Chapter XI: The German Idealists (1)

=Idealism after Kant.=[59] Kant’s criticism had been a fine dissection of the processes of knowledge. He had laid scientific knowledge open and separated it into its parts. In doing this he had acted in the spirit of his time, which had been inaugurated by Lessing. His doctrine became the point of departure of many differing systems. A modern German professor in the University of Berlin has been wont to say, “There are ten interpretations of Kant’s _Critique_, which are the ten kinds of philosophy at the present time.” The incoherence of Kant’s philosophy made it famous. He represented the first stage of a social movement; and like all social movements the world over, the first stage was critical, self-inconsistent, and destructive of tradition. The second stage is the one upon which we now enter, and we shall find it to be reconstructive along several lines. Criticism is always an inducement to new systematization. In Germany, after Kant, there was naturally, therefore, a great systematic movement which its intellectually virile and many-sided life was ready to express. Culture and philosophy went hand in hand. Jena was the centre of Kantianism and was in close proximity to Weimar, the centre of German culture.

At the time that the philosophy of Kant became popular, the teaching of Spinoza was resurrected from its long sleep and introduced into Germany. Kant was the “all-crushing” critic; Spinoza was the dogmatic mystic. Their opposition did not amount to a contradiction, but was of the correlative sort. Kant and Spinoza became the two intellectual foci about which revolved the thought of the generation after Kant. All the succeeding philosophers show Kant’s influence upon them, for they all accept his epistemology. They show the influence of Spinoza in varying degrees.

The philosophers whom we shall now meet may be divided into groups. The first group consists of Rheinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. These took the lead in destroying the Kantian conception of the thing-in-itself and in constructing a pure idealism. The second group consists of Herbart and Schopenhauer. These tried in different ways to develop a metaphysics of the thing-in-itself. A third group consisted of the old Wolffian rationalistic school, which was, however, unsuccessful in its opposition to the spread of the doctrines of Kant and Spinoza. A summary of the leaders of the German thought of this time would not be complete without mention, lastly, of the miscellaneous group of literary Romanticists, whose writings partook of the philosophical spirit. The influence of Spinoza is especially prominent in this group. Jean Paul Richter (1763–1825) was the forerunner of this movement, and it included the names of Tieck, Wackenroder, the two Schlegels, Novalis, the two Romantic women,――Dorothea and Caroline,――Schiller, and Goethe. The poet Schiller did much to popularize Kant’s æsthetic and moral doctrines.

Illustration:
MAP SHOWING THE UNIVERSITY TOWNS
AND OTHER IMPORTANT PLACES CONNECTED WITH THE GERMAN IDEALISTS

=Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.= This group of disciples of Kant can be understood sympathetically only in the light of their age. They were not philosophical adventurers, otherwise the great representative of the age, Goethe, would not have associated with Schelling and Hegel on equal terms. They stood for the revulsion of the period against all external systems, and for the realization of a spiritual realm of free spirits. They sought not a factitious and imaginary condition, but tried rather to discover the essentials of the spiritual life. They would reclaim reality spiritually, and their only defect was in their haste in carrying out their principles. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel are sharers in one common movement. They tried systematically to present the evolution of the world as an unbroken evolution of thought. They went back to Kant, but they were bolder than he. They sought to transcend the limitations of thought which he had laid down. They would set thought free, and, gazing in upon their own spirits, they would find there the whole infinite universe. The spiritual realm seemed to them to be wider than any one had supposed. It was a self-governing realm, quite different from the world of matter. History to them is cosmic and develops under one law of progression. It is an upward movement of assertions, negations, and syntheses. Life is cosmic spirituality. For Fichte the spirit is a cosmic battle for moral ends; for Schelling the spirit is a cosmic artistic construction, which transforms the external and internal worlds into a work of living art; for Hegel the cosmic spirit unfolds in a strict and rigorous logic, whose consummation is thought of thought. But while Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel look at the world each in his own way, they are members of one common movement toward spiritual freedom, and toward the reëstablishment of metaphysics.

=The Life and Writings of Fichte= (1762–1814).[60] Johann Gottlieb Fichte was the most notable of the immediate disciples of Kant. In contrast with the undisturbed and uneventful scholastic retirement of his master, Fichte’s life looms up as a series of conflicts, sometimes with extreme poverty and sometimes with hostile forces created by his own stubborn and irascible disposition. Fichte’s external life was throughout one of curious contrasts, both of tragedy and romance. His love for the moral and theological appears in his early youth in his voluntary self-denial and in his sermons to the geese which he was herding. Again, he made preparation to become a preacher, but his intellectual training in the university drove him to abandon it. He became a necessitarian and tried to square his life with his philosophy, although it weighed his heart down. Then came the so-called “Atheistic Controversy” when he was professor at Jena, and his defiance of the authorities and his dismissal. In the tumultuous days at Berlin he turned his metaphysics into patriotic appeals, and would have joined the army, but his death intervened. The inner development of Fichte, too, was different from that of Kant. Kant’s inner development was coincident with his long life. Fichte, on the other hand, at the age of twenty-eight had read and accepted Kant’s philosophy, and four years later had created his own. This was only slightly modified in his later years in the direction of the pantheism of Spinoza. Kant’s life was apart from the political current of his time, while his doctrine became fundamental for all future philosophy. Fichte’s life and philosophy were more expressive of his time, but less lasting in their influence. Fichte is the philosophic preacher to his time; Kant is the instructor of all time.

Fichte’s life may be divided into four periods, which are marked by certain external events.

1. _His Education_ (1762–1790). He was the son of a poor ribbon-maker. As a boy he worked for his father, and again at the equally humble employment of herding geese. It was during this latter occupation that his wonderful memory attracted the attention of a philanthropic nobleman, who gave him means for an education. Fichte studied theology, philosophy, and philology at Leipsic and Jena; but he had to face extreme poverty again upon the death of his benefactor. In 1788 he got a position as tutor in Zurich, and here he met Pestalozzi, Lavater, and his future wife, a niece of the poet, Klopstock. During this period his philosophy was a necessitarianism, which he had evolved from the theology in which he was trained and his reading of certain books on Spinoza.

2. _Discipleship of Kant_ (1790–1794). Fichte returned from Zurich to Leipsic, and in the capacity of tutor in philosophy he assisted a young man in the reading of Kant’s _Critique_. He was at once converted heart and soul to the Kantian doctrine. In 1791 he called on Kant at Königsberg and submitted to Kant his _Critique of Revelation_. The next year he published this work, and by some fortunate accident his name as author was omitted from the title-page. The work was attributed to Kant, and was widely read as a masterpiece by Kant. Kant had to correct the mistake, which, however, made the real author, Fichte, famous. So he returned to Zurich in 1793 to marry Fräulein Rahn, who was herself now in comfortable circumstances.

3. _His Life at Jena_ (1794–1799). The year 1794 was another milestone in the biography of Fichte. In this year he was called to Jena, then the principal university of Germany, to succeed Rheinhold. In this year he published his philosophy in his best known work, the _Wissenschaftslehre_. He remained at Jena only five years. At first his popularity exceeded that of the popular Rheinhold, but he soon filled his life with controversies. He quarreled with the students and the clergy, and in 1799 the so-called “Atheistic Controversy” arose, in which charges were brought against his teaching as atheism. Brooking no criticism either of his teaching or of his official position, he defied the authorities of the university and was dismissed.

4. _His Life at Berlin_ (1799–1814). In 1799 Fichte went to Berlin to live. At first he had no academic affiliations, but he found a large and sympathetic public, to whom he lectured. He was warmly received by the circle of Romanticists,――the Schlegels, Tieck, and Schleiermacher. His philosophical system got little development; but the influence of Spinoza appeared in his teaching. He lectured upon the ethical and religious aspects of his philosophy, and upon political and social subjects. In 1808 he delivered his famous _Addresses to the German People_. In 1810 the University of Berlin was founded and he was called to the chair of philosophy, but he was connected with the university only two years. For in 1812 came the call to arms, and Fichte was with difficulty dissuaded from enlisting. He remained in Berlin and preached to the soldiers in camp. His wife volunteered as hospital nurse and contracted a fever, from which she recovered. Fichte, however, who nursed her through her sickness, died of the disease in 1814.

=The Influences upon Fichte’s Teaching.= Any estimate of the influences upon Fichte would be distorted that did not recognize the calibre of the man himself. Fichte was essentially a puritan reformer. He was impetuous and life-loving, but withal a simple-minded man. All the philosophical influences which he was capable of feeling would naturally be turned by him into ethical and religious sermons to reach the life of men. He must be thought of as the crusader armed with abstract truths, which he wields with a giant’s strength for the moral uplift of man.

It was natural then that the two principal influences upon Fichte’s doctrine should be Spinoza and Kant. To be sure, such writers as Lessing, Rousseau, and Pestalozzi furnished him much material in his early years, and the Romanticists in his later years. His wife, Johanna Rahn, was also a source of power to him, and through her influence after their marriage his aim became clearer and his character lost much of its harshness. But the two great influences upon Fichte were the two great philosophical forces of this time, Spinoza and Kant. Fichte’s philosophy has been described as “Spinoza in terms of Kant,” and also as “an inverted or idealistic Spinozism.” The influence of Spinoza upon Fichte’s thought is seen at both ends of his life. At the beginning he was an amateurish Spinozist. He found that the theological training of his boyhood was a necessitarianism like Spinozism. He lost his faith in Christianity, and he was unhappy because he found Spinoza’s doctrine of necessity was intolerable and yet unanswerable. Then he read Kant and found a solution of his difficulty without having to change the doctrine of Spinoza. For Kant had placed behind the necessitated world the free spirit. In the last period of Fichte’s life the influence of the mystical side of Spinozism appeared, through Fichte’s intercourse with the Romanticists in Berlin.

=Why We Philosophize.= To Fichte philosophy was distinctly a personal problem, and we feel in all his words that he is wrestling with his own nature. He found in his mind two very different classes of ideas, and he was certain that philosophical problems arise from their antagonism. On the one hand there are the ideas about the world of physical nature, which are only our experiences under the law of necessity. On the other hand there are the ideas of the individual consciousness, which are contingent and voluntary. Which of these two classes of ideas is primal? Fichte felt that all philosophical curiosity arose from the contrast of these two classes; the solution of philosophy and the satisfaction of our philosophical curiosity would be reached only by the reduction of one class to the other. Fichte calls the philosopher a dogmatist who seeks to reduce voluntary ideas, which compose our individual consciousness, to the necessitated series. Spinoza sought to do this, and the philosophy of Spinoza depressed Fichte as intolerable. But there is the alternative to the philosopher to explain the necessitated series by voluntary consciousness. This is idealism. The moment a man begins to reflect, he must choose between dogmatism, _i. e._ necessitarianism, and idealism. He is always confronted by an Either-Or, a choice between freedom and necessity.

=The Moral Awakening.= In his early life Fichte saw to his despair no escape from the philosophy of necessity. When he read the _Critique of Pure Reason_ a great light came to him. He flung himself immediately upon the side of idealism. He saw that necessitated events were phenomena, and therefore the creations of consciousness. Consciousness cannot be the slave of necessitated events. Kant’s philosophy was to Fichte a work of art of the free spirit. The world cannot contain man and compel him. Man may be oppressed by the world, but he can see that such oppression is not real. In his _Vocation of Man_ (1800) he gave in autobiographical terms the story of the awakening and development of the individual mind. At first one is overwhelmed by the sight of the necessitated events of the world. Next he comes to believe that all events are mere appearances, and he is weighed down by the still greater despair that no reality whatever exists. Finally he finds the rock of hope amid the sea of appearances. He finds an ultimate and irreducible fact in the categorical imperative of duty. “Thou must” is above necessity, above the phenomena that are always reducible to other phenomena. Duty means the freedom of my inner life. That there is always lodged in me a duty to perform, shows that I am superior to phenomena, that I am a citizen of the supersensuous world. This “heaven does not lie beyond the grave, but already encompasses us, and its light dawns in every human heart.” “That I myself am a freely acting individual must be the fundamental thought of every true philosopher.”

Every one must therefore choose between dogmatism and idealism, if he would not fall a victim to skeptical despair. Two motives will determine one’s choice: one theoretical, the other practical. The primary motive is the practical one, and since dogmatism and idealism are equally consistent systems, man’s choice will depend mainly on the manner of man he is. If the individual has a high sense of duty, he will be disposed to believe in his moral control over all his experiences, however much they may seem to be necessitated. Conscious freedom will seem to him to be the only satisfactory explanation of practical life. But then there will be the additional theoretical motive. The man that chooses either dogmatism or idealism must theoretically make his world consistent. The dogmatist cannot explain the conscious facts in terms of determinism; but, Fichte thinks, the idealist can explain the necessitated facts in terms of consciousness. At any rate the idealist has the task of rethinking his scientific knowledge.

=The Central Principle in Fichte’s Philosophy.= How does Fichte attempt to draw up a consistent theory so that he can overcome the dualism between the necessitated facts of physical nature and the free states of consciousness? As an idealist he must rethink the knowledge of science. But how is this to be done? What principle will he place at the central point of consciousness, so to illuminate the manifold problems of life that life’s dualism will prove to be only apparent after all? Here as answer we find the outcome of Fichte’s struggle with his own nature. He believed that the principle of the true philosophy of life comes from the study of consciousness. The nature of the Ego is the subject for philosophical study. What is the essence of the Ego or the personality? It is activity, will, vitality; not intellect and changelessness. But can we not get beneath the activity of the personality and ask, Why does it act? Yes, _because it ought_. When we have said this we have said all. The essence of the vitality of the Ego is moral obligation. _Ought_ is the foundation of life; it is ultimate ground of existence. If we ask why there is an ought, the only answer is, there ought to be. The duty exists that you and I shall have a duty. In order to be, the Ego must act; and it acts in response to duty. This activity is free activity. The Ego is unconditioned because it is acting out its own nature. Thus when Fichte is talking about the Ego, the ought, the moral law or freedom, he is talking about the same thing in different guises. Fichte placed moral freedom as the central principle of metaphysics and tried to rethink the world of necessitated experiences in terms of moral freedom. He attempted to construct a monistic view of life, of which the free moral personality should be its inner vitality. Monism and liberty was Fichte’s war-cry. Reality is in us; there can be no reality independent of us. The morally free Ego is the central principle of life.

Such a message to the German people would appeal to two sides of their nature. It would appeal as a metaphysics to the mysticism in their blood; it would find also a practical response in the humanitarian and revolutionary spirit of that revolutionary time. Be up and be doing, for reality is not what people commonly think it is. Your environment is only apparently an independent existence beyond your control. Reality is not static. Rethink it and make it dynamic. Not being, but acting, and free acting, is reality. Such was Fichte’s sermon to the Germans of his day. His theory can be stated in the terms of the Greek Heracleitus, “All things change,” provided the change be thought of as moral activity. To philosophize was to Fichte to think the universe as free moral activity, to see inactivity nowhere, to free ourselves from dualism and to participate in the universal freedom. Freedom is higher than truth. Existence is derived from thought in action, and thus our existence and our environment may be shaped by us. Thought is essentially action, and we shall educate the world only through our own activity.

=The Moral World.= Fichte had a philosophy, the principles of which he repeated over and over again as a kind of habit. He was a man of few but great ideas. He was inspired by some general conceptions which he did not carefully elaborate. His philosophy can be expressed in few words, and his point of view is not difficult to feel. Nevertheless, there is great difficulty in restating his meaning. He maintained that Kant’s early philosophy was not truly Kantian, and that he, Fichte, represented the true Kant. In taking this stand he was obliged to do two things: to explain away the thing-in-itself, and to rethink the world of necessitated nature in terms of the activity of the morally free Ego.

If we start from the heart of existence――the active Ego――the world spreads out before us as a system of reason which has been created by the activity of the Ego. On this account Fichte’s philosophy has been called subjective idealism. In such a scheme of things there is no place for the Kantian thing-in-itself. All Being is only an extended product of the active Ego and the object of its knowledge. The Ego acts because it must, and then reflects upon its activity. Its knowledge of its activity is in grades from sense-perception to complete knowledge. Now Kant had referred sensations to the thing-in-itself as their source. But this is unnecessary, since sensations are only the activity of the Ego. Sensations are the groundless, free act of the Ego. They appear to be “given,” because they appear to be foreign and coming from without. They are, however, only the lowest form of the activity of the personality――they are unconscious self-limitation of the Ego. The sensations have no ground that determines them, but as the lowest form of the activity of the Ego they are absolutely free. Thus the thing-in-itself becomes superfluous, since it is not necessary to account for sensations.

The next task for Fichte is to rethink the series of necessitated events of physical nature. If we will look at these events from the point of view of the willing Ego, which is reality, they will be seen to be products of purposive action. Together they will make a world of connected rational activities rather than a mechanical system. The necessity in nature is not causal, but teleological. It is not the necessity linking the series of events together, but rather the linking of each event to the acting Ego, and thus the connecting of the whole series. Take the idealist’s position and this illuminating thought will come to you: a thing is not because something else is, but in order that something else may be. As moral beings we have tasks. As moral beings we are the impersonation of duty, and duty is reality. These phenomena that so trouble us because we think them necessitated are only contingent upon the performance of our duty. The existence of one thing is not to be explained by the existence of another, but by the existence of me, an Ego. Phenomena are little steps toward great ends. When I rethink the world I see no causal relationship, but the teleological means for the achievement of purposes by striving souls. History and nature――these are the material created by human beings for their own activity. We not only create our human drama, but we create also the stage upon which it is performed. Being is not the cause of Doing, but Being is created for the sake of Doing. Whatever is, is to be explained by what ought to be. “The world is the theatre of moral action.” “Nature is the sensible material of duty.”

=God and Man.= If Fichte regarded the human personality from this moral height, he would naturally give a new meaning to God, the absolute reality. God is not a substance, a something that “is.” God is the universal moral process, the moral world-order. God is the Universal Ego, a free, world-creating activity. God was conceived by Fichte as Matthew Arnold’s “something not ourselves that makes for righteousness.” When I find in myself that duty is reality and not this or that fixed and crystallized thing, when I find that my real self is moral functioning and not a tangible form of flesh and bones, then I take the next step. I then find that God is universal duty, universal moral functioning, in which I am participating. We are not only part of God――yea, we are He. As the Holy Writ says, “Ye are Gods.” The absolute Ego manifests Itself in our poor finite Egos. How dignified our humble lot is made by thinking that in our acting, God is acting! We are fighting God’s battle, and His victory is not won except as we win. Duty in us is the clarion voice of God, and we are persons so far as we express that voice. It matters little whether I speak of my own duty or the moral purpose of the world. They are the same thing.

This enjoined labor upon every rational soul to perform his duty of reaching high ideals, through his humble tasks, of “fighting the good fight and keeping the faith,” is to Fichte the meaning of coming to a consciousness of one’s self. What is myself, my real self? It is not this phenomenal existence with its appearance of necessity. It is the eternal and everlasting duty within me. What is it to think myself? It is to think my duty; and to think duty is to think God. When I come to consciousness of myself, the cosmic order is coming so far to self-consciousness. Reality is so far attained. History is the record of this process of the moral order coming to self-consciousness.

In his later teaching Fichte succumbed to the victorious Spinozism of the period. He conceived God as an Ego whose infinite impulse is directed toward Himself; he conceived finite things as products of this infinitely active consciousness. The finite products find their vocation in imitating the infinite producer, which imitation consists not in the activity of producing other finite things through the categorical imperative, but in the “blessed life” of sinking into the infinite.

=What a Moral Reality involves.= Since reality is this process of moral development, its conditions will arise out of itself and be its own creation. Since the world is reason coming to itself, it must develop its own conditions out of its original task. All the acts of history must be explained as the original “deed-act,” as Fichte calls it. Fichte thought that the whole business of philosophy consists in showing what is involved in this original “deed-act” of consciousness, this attempt of consciousness to think itself. Since self-consciousness is reality, this will be the same as showing what reality involves.

1. In the first place, consciousness always involves the consciousness of something else. To use Fichte’s technical language, the Ego posits itself (since it is a moral process) and in the same act it posits a non-Ego (which is the necessary object of consciousness). “The absolute Ego asserts a distinguishable Ego against a distinguishable non-Ego.” It is like a boy who feels the call to become a lawyer. He asserts himself in that call, and at the same time in that assertion he creates his life’s career. His career in the law is his non-Ego. Both the Ego and the non-Ego are creations of that absolute Ego, which is the ever surging duty or God. While both the Ego and the non-Ego are the creations of that absolute Ego, which is cosmic duty or God, yet each limits the other. Ego and non-Ego are correlative terms; both originate in the free act of God. The world is, therefore, the creation of the real self as the condition of its own activity. It even creates its sensations as the given materials of its knowledge. The world is the material of duty put into sense forms. While we create matter in order that we may be active in it, the spatial and temporal forms, its categories, limit our activities.

2. In the second place, this awakening of the Ego to a consciousness of itself involves a curious contradiction. Duty is by nature contradictory. Duty calls me to know myself and to perform my task, and yet in that call duty prevents the task from being performed. In attempting to know duty completely I am always under the condition of an opposing and limiting non-Ego. The non-Ego is essential to the Ego and at the same time thwarts the Ego’s full knowledge of itself. So long as the non-Ego exists, no complete knowledge of myself is possible. A limiting non-Ego makes the Ego limited, and therefore prevents complete knowledge and fulfillment of duty. Duty calls upon us to perform a task, but under conditions such that it cannot be performed. So long as the boy strives in his legal profession, duty appears; but so long is duty rendered incomplete. Moral progress is endless, but that only shows how contented we must be with the process of striving and not with some static condition. To strive morally is reality; the goal is nowhere. The contradiction is seen in the eternal contrast between what is and what ought to be, between the moral task and the actual performance. We are under the requirement to perform, and in the requirement is the restraint. The dialectic process is endless. First there is the stage which Fichte calls the Thesis in the call of the absolute Ego. The next stage is the Antithesis, seen in the mutually limiting Ego and non-Ego. The next stage is the Synthesis, in which some accomplishment is gained, but which becomes only the Thesis for another Antithesis; and so on infinitely. The terms Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis are important, for they are employed by Fichte’s successors, Schelling and Hegel.

=Romanticism.=[61] “We seek the plan of nature in the outside world. We ourselves are this plan. Why need we traverse the difficult roads through physical nature? The better and purer road lies within our own mind.” (Novalis.)

Romanticism was a great European movement which lasted about a century from 1750 to 1850; and it would be perfectly justifiable to speak of the intellectual period in Germany from Lessing to Heine as Romanticism. Rousseau and the French Revolutionists, Ossian, Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Wagner were in the forefront of this world-wide movement. The Storm and Stress Period was a phase of it; and so even was the Period of Classicism that followed. Goethe and Schiller were Romanticists, and Classicism was only an episode in their lives. The Period of German Classicism (1787–1805) was different from the Classicism of the seventeenth century, because it was thoroughly infected with Romantic germs. If one is to take account of the different phases of German thought after Lessing, one mentions first the Storm and Stress Period, then Classicism, and then the Romantic movement proper from 1795 to 1850. Some of the literary names connected with the Romantic movement have already been mentioned,――Richter, Tieck, ♦Wackenroder, Novalis, the Schlegels, Schiller, and Goethe. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel are the philosophers of this Romantic movement and embody its spirit in different degrees. The true philosophical exponent of it is Schelling.

Romanticism is an accidental and inadequate name for this world-wide literary and philosophical movement. In general it means the exalting of the individual, “who admits no law above himself.” The Romantic individuality is dominated by unrestrained fancy, is animated by feeling and passion, and prefers the vague and mystical to the clear and defined. In literature Romanticism is contrasted with Classicism. The Classicist emphasizes the type, the Romanticist the individual. The Classicist defers to traditional form and law; the Romanticist has no common canon even with other Romanticists except the right to disagree. The only common principle among Romanticists is subjective――the truth of the individual intuitions, which in the case of the historical Romanticists found expression in the play of fiercely egoistic wills seeking self-realization. The historical Romantic movement was a passionate and mighty reaction against the previous shallow intellectual life with its narrow conventions. Romanticism was a revolt against the period of the Enlightenment, which scorned what it could not define. These Romanticists were discontented with typical ideas and with logical reasoning about them. They challenged the universe, because it was not obedient to their egoistic cravings.

It is very clear what the dangers as well as the greatness of this German Romanticism were. The dangers of the movement lay within itself, in its aristocratic exclusiveness, its reluctance to face the forces of evil, its lack of strength and of firmness of character. Yet the age itself may be largely responsible for these. Its strength lay also within, in its deepening of self-consciousness, in its rejuvenating and ennobling the whole expanse of being, in its intellectual conception of man’s most intimate relations to himself, to his companions, and to the world around him. Sometimes, indeed, the spiritual force of this small band shows itself quite capable of strong action in the outer world. Napoleon himself ascribed his downfall not primarily to diplomacy or to the bayonet, but to the resistance of the German Ideologists.

=Goethe as a Romanticist.= We have already spoken of the resurrection of Spinoza’s doctrine and its acceptance as a model by this time. The Romanticists, following Spinoza, conceived of nature as a unity in which the divine manifests itself in its fullness. Nature is Reason in Becoming. So fitting, indeed, for the time was Spinoza’s pantheism that Goethe, the literary exponent of the period, made it the central principle of his poetic thought. Goethe can be understood only as the Romantic Spinoza. The philosophy that underlies Goethe’s work is noted here as an example of the Romantic movement.

Like all the Romantic philosophy, Goethe’s philosophy was a personal revelation, and not a formulated doctrine for universal application. Like all the Romanticists, Goethe was a highly strung personality, and his philosophy was conceived to be true by himself only for himself. He did not look upon the trivialities and the conventions of life as mere limitations of his personality, but as a fall from truth. _Truth is realized by man when he is in vital interchange with the universe._ Therefore Goethe was in full agreement with Spinoza in longing for emancipation from human littleness and in his desire for the infinite. Goethe differed from Spinoza’s pantheism in his own way; for Goethe conceived man to have an independent function in the infinite. Man makes his contribution to history and does not merely passively appropriate the products of the world around himself. Man reacts upon the world, he resists it, and becomes alive to the joy of it.

To Goethe the world had a soul, because the world gives clearness to the human soul. Nature shows how closely she is related to us by disclosing to us her inmost soul. Here in Goethe is a mysticism in modern garb, an artistic view of life. Besides, the world expresses human experiences on a large scale, and the way to nature’s heart is not to go behind nature-phenomena, but through them. The facts of nature are real, and our own life is like nature. Both move in prescribed orbits, but both are empty if the connection between them is severed. We find therefore the secret of our life by returning to nature, and this is a return to the spiritual whole of things. At different times Goethe was pantheist, naturalist, and theist. He believed that all finite life is divine, and is a synthesis of opposite forces, in which individuality has a place. Humanity is ruled by necessary types, yet within them the individual is free. Such free individuals take their objects from the world, spiritually endow these objects, and thus make art and ethics very close to nature.

=Romanticism in Philosophy.=[62] The Romantic movement was intrinsically speculative and naturally had its representatives in philosophy, which is systematic speculation. Fichte and Hegel, but especially Schelling, are the philosophical exponents of the revolutionary spirit of the age. All three were demonstrators in philosophy of the truths and dreams held by ardent souls, but Schelling’s system reflected the spiritual upheaval. Fichte belongs to the Romantic movement inasmuch as he strives for the infinite, but Fichte separates himself from that movement by distinguishing between consciousness and its content. The true Romantic spirit appears in Schelling――the impulse to revel in intuitions, in symbolism, to run riot first in nature and art, and afterwards in religion. The Romantic philosophers were friends and sympathizers of the Romanticists, living in the same city, sometimes in the same house, and were members of the same spiritual family. But it must be remembered that there was not one Romanticist leader with many imitators, but that each Romanticist followed out his own line. When we speak of Schelling as a Romantic philosopher we mean that he gives the speculative tendency of the many Romanticists his own clearer definition and formulation. The background of Schelling’s philosophy is the source of the Romanticists’ motives. It may be stated under three headings:――

(1) Man’s ideal is to expand his soul until it becomes one with God.

(2) There is no Thing-in-Itself. The finite world is only a limitation of the ego.

(3) Man and the nature world are essentially one. Man has a knowledge of nature when he has a knowledge of himself. In reading his own history he reads the history of nature. The Romanticist drew a veil from the face of nature and found there his own spirit.

=The Life and the Writings of Schelling= (1775–1854).[63] Of Schelling’s long life of seventy-nine years, the fifteen years from 1795 to 1810 were the most important productive period. Like Berkeley, he was a many-sided genius, and began to write brilliantly in his early years. He published his first treatise at sixteen years, and before he was twenty he published several essays of distinct merit on Fichte’s philosophy, the success of which led to his call to the chair of philosophy at Jena. All his technical works were written in an academic atmosphere. After 1812 he, so fond of writing, became silent. He even ceased to deliver lectures at the University of Berlin when he found that notes of them were published without his consent. Hegel, in commenting on Schelling, said that Schelling liked to carry on his thinking in public.

Schelling and Fichte may be studied together because they are alike in developing one side of Kant’s doctrine. But their careers were very different. Contrasted with Fichte’s life of poverty, struggle, self-created antagonisms, long-delayed victory, and devotion to rigorous morality, is Schelling’s life of early academic success, prosperity, and romantic friendships. The life of Kant was one of inner development and outward routine; that of Fichte of early formulated thought and external warfare. Schelling’s life, on the other hand, does not strike us as one of development, either externally or subjectively. It was rather a series of changes. He looked upon his own philosophy as a development, but its linkage is thread-like, due to his wonderful imagination and mobility of thought. With his great suggestive power, he depended more upon analogy than logic; his argument and his philosophy lie before us as if ever in process of continuous readaptation. Schelling possessed all the fervor and insight of the Romanticists, and all their egoism and caprice. It is even more difficult to characterize his philosophy than that of Spinoza. He was monist, pantheist, and evolutionist; parallelist, theosophist, and believer in freedom; he accepted the doctrine of the Trinity; in all this he was the true Romanticist. Schelling’s philosophy of nature is intelligible only in the light of the great artistic ferment of his time and as the expression of his strong artistic personality. His ideal of artistic insight into nature became for him his idea of science. Reality is nature, and nature is a work of art, self composed and self renewing. The endeavor of Schelling was to fashion all human existence into artistic form. At first he looked upon nature as rational, but later he was impressed with its irrationality.

Schelling’s life may be divided into six periods on the basis of the changes of his thought:――

1. _Earlier Period_ (1775–1797). Schelling was the son of the chaplain of a cloister school near Tübingen, and was educated in history and speculative science in the university of that town. After his university education he held the position of tutor in a nobleman’s family at Leipsic for two years. During this time he listened to lectures at the University of Leipsic on medicine and physics. Before he was twenty he had published several notable essays on speculative matters, among them _The Ego as a Principle in Philosophy_; and in 1797 _Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature_. These led to his call to a chair in the University of Jena. Schelling was early acquainted with the doctrine of Leibnitz, but the most powerful influences upon him at this time were Kant and, especially, Fichte.

2. _The Philosophy of Nature_ (1797–1800). Schelling was called to Jena through the influence of Goethe, Schiller, and Fichte; and it was here that he completed what he had begun at Leipsic――the supplementation of Fichte’s philosophy with a _Philosophy of Nature_ (written 1798). He was colleague of Fichte and afterwards a helpful friend of Hegel. Jena was then the centre of the Romantic movement, the moving spirit of which was Caroline, the wife of August Schlegel. Schelling was very successful at Jena as lecturer, and his publications at this time were very many.

3. _The Transcendental Philosophy_ (1800–1801). While still at Jena he felt the influence of Schiller, who had united the ideas of Kant and Goethe into an Æsthetic Idealism. Under this influence Schelling reconstructed the Fichtean philosophy of the Ego on a Romantic basis.

4. _The Philosophy of Identity_ (1801–1804). Schelling now undertook to put his recast philosophy of Fichte upon the basis of Spinozism. This caused a break between him and Fichte and Hegel. In 1803 he married Caroline, the divorced wife of August Schlegel and the idol of the Romantic circle, and the same year accepted a call to the University of Wurzburg, where he remained three years (1803–1806).

5. _The Philosophy of Freedom and God_ (1804–1809). The doctrine of Schelling now became mystical and showed the influence of Boehme. In 1806 Schelling was called to the Academy of Munich.

6. _The Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation_ (1809–1854). This may be well called Schelling’s period of silence, so far as publication was concerned. He who had poured forth his thoughts in print now became averse to publishing anything. He accepted the call to Munich in 1806 and remained there, excepting his seven years at Erlangen, thirty-five years (until 1841). During this time he was much under the influence of Aristotle, neo-Platonism, and the Gnostics. He had first an official position at the Academy of Munich; then he spent seven years as teacher at the University of Erlangen (1820–1827); and in 1827 he entered the newly founded University of Munich. In 1841 he was called to Berlin to counteract the Hegelian movement, and he became a member of the Academy with the privilege of lecturing at the University. He was now sixty-six, and he spent the remaining years in elaborating his system. He died in 1854.

=A Brief Comparison of Fichte and Schelling as Philosophers.= We have already spoken of the relation of Fichte and Schelling to the Romantic movement. What is their relation as philosophers? Fichte’s idealism is commonly called subjective because of his emphasis upon the Ego at the expense of the non-Ego. In non-technical terms Fichte gave no adequate philosophy of nature; for his assumption was that nature is only material for the reason. Nature to Fichte was only the stage upon which the reason could act. Fichte’s keen insight into human affairs blinded him to the meaning of nature. The contribution of Schelling to the philosophy of nature was not therefore unwelcomed by Fichte; for he saw that such a philosophy could easily be developed from his point of view, provided nature be regarded as a unity in the service of the reason. _In brief, the development of Schelling over Fichte was this_: (1) Schelling added a science of nature to Fichte’s science of mind; (2) Then he transformed Fichte’s philosophy of mind into an æsthetic philosophy of mind; (3) Then he tried in several successive attempts to find a common metaphysical ground for his own philosophy of nature and his recast philosophy of mind. While the method of Schelling was not different from that of Fichte, his general motive was different; for to Schelling the universe must not be regarded as the creation of an active moral Ego, but as having an existence of its own. While for Fichte to think is to produce, for Schelling it is to reproduce. To the investigating mind of Schelling experience and observation are the sources of knowledge; yet it must not be inferred that Schelling’s philosophy was inductive or that he _derived_ the Ego from the non-Ego, as if the Ego had been evolved from the non-Ego. These were the days before the modern theory of evolution. Mind does not have its source in nature; on the contrary, mind and nature have a common source in the Reason. They have a parallel existence and develop according to the same law. Nature is existing Reason, mind is thinking Reason.

=Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature.= Schelling started with Kant’s early conception of nature as dynamic――that matter exists through the interplay of the forces of attraction and repulsion. The human organism is the highest expression of such dynamic activity. In the world there is nothing dead. Matter is the lowest expression of dynamic activity; the vegetable is next, the animal next, and the human brain is the consummation of this process of productivity. Thus matter on the one hand and mind on the other are the two poles of reason in nature. Everything is life movement; everything is the oscillation between two extremes, the interplay of contrary but correlative forces. In romantic terms, nature is the Self in Becoming. Nature is a living whole which manifests itself in an ascending scale of rich and varied forces between matter and mind.

Such a conception met consistently the demands of this Romantic period.[64] The high expectations of the physicists of the previous century had been unfulfilled, for they had not succeeded in obtaining a purely mechanical explanation of the derivation of life from matter. Darwin was still to come. Medicine, which was at that time showing great progress, offered no argument for the mechanical conception of the world. There had, however, been many discoveries at this time in electricity and magnetism; and these mysterious qualities seemed to repudiate the mechanical theory. Vitalism thus usurped the place of mathematics. Spinoza rather than Galileo was the model of the time. Nature must be conceived as a unity in which the Divine manifests itself in its fullness.

All these influences appear in Schelling’s first philosophical undertaking. He states philosophically what Goethe states poetically. Nature is not to be described in quantities nor measured by rule. It transcends measurement. It is to be truly understood only as productivity having organic life as its goal. Nature is rational life, not mechanism. Everything has its logically determined place. Schelling used the natural science of his time to show how the connection of forces and their transformation into one another were the manifestation of divine cosmic purpose. The gaps he filled in with teleological conceptions. He used morphology with the same purpose as Goethe. He felt the same need of a deeper meaning of nature than mathematics can give――the need of a rational purposeful meaning. Goethe shows this in his “Theory of Colors” when he looks upon colors not as atomic movements, but as something essentially qualitative. Schelling, too, was not an evolutionist in the modern sense, and he did not regard one species as derived from another. He thought of species in an ascending scale, to be sure; but he saw in each only the preliminary stage to the next, and all as the divine expression. One accomplishment of nature merely precedes another in time.

The nineteenth century looked back on this Romantic science as merely a fit of excessive sentiment that has impeded the modern work of serious investigation. Yet it may safely be said that the nineteenth century has not settled the question, and that nature will always need a rational as well as a mechanical explanation.

=Schelling’s Transcendental Philosophy.= _The Philosophy of Nature_ ends with the explanation of sensitivity; and it is there for Schelling that the philosophy of knowledge begins. When three years later Schelling was ready to reconstruct Fichte’s philosophy of mind――when he was ready to break with Fichte――he was influenced by the great change that had come over the thought of the Jena idealists. This change was due curiously enough to the philosophy of the intimate friend of Goethe, the poet Schiller. Here again the proximity of Weimar and Jena was the cause of the reciprocal influence of philosophy and literature. Schelling was the first to give this new thought its philosophical expression. The theory of Schiller is an æsthetic idealism in which the artistic function supplants the moral law of Fichte and Kant, and is the fundamental reality of life.

When Schiller[65] reshaped Kant’s moral philosophy he was not concerned, as might be supposed, merely with æsthetic results, but with conduct, history, and the whole system of metaphysics. The problem always uppermost in Schiller’s mind was the place of art and beauty in the whole system of things. So when he tried to reconcile Kant’s theoretical reason and Kant’s practical reason, he naturally looked to art for such reconciliation. What is there that is both necessary and free? Beauty! “Beauty is freedom in phenomenal appearance.” Æsthetic contemplation apprehends the beautiful object, and yet in so doing it transcends all the trammels and bonds of experience. The artistic ecstasy is freedom in necessity. It is independent of moral as well as intellectual rules. Beauty is as little an object of sense as of will. It does not have the quality of need that belongs to sense phenomena, nor of earnestness that accompanies morality. Sense is obliterated; the stirrings of the will become silent. That which appears was called by Schiller the “play impulse.” Toward the education of man Schiller thus offered art, while Kant had presented religion. Art refines the feelings, tempers the sensuous will, and makes room for the moral will. Yet the moral will is not the end; for art is not only the means of education, but the goal as well. Complete life comes when the conflict between morality and sense disappears in artistic feeling. “Only as man plays is he truly man.” The ideal that Schiller formulated for this Romantic age was the “schöne Seele.” While in the soul of man the Kantian rigoristic moral law exists when sense stands in opposition to duty, the “beautiful soul” does not know conflict because its nature is ennobled by its own inclination. This æsthetic humanism Schiller expresses for his time in antithesis to Kant’s and Fichte’s rigorism. Goethe impersonated this ideal in his life and represented it in his works. The Romanticists carried this conception to its extreme both in their practice and in their literary productions. Thus they came to stand for an aristocracy of culture, and in them “ethical geniality” culminated. The Romanticist contrasted himself with the “Philistine” who lives according to rules. The Romanticist would live out his own individuality as valuable in itself. He substituted the endless play of the imagination for Fichte’s moral law, and was frequently very wayward and capricious. This is seen in Schlegel’s _Lucinde_. Schleiermacher the preacher tried to preserve the purity of Schiller’s doctrine.

In his construction of his own philosophy of mind Schelling adopted completely Schiller’s theory of the æsthetic reason in what he called _Transcendental Idealism_. He looked upon the Fichtean antithesis between theoretical and practical reason as the same as that between the unconscious and the conscious activity of the Self. Theoretically, or from the point of view of the understanding, consciousness is determined by the unconscious; practically, or from the point of view of the will, the unconscious is the creation of consciousness. The practical or willing Self re-shapes the products of the nature world. For a thinking being is not merely a reflector or re-presenter of events as they occur in the nature world――as nature produces them. Thinking man is not merely passive. He re-shapes and transforms nature through the freedom of his morality.

But neither the series of passively apprehended events, nor the series of events transformed by the active moral will, is ever complete. Neither as a passive product of nature nor as a moral will is man a perfected being. In either condition man perpetually feels the contradiction, since he is neither wholly passive nor wholly active. The antagonism between will and sense is ever present. Man realizes the fullness of his Ego, when he transcends both will and sense, both morality and science, in the conscious-unconscious activity of artistic genius. This is the highest synthesis. In Schelling’s lectures delivered at Jena on the philosophy of art, after he had written his _Transcendental Idealism_, he developed and applied this theory and it determined the subsequent development of æsthetics in the Jena circle. Kant had previously defined genius as intellect that works like nature; Schiller had defined it as playing; Schelling looked upon it as æsthetic reason and the climax of the philosophy of mind. Art, and not logic, is the instrument by which the reason develops. Artistic reason is the goal toward which the reason aims.