Sevem theistic philosophers : an historico-critical study

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

43252S

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

2 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

IMMANUEL HERMANN FICHTE. 3

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

4 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

IMMANUEL HERMANN FICHTE. 5

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

6 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

IMMANUEL HERMANN FICHTE. 7

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

& SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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.

IMMANUEL HERMANN FICHTE. 9

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.

10 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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-

IMMANUEL HERMANN FICHTE. 11

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

12 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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.

IMMANUEL HERMANN FICHTE. 13

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

14 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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-

IMMANUEL HERMANN FICHTE. 15

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

16 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHEKS.

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

IMMANUEL HERMANN FICHTE. 17

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

18 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

IMMANUEL HERMANN FICHTE. 19

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

20 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

IMMANUEL HEKMANN FICHTE. 21

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

22 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

48 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

52 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

54 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

56 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

58 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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;

60 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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.

62 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

64 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

66 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

68 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

70 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

HEINRICH MORITZ CHALYBAUS. 71

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

72 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

HEINRICH MORITZ CHALYBAUS. 73

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

74 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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,

HEINRICH MORITZ CHALYBAUS. 75

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-

76 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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-

HEINRICH MORITZ CHALYBAUS. 77

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

78 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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.

79

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

80 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

FRANZ HOFFMANN. 81

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

82 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

FRANZ HOFFMANN. 83

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

84 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

FRANZ HOFFMANN. 85

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,

86 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

FRANZ HOFFMANN. 87

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

88 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

FRANZ HOFFMANN. 89

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."

90

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

HERMANN ULRICI. 91

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

92 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

HERMANN ULRICI. 93

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

94 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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,

HERMANN ULRICI. 95

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

96 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

HERMANN ULRICI. 97

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

98 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

HERMANN ULRICI. 99

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

100 SEVEN THEISTTC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

HERMANN ULRICI.

..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

1 02 SEVES THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

HERMANN ULKICI. 103

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

104 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

HERMANN ULRICI. 105

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

106 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

HERMANN ULBICI. 107

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

108 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

HERMANN ULRICI. 109

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.

110

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

112 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

FRIEDRICH ADOLF TRENDELENBURG. 113

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.

114 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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.

FRIEDRICH ADOLF TRENDELENBURG. 115

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

116 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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.

FRIEDRICH ADOLF TRENDELENBURG. 117

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

118 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

PRIEDRICH ADOLF TRENDELENBURG. 119

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.

120 SEVEN THEISTIC PHILOSOPHERS.

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

FRIEDRICH ADOLF TRENDELENBURG. 121

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.

122

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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