 108

Eternity, 14-16, 43-44, 63-64

Ethicism, 46-47, 105-106

Ethics, 4, 59, 69, 77-78, 87, 112

Eucken, R., 112, 123, 133

Euripides, 73

Evil, 87

Experience, 7, 20, 37, 48, 70, 105-

106, 111, 132 ; the Absolute, 34-

36

136

INDEX.

Fechner, 53, 90

Feuerbach, 46, 122, 131

Fichte, I. H., 41, 45, 47, 43, 49, 50, 62, 63, 64, 65, 68, 71, 80, 105, 132; estimate of, 1-3, 24-26; system, 4-24 ; works, 3-4, 11, 22 24, 48

Fichte, J. G., 5, 50, 70, 114, 122

Fischer, K. Ph., 3, 10, 16, 52; estimate of, 50,59,67-68 ; system, 50-67 ; works, 50, 59-60, 62

Fischer, Kuno, 114

Fraser, A. C., 24

Freewill, 44, 65, 96, 99, 101, 126

Galloway, G., 54-55, 58 Gloatz, P., 116 Giinther, 1, 71, 77

Haeckel, 105 Hamberger, J., 88 Harris, S., 133 Hartmann, 18, 62, 82 Hegel, 2, 3, 5, 6, 10, 27, 28, 29, 31, 35, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 56, 57, 62,

69, 71, 74, 90-91, 101, 102, 112, 114, 117, 122, 123, 125

Heraclitus, 88

Herbart, 5, 6, 74, 111, 116

History of Philosophy, the, 24-25,

58-59, t>9

Hoffding, H., 25, 62-63 Hoffmann, Fr., 3, 12; estimate of,

79-80, 88 ; system, 80-84, 87-88 ;

works, 79-80, 83 Hugo, Victor, 58

Idealism, 2, 30, 67, 74, 91, 113,

120, 123, 124 Immortality, 6, 12, 45-47 Individuality, 6, 23, 39, 65

James, W., 133, 134 Janet, P., 101, 102

Kant, 6, 7, 49, 53, 56, 69, 84, 85, 87, 93-94, 108, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 119, 122, 125

Kierkegaard, S., 121

Kleutgen, 56,

Knowledge, theory of, 7, 52, 69,

70, 93, 133 Konig, E., 117 Krause, 86

Kym, 112

Laas, E., 115

Lange, F. A., 123

Laurie, S. S., 15

Leibniz 5, 11, 28, 29, 32, 52, 82

Lessing, 126

Lindsay, J., works by, 5, 16, 45 ;

articles by, 11, 105 Logic, 48, 59, 87, 91 Lotze, 22, 27, 28, 45, 75, 90, 106,

114,122,132-133 Lutterbeck, A., 88

Martensen, 12

Martineau, J., 113, 120, 133

Materialism, 72, 73, 84, 123

Mathematics, 31, 115

Matter, 42, 72, 87

Merz, J. T., 4, 111, 123

Metaphysics, 6, 12, 28-29, 37, 39,

45-47, 124 Mill, J. S., Ill, 123 'Mind, '54 Moleschott, 123 ' Monist, The,' 11, 105 Morris, G. S. , 121 M'Taggart, J. E., 46-47 Mulford, E., 118 Mysticism, 87

Nature, 18, 40, 73, 75, 80, 88, 89,

92,124

Neo-Platonism, 87 Nitzsch, C. I., 68

Oetinger, 49

Oken, 50, 52

Ontological argument, the, 53-fi8

Ontology, 3, 31. 34, 48, 72, 102

Optimism, 23-24

Panen theism, 86

Pantheism, 1, 7, 13, 14, 17, 18, 22, 24, 40, 42, 52, 69, 72, 75, 83, 85, 88, 90, 93, 97, 98, 126, 129, 130, 131, 132

Paulsen, F., 4

Personality, 20, 22, 33, 44, 65, 66, 75, 124, 125; of God, 1, 3, 20, 32, 37, 38, 39, 41, 60, 65-66, 67, 83, 99, 102, 103, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 132 ; of Man, 20, 22, 66, 124, 125, 126, 133

INDEX.

137

Pessimism, 122

Pfleiderer, 0., 49, 125

Physics, 87

Physiology, 23

Plato, 53, 110

Porter, Noah, 121

Positivism, 123-124

Pringle-Pattison, A. S., 33-38, 57,

96-97, 99-104 Psychology, 4, 6, 22, 104, 106

Bashdall, H., 36

Rationalism, 10-11, 18

Realism, 74, 82, 90, 114

Reinhold, 110

Relativity, 19, 101, 117

Religion, philosophy of, 12, 44, 48-

49, 60, 106, 123, 130, 132 Revelation, 44 Rickert, H., 105 Romanticism, 122 Rothe, R., 1, 14, 25, 38, 40, 42, 49,

61, 98, 103 Royce, J., 46, 120

Schaden, E. A., v., 84

Schelling, 3, 10, 12, 27, 44, 50, 52,

62, 66, 73, 82, 83, 87-88, 97, 113, 114, 116, 122

Schenkel, 107

Schleiermacher, 42, 52

Scholasticism, 87

Schopenhauer, 62, 82, 113, 122

Schwarz, C., 25, 68

Schwarz, H., 133

Science, 73, 91-93, 111, 115, 118,

123, 124 Self-consciousness, Divine, 9, 16-

17, 18-19, 33, 48, 64, 75, 76, 95,

131 ; human, 33, 35, 48, 51, 70,

76, 85, 131

Sengler, J., 1, 3, 52, 66 Seydel, R., 28, 49 Shakespeare, 100 Sidgwick, H., 45 Siebeck, H., 130 Sociology, 87 Soul, the, 11, 22-26, 73, 74, 104,

105, 106

Space, 13, 42-43, 113, 114 Speculative School, 1, 125 Speculative Theology, 3, 6-21, 48-

49, 51, 57, 60 70, 79-80, 125 Spinoza, 52

Stahl, 106 Steudel, 75 Stirling, J. H., 102 Strauss, 131 Substance, 116-117

TeichmUller, 112

Teleology, 2, 20-21, 116, 118-119

Tennyson, 70

Theism, 2, 3, 6, 19, 23, 25, 40, 49,

50, 51, 52, 59, 75, 78, 86, 90, 92-

93, 103, 104, 118, 125-128, 129,

130, 133, 134 Thilly, F., 4 Thought, 8, 53, 55, 56, 71, 74, 85,

86, 91, 111, 113, 114, 115, 120,

127

Time, 13-16, 42-43, 64, 65, 113, 114 Transcendentalism, 87 Trendelenburg, F. A., 3, 48, 132 ;

estimate of, 110-112, 120-121;

system, 110-120 ; works, 110-112 Trinity, the, 33, 39, 40-41, 60, 67,

133 Troeltsch, 47

Ueberweg - Heinze - Oesterreich, : Hist, of Philosophy,' 25

Ulrici, H., 3, 41, 121, 132; esti- mate of, 90-91, 108-109 ; system, 91-108 ; works, 91-92, 104, 107

Value, 55, 58, 105, 131 Vogt, 123 Voluntarism, 10-11

Wagner, R., 23

Ward, J., 56

Webb, C. C. J., 127

Weisse, C. H., 3, 6-7, 9, 10, 16, 25, 50, 60, 62, 65, 68, 103, 132 ; esti- mate of, 27-28, 49 ; system, 28- 49 ; works, 28-29

Wenley, R. M., 121

Wentscher, 133

Whetham, 124

Wirth, J. U., 3, 52

World, the, 18, 21, 24, 75, 82, 98- 99, 101, 102, 130

World-Ground, 7, 12, 20, 63

World-View, Theistic, 2, 3, 7, 22, 25, 98, 125, 128-131, 133, 134

'Zeitschrift fur Philosophic," 3. 18, 20, 29, 60, 78, 83, 92

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