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THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY -- VOLUMES 1 & 2 |
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6. PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION (FROM FRANCIS OF ASSISI TO IMMANUEL KANT) I HAVE already given (p. 241) a definition of philosophy (Weltanschauung), and in this book I have frequently discussed religion; [1] I have also called attention (p. 244) to the inseparability of the two ideas. I am far from maintaining the identity of philosophy and religion, for that would be a purely logical and formalistic undertaking, which is quite beyond my purpose; but I see that everywhere in our history philosophical speculation is rooted in religion, and in its full development aims at religion -- and when on the one hand I contemplate national idiosyncrasies and on the other pass a succession of pre-eminent men in review before my mind's eye, I discover a whole series of relations between philosophy and religion, which show me that they are closely and organically connected: where the one is absent the other fails, where the one is strong and vigorous, so is the other: a deeply religious man is a true philosopher (in the living, popular sense of the word), and those choice minds that rise to comprehensive, clear, philosophical views -- a Roger Bacon, a Leonardo, a Bruno, a Kant, a Goethe-are not often ecclesiastically pious, but always strikingly "religious." We see, therefore, that philosophy and religion on the one hand further one another, and on the other hand are substitutes for, or complementary to, each other. On pp. 258-9 I wrote: In the want of a true religion springing from and corresponding to our individuality I see the greatest danger for the future of the Teuton, that is in him the heel of Achilles, whoever wounds him there, will lay him low. If we look closer, we shall see that the inadequacy of our ecclesiastical religion revealed itself, to begin with, in the invalidity of the philosophy which it presupposed; our earliest philosophers are all theologians and mostly honest ones, who pass through an inner struggle for truth, and truth always means the sincerity of views as determined by the special nature of the individual. Out of this struggle our Teutonic philosophy, which is absolutely new, gradually grew up. This development did not follow one straight line; the work was taken in hand simultaneously at most divergent points, as if in the building of a house, mason, carpenter, locksmith and painter each did his own work independently, troubling himself as little as possible about the others. It is the will of the architect that unites the essentially different aims; in this case instinct of race is the architect; the homo europaeus can only follow definite paths, and he, as Master, to the best of his power forces his path upon others who do not belong to him. I do not think that the structure is complete; I am not bound to any school, but take joy in the growth and development of the Teutonic work, and do what I can reverently to assimilate it. My task in this section is, in the most general outlines, to show the growth and present condition of this Teutonic work. Here history again comes to its own; for while civilisation only fastens on to the past in orqer to destroy it and replace it by something new, and knowledge is, as it were, of no special time, the philosophical and religious development of seven hundred years is still alive, and it is, indeed, impossible to speak of to-day, without remembering that it is born of yesterday. Here everything is still in process of development; our philosophy and, above all, our religion, is the most incomplete feature of our whole life. Here, then, the historical method is forced upon us; it alone can enable us so to pick up and follow the various threads that the web of the tissue, as it was made over to us by the year 1800, shall be clearly seen and surveyed. [2] Ecclesiastical Christianity, purely as religion, consists, as I endeavoured to show in the seventh chapter, of unreconciled elements, so that we found Paul and Augustine involved in most serious contradictions. In Christianity, as a matter of fact, we are dealing not with a normal religious philosophy, but with an artificial philosophy forcibly welded into unity. Now as soon as genuine philosophic thought began to be active -- which was never the case with the Romans, but was bound to come with the advent of the Teuton -- the nature of this faith full of contradictions violently asserted itself; and in fact it is a truly tragic spectacle to see noble minds like Scotus Erigena in the ninth, and Abelard in the twelfth century wriggle and turn in the hopeless struggle to bring the complex of faith which was forced upon them into harmony with themselves and with the demands of honest reason. Inasmuch as the Church dogmas were regarded as infallible, philosophy had henceforth two paths to choose between; it could openly admit the incompatibility of philosophy and theology -- that was the course of truth; or it could deny the evidence of the senses, cheat itself and others, and by means of countless tricks and devices force the irreconcilable to be reconciled -- this was the course of falsehood. The course of truth branches off almost from the first in different directions. It could lead to a daring, genuinely Pauline, anti-rationalistic theology, as Duns Scotus (1274-1308) and Occam (died 1343) show. It could bring about a systematic subordination of logic to intuitive feeling and this conduced to the rich variety of mystical philosophies, which, beginning with Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) and Eckhart (1260-1328), was to lead up to minds of such different character as Thomas a Kempis, the author of the Imitatio Christi (1380-1471), Paracelsus, the founder of scientific medicine (1493- 1541), or Stahl, the founder of modern chemistry (1660-1734). [2] Or, on the other hand, this unswerving honesty could cause men to turn away from all special study of Christian theology and spur them on to acquire a comprehensive, free cosmogony; we see an indication of this in the encyclopaedist Albertus Magnus (1193-1280), it is then further developed in the Humanists, e.g., in Picus of Mirandola (1463-94), who considers the science of the Hellenes as divine a revelation as the books of the Jews and consequently studies it with the fire of religious zeal. Finally, this path could lead the most profound philosophic intellects to test and reject the foundations of the theoretical philosophy then regarded as authoritative, in order to proceed, as free responsible men, to the construction of a new philosophy in harmony with our intellect and knowledge; this movement -- the really "philosophical" one -- always starts in our case from the investigation of nature; its representatives are philosophers who study nature, or philosophic investigators; it begins with Roger Bacon (1214-1294), then slumbers for a long time, repressed by main force by the Church, but raises its head again when the natural sciences have developed strength, and runs a glorious course, from Campanella (perhaps the first man who consciously propounded a scientific theory of perception, 1568-1639) and Francis Bacon (1561-1626) to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) at the threshold of the nineteenth century. So manifold were the new paths opened up to the human spirit when it once faithfully followed its true nature. And by each of the courses mentioned a splendid harvest was garnered. Pauline theology gave birth to Church reform and political freedom; mysticism led to a deeper view of religion, and at the same time to reform and brilliant natural science; the awakened humanist desire for knowledge advanced genuine liberal culture, and the horizon of mankind was powerfully widened by the reconstruction of philosophy in the special sense on the basis of exact observation and critical, free thought; while all scientific knowledge gained in depth and religious conceptions in the Teutonic sense began to undergo a complete transformation. The other method, which I have designated the course of falsehood, remained absolutely barren of results; for here arbitrary caprice and capricious arbitrariness predominated. The very attempt to rationalise all religion, that is, to accommodate it to reason, and yet at the same time to bind and put thought under the yoke of faith, is a double crime against human nature. For such an attempt to succeed the delusive belief in dogmatism must first become a raving madness. A Church doctrine which had been patched together out of the most varying foreign alien elements, and which contradicted itself in the most essential points, had to be declared eternal, divine truth; a fragmentary, badly translated, often totally misunderstood, essentially individualistic, pre-Christian philosophy had to be declared infallible; for without these prodigious acceptations the attempt would never have succeeded. And so this theology and this philosophy, which had no connection with one another, were forced into wedlock and a monstrosity was imposed upon humanity as the absolute, all-embracing system to be unconditionally accepted. [4] In this path development followed a straight, short line; for, while divine truth is as manifold as the creatures in which it is reflected, the impious caprice of a human system, which lays down the law of "truth" and carries it out with fire and sword, soon reaches its limit, and any further step would be a negation of itself. Anselm, who died in the year 1109, can be regarded as the author of this method, which gags thought and feeling; scarcely a hundred and fifty years after his death Thomas Aquinas (1227-1274) and Ramon Lull (1234-1315) had brought the system to the highest perfection. Progress was in this case impossible. Such an absolute theological philosophy neither contained in itself the germ of any possible development, nor could it exercise a stimulating influence upon any branch of human intellectual activity. on the contrary, it necessarily signified an end. [5] It becomes clear how irrefutable this assertion is when we look at the frequently mentioned bull AEterni Patris, of August 4, 1879, which represents Thomas Aquinas as the unsurpassed, solely authoritative philosopher of the Roman view of life even for the present day; and, to make matters more complete, some lovers of the Absolute have lately put Ramon Lull with his Ars magna even above Thomas. For Thomas, who was a thoroughly honest Teuton, possessed of brilliant intellectual gifts, and who had learned all that he really knew at the feet of the great Swabian Albert von Bollstadt, expressly admits that some few of the highest mysteries -- e.g., the Trinity and the Incarnation -- are incomprehensible to human reason. It is true he tries to explain this incomprehensibility by rational means, when he says that God intentionally made it so, that faith might be more meritorious. But he at least admits the incomprehensibility. Now Ramon does not admit this, for this Spaniard had learned in a different school, that of the Mohammedans, and had there imbibed the fundamental doctrine of Semitic religion that nothing can be incomprehensible, and so he undertakes to prove everything under the sun on grounds of reason. [6] He also makes the boastful claim that from his method (of rotary differently coloured disks with letters for the chief ideas) all sciences can be derived without the necessity of studying them. Thus absolutism is at the same moment perfected in -two ways, by the earnest, ethically idealistic system of Thomas and by the faultlessly logical and consequently absurd doctrine of Ramon. I have already mentioned (p. 276) the judgment of the great Roger Bacon, who was a contemporary of both these misguided men, upon Thomas Aquinas; similar and just as much to the point was the opinion of Cardanus, the doctor, mathematician and philosopher, who had wasted much time on Ramon Lull -- a marvellous master! he teaches all sciences without knowing a single one. [7] There is nothing to be gained by lingering over these delusions, although the fact that at the close of the nineteenth century we were solemnly called upon to turn about and choose this insincere course lends them a melancholy present interest. We prefer to turn to that long, magnificent series of splendid men who imposed no shackles on their inner nature, but in simple sincerity and dignity sought to know God and the world. I must, however, first make a remark on method. In the grouping, which I have sketched above (into theologians, mystics, humanists and scientists), the usual conception of a "scholastic period" completely disappears. And I really think that the notion may be dispensed with here, as being altogether superfluous, if not directly harmful, for the vivid comprehension of the philosophic and religious development of the Teutonic world; it is contrary to the motto from Goethe which I prefixed to this "Historical Survey," in that it unites what is heterogeneous and at the same time rends links that belong to one single chain. Taken literally, scholastic means simply schoolman; the name should therefore be limited to men who derive their knowledge solely from books; in fact that is the sort of derogatory sense which the word has acquired in common parlance. But we may define more exactly. A predominance of dialectical hairsplitting to the disadvantage of observation -- of the Theoretical to the disadvantage of the Practical -- is what we call "scholastic"; every abstractly intellectual, purely logical construction seems to us to be "scholasticism," and every man who constructs such systems out of his head, or, as the German popular saying is, " Out of his little finger," is a scholastic. But when thus viewed the word has no historical value; there have been such scholastics at all times and there is a rich crop of them at the present day. From the historical point of view we generally regard the scholastics as a group of theologians, who for several centuries endeavoured to fix the relations between thought and the Church doctrine, which was now almost completely developed and rigidified. Such a grouping may be useful to the Church historian; it took the "Fathers" a thousand years of bitter struggle to fix the dogmas; then for five hundred years there raged a violent dispute with regard to the manner in which these Church doctrines could be reconciled with the surrounding world, and especially with the nature of man, so far as this could be derived from Aristotle. Finally, however, the underground current of true humanity had undermined more and more seriously the rock of St. Peter, and the thunder of Martin Luther scattered the theologians; and so on one side and on the other a third period, that of the practical testing of principles, was introduced. As I have said above, from the point of view of the Church historian this may give a useful idea of scholasticism, but from the philosophic standpoint I find it exceedingly misleading, and for the history of our Teutonic culture it is utterly useless. What, for example, is the sense of saying, as I find in all text-books, that Scotus Erigena is the founder of scholastic philosophy? Erigena! one of the greatest mystics of all times, who interprets the Bible, verse by verse, allegorically, who fastens directly on to Greek gnosticism [8] and like Origenes teaches that hell means the tortures of our own consciences, heaven their joys (De Divisione Naturae v. 36), that every man will at last be redeemed) "whether he has led a good or a wicked life" (v. 39), that to understand eternity We must realise that "space and time are false ideas" (iii. 9), &c. What connection is there between this daring Teuton [9] and Anselm or Thomas? Even if we look more closely at Abelard, who, as a pupil of Anselm and an incomparable dialectician, stands much nearer to the doctors named, we must observe that though he is animated by the same purpose -- that of reconciling reason and theology -- his method and results are so very different that it is quite ridiculous to class such contradictions together merely because of external points of contact. [10] And what is the meaning of linking together Thomas Aquinas with Duns Scotus and Occam, the sworn opponents, the diametrical contradictions of the doctor angelicus? What is the use of trying to persuade us that it is merely a question of fine metaphysical differences between realism and nominalism? On the contrary, these metaphysical subtleties are merely the external shell, the real difference is the wide gulf that separates the one intellectual tendency from the other, the fact that different characters forge quite different weapons from the same metal. It is the duty of the historian to bring into evidence that which is not immediately clear to everyone; to distinguish what seems uniform, while in reality it is essentially antagonistic; to unite what seems contradictory but is fundamentally in agreement -- as, for example, Duns Scotus and Eckhart. Martin Luther felt vividly and profoundly the difference between these various doctors; in a passage of his Table-talk he says: "Duns Scotus has written very well ... and has endeavoured to teach with good system and correctly. Occam was an intelligent and ingenious man .... Thomas Aquinas is a gossiping old washerwoman." [11] And is it not perfectly ridiculous when a Roger Bacon, the inventor of the telescope, the founder of scientific mathematics and philology, the proclaimer of genuine natural science, is thrown into the same class as those who pretended to know everything and consequently stopped Roger Bacon's mouth and threw him into prison? Finally I should like to ask: if Erigena is a scholastic and Amalrich also, how is it that Eckhart, who is manifestly under the power of both, is not one, although he is contemporary of Thomas and Duns? I know that the sole reason is the desire to form a new group, that of the Mystics, which shall lead up to B6hme and Angelus Silesius; and with this object in view Eckhart is violently separated from Erigena, Amalrich and Bonaventura! And that nothing may be wanting to show the artificiality of the system, the great Francis of Assisi is excluded altogether; the man who has exercised perhaps more influence upon the trend of thought than anyone, the man to whose order Duns Scotus and Occam belong, to whom Roger Bacon, the regenerator of natural science, confesses his allegiance, and who, by the power of his personality, did more than any other to awaken mysticism to new life! This man, who is a real force in every field of culture -- since he has stimulated art as powerfully as philosophy -- is not even mentioned in the history of philosophy; this reveals the faultiness of the scheme which I am criticising, and at the same time the untenability of the idea that religion and philosophy are two fundamentally different things. My bridge will, I think, have been substantially advanced if I have succeeded in replacing this artificial scheme by a living discernment. Such a discernment must naturally in all cases be gained from living facts, not from theoretical deductions. We see here the very same struggle, the same revolt, as in other spheres; on the one hand the Roman ideal which grew out of the Chaos of Peoples, on the other Teutonic individuality. I have shown already that Rome can be satisfied in philosophy as in religion with nothing less than the unconditionally Absolute. The sacrifizio dell' intelletto is the first law which it imposes upon every thinking man. This too is perfectly logical and justifiable. That moral pre-eminence is not incompatible with it is proved by Thomas Aquinas himself. Endowed with that peculiar, fatal gift of the Teuton to sink himself in alien views, and, thanks to his greater capacities, to transfigure them and give them new life, Thomas Aquinas, who had drunk in the southern poison from childhood, devoted Teutonic science and power of conviction to the service of the Anti-Teutonic cause. In former ages the Teuton had produced soldiers and commanders to conquer their own nations, now they supplied the enemy with theologians and philosophers; for two thousand years this has steadily been going on. But every unprejudiced observer feels that such men as Thomas are doing violence to their own nature. I do not assert that they consciously and intentionally lie, though that was and is often enough the case with men of lower calibre; but, fascinated by the lofty (and for a noble, misguided mind, actually holy) ideal of the Roman delusion, they fall a, prey to suggestion and plunge into that view of life which destroys their personality and their dignity, just as the song- bird throws itself into the serpent's jaw. That is why I call this the way of falsehood. For whoever follows it sacrifices what he received from God, his own self; and in truth that is no trifle; Meister Eckhart, a good and learned Catholic, a Provincial of the Dominican Order, teaches us that man should not seek God outside himself -- "Got uzer sich seIber nicht ensuoche"; [12] whoever therefore sacrifices his personality loses the God whom he could have found only within himself. Whoever, on the other hand, does not sacrifice his personality in his philosophy, manifestly follows the very opposite path no matter to what manner of opinions his character may impel him, and no matter whether he belong to the Catholic or to any other Church. A Duns Scotus, for example, is an absolutely fanatical priest, wholly devoted to the essential doctrines of Rome, such as justification by works -- a hundred times more intolerant and one-sided than Thomas Aquinas; yet everyone of his words breathes the atmosphere of sincerity and of autonomous personality. This doctor subtilis, the greatest dialectician of the Church, exposes with contempt and holy indignation the whole tissue of pitiful sophism upon which Thomas has built up his artificial system. It is not true, as he points out, that the dogmas of the Church stand the test of reason, much less that, as Thomas had taught, they can be proved by reason to be necessary truths; even the so-called proofs of the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul are wretched sophistries (see the Quaestiones subtilissimae); it is not the syllogism that is of value in religion, but faith only; it is not the understanding which forms the centre of human nature, but the will; voluntas superior intellectu! However intolerant from the ecclesiastical point of view Duns Scotus might personally be, the path that he trod led to freedom. And why? Because this Anglo-Saxon is absolutely sincere. He accepts without question all the doctrines of the Roman Church, even those which do violence to the Teutonic nature, but he despises all deceit. What Lutheran theologian of the eighteenth century would have dared to declare the existence of God to be incapable of philosophic proof? What persecutions had not Kant to suffer for this very thing? Scotus had long ago asserted it. And Scotus, by putting the Individual in the centre of his philosophy as « the one real thing," saves the personality; and that means the rescue of everything. Now this one example shows with special clearness that all those who follow the same path, the path of sincerity, are closely connected with one another; for what the theologian Scotus teaches is lived by the mystic Francis of Assisi: the will is the supreme thing, God is a direct perception, not a logical deduction, personality is the "greatest blessing"; Occam, on the other hand, a pupil of Scotus, and as zealous a dogmatist as his master, found it not only necessary to separate faith still more completely from knowledge, and to destroy rationalistic theology by proving that the most important Church dogmas are actually absurd, whereby he became a founder of the sciences of observation -- but he also upheld the cause of the Kings in opposition to the Papal stool, that is, he fought for Teutonic nationalism against Roman universalism; at the same time he also stoutly upheld the rights of the Church against the interference of the Roman Pontifex -- and for this he was thrown into prison. Here, as we see, Politics, Science and Philosophy, in their later anti-Roman development, are directly connected with Theology. Even such hasty indications will, I think, suffice to convince the reader that the grouping which I suggest goes to the heart of the mat ter. This division has one great advantage, namely, that it is not limited to a few centuries, but permits us to survey at one glance the history of a thousand years, From Scotus Erigena to Arthur Schopenhauer. In the second place, derived as it is from living facts, it has the further advantage for our own practical life that it teaches us unlimited tolerance towards every sincere, genuinely Teutonic view; we do not inquire about the What of a particular Philosophy, but about the How; free or not free? personal or not personal? It is solely thus that we learn to draw a clear line between our own selves and the alien, and to oppose the latter with all our weapons at once and at all times, no matter how noble and unselfish and thoroughly Teutonic he may pretend to be, The enemy worms his way into our very souls. Was that not the case with Thomas Aquinas? And do we not see a similar phenomenon in the case of Leibniz and Hegel? The great Occam was called doctor invincibilis: may we live to see many doctores invincibiles taking part in the struggle which threatens our culture on all sides! The ground is now, I hope, sufficiently prepared to enable us to proceed methodically to consider the four groups of men who devoted their lives to the service of truth, without laying the flattering unction to their souls that they possessed or could fully grasp it; by their combined efforts the new philosophy of life has gradually assumed a more and more definite shape. These groups are the theologians, the mystics, the humanists and the natural scientists, in which the last-named category the philosophers in the narrower sense of the word are included. For the sake of convenience we shall retain the groups thus established, but we must avoid attaching to such a definition any wider significance than that of a convenient and practical handle for our purpose, for the four classes merge into each other at a hundred points. Were it my intention to defend any artificial thesis, the group of the theologians would trouble me considerably; indeed I should be tortured with the feeling of my incompetence. But disregarding all technical details which may be beyond my comprehension, I need only open my eyes to see theologians of the character of Duns Scotus as direct pioneers of the Reformation, and not only of the Reformation -- for that remained from a religious point of view a very unsatisfactory piece of patchwork, or, as Lamprecht optimistically says, "a leaven for the religious attitude of the future" -- but also as the pioneers of a far-reaching movement of fundamental importance in the building up of a new Philosophy. We know what metaphysical acumen Kant employs in his Critique of Pure Reason to prove that "all attempts to establish a theology by the aid of speculation alone are fruitless and from their inner nature null and void"; [13] this proof was indispensable for the foundation of his philosophy; it was Kant, the all-destroyer, as Moses Mendelssohn fitly named him, who first shattered the sham edifice of Roman theology. The very earliest theologians, who followed the "way of truth" had undertaken the same task. Duns Scotus and Occam were not of course in a position, as Kant was, to under~ mine the" sham edifice" of the Church by the direct method of natural science, but for all practical purposes they had with adequate power of conviction attained exactly the same end, by the reductio ad absurdum of the hypothesis which was opposed to them. This fact was bound to lead with mathematical necessity to two immediate consequences: first, the freeing of reason with all that pertained to it from the service of theology, where it was of no use; secondly, the basing of religious faith upon another principle, since that of reason had proved useless. And in fact, as far as the freeing of reason is concerned, we already see Occam joining hands with Roger Bacon, a member of his own order, and demanding the empirical observation of nature; at the same time we see him enter the sphere of practical politics to demand wider personal and national freedom. This was a demand of freed reason, for fettered reason had tried to prove the universal Civitas Dei (in Occam's day by Dante's testimony) to be a divine institution. And in regard to the second point it is clear that, if the doctrines of religion find no guarantee in the reasoned conclusions of the brain, the theologian must endeavour with all the more energy to find this guarantee elsewhere, and the only available source was in the first place to be found in Holy Scripture. However paradoxical it may at first appear, it is nevertheless a fad that it was the violent, intolerant, narrow-minded orthodoxy of Scotus, in contrast to the occasionally almost free-thinking imperturbability of a Thomas, playing in a spirit of superiority with Augustinian contradictions, which pointed the way to emancipation from the Church. For the tendency of Thomas' thought. which the Roman Church so strongly supported, in reality emancipated it entirely from the doctrine of Christ. The Church with its Church Fathers and Councils had already pressed itself so much into the foreground that the Gospel had seriously lost credit: now it was proved that the dogmas of faith "had to be so," as reason could at any moment demonstrate that this is a logical necessity. To refer further to Holy Scripture would be just as foolish as if a captain, on going to sea, were to take a few pailfuls of water from the river that feeds the ocean and throw them over the bowsprit, for fear he should not have sufficient depth of water. But even before Thomas Aquinas had started to build his Tower of Babel, many profoundly sensitive minds had felt that this tendency which the Romish Church had introduced in practice and Anselm in theory, meant the death of all sincere religion: the greatest of these was Francis of Assisi. Certainly this extraordinary man belongs to the group of the Mystics, but he also deserves mention here among the theologians, for it was from him that the champions of true Christian theology derived their inspiration. That, indeed, seems paradoxical, for no saint was less of a theologian than Francis: but it is an historical fact, and the paradox disappears when we see that it is his emphasising of the importance of the Gospel and of Jesus Christ that forms the connection. This layman, who forces his way into the Church, pushes the priesthood aside, and proclaims the Word of Christ to all people, represents a violent reaction un the part of men longing for religion, against the cold, incomprehensible, argumentative and stilted faith in dogma. Francis, who from youth had been subject to Waldensian influence, doubtless knew the Gospel well; [14] we should almost have said it was a miracle, did we not know it was the merest accident, that he was not burned as a heretic; his religion can be expressed in the words of Luther: "The law of Christ is not doctrine but life, not word but being, not sign but fulness itself." [15] The Gospel which Francis rescued from oblivion became the rock of refuge to which the northern theologians retired, when they had convinced themselves that theological nationalism was untenable and dangerous. And they did so with the passion of combative conviction, urged on by the example of Francis. Duns teaches in direct contrast to Thomas that the highest bliss of heaven will not be Knowing but Loving. The influence which such a tendency must in time acquire is clear; we have already seen how highly Scotus and Occam were esteemed by Luther, while he called Thomas a gossip. The recognition of the fundamental importance of the Biblical Word, the emphasising of the evangelical life in contrast to dogmatic doctrine must inevitably result. Even the more external movement of revolt against the pomp and greed and the whole worldly tendency of the Curia was so self-evident a conclusion from these premisses, that we find even Occam attacking all these abuses, and Jacopone da Todi, the author of Stabat Mater, intellectually the most pre-eminent of the Italian Franciscans of the thirteenth century, calls upon men to revolt openly against Pope Boniface VIII, and for so doing has to spend the best years of his life in an underground prison. And though Duns Scotus himself emphasises the importance of works almost more than anyone else, while in reference to grace and faith he is not prepared to go even as far as Thomas, it is only a very superficial thinker who sees in this anything specifically Roman, and does not realise that this very doctrine necessarily paves the way for that of Luther: for the whole aim of these Franciscans is to make will, and not formal orthodoxy, the central point of religion; this makes religion something lived, experienced, immediately present. As Luther says, "Faith is Will essentially good"; and in another passage, "Faith is a living, busy, active, mighty thing, so that it could not but unceasingly do good." [16] Now this "Will," this "Doing" are the things upon which Scotus and Occam, taught by Francis, lay a I emphasis, and that, too, in contrast to a cold, academic creed. Certain much-read authors of the present day use the terms "faith" and "good works" in a most frivolous manner; without joining issue with those to whom the practice of falsehood seems a "good work," I ask every unbiased reader to consider Francis of Assisi and to say what is the essence of this personality. Everyone must answer "the power of faith." He is faith incorporate: "not doctrine but life, not word but being." Read the history of his life. It was not priestly admonition, not sacramental consecration that led him to God, but the vision of the Cross in a ruined chapel near Assisi and Christ's message in the diligently studied Gospel. [17] And yet Francis -- as also the Order which he founded -- is rightly regarded by us as the special Apostle of good works. And now look at Martin Luther -- the advocate of redemption by faith -- and say whether he has done no works, whether on the contrary he did not consecrate his life to working, whether indeed he was not the very man who revealed to us the secret of good works, when he said they must be eitel Freie Werke, "nothing but free works, done only to please God, not for the sake of piety ... for wherever they contain the false supplement and wrong-headed idea that we wish by works to become pious and blessed, they are not good but utterly culpable, for they are not free." [18] The learned may shake their heads as they will, we laymen recognise the fact that a Francis of Assisi has led up to a Duns Scotus and the latter to a Martin Luther; for it is the impulse of freedom -- the freeing of the personality that is at the root of this movement. The whole life of Francis is a revolt of the individual -- against his family, against all society around him, against a thoroughly corrupt priesthood and a Church that had fallen away from Apostolic tradition; and while the priesthood prescribes to him definite paths as alone conducing to bliss, he undauntedly goes his own way and as a free man holds commune directly with his God. Such a view raised to the sphere of theological philosophy must needs lead to almost exclusive emphasising of freedom of will, and this is exactly what took place in the case of Scotus. We are bound to admit that the latter with his one-sided emphasising of liberum arbitrium shows less philosophic depth than his opponent Thomas, but all the more profundity in religion and (if I may so say) in politics. For hereby this theology succeeds -- in direct contrast to Rome -- in making the individual the central point in religion: "Christ is the door of salvation: it is for man to enter in or not!" Now it is this accentuation of free personality that is the only important matter -- not subtleties concerning grace and merit, faith and good works. This path led to an anti-Roman, antisacerdotal conception of the Church and to an altogether new religion which was spiritual, not historical and materialistic. That very soon became clear. Luther, the political hero, did indeed close the door for a long time against this natural and inevitable religious movement. Like Duns Scotus he too enveloped his healthy, strong, freedom-breathing perception in a tissue of over-subtle theological dogmas, and never freed himself from the historical and therefore intolerant conceptions of a faith which had grown out of Judaism; but this attitude gave him the right strength for the right work: in his struggle for the Fatherland and the dignity of the Teutonic peoples he proved victorious, whereas his rigid, monkish theology broke like an earthen pitcher, being too small to hold all that he himself had poured into it. It was not till the nineteenth century that we again took those great theologians as our starting-point to enable us to pursue the path to freedom even in the sphere of theology. Let us not underestimate the value of the theologians for the development of our culture! Whoever with more knowledge than I possess makes a further study of what has here been briefly sketched will, I think, find the work of these men even up to our own times manifoldly blessed. A learned Roman theologian, Abelard, exclaims even in the twelfth century, "Si omnes patres sic, at ego non sic!" [19] and it would be a good thing if a great many theologians of our century possessed the same courage. See what a Savonarola -- the man whose fiery spirit inspired a Leonardo, a Michael Angelo, a Raphael -- does for freedom, when from the pulpit he cries: [20] "Behold Rome, the head of the world, and from the head turn the eyes upon the limbs! from the sole of the foot to the crown of the head not one part is sound; we live among Christians, have intercourse with them; but they are not Christians who are Christians in name only; it were truly better to live among the heathen!" -- this monk, I say, when he utters such words before thousands and seals them with his death at the stake, does more for freedom than a whole academy of free-thinkers; for freedom asserts itself not by opinions but by attitude, it is "not word, but being." So too, in the nineteenth century, a pious, inwardly religious Schleiermacher has certainly done more in the interests of a living, religious philosophy than a sceptical David Strauss. The real High School of freedom from hieratic and historical shackles is mysticism, the philosophia teutonica as it was called. [21] A mystical philosophy, when completely worked out, dissolves one dogmatic theory after another as allegory; what remains is pure symbol, for religion is then no longer a creed, a hope, a conviction, but an experience of life, an actual process, a direct state of mind. Lagarde somewhere says, It Religion is an unconditional present"; [22] this is the view of a mystic. The most perfect expression of absolutely mystical religion is found among the Aryan Indians; but scarcely a hair's-breadth separates our great Teutonic mystics from their Indian predecessors and contemporaries; only one thing really distinguishes them: Indian religion is genuinely Indo-Teutonic, mysticism finds in it a natural, universally recognised place, but there is no place for mysticism in such a conjunction as that of Semitic history with pseudo-Egyptian magic, and so it was and is at best merely tolerated, though mostly persecuted by our various sects. The Christian Churches are right from their point of view. Listen to the fifty-fourth saying of Meister Eckhart: "You know that all our perfection and all our bliss depends on this, that man should pass through and over all creation, all temporality and all being, and go into the depths which are unfathomable." That is essentially Indian and might be a quotation from the Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad. No sophistry could succeed in proving a connection between this religion and Abrahamitic promises, and no honest man will deny that in a philosophy which rises above "creation" and "temporality," the Fall and the Redemption must be merely symbols of an otherwise inexpressible truth of inner experience. The following passage from the forty-ninth Sermon of Eckhart is also apposite: It So long as I am this or that or have this or that, I am not all things and have not all things; but as soon as you decide that you are not, and have not, this or that, then you are everywhere; as soon, therefore, as you are neither this nor that, you are all things." [23] This is the doctrine of Atman, and to it the theology of Duns Scotus is just as irrelevant as that of Thomas Aquinas. Before leaving the subject, upon one thing I must insist. The religion of Jesus Christ was just such a mystical religion; His deeds and words prove it. His saying, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you," [24] cannot be interpreted by empiricism or history. Naturally, I cannot here enter into a fuller exposition of mysticism, that would be seeking in a few lines to fathom human nature where it is "unfathomable"; my duty consists solely in so presenting the subject that even the uninitiated will at once perceive that it is the necessary tendency of mysticism to free men from ecclesiastical tenets. Fortunately -- I may well say so -- it is not the Teutonic nature to pursue thoughts to their last consequences, in other words, to let them tyrannise over us, and so we see Eckhart in spite of his Atman doctrine remaining a good Dominican -- escaping the Inquisition, it is true, by the skin of his teeth [25] -- but signing all necessary orthodox confessions, and we never find that -- in spite of all the recommendations of the sopor pacis (the sleep of peace) by Bonaventura (1221-1274) and others -- quietism has with us as with the Indians drained the veins of life. For that reason I shall limit myself to the narrow compass of this chapter, and only briefly point out what a destructive influence the army of Mystics exercised on the alien traditional religion, and how on the other hand they did so much to create and promote a new philosophy in keeping with our individuality. Usually too little is made both of the negative and of the positive activity of these men. Very striking is, in the first place, their dislike for Jewish doctrines of religion; every Mystic is, whether he will or not, a born Anti-Semite. Pious minds like Bonaventura get over the difficulty by interpreting the whole Old Testament allegorically and giving a symbolical meaning to the borrowed mythical elements -- a tendency which we find fully developed five hundred years earlier in Scotus Erigena, and which we may trace still further back, to Marcion and Origines. [26] But this does not satisfy those souls in their thirst after true religion. The strictly orthodox Thomas a. Kempis prays with pathetic simplicity to God, "Let it not be Moses or the Prophets that speak to me, but speak thyself ... from them I hear words indeed, but the spirit is absent; what they say is beautiful, but it warms not the heart." [27] This feeling we meet with in almost all the Mystics, but nowhere so beautifully expressed as by the great Jacob Bohme (1575-1624). In regard to many passages in the Bible, after he has explained all that he can (e.g., the whole history of creation), symbolically and allegorically, and sees that he cannot proceed any further, he simply exclaims, "Here the eyes of Moses are veiled," and goes on to interpret the matter freely in his own way! [28] The contradiction is more serious when we come to conceptions of heaven and especially of hell. To be quite candid, we must admit that the conception of hell is really the blot of shame upon ecclesiastical doctrine. Born amid the scum of raceless slaves in Asia Minor, nurtured during the hopelessly chaotic, ignorant, bestial centuries of the declining and fallen Roman Empire, it was always repulsive to noble minds, though but few were able to rise so completely above it as Origenes and that incomprehensibly great mind, Scotus Erigena. [29] We can easily comprehend how few could do so, for ecclesiastical Christianity had gradually grown into a religion of heaven and hell everything else was of little moment. Take up any old chronicles you like, it is the fear of hell that has been the most effectual, generally the sole religious motive. The immense estates of the Church, her incalculable incomes from indulgences and suchlike, she owes almost solely to the fear of hell. At a later period the Jesuits, by frankly making this fear of hell the central point of all religion, [30] acted quite logically and soon earned the reward of consistent sincerity; for heaven and hell, reward and punishment form to-day more than ever the real or at least the effectual basis of our Church ethics. [31] "Otez la crainte de l'enfer a un chretien, et vous lui oterez sa croyance," says Diderot not quite unjustly. [32] If we take all these facts into consideration, we shall comprehend what an effect must have been produced by the beautiful doctrine of Eckhart: "Were there no Hell and no Kingdom of Heaven, yet I would love God -- Thee, Thou sweet father, and Thy sublime nature"; and, "The right, perfect essence of the Spirit is to love God for His own goodness, though there were no Heaven and no Hell." [33] Some fifty years later the unknown author of the Theologia deutsch, that splendid monument of German mysticism in Catholic garb, expresses himself still more definitely, for he entitles his tenth chapter, "How perfect men have lost their fear of hell and desire of heaven," and shows that perfection consists in freedom from these conceptions: "The freedom of those men is such that they have lost fear of pain or hell, and hope of reward or heaven, and live in pure submission and obedience to everlasting goodness, in the complete freedom of fervent love." It is scarcely necessary to prove that between this freedom and the "quaking fear," which Loyola holds to be the soul of religion, [34] there is a gulf deeper and wider than that which separates planet from planet. There two radically different souls are speaking, a Teutonic and a non-Teutonic. [35] In the following chapter this "man of Frankfort," as he is called, goes on to say that there is no hell in the ordinary, popular sense of a future penitentiary, but that hell is a phenomenon of our present life. This priest is obviously at one with Origenes and Erigena and comes to the conclusion that "hell passes away and heaven continues to exist." One further remark most emphatically characterises his opinion. He calls heaven and hell "two good, sure ways for man in this age," he assigns to neither of these "ways" any preference over the other and expresses the opinion that "in hell a man may be quite at his ease and as safe as in heaven!" This view, which we find in this form or in a similar form among other Mystics, e.g., Eckhart's pupils Tauler and Seuse, is especially often and clearly expressed by Jacob Bohme: it is the expression of a philosophy which has pursued the thought further, and is on the point of passing from a negative conclusion to a positive conception. Thus to the question, "Whither does the soul go when the body dies, be it blessed or condemned? " he gives the answer, "The soul does not require to leave the body, but the external, mortal life and the body separated themselves from it. The soul has previously had heaven and hell within it ... for heaven and hell are everywhere present. It is merely a turning of the will towards the love of God or towards the wrath of God, and such may take place while the body is still alive." [36] Here nothing remains vague; for we manifestly stand with both feet on the foundation of a new religion; it is not new in so far as Bohme can point in this case to the words of Christ: "The Kingdom of God cometh not with outward signs"; "The world of angels is within the place (in loco) of this world" [37] but it is a new religion as compared with all Church doctrines. In another passage he writes: "The right, holy man, who is concealed in the visible man, is in Heaven as well as God, and Heaven is in him." [38] And Bohme fearlessly goes further and denies the absolute difference between good and evil; the inner foundation of the soul, he says, is neither good nor bad, God himself is both: "He is himself all Existence, he is Good and Evil, Heaven and Earth, Light and Darkness"; [39] it is the will that first "distinguishes" in the mass of indifferent actions, it is by the will that the action of the doer becomes good or evil. This is pure Indian doctrine; our theologians have long since and without difficulty proved that it simply contradicts the doctrine of the Christian Church. [40] While the mystics already named and the incalculable number of others who held similar views, whether Protestants or Catholics, remained inside the Church, without ever thinking how thoroughly they were undermining that toilsomely erected structure, there were large groups of Mystics who perhaps did not go so far in viewing the essence of religion in the light of inward experience as the Theologia deutsch and Jacob B6hme, or as the saintly Antoinette Bourignon (1616-80), who wished to unite all sects by abolishing the doctrines of Scripture and emphasising only the longing for God: but these teachers directly attacked all ecclesiasticism and priesthood, dogmas, scripture and sacrament. Thus Amalrich of Chartres (died 1209), Professor of Theology in Paris, rejected the whole Old Testament and all sacraments. and accepted only the direct revelation of God in the heart of each individual. This gave rise to the league of the" Brothers of the Free Spirit," which was, it seems, a rather licentious and outrageous society. Others again, like Johannes Wessel (1419-89) by greater moderation achieved greater success; Wessel is essentially a mystic and regards religion as an inner, present experience, but in the figure of Christ he sees the divine motive power of this experience, and far from wishing to destroy the Church, which has handed down this valuable legacy, he desires to purify it by destroying the chimeras of Rome. Staupitz, the protector of Luther, holds very similar views. Men like these, who imperceptibly merge into the class of the theologians like Wyclif and Hus, are vigorous pioneers of the Reformation. Mysticism, in fact, had in so far a great deal to do with the Reformation, as Martin Luther in the depths of his heart was a mystic: he loved Eckhart and was responsible for the first printed edition of the Theologia deutsch; in particular, his central theory of present conversion by faith can only be understood through mysticism. On the other hand, he was annoyed by the "fanatics" who would soon, he thought, have spoiled his life-work. Mystics like Thomas Munzer (1490-1525), who began by abusing the "delicately treading reformers" and then openly revolted against all secular authority, have done more harm than anything else to the great political Church-reform. And even such noble men as Kaspar Schwenkfeld (1490-1561) merely frittered away their powers and awakened bitter passions by abandoning contemplative mysticism for practical Church reform. A Jacob Bohme, who quietly remains in the Church, but teaches that the sacraments (baptism and communion) are "not essentials" of Christianity, effects much more. [41] The sphere of the genuine mystic's influence is within not without. Hence in the sixteenth century we see the good Protestant tinker Bunyan and the pious Catholic priest Molinos doing more sound and lasting work than crowds of free-thinkers to free religion from narrowly ecclesiastical and coldly historical conceptions. Bunyan, who never harmed a soul, spent the greater part of his life in prison, a victim of Protestant intolerance; the gentle Molinos, hounded like a mad dog by the Jesuits, submitted in silence to the penances imposed by the Inquisition and died from their severity. The influence of both lasted, raising to a higher level the minds of religious men within the Churches; in this way they surely paved the way for secession. Now that I have indicated how mysticism in countless respects broke up and destroyed the un-Teutonic conceptions which had been forced upon us, it remains for me to indicate how infinitely stimulating and helpful the Mystics at all times were in the building up of our new world and our new Philosophy. Here we might be inclined to distinguish with Kant -- who, like Luther, is closely bound up with the Mystics, though he might not wish to have much to do with them, -- between "dreamers of reason" and "dreamers of feeling." [42] For as a matter of fact, two distinct leading tendencies are noticeable, the one towards the Moral and Religious, the other rather to the Metaphysical. But it would be difficult to follow out the distinction, for metaphysics and religion can never be fully separated in the mind of the Teuton. How important, for example, is the complete transference of Good and Evil to the will, which on close inspection we find already indicated in Duns Scotus and clearly expressed in Eckhart and Jacob Bohme. For this the will must be free. Now the feeling of necessity comes into all mysticism, since mysticism is closely bound up with nature, in which necessity is everywhere seen at work. [43] Hence Bohme at once calls nature "eternal," and denies its creation out of nothing: there he reasoned like a philosopher. But how to save freedom? Here, clearly, a moral and a metaphysical problem clutch at each other like two men drowning: and in fact things looked black till the great Kant, in whose hands the various threads which we are following -- theology, mysticism, humanism and natural science -- were joined, came to the rescue. It is only by the perception of the transcendental ideality of time and space that we can save freedom without fettering reason, that is, we can do so only by realising that our own being is not completely exhausted by the world of phenomena (including our own body), that rather there is a direct antagonism between the most indubitable experiences of our life and the world which we grasp with the senses and think with the brain. For example, in reference to freedom, Kant has laid down once for all the principle that "no reason can explain the possibility of freedom"; [44] for nature and freedom are contradictions; he who as an inveterate realist denies this will find that, if he follows out the question to its final consequences, " neither nature nor freedom remains." [45] In presence of nature, freedom is simply unthinkable. "We understand quite well what freedom is in a practical connection, but in theory, so far as its nature is concerned, we cannot without contradiction even think of trying to understand it"; [46] for, "the fact that my will moves my arm is not more comprehensible to me than if some one were to say that my will could also hold back the moon in its course; the difference is merely this, that I experience the former, while the latter has never occurred to my senses," [47] But the former -- the freedom of my will to move my arm -- I experience, and hence in another passage Kant comes to the irrefutable conclusion: "I say now, every being that cannot act but under the idea of freedom is for that very reason practically and really free." [48] In such a work as this I must, of course, avoid all minute metaphysical discussion, though indeed nothing short of that would make the matter really clear and convincing, but I hope that I have said enough to make everyone feel how closely religion and philosophy are here connected. Such a problem could never suggest itself to the Jews, since their observation of nature and of their own selves was never more than skin-deep, and they remained on the childish standpoint of empiricism hooded on both sides with blinkers; much less need we mention the refuse of humanity from Africa, Egypt and elsewhere, which helped to build up the Christian Church. In this sphere therefore -- where the deepest secrets of the human mind were to be unlocked -- a positive structure had to be built from the very foundations; for the Hellenes had contributed little [49] to this purpose and the Indians were as yet unknown. Augustine -- in his true nature a genuine mystic -- had pointed the way by his remarks on the nature of time (p. 78), and likewise Abelard in regard to space (vol. i. p. 502), but it was the Mystics proper who first went to the root of the matter. They never grow tired of emphasising the ideality of time and space. "The moment contains eternity," says Eckhart more than once. Or again: "Everything that is in God is a present moment, without renewal or future creation." [50] Here, as so often, the Silesian shoemaker is especially convincing, for with him such perceptions have lost almost all their abstract flavour and speak directly from the mind to the mind. If time is only a conditional form of experience, if God is in no way "subject to space" [51] then Eternity is nothing future, we already grasp it perfectly and completely, and so Bohme says in his famous lines:
The other closely related problem of the simultaneous sway of freedom and necessity was likewise always present to the Mystics; they speak often of their "own" mutable will in contrast to the "everlasting" immutable will of necessity, and so forth; and though it was Kant who first solved the riddle, yet a contemporary of Jacob Bohme, the great "dreamer of feeling," approached very near to it. Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), one of the greatest "dreamers of reason" of all times, propounds the paradox that freedom and necessity are synonymous! Here we see the audacity of true mystical thought; it is not restrained by the halter of purely formal logic, it looks outwards with the eye of the genuine investigator and admits that the law of nature is necessity, but then it probes its own inner soul and asserts "my law is freedom." [53] So much for the positive contribution of the Mystics to modern metaphysics. Still more important is the part they played in the establishment of a pure doctrine of morals. The most essential points have been already mentioned: ethical merit centred in Will, purely as such; religion not a matter of future reward and future punishment, but a present act, a grasping of Eternity at the present moment. This gives rise to an utterly different idea of sin, and consequently of virtue, from that which the Christian Church has inherited from Judaism. Thus Eckhart, for example, says: "That man cannot be called virtuous who does works as virtue commands, but only the man who does these works out of virtue; not by prayer can a heart become pure, but from a pure heart the pure prayer flows." [54] We find this thought in all Mystics in countless passages, it is the central point of their faith; it forms the kernel of Luther's religion; [55] it was most completely expressed by Kant, who says: "There is nothing in the world nor anything outside of it which can be termed absolutely and altogether good, except a good Will. A good Will is esteemed to be so not by the effect which it produces nor by its fitness for accomplishing any given end, but by its mere good volition, that is, it is good in itself ... even though it should happen that, owing to an unhappy conjunction of events or the scanty endowment of unkind nature, this good volition should be deprived of power to execute its benign intent, executing nothing and only retaining the good Will, still it would shine like a jewel in itself and by virtue of its native lustre. The usefulness or fruitlessness of acts cannot add to or detract from this lustre." [56] Unfortunately, I must limit myself to this central point of Teutonic ethics; everything else is derived from it. But I must mention one thing more before taking leave of the Mystics -- their influence upon natural science. Passionate love of nature is strongly marked in most of the Mystics, hence the extraordinary power of intuition which we notice in them. They frequently identify nature with God, often they put nature alongside of God as something Eternal, but they hardly ever fall into the hereditary error of the Christian Church, that of teaching men to despise and hate nature. It is true that Erigena is still so much under the influence of the Church Fathers that he regards the admiration of nature as a sin comparable to breach of marriage vows, [57] but how different is the view of Francis of Assisi! Read his famous Hymn to the Sun, which he wrote down shortly before his death as the last and complete expression of his feelings, and sang day and night till he died, to such a bright and cheerful melody that ecclesiastically pious souls were shocked at hearing it from a death-bed. [58] Here he speaks of "mother" earth, of his "brothers" the sun, wind and fire, of his "sisters" the moon, stars and water, of the many-coloured flowers and fruits, and lastly of his dear "sister," the morte corporale, and the whole closes with praise, blessing and thanks to the altissimu, bon signore. [59] In this last, most heartfelt hymn of praise this holy man does not touch upon a single dogma of the Church. Few things are more instructive than a comparison between these outpourings of a man who had become altogether religious and now gathers his sinking strength to sing exultingly to all nature this rapturous unecclesiastical tat tvam asi [60] and the orthodox, soulless, cold confession of faith of the learned, experienced politician and theologian Dante in the twenty-fourth canto of his Paradiso. [61] Dante with his song closed an old, dead age, Francis began a new one. Jacob Bohme puts nature above Holy Scripture: "There is no book in which you will find more of divine wisdom than the book of nature spread before you in the form of a green and growing meadow; there you will see the wondrous power of God, you will smell and taste it, though it be but an image ... but to the searcher it is a beloved teacher, he will learn very much from it." [62] This tendency of mind revolutionised our natural science. I need only refer to Paracelsus, whose importance in almost all the natural sciences is daily becoming more and more recognised. The great and enduring part of this remarkable man's work is not the discovery of facts -- by his unfortunate connection with magic and alchemy he spread many absurd ideas -- but the spirit with which he inspired natural science. Virchow, who is certainly not prejudiced in favour of mysticism, and who shows poor courage in calling Paracelsus a "charlatan," nevertheless expressly declares that it was he who delivered the death-blow to ancient medicine and gave science the "idea of life. [63] Paracelsus is the creator of real physiology, neither more nor less; and that is so very high an honour that a soberly scientific historian of medicine speaks of "the sublimely radiant figure of this hero." [64] Paracelsus was a fanatical mystic; he said that" the inner light stands high above bestial reason"; hence his extreme one-sidedness. He would, for example, have little to do with anatomy; it seemed to him" dead," and he said that the chief thing was "the conclusion to be drawn from great nature -- that is to say, the outward man -- concerning the little nature of the individual." But in order to get at this outward man, he established two principles which have become essential in all natural science -- observation and experiment. In this way he succeeded in founding a rational system of pathology: "Fevers are storms, which cure themselves," &c.; likewise rational therapeutics: "The aim of medicine should be to support nature in her efforts to heal." And how beautiful is his admonition to young doctors: "The loftiest basis of medicine is love ... it is love which teaches art and outside of love no doctor is born." [63] One more service of this adventurous mystic should be mentioned: he was the first to introduce the German language into the University! "Truth and freedom" was, in fact, the motto of all genuine mysticism; for that reason its apostles banished the language of privileged hypocritical learning from the lecture-rooms and firmly refused to wear the red livery of the faculty: "the universities supply only the red cloak, the trencher-cap and a four-cornered fool." [66] Mysticism achieved a great deal more, especially in the sphere of medicine and chemistry. Thus the mystic van Helmont (1577-1644) discovered laudanum to deaden pain, and carbonic acid; he was the first to recognise the true nature of hysteria, catarrh, &c. Glisson (1597-1677), who by his discovery of the irritability of living tissue very greatly advanced our knowledge of the animal organism, was a pronounced mystic, who said of himself that "inner thought" guided the scalpel. [67] We could easily add to the above list, but all that we require is to point to the fact. The mystic has -- as we see in the case of Stahl with his phlogiston [68] and of the great astronomer Kepler, an equally zealous mystic and Protestant -- thrown many flashes of genius upon the path of natural science and the philosophy based thereon. The mystic was neither a reliable guide nor a reliable worker; but yet his services are not to be overlooked. Not only does he discover much, as we have just seen, not only does he fill with his wealth of ideas the frequently very empty arsenal of the so-called empiricists (Francis Bacon, for example, copies chapter after chapter from Paracelsus without any acknowledgment); but he possesses a peculiar instinct of his own, which nothing in the world can replace and which more cautious men must know how to turn to account. The philosopher Baumgarten recognised even in the eighteenth century that "vague perception often carries within it the germs of clear perception." [69] Kant has made a profound remark in this connection. As is well known, this philosopher recognises no interpretation of empirical phenomena but the mechanical, and that, as he convincingly proves, because fl only those causes of world- phenomena which are based upon the laws of motion of mere matter are capable of being comprehended"; but this does not prevent him from making the remark, which is worth taking to heart, concerning Stahl's nowadays much ridiculed idea of life-power: "Yet I am convinced that Stahl, who is fond of explaining the animal changes organically, is often nearer the truth than Hofmann, Boerhaave and others, who leave out of account the immaterial forces and cling to the mechanical causes." [70] And so it seems to me that these men who are "nearer the truth" have done great service in the building up of modem science and philosophy, and we cannot afford to neglect them either now or in the future. From this point there runs a narrow path along the loftiest heights -- accessible only to the elect -- leading over to that artistic intuition closely related to the mystical, the importance of which Goethe revealed to us before the end of the eighteenth century. His discovery of the intermaxillary bone was made in the year 1784, the metamorphosis of plants appeared in 1790, the introduction to comparative anatomy 1795. Here that gushing enthusiasm which had awakened Luther's scorn, that "raving with reason and feeling" which so angered the mild-tempered Kant, were elevated and purified to "seeing," after a night lit up by will-o'-the-wisps, a new day had dawned, and the genius of the new Teutonic philosophy could print together with his Comparative Anatomy the splendid poem which begins:
and closes with the words:
It is self-evident that the Humanists, in a certain sense, form a direct contrast to the Mystics; yet there is no real contradiction between them. Thus Bohme, though not a learned man, has a very high opinion of the heathen, in so far as they are "children of free will," and says that "in them the spirit of freedom has revealed great wonders, as we see from the wisdom which they have bequeathed to us;" [72] indeed, he boldly asserts that "in these intelligent heathens the inner sacred kingdom is reflected." [73] Almost all genuine Humanists, when they have the necessary courage, devote much thought to the already discussed central problem of all ethics and are all without exception of the opinion of Pomponazzi (1462-1525) that a virtue which aims at reward is no virtue; that to regard fear and hope as moral motives is childish and worthy only of the uneducated mob; that the idea of immortality should be considered from a purely philosophical standpoint and has nothing to do with the theory of morals, &c. [74] The Humanists are just as eager as the Mystics to tear down the philosophy of religion imposed upon us by Rome and to build up a new one in its place, but their chief interests and efforts lie in a different direction. Their weapon of destruction is scepticism; that of the Mystics was faith. Even when humanism did not lead to frank scepticism, it always laid the foundation of very independent judgment. [75] Here we should at once mention Dante, who honours Virgil more than any of the Church Fathers, and who, far from teaching seclusion and asceticism, considers man's real happiness to lie in the exercise of his individual powers. [76] Petrarch, who is usually mentioned as the first real humanist, follows the example of his great predecessor: he calls Rome an "empia Babilonia" and the Church an "impudent wench:"
Like Dante he upbraids Constantine, who by his fatal gift, mal nate ricchezze, has transformed the once chaste, unassuming bride of Christ into "a shameless adulteress." [77] But scepticism soon followed so inevitably in the train of humanistic culture that it filled the College of Cardinals and even ascended the Papal stool; it was the Reformation in league with the narrow Basque mind that first brought about a pietistic reaction. Even at the beginning of the sixteenth century the Italian humanists establish the principle, intus ut libet, foris ut moris est, and Erasmus publishes his immortal Praise of Folly, in which churches, priesthood, dogmas, ethical doctrine, in short, the whole Roman structure, the whole "foul-smelling weeds of theology," as he calls them, are so denounced that some have been of opinion that this one work contributed more than anything else to the Reformation. [78] Similar methods and equal ability are revealed with as much force in the eighteenth century by Voltaire. The most important contribution of the Humanists towards the construction of a new Teutonic philosophy is the relinking of our intellectual life to that of the related Indo- Europeans, in particular to that of the Hellenes, [79] and as a result of this the gradual development of the conception "man." The Mystics had destroyed the idea of time and so of history -- a perfectly justifiable reaction against the abuse of history by the Church; it was the task of the Humanists to build up true history anew, and so to put an end to the evil dream which the Chaos had conjured up. From Picus of Mirandola, who sees the divine guidance of God in the intellectual achievement of the Hellene, down to that great Humanist Johann Gottfried Herder, who asks himself "whether God might not after all have a plan in the vocation and institution of the human race," and who collects the "Voices" of all peoples, we see the historical horizon being extended, and we notice how this contact with the Hellenes led to a more and more distinct endeavour to arrange and thus give shape to experiences. And while the Humanists, in thus seeking inspiration outside, certainly over-estimated their own capacity just as much as the Mystics did in seeking it inwardly, yet many splendid results were achieved in both cases. I have shown how introspection led the Mystics to discoveries in outward nature -- an unexpected, paradoxical result; the Humanists struck out in the opposite direction, but with equal success; in their case it was the study of mankind around them that conduced to the strict delimitation of national individuality and to the decisive emphasising of the importance of the individual personality. It was philologists, not anatomists, who first propounded the theories of absolutely different human races, and though there may be a reaction at the present day, because the linguists have been inclined to lay too much stress on the single criterion of language, [80] yet the humanistic distinctions still hold and always will hold good; for they are facts of nature, facts, moreover, which can be more surely derived from the study of the intellectual achievements of peoples than from statistics of the breadth of skulls. So too out of the study of the dead languages there resulted a better knowledge of the living ones. We have seen how in India scientific philology was the outcome of a fervent longing to understand a half-forgotten idiom (vol. i. p. 432); the same thing took place among ourselves. A thorough knowledge of foreign, but related languages led to an ever more and more exact knowledge of the thorough development of our own. It must be confessed that this led, in so far as language is concerned, to a dark period of transition; the strong primal instinct of the people became awakened and, as usual, pedantic learning played havoc with this most sacred heritage, yet on the whole our languages came forth in purer beauty from the classical furnace; they were less powerful perhaps than before, but more pliant, more flexible and thus more perfect instruments for expressing the thoughts of a more advanced culture. The Roman Church, not the Humanists, as is so often ignorantly asserted, was the enemy of our language; on the contrary, it was the Humanists who. in league with the Mystics, introduced the native languages into literature and science; from Petrarch, the perfecter of the poetical language of Italy, and Boccaccio (one of the greatest of the early Humanists), the founder of Italian prose, to Boileau and Herder we see this everywhere, and in the universities it was, in addition to Mystics, like Paracelsus, pre- eminent Humanists, like Christian Thomasius, who forcibly introduced the mother-tongues, and thus rescued them, even in the circles of learning, from that contempt into which they had fallen owing to the enduring influence of Rome. We can scarcely estimate what this means for the development of our philosophy. The Latin tongue is like a lofty dam which dries up the intellectual field and shuts out the element of metaphysics; it has no sense of the mysterious, there is no walking on the boundary between the two realms of the Explorable and the Inexplorable; it is a legal and not a religious language. Indeed we can boldly assert that without the vehicle of our own Teutonic languages we should never have succeeded in giving shape and expression to our philosophy. [81] But however great this service may be, it by no means exhausts the contribution of the Humanists to our work of culture. This emphatic -- I might almost say sculptural -- chiselling of the distinct, this assertion of the justification, or I may say of the sacred character of the Individual led for the first time to the conscious acknowledgment of the value of personality. It is true that this fact was already implicitly embodied in the tendency of thought of a Duns Scotus (p. 409); but it only became common property through the works of the Humanists. The idea of Genius -- that is, of personality in its highest potentiality -- is what is essential. The men whose knowledge embraced a wide sphere gradually noticed in how various a degree the personality reveals itself autonomously, and so as absolutely original and creative. From the beginning of the Humanistic movement we can trace the dawn of this inevitable perception, till in the Humanists of the eighteenth century it became so dominant that it found expression on all sides and in the most varying forms, from Winckelmann's brilliant intuition, which confined itself to the most clearly visible works, to Hamann's endeavours to descend by dark paths to the innermost souls of creative spirits. The finest remark was made by Diderot in that monument of Humanism, the great French Encyclopaedia: it is, he says, l'activite de l' ame -- i.e., the higher activity of the soul -- which makes up genius. What in the case of others is remembrance, is in the case of genius actual intuitive perception; in genius everything springs into life and remains living. "If genius has passed by, it is as if the essence of things were transformed, for genius diffuses its character over everything that it touches." [82] Herder makes a similar remark: "The geniuses of the human race are the friends and saviours, guardians and helpers of the race. A beautiful act, which they inspire, exercises an endless and indelible effect." [83] Diderot and Herder rightly distinguish between genius and the greatest talent. Rousseau also distinguishes genius from talent and intellect, but he does it, after his fashion, in a more subjective way, by expressing the opinion that he who does not possess genius himself will never understand wherein it consists. One of his letters contains a profound remark: "C'est le genie qui rend le savoir utile." [84] Besides this, Rousseau has devoted a whole essay to the Hero, who is the brother of the genius, and like him a triumph of personality; Schiller indicates the affinity of the two by characterising the ideas of the genius as "heroic." "Without heroes no people," cried Rousseau, and thereby gave powerful expression to the Teutonic view of life. And what stamps a man as a hero? It is pre-eminence of Soul; not animal courage -- he emphasises this in particular -- but the power of personality. [85] Kant defines genius as " the talent to discover that which cannot be taught or learned." [86] It would be easy to multiply these few quotations by the hundred, to such an extent had humanistic culture gradually brought into the foreground of human interest the question of the importance of personality in contrast to the tyranny of so-called superpersonal revelations and laws. It was distinction between individuals (a matter absolutely unknown to mysticism) which first revealed the full importance of pre-eminent personalities as the true bearers of a culture, genuine, liberal, and capable of development; that is why this distinction was one of the most beneficial achievements of the rise and for the rise of our new culture; for it put really great men on the pedestal to which they rightly belong, and where everyone can clearly see them. Nothing short of this is freedom -- unconditionally to acknowledge human greatness, in whatever way it may arise. This "greatest bliss" as Goethe called it, the Humanists won back for us; henceforth we must strive with all our power to keep it. Whoever would rob us of it, though he came down from heaven, is our mortal foe. I do not intend to say anything more about the Humanists, for what I could say would only be a repetition of what is universally known; in their case I may take it for granted, as I could not in the case of the Mystics, that the facts, as also their importance, are on the whole correctly estimated; it was only necessary to emphasise that brilliant central point -- the emancipation of the individual -- because it is generally overlooked; it is only by the eye of genius that we can attain a bright and radiant philosophy, and it is only in our own languages that it can win its full expression. All men of culture are equally familiar with this last group of men struggling for a new philosophy -- the Naturalist-Philosophers. In their case, too, I can limit myself to the indications demanded by the nature and aim of this chapter. I am, however, forced to a certain detail because it is essential that I should, more emphatically and clearly than is usual, bring home to the reader who is not widely read in philosophy, the importance of this essential feature of our culture; this detail will, I hope, serve as an enlightenment of our understanding. The essential point is this, that men, in their desire to understand the world, are no longer satisfied with authoritative, superhuman claims, but turn once more to the world itself and question it; for centuries that had been forbidden. If we examine the matter closely, we shall see that this is a peculiarity common to all the groups which represent the awakening of Teutonism. For the Mystic absorbs himself into the world of his own mind, and also, therefore, into the great world -- and grasps with such might the direct presence of his individual life that testimony of Scripture and doctrine of faith fade into something subsidiary; his method might be described as the rendering of the subjectively given material of the world into some· thing objective. The task of the Humanist, on the other hand, is to collect and test all the different human evidences -- truly a weighty document of the world's history; the mere endeavour proves an objective interest in human nature as a whole, and no other method could more quickly undermine the false pretensions of so- called authority. Even in the case of theology this new tendency had asserted itself; for Dun Scotus, by desiring completely to separate reason and world from faith, freed them and gave them independent life, while Roger Bacon, a brother of the same order, demanded a study of nature fettered by no theological considerations, and thereby gave the first impulse to true naturalist philosophy. I say "naturalist philosophy," not "nature philosophy," for the latter expression is claimed by definite systems, whereas I wish merely to lay stress upon a method. [87] But this method is a matter of primary importance, inasmuch as it forms the bond of union, and has enabled our philosophy, in spite of differences of aim and of attempted solutions, to develop itself on the whole as a combined entity and to become a genuine element of culture, because it has paved the way for, and, to a certain degree, has already established, a new philosophy. The essence of this method is observation of nature, wholly disinterested observation, aiming solely at the discovery of truth. Such philosophy as this is philosophy in the shape of science; this it is which distinguishes it not only from theology and mysticism, but also -- as we should be careful to note -- from that dangerous and ever barren type, philosophy in the shape of logic. Theology is justified by the fact that it serves either a great idea or a political purpose, mysticism is a direct phenomenon of life; but to apply mere logic to the interpretation of the world (the outer and the inner); to raise logic, instead of intuition or experience, to the position of lawgiver, means nothing but fettering truth with manacles, and betokens (as I have tried to prove in the first chapter) nothing less than a new outbreak of superstition. That is why we see the new period of naturalist philosophy start with a general revolt against Aristotle. The Greek had not only analysed the formal laws of thought and so made their use more sure, for which he deserved the gratitude of all future generations, but he had also undertaken to solve all problems, even those which it might be impossible to investigate, by means of logic; this had rendered science impossible. [88] For the silent assumption of logic as law-giver is, that man is the measure of all things, whereas in reality, as a merely logical being, he is not even the measure of himself. Telesius (1508-86), a great Neapolitan mathematician and naturalist, a forerunner of Harvey as regards the discovery of the circulation of the blood, was perhaps the first to make it his special task to clear the hapless human brain of this Aristotelian cobweb. Roger Bacon had, it is true, already made a timid start, and Leonardo, with the coolness of genius had called Aristotle's doctrine of soul and of God a "lying science" (vol. i. p. 82); Luther, too, in his early days, while still within the fold of the Roman Church, is said to have been a violent opponent of Aristotle, and to have intended to purge philosophy from his influence; [89] but now there came forward men who had the courage with their own hands to sweep aside the falsehood, in order to find room for the truth. They contended not solely and not chiefly against Aristotle, but against the whole prevailing system, according to which logic, instead of being a handmaid, sat as Queen upon the throne. Campanella, with his theory of perception, and Giordano Bruno were the immediate disciples of Telesius; both helped bravely to hurl down the logical idol with the feet of clay. Francis Bacon, who, although not to be com pared with these two as a philosopher, yet exercised a much wider influence, was directly dependent upon Telesius on the one hand and Paracelsus on the other, that is, upon two sworn Anti-Aristotelians. With his criticism of all Hellenic thought he certainly shot far beyond the mark, but precisely by this he succeeded in more or less making tabula rasa for genuine science and scientific philosophy, that is, for the only correct method which he has brilliantly characterised in the introduction to his Instauratio Magna as inter empiricam et rationalem facultatem conjugium verum et legitimum. It was not long before out of the fold of the Roman Church a Gassendi (1592-1655) appeared, whose Anti- ristotelian Exercises are described by Lange as "one of the keenest and most exultant attacks upon Aristotelian philosophy"; though the young priest considered it more prudent to leave only fragments of his book unburnt, it still remains a sign of the times, and all the more so, as Gassendi became one of the principal stimulators of the sciences of observation and of the strictly mathematical and mechanical interpretation of natural phenomena. Aristotle had taken the fatal step from observation of nature to theology; now comes a theologian who destroys the Aristotelian sophisms and leads the human mind back to pure contemplation of nature. The principal point in the new philosophical efforts -- from Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century to Kant at the beginning of the nineteenth -- is therefore the systematic emphasising of observation as the source of knowledge. From this time forth the practice of faithful observation became the criterion of every philosopher who is to be taken seriously. The word nature must of course be taken in the most comprehensive sense. Hobbes, for example, studied chiefly human society, not physics or medicine, but in this division of nature he has proved his capacity of observation and shown that he is scientific by the fact that he confined himself almost exclusively to the subject with which he was best acquainted, namely, the State. Yet it is a fact that all our epoch-making philosophers have won their spurs in the "exact" sciences, and they possess in addition an extensive culture, that is to say, they are masters of method, and of the material dealt with. Thus Rene Descartes (1596-1650) is essentially a mathematician, and that meant in those days, when mathematics were being daily developed out of the needs of the discoverers, a natural scientist and astronomer. Nature, therefore, in her phenomena of motion was familiar to him from his youth. Before he began to philosophise, he became in addition a keen anatomist and physiologist, so that he was able not only as a physicist to write a treatise on the Nature of Light, but also as embryologist one on the Development of the Foetus. Moreover, he had with philosophic intent "read diligently the great book of the world" (as he himself tells us); he had been soldier, man of the world, courtier; he had practised the art of music so successfully that he was impelled to publish an Outlines of Music; he so applied himself to swordsmanship that he was able to issue a Theory of Fencing; and he did all this, as he expressly tells us, in order to be able to think more correctly than the scholars who spend all their lives in their study. [90] And now, disciplined by the accurate observation of outward nature, this rare man turned his glance inwards and observed nature in his own self. This attitude is henceforth -- in spite of divergences in the individual -- typical. Leibniz, it is true, was little more than a mathematician, but this made it impossible for him -- in spite of the scholasticism with which he was from youth imbued -- to depart from the mechanical interpretation of natural phenomena; it is all very well for us to-day to laugh at the "pre-established harmony," but we should not forget that this monstrous supposition proves loyal adherence to natural scientific method and perception. [91] Locke was led to philosophic speculation by medical studies; Berkeley, though a minister, in his youth made a thorough study both of chemistry and physiology, and his brilliant Theory of Vision intuitively divines much that was later confirmed by exact science, thus testifying to the success of the correct scientific method when supported by great talents. Wolf was a remarkably capable man, not only in the sphere of mathematics, but likewise in that of physics, and he had also mastered the other natural sciences of his time. Hume certainly, so far as I know, read more diligently in "the book of the world," as Descartes calls it, than in that of nature; history and psychology -- not physics or physiology -- were the field of his exact studies; this very fact has cramped his philosophical speculation in certain directions; he who has a keen eye for such things will soon observe that the fundamental weakness of Hume's thought is, that it is fed not from without, but only from within, and this always means a predominance of logic at the cost of constructive. gropingly inventive imagination, and explains Hume's purely negative result in spite of his extraordinary intellectual powers; as a personality he is incomparably greater than Locke, yet I do not think I err in saying that the latter gave birth to many more constructive ideas. And yet we count him among the natural investigators, for within the purely human sphere he has observed more acutely or truly than any of his predecessors, and never departed from the method which he propounded in his first work: observation and experiment. [92] Finally, in the case of Kant, comprehensive knowledge in all branches and thorough study of natural science during a whole long life form features which are too often overlooked. Herder, his pupil, tells us: "The history of man, of races, of nature, physics, mathematics and experience were the sources from which he drew the inspiration which revealed itself in his lectures and conversation; nothing worth knowing was indifferent to him." Kant's literary work in the service of science stretches from his twentieth to his seventieth year, from his Gedanken von der wahren Schatzung der lebendigen Krafte, which he began to work out in the year 1744, to his essay, Etwas uber den Einfluss des Mondes auf die Witterung, which appeared in 1794. For thirty years his most popular lectures were those which he delivered in winter on anthropology and in summer on physical geography; and his daily companion In his last years, Wasianski, tells us that to the very last Kant's animated conversation at table dealt chiefly with meteorology, physics, chemistry, natural history and politics. [93] It is true that Kant was only a thinker about natural observations, not (so far as I know) himself an observer and experimenter, as Descartes had been; but he was an excellent indirect observer, as is proved by such writings as his description of the great earthquake of November 1, 1755, his thoughts on the volcanoes of the moon, on the theory of winds and many other things; and I need hardly remind the reader that Kant's philosophic thoughts in cosmic nature have produced two immortal works, the Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels oder Versuch von der Verfassung und dem mechanischen Ursprunge des ganzen Weltgebaudes (1755), dedicated to Frederick the Great, and the Die Metaphysischen Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft (1786). The method which Kant learnt from successful observation of nature and which had been perfected by the same observation penetrates all his life and thought, so that he has been compared as a discoverer with Copernicus and Galilei (p. 292 note). In his Critique of Pure Reason he says that his method of analysing human reason is "a method copied from that of the naturalist," [94] and in another passage he says: "The true method of metaphysics is fundamentally the same as that which Newton introduced into natural science, and was so useful there." And what is this method? "By sure experiences to seek the rules which govern certain phenomena of nature"; in the sphere of metaphysics therefore, "by sure, inner experience." [95] What I have here made it my endeavour to trace in general and rough outlines can be worked out in the. most minute detail by every thinking person. Thus, for example, the central point of Kant's whole activity is the question of the moral nucleus of individuality: to get at that, he first of all analyses the mechanism of the surrounding cosmos; afterwards, by twenty-five more years of continuous work, he analyses the inner organism of thought; then he devotes twenty more years to the investigation of the human personality thus revealed. Nothing could show more clearly how far observation is here the informing principle than Kant's high estimate of human individuality. The Church Fathers and scholastics had never been able to find words enough to express their contempt of themselves and of all men; it had already been an important symptom when, three hundred years before Kant, Mirandola, that star in the dawn of the new day, wrote a book entitled On the Dignity of Man; helpless mankind had under the long sway of the Empire and the Pontificate forgotten that he possessed such a dignity; in the meantime, he himself, his achievements and his independence had grown, and a Kant, who lived in the society of a very few and not very notable people in distant Konigsberg, and whose only other intercourse was with the sublimest minds of humanity and above all with his own, formed for himself from direct observation of his own soul a high conception of inscrutable human personality. This conviction we meet everywhere in his writings, and thereby get a glimpse into the depths of this wonderful man's heart. Already in that Theorie des Himmels which is intended to reveal only the mechanism of the structure of the world, he exclaims: "With what reverence should the soul not regard its own being!" [96] In a later passage he speaks of the "sublimity and dignity which we conceive as belonging to that person who fulfils all duties." [97] But ever profounder becomes the thought of the thinker; "In man there is revealed a profundity of divine qualities which make him feel a tremor of holy awe at the greatness and sublimity of his own true calling." [98] And in his seventieth year, as an old man he writes: "The feeling of the sublimity of our own vocation enraptures us more than all beauty." [99] This I quote only as an indication of what the scientific method leads to. As soon as in Kant it had revealed to reason a new philosophy which had grown out of, and was therefore in keeping with, natural investigation, it at the same time gave the heart a new religion -- that of Christ and of the Mystics, the religion of experience. But now we must look at this characteristic of our new philosophy, the complete devotion to nature, from another point of view: we must regard it purely theoretically, in order not only to recognise the fact but also to comprehend its importance. A specially capable and thoroughly matter-of-fact modern scientist writes: "The boundary- line between the Known and the Unknown is never so clearly perceived as when we accurately observe facts, whether as directly offered by nature, or in an artificially arranged experiment." [100] These words are spoken without any philosophical reserve, but they will contribute towards giving us a first insight which may be gradually deepened. Any man who has busied himself with practical scientific work must in the course of a long life have noticed that even naturalists have no clear idea of what they do not know, till in each case exact investigation has shown them how far their knowledge extends. That sounds very simple and commonplace, but it is by no means self-evident and so difficult to introduce into practical thought that I do not believe that anyone who has not gone through the discipline of natural science will fully appreciate De Candolle's remark. [101] For in every other sphere self-deception may go so far as to become complete delusion; the facts themselves are mostly fragmentary or questionable, they are not durable or unchangeable, repetition is therefore impossible, experiment out of the question -- passion rules and deception obeys. Moreover, the knowledge of knowledge can never replace knowledge of a fact of nature: the latter is knowledge of quite a different kind; for here man finds himself face to face not with man, but with an incommensurable being, over which he possesses no power, a being which we can designate, in contrast to the ever-combining, confusing, anthropomorphically systematising human brain, as unvarnished, naked, cold, eternal truth. What manifold advantages, positive and negative, such intercourse would have for the widening and development of the human mind is self-evident. I have already proved that the natural investigator, in particular, in the empirical sphere takes the first step towards increase of knowledge by exactly defining what he does not know; [102] but we can easily comprehend what an influence such a schooling must exercise upon philosophic thought: a serious man will no longer with Thomas Aquinas talk of the condition of bodies in hell, since he must admit that he knows almost nothing about the condition of the human body upon earth. Still more important are the positive gains -- to which I have already referred (p. 261) -- and the explanation of this is that nature alone is inventive. As Goethe says: "It is only creative nature that possesses unambiguous certain genius." [103] Nature gives us material and idea at the same time; every form testifies to that. And if we take nature not in the narrow nursery sense of astronomy and zoology, but in the wider application to which I have referred when discussing he individual philosophers, we shall find Goethe's remark everywhere confirmed: nature is the unambiguous genius, the real inventor. But here we should carefully note the following fact: Nature reveals herself not only in the rainbow or in the eye which perceives the rainbow, but also in the mind which admires it and in the reason which thinks about it. However, in order that the eye, the mind, the reason may consciously see and appropriate to themselves the genius of nature, a particular facility and special schooling are required. Here, as elsewhere, the important thing is the direction given to the intellect; [104] if this is settled, time and practice will accomplish the rest. Here we may say with Schiller "The direction is at the same time the accomplishment, and the journey is ended as soon as begun." [105] Thus Locke's life-work, the Essay on the Human Understanding, might have been written at any time during the preceding two thousand five hundred years, if only some one had felt inclined to apply himself to nature. Learning, instruments, mathematical or other discoveries are not required, but only faithful observation of Self, questioning of Self in the same way as we should observe and question any other phenomenon of nature. What hindered the much greater Aristotle from achieving this but the anthropomorphic superficiality of Hellenic observation of nature, which like a comet following a hyperbolic course approached every given fact with frenzied speed, soon afterwards to lose sight of it for ever? What hindered Augustine, who possessed profound philosophical gifts, but his systematic contempt of nature? What Thomas Aquinas but the delusion that he knew everything without observing anything? This turning towards nature -- this new goal of the intellect, an achievement of the Teutonic soul -- signifies, as I have said, a mighty, indeed almost incalculable, enrichment of the human mind: for it provides it constantly with inexhaustible material (i.e., conceptions) and new associations (i.e., ideas). Now man drinks directly from the fountain of all invention, all genius. That is an essential feature of our new world, which may well inspire us with pride and confidence in ourselves. Formerly man resembled the pump-driving donkeys of Southern Europe. He was compelled all day long to turn round in the circle of his own poor self, merely to provide some water for his thirst; now he lies at the breasts of Mother Nature. We have already advanced further than the remark of Alphonse de Candolle seemed to lead us; the knowledge of our ignorance introduced us to the inexhaustible treasure-house of nature and showed us the lost path to the ever-bubbling source of all invention. But now we must follow the thorny path of pure philosophy and here also we shall find that the same principle of exact distinction between the Known and the Unknown will be of essential service. When Locke observes and analyses his understanding, he gets out of himself, so to speak, in order to be able to regard himself as a piece of nature 1 but here, there clearly lies an insurmountable obstacle in the way. With what shall he observe himself? After all it is a case of nature looking at nature. Everyone at once comprehends, or at least dimly feels, how correct and far-reaching this consideration is. But a second consideration, requiring a little more reflection, must be added to the first before it really bears fruit. Let me give an example. When that other profound thinker, Descartes, in contrast to Locke, regards not himself, but surrounding nature -- from the revolving planet to the pulsating heart of the newly dissected animal -- and discovers everywhere the law of mechanism, so that he teaches the doctrine that even mental phenomena must be caused by movements, [106] very little reflection is required to convince us that the old obstacle here again meets us, and that we cannot accept his conclusion as absolutely valid; for the thinker Descartes does not stand apart as an isolated observer, but is himself part and parcel of nature: here again it is a case of nature observing nature. We may look wherever we like, we always look inwards. Of course, if, with the Jews and the Christian scholastics, we ascribe to man a supernatural origin and a being outside of nature, then this dilemma does not exist, man and nature then stand opposite each other like Faust and Helena, and can join hands "over the cushioned glory of the throne," Faust, the really living one, the human being, Helena, the apparently living, apparently comprehending, apparently speaking and loving shadowy form, Nature. [107] This is the central point; here world is separated from world, the science of the Relative from the dogmatism of the Absolute: here too (as we see, if not blinded by self-deception) begins the final separation between the religion of experience and all historical religion. Now if we adopt the Teutonic standpoint and can see the absolute necessity of Descartes' view -- by which alone natural science as a connected whole is possible -- then we must be struck by the following fact: when Locke desires to analyse his own understanding in regard to its origin and working, he is after an a portion of nature and in so far consequently a machine; he therefore, if I may say so, resembles a steam-engine that would desire to take itself to pieces in order to comprehend its own working; we can hardly suppose that such an undertaking would be quite successful; for that it may not cease to be, the locomotive must remain in activity, it could therefore only test a part of its apparatus, now in one place, now in another, or it might take to pieces some unimportant parts, but the really important things it could not touch; its knowledge would be a superficial description rather than a thorough insight, and even this description (i.e., the locomotive's view of its own being) would not exhaust and fully master the object; it would be essentially limited and determined by the structure of the locomotive. I know that the comparison is very lame, but, if it helps us, that is all that is wanted. In any case we have seen that Descartes' looking outwards is likewise mere contemplation of nature by nature, that is, looking inwards, so that the objection formerly urged applies also to his case. From this it is clear that we shall never be able to solve the problem. whether the interpretation of nature as mechanism is merely a law of the human intellect or also an extra-human law. Locke with his acuteness comprehended this and expressly admits that, "whatsoever we can reach with our thoughts is but a point, almost nothing." [108] The reader who pursues this train of thought further, as I cannot do for lack of space, will, I think, understand what I mean when I summarise the result of the discussion thus: Our knowledge of nature (natural science in the most comprehensive sense of the word and including scientific philosophy) is the ever more and more detailed exposition of something Unknowable. But all this only deals with one side of the question. Our investigation of nature undoubtedly contributes to the "extension" of our knowledge; we are ever seeing more, and we are ever seeing more accurately, but that does not mean an "intensive" increase of knowledge, that is, we certainly know more than we did, but we are not wiser, we have not penetrated one hand's-breadth further into the heart of the riddle of the world. Yet the true benefit derived from our study of nature has been ascertained: it is an inner benefit, for it really directs us inwards, teaching us not to solve, but to grasp the world's riddle; that in itself is a great deal, for that alone makes us, if not more learned, at least more wise. Physics are the great, direct teachers of metaphysics. It is only by the study of nature that man learns to know himself. But in order to grasp this truth more fully we must now sketch in stronger outlines what has already been indicated. I must remind the reader of what He Candolle said, that it is only by exact knowledge that the boundary between the Known and the Unknown can be perceived. In other words, it is only by exact knowledge that we clearly perceive what we do not know. I think that the above discussion has confirmed this in a surprising manner. It was the movement in the direction of exact investigation that first revealed to thinkers the inscrutability of nature, of which no one previously had had the slightest notion. Everything had seemed so simple that we only needed to lay hands upon it. I think we could easily prove that before the era of the great discoveries men were actually ashamed to observe and experiment: it seemed to them childish. How little notion they had of there being any mystery is seen from the first efforts of natural investigation, such as those of Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon: scarcely had they noted a phenomenon than they at once proceeded to explain it. Two hundred years later Paracelsus does experiment and observe diligently; he even has the feverish mania for collecting new facts and he is penetrated with the sense of our boundless ignorance in regard to them; but he too is never for a moment at a loss for reasons and explanations. But the nearer we came to Nature, the further she retreated, and when our ablest philosophers wished fully to fathom Nature, the fact was established that she was inscrutable. That was the development from Descartes to Kant. Even Descartes, that profound master of mechanics, felt the need of devoting a whole essay to the question, "Do material things really exist?" Not that he seriously doubted the fact; but his consistently developed theory that all science had to deal with motion had forced upon him the conviction, which before his time had appeared only here and there in the form of sophistical trifling, that "from corporeal nature no single argument can be derived, which necessarily permits us to draw the conclusion that a body exists." And he himself was so startled at the irrefutable truth of this scientific result that he had, in order to get out of the difficulty, to have recourse to theology. As he says: "Since God is not a deceiver; I must conclude that He has not deceived me in reference to things corporeal." [109] Fifty years later Locke arrived by a different method at an absolutely analogous conclusion. "There can be no knowledge of the bodies that fall under the examination of our senses. How far soever human industry may advance useful and explicit philosophy in physical things, scientific knowledge will still be out of our reach, because we want perfect and adequate ideas of those very bodies which are nearest to us and most under our command ... we shall never be able to discover general, instructive, unquestionable truth concerning them." [110] Locke also got out of the difficulty by evading the problem and taking refuge in the arms of theology: "Reason is natural revelation whereby the eternal Father communicates to mankind a portion of truth," &c. The difference between Descartes and Locke consists only in this, that the mechanical thinker (Descartes) feels keenly the impossibility of proving by science the existence of bodies, whereas the psychologist (Locke) grasps less fully the force of the mechanical considerations, but is struck by the psychological impossibility of concluding that a thing has being from the fact that he perceives its qualities. The new philosophy grew and deepened; but this conclusion remained irrefutable. Kant too had to testify that all philosophical attempts to explain the mathematical-mechanical theory of bodies "ends with the Empty and therefore Incomprehensible." [111] Exact science has, therefore, not only in the sphere of empiricism done us the very great service of teaching us to distinguish exactly between what we know and what we do not know, but the philosophical deepening of exact science has also drawn a clear line between Knowledge and Nonknowledge: the whole world of bodies cannot be "known." Lest the reader should fall into similar blunders I must incidentally refer to two errors -- idealism and materialism -- which spring from the first result of the philosophical investigation of nature by Descartes and Locke. Though the world of bodies cannot be "known," it is ingenious, but ridiculous trifling to deny its existence, as Berkeley does (1685-1753); that is equivalent to asserting that, because I perceive the world of sense by my senses and have no other guarantee for its existence, therefore it does not exist; because I smell the rose only by means of my nose, therefore there is a nose (at least an ideal one) but no rose. Just as untenable is the other conclusion, which was drawn by thinkers inclined to take a too superficial view, and expressed most clearly by Lamettrie (1709-51) and Condillac (1715-80): as my senses only perceive things of sense, therefore only things of sense exist; because my intellect is a mechanism, which can grasp only "mechanically" what is perceived by my senses, therefore mechanism is complete world- wisdom. Both idealism and materialism are palpable delusions -- delusions which base themselves on Descartes and Locke, and yet contradict the clearest results of their works. Moreover, these two views completely overlook an essential part of the philosophy of Descartes and Locke: for Descartes did not mechanically interpret the whole world, but only the world of phenomena; Locke analysed not the whole world but only the soul, when he expressed the opinion that there can be no science of bodies. The great men of genius have always been liable to be thus misunderstood; let us, therefore, leave these misapprehensions on one side and see how our new philosophy continued to develop on the true heights of thought. have already remarked that nature includes not only the rainbow and the eye that beholds it, but also the mind that is moved by the spectacle and the thought that reflects upon it. This consideration is so obvious that a Descartes and a Locke must have perceived it, but these great men had still a heavy burden to carry in the hereditary conception of a special, bodiless soul; this load clung to them as fast as the child that grew into a giant clung to the shoulders of St. Christopher, and it often caused their reasoning to stumble; they were, besides, so much occupied with analysis that they lost the power of comprehensive synthesis. Yet we find in them, under all kinds of systematic and systemless guises, very profound thoughts, which pointed the way to metaphysics. As I said before, both had become convinced that the existence of things cannot be deduced from our conceptions; our conceptions of the qualities of things are no more like things than pain is like the sharp dagger, or the feeling of tickling like the feather which causes it. [112] Descartes pursues this thought further and comes to the conclusion that human nature consists of two completely separated parts, only one of which belongs to the realm of otherwise all- prevailing mechanism, while the other -- to which he gives the name of soul -- does not. Thoughts and passions form the soul. [113] Now it is a proof not only of Descartes' profundity, but also of his genuinely scientific way of thinking, that he always strongly supported the absolute, unconditional separation of soul and body; we must not regard this conviction, which he so frequently and passionately asserted, as religious prejudice; no, more than one hundred years later Kant clearly pointed out why we are compelled in practice "to conceive phenomena in space as quite different from the actions of thought, and in so far to accept the view that there is a double nature, the thinking and the corporeal." [114] Descartes elected to put this view in the form available to him, and thereby clearly promulgated two fundamental facts of knowledge, the absolute mechanism of corporeal nature and the absolute non-mechanism of thinking nature. But this view required a supplement. Locke, who was no mechanician or mathematician, had a better chance of hitting upon it. He, too, had thought that he was bound to presuppose the soul as a special, separate entity; but he found this constantly in his way, and as a mere psychologist -- as a scientific dilettante, if I may use the word with no signification of reproach -- he did not feel the impelling force of Descartes' strictly scientific and formal anxiety; altogether he was far from being so profound a mind as Descartes, and so with the most innocent air in the world he asked the question, Why should not body and soul be identical, and thinking nature be extended, corporeal? [115] For the reader who has not been schooled in philosophy, the following may serve as explanation: from a strictly scientific point of view thought is derived solely from personal, inner experience; every phenomenon, even such as I from analogy ascribe with the greatest certainty to the thought and feeling of others, must be able to be interpreted mechanically; to have established this is Descartes' eternal service. Now comes Locke and makes the very fine remark (which, in order to make the connection clear, I must translate from the somewhat loose psychological manner of Locke into the scientific manner of Descartes): Since we can explain all phenomena -- even such as seem to spring from activity of reason -- even without having to presuppose thought, but know from personal experience that in some cases the mechanical process is accompanied by thought, who can prove to us that every corporeal phenomenon does not contain thought, and that every mechanical process may not be accompanied by thoughts? [116] It is evident that Locke had no idea of what he was destroying by this notion, or, on the other hand, for what he had paved the way; he goes on to distinguish between two natures (how could he as a sensible man do otherwise), not, however, between a thinking and a corporeal nature, but only between a thinking and a nonthinking nature. With this Locke leaves the empirical sphere, the sphere of genuine scientific thought. For if I say of a phenomenon it is "corporeal," I express what experience teaches me, but if I say it is "non-thinking," I predicate something which I cannot possibly prove. The very man who, a moment ago, made the fine remark that thought may be a quality of matter altogether, wishes here to distinguish between thinking and non-thinking bodies! Little wonder that the two delusions, an Idealism which is absolute (and consequently purely materialistic) and a Materialism which springs from a symbolical hypothesis (and is therefore purely "ideal"), are linked on here where Locke stumbled so terribly. But Locke recovered himself in a manner which very many of his followers up to the present day have not been able to imitate, and, with the simplicity of genius, proceeded to one of his most brilliant achievements, namely, the proof that from non-thinking matter, however richly endowed it may be with motion, thought never can arise; it is just as impossible, he says, as that something should come out of nothing. [117] Here we see Locke once more join hands with Descartes (i.e., with the principles of strictly scientific thought). Now Locke's peculiar and individual line of thought, in spite of all its weaknesses, [118] exercised far-reaching influence, for it was just suited to destroy the last remnant of supernatural dogmatism, and it awakened to full consciousness the philosopher who addresses himself to nature. The latter must now either give up all hope of further progress, regard his undertaking as wrecked and surrender to the Absolutist, or he must grasp the problem in all its profundity, and that would mean that he must of necessity enter the field of metaphysics. The term "metaphysics" has met with so much just disapproval that one does not care to use it; it has the effect of a scarecrow. We really do not need the word -- or at any rate we should not need it, if it were agreed that the old metaphysics have no longer a right to existence, and the new -- that of the naturalist -- are simply "philosophy." Aristotle called that part of his system, which was afterwards termed metaphysics, theology; that was the correct word, for it was the doctrine of Theos in contrast to that of Physis, God as contrast to nature. From him to Hume the science of metaphysics was theology, that is, it was a collection of unproved, apodeictic theorems, derived either from direct, divine Revelation or from indirect Revelation, in that men proceeded from the supposition that the human reason was itself supernatural and could therefore, by virtue of its own reflection, discover every truth; metaphysics were therefore never directly based upon experience, nor did they refer to it; they were either inspiration or ratiocination, either suggestion or pure reasoned conclusion. Now Hume (1711-1776), powerfully stimulated by Locke's paradoxical results, expressly demanded that metaphysics should cease to be theology and should become science. [119] He himself did not quite succeed in carrying out this programme, for his talent lay rather in destroying false science than in building up the true; but the stimulus he gave was so great that he "wakened" Immanuel Kant "from dogmatic slumber." Henceforth the word metaphysics has quite a different interpretation. It does not mean a contrast to experience, but reflection on the facts given by experience, and their association to form a definite philosophy of life. Four words of Kant contain the essence of what metaphysics now mean; metaphysics are the answer to the question, How is experience possible? This problem was the direct result of the dilemma described above, to which honest, naturalist philosophy had led. If our zeal for an exact science of bodies forces us to separate thought completely from the corporeal phenomenon, how then does thought arrive at experience of corporeal things? Or, on the other hand, if I attack the problem as a psychologist and assign thought as an attribute to the corporeal, which obeys mechanical laws, do I not at a blow destroy genuine (i.e., mechanical) science, without contributing in the least to the solution of the problem? Reflection concerning this will lead us to reflection concerning ourselves, since these various judgments are rooted within ourselves, and it will be impossible to answer the question, How is experience possible? without at the same time sketching the main outlines of a philosophical system. Perhaps the question will admit, within certain limits, of various answers, but the cardinal difference will henceforth always be: whether the problem which has resulted from purely natural-scientific considerations will be scientifically answered, or, after the manner of the old theologians, simply hacked in two in favour of some dogma of reason. [120] The former method furthers both science and religion, the latter destroys both; the former enriches culture and knowledge, no matter whether or not we accept as valid all the conclusions of a definite philosopher (e.g., Kant) -- the latter is anti-Teutonic and fetters science in all its branches, just as in its time the theology of Aristotle had done. For the comprehension of our new world, and of the whole nineteenth century, it was absolutely necessary to show clearly how from a new spirit and a new method new results were derived, and how these in turn were bound to lead to a perfectly new philosophical problem. Some diffusiveness has been unavoidable, for the delusion of "humanity" and "progress" causes historians to represent our philosophy as gradually growing out of the Hellenic and the Scholastic, and that is nothing but a chimera. Our philosophy has rather developed in direct antagonism to the Hellenic and the Christo-Hellenic; our theologians openly revolted against Church philosophy; our mystics shook off historical tradition, as far as they could, in order to concentrate their thoughts on the experience of their own selves; our humanists denied the Absolute, denied progress, returned wistfully to the disparaged past and taught us to distinguish and appreciate the Individual in its various manifestations; finally, our thinkers who investigated nature directed all their thought to the results of a science hitherto unanticipated and unattempted; a Descartes, a Locke are from the sales of their feet to the crowns of their heads new phenomena, they are not bound up with Aristotle and Plato, but energetically break away from them, and the scholasticism of their time which still clings to them is not the essential but the accidental part of their system. I hope I have convinced the reader of this; I feel it was worth my while to devote a few pages to the point. It was only thus that I could make the reader understand that the Dilemma. in which Descartes and Locke suddenly found themselves was not an old warmed-up philosophical question, but a perfectly new one, resulting from the honest endeavour to be led by experience alone, by nature alone. The problem which now came into the foreground may well have had some affinity with other problems which engaged the attention of other philosophers at other times, but there is no genuine connection; and the special way in which it here appeared is new. Here historical clearness can be secured only by separating, not by uniting. Now I must beg the reader's attention for a moment longer. I must attempt, as far as it is possible without plunging into the depths of metaphysics, to explain that metaphysical problem which is at the basis of our specifically Teutonic philosophy, so far at least that every reader may see what justification I had for my assertion that the investigation of nature teaches man to know himself -- that it leads him into the inner world. It is only in this way that we can clearly show the connection with religion which was thoroughly and passionately studied by all the philosophers named. Even Hume, the sceptic, is at heart profoundly religious. The violent rage with which he attacks historical religions as "the phantastic structures of half-human apes," [121] proves how serious he was in the matter; and such chapters as that of the Immateriality of the Soul [122] proves Hume to be the genuine predecessor of Kant in the field of religion, as in that of philosophy. No man, without having recourse to the supernatural, can answer the
question, "How is experience possible?" in any other way than by a
critical examination of the whole capacity of his consciousness.
Critique comes from
Hume took the decisive step towards it; he put aside this artificial division of self into two parts, the one of which we pretend to desire to explain fully, while the other is completely neglected and reserved for angels and the dead. Hume took the standpoint of a man consistently questioning nature -- in Self and outside of Self; he was the first to approach in real earnest the metaphysical problem, How is experience possible? He adduced the critical objections one after another and arrived at the paradoxical conclusion, which can be summarised in the following words: Experience is impossible. In a certain sense he was perfectly right, and his brilliant paradox must only be taken as irony. If we persistently maintained the standpoint of a Descartes and a Locke and yet put aside their deus ex machina, the whole structure would immediately collapse. And it did collapse all the more completely, as their one-sidedness consisted not only in leaving out of account a large and most important part of the material of our experience, but also -- and I beg the reader to note this specially -- in unhesitatingly assuming as possible a faultless, logical explanation of the other part. That was an inheritance from the schoolmen. Who told them forsooth that nature would be able to be understood, explained? Thomas Aquinas might indeed do that, for this dogma is his starting-point. But how does the mathematician Descartes come to that? The man who had expressed a desire to banish every traditional doctrine from his mind! How did John Locke, Gentleman, come to it, after declaring at the beginning of his investigation that he merely desired to fix the boundaries of the human understanding? Descartes answers: God is no betrayer, hence my understanding must penetrate to the root of things; Locke answers: Reason is divine Revelation, hence it is infallible, as far as it goes. That is not genuine investigation of nature, but only an attempt at it, hence the defectiveness of the result. In the interests of the unphilosophical reader I have sketched from the negative side the condition of our young, developing philosophy at that time. In this way he will be better able to understand what had now to be done to save and improve it. To begin with, it had to be purified, purged of the last traces of alien ingredients; in the second place, the scientific philosopher had to have the full courage of his convictions; he had, like Columbus, to trust himself unhesitatingly to the ocean of nature, and not fancy, as the crew did, that he was lost as soon as the spire of the last church-tower disappeared below the horizon. But this required not merely courage, such as the foolhardy Hume possessed, but also the solemn consciousness of great responsibility. Who had the right to lead men away from the sacred ancestral home? Only he who possesses the power to lead them to a new one. That is why it was only by a man like Kant that the work could be executed, for he not only possessed phenomenal intellectual gifts, but a moral character which was equally great. Kant is the true rocher de bronze of our new philosophy. Whether we agree with all his philosophical conclusions is a matter of indifference; he alone possessed the power to tear us away, he alone possessed the moral justification for doing so, he, whose long life was a model of spotless honour, strict self-control and complete devotion to an aim which he regarded as sacred. When just over twenty years of age he wrote: "I believe it is sometimes advisable to have a certain noble confidence in one's own powers. On this I take my stand. I have already mapped out the course which I wish to follow. I shall make a start and nothing shall prevent me from continuing as I have begun." [126] This promise he kept. This confidence in his own powers was at the same time a realisation that we were on the right path, and he immediately began -- a second Luther, a second Copernicus -- to clear away all that is alien to us:
Nothing can be more foolish than to attempt, as is so common, to know Kant from one or two metaphysical works; everybody quotes them, and scarcely one among ten thousand understands them, not because they are incomprehensible but because such a personality as Kant's can only be understood in connection with its whole activity. Whoever attempts to understand him thus will soon see that his philosophy is to be found in all his writings, and that his metaphysics can be understood only by those who have a familiar acquaintance with his natural science. [128] For Kant is at all times and in all places an investigator of nature. And thus we behold him, at the very beginning of his career, in his Allgemeine Naturgeschichte des Himmels, busily engaged in ruling out of our natural philosophy the God of Genesis and the tenacious Aristotelian theology. He there clearly proves that the ecclesiastical conception of God involves "the converting of all nature into miracles"; in that case nothing would remain for natural science, which had worked so laboriously for centuries, but to repent and "solemnly recant at the judgment stool of religion." "Nature will then no longer exist; all the changes in the world will be brought about by a mere Deus ex machina." Kant evidently gives us the choice: God or Nature. In the same passage he attacks "that rotten world-wisdom, which under a pious exterior seeks to conceal the ignorance due to laziness." [129] So much for the work of purging, by means of which our thought at last became free, free to be true to itself. But that was not enough; it was not sufficient merely to remove the Alien, the whole sphere of what is our own had to be taken possession of, and this implied two things in particular: a great extension of the conception "nature" and profound study of our own "Ego." To these two things Kant's positive life-work was devoted. He did not work alone, but, like every great man, he laboured to bring into the fullest light of truth the unconscious and contradictory tendencies of his contemporaries. The extension of the conception " Nature" necessarily led to the deepening of the idea of the "Ego"; the one implied the other. We cannot make the extension of the conception "Nature" too comprehensive. At the very moment when Kant finished his Critique of Pure Reason, Goethe wrote: "Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her; men are all in her and she in all; even the most unnatural thing is nature, even the coarsest philistinism has something of her genius. He who does not see her everywhere sees her rightly nowhere." [130] From this consideration we may conclude how powerfully at this very point our intellectual powers, developed as they were in various directions, could contribute to the elucidation and deepening of our new philosophy. Here in fact unification was effected. The Humanists (in the wide sense, which I gave to this word above) here joined hands with the philosophers. What I have already pointed out, in a former part of this section, regarding the purely philosophical influence of this group, was a very considerable contribution. [131] To this were added great achievements in the spheres of history, philology, archaeology, description of nature. For nature, which immediately surrounds us from our very youth -- human nature, and the nature which is outside of man -- we do not, to begin with, perceive as "nature." It was the mass of new material, the great extension of our conceptions, which thus awakened reflection concerning ourselves and the relation of man to nature. A Herder might, in the last years of his life, in the impotent rage of misconception, rise up against a Kant; yet he himself had contributed very much to the extension of the conception "nature"; the whole first part of his Ideas for the History of Humanity perhaps did more than anything else to spread this anti-theological view; the whole efforts of this noble and brilliant man are directed towards placing man in the midst of nature, as an organic part of her, as one of her creatures still in the process of development; and though in his preface he makes a side- thrust at "metaphysical speculations," which, "separated from experiences and analogies of nature, are like a pleasure-trip, which seldom leads to a definite goal," he has no idea how much he himself is influenced by the new philosophy, and how much his own views would have gained in depth and accuracy (perhaps at the cost of popularity). if he had more thoroughly studied that science of metaphysics which had been opened up by faithful observation of nature. This man, worthy of all honour, may stand as the most brilliant representative of a whole tendency. We meet another tendency in men like Buffon. Of this describer of nature Condorcet writes: "Il etait frappe d'une sorte de respect religieux pour les grands phenomenes de l'univers." So it is nature herself that inspires Buffon with the reverence of religion. The encyclopaedic naturalists like him (in the nineteenth century their work was carried to great lengths by Humboldt) did a very great deal, if not to extend, yet to enrich the conception "nature," and the fact that they felt, and knew how to communicate, religious reverence for it, was, from the point of view of philosophy, of importance. This movement to extend the idea "nature" might be traced in many spheres. Even a Leibniz, who still tries to save theological dogmatism, liberates nature in the most comprehensive sense, for by his pre-established harmony everything in truth becomes super-nature, but at the same time everything without exception is nature. But the most important and decisive step was the great extension of the term by the complete incorporation of the inner Ego. Why indeed should this remain excluded? How was it justifiable? How could we continue to do as Locke and Descartes did, namely, neglect the surest facts of experience under the pretext that they were not mechanical, could not be comprehended, and so should be excluded from consideration? Scientific method and honesty made the simple conclusion inevitable, that not everything in nature is mechanical, that not every experience can be forged into a logical chain of ideas. How could anyone be satisfied with Herder's half-measure: first of all to identify man completely with nature, and finally to conjure him out of it again, not in truth the whole man, but his "spirit," thanks to the supposition of extra-natural powers and supernatural Providence? [132] Here, too, it was really a question simply of the goal which the intellect aimed at; this aim, however, determined the whole philosophy. For as long as man was not fully included in nature, they stood opposed and alien to each other, and, ,if man and nature are in reality alien, our whole Teutonic aim and method is an error. But it is not an error, and for that reason the decisive incorporation of the Ego in nature was immediately followed by a great deepening of metaphysics. Here the mystics rendered good service. When Francis of Assisi addresses the sun as messor lo frate sole, he says: All nature is related to me, I sprang from her lap, and if once my eyes no longer see that brightly shining "brother" then it is my "sister" -- death -- that lulls me to sleep. Little wonder that this man preached to the birds in the wood the best that he knew-the gospel of the dear Saviour. The philosophers required half a millennium to reach the standpoint upon which that wonderful man in all his simplicity had stood. However, let us not exaggerate: mysticism has opened up many profound metaphysical questions in reference to the innermost life of the Ego; it contributed splendidly not only to the advancement of scientific thought, but also to the necessary extension of the conception "nature"; [133] but it did not accomplish the real deepening, the philosophical deepening; for that needed a scientific mind, a kind of mind seldom found in conjunction with mysticism. In general, mysticism deepens the character, not the thought, and even a Paracelsus is deluded by his "inner light" into proclaiming as wisdom a vast amount of nonsense. Upon vaguely divining mystical ecstasy a more exact method of thinking had to be grafted. And that was done within the circle influenced by Francis of Assisi. The theology of the Franciscans in its best days had in fact done much preliminary work towards amalgamating the otherwise so carefully separated ideas "Nature" and "Ego"; indeed, they had done almost more than was desirable. for thereby many a purely abstract system had become crystallised to the prejudice of inquiry into nature, so that even a Kant found himself in many ways hampered by it. Yet it deserves mention that Duns Scotus himself had energetically protested, in reference to our perception of surrounding objects, against the dogma that this process was a mere passive receiving, that is to say, a mere reception of impressions of sense, leading to the immediate conclusion that these sense- impressions, with the conceptions resulting therefrom, corresponded exactly to things -- that they were, as we might say in vulgar parlance, a photograph of actual reality. No, he said, the human mind in receiving impressions (which then, united according to reason, &c., form perception) is not merely passive, but also active, that is, it contributes its own quota, it colours and shapes what it receives from the outer world, it remodels it in its own way and transforms it into something new; in short, the human mind is, from the very outset, creative, and what it perceives as existing outside of itself is partly, and in the special form in which it is perceived, created by itself. Every layman must immediately grasp the one fact: if the human mind in the reception and elaboration of its perceptions is itself creatively active, it follows of necessity that it must find itself again everywhere in nature; this nature, as the mind sees it, is in a certain sense, and without its reality being called in question, its work. Hence Kant too comes to the conclusion: "It sounds at first singular, but is none the less certain, that the understanding does not derive its laws from nature, but prescribes them to nature ... the supreme legislation of nature lies in ourselves, that is, in our understanding." [134] The realisation of this fact made the relation between man and nature (in its most primary and simple sense) clear and comprehensible. It now became manifest why every investigation of nature, even the strictly mechanical, finally leads back in all cases to metaphysical questions, that is, questions directed to man's being; this was what had so hopelessly perplexed Descartes and Locke. Experience is not something simple, and can never be purely objective, because it is our own active organisation which first makes experience possible, in that our senses take up only definite impressions, definitely shaped, moreover, by themselves, [134] while our understanding also sifts, arranges and unites the impressions according to definite systems. And this is so evident to everyone who is at the same time an observer of nature and a thinker, that even a Goethe -- whom no one will charge with particular liking for such speculations -- is driven to confess: "There are many problems in the natural sciences on which we cannot with propriety speak, if we do not call in the aid of metaphysics." [135] On the other hand, it now becomes clear how justified the Mystics were in claiming to see everywhere in outer nature the inner essence of man: this nature is, in fact, the opened, brightly illuminated book of our understanding; I do not mean that it is an unreal phantom of that understanding. but it shows us our understanding at work and teaches us its peculiar individuality. As the mathematician and astronomer Lichtenberg says: "We must never lose sight of the fact that we are always merely observing ourselves when we observe nature and especially our views of nature." [136] Schopenhauer has given expression to the great importance of this fact: "The most complete perception of nature is the proper basis for metaphysical speculation, hence no one should presume to attempt this, without having first acquired a thorough (though only general) and clear, connected knowledge of all branches of natural science." [137] As the reader sees, as soon as this new phase of thought was traversed, the philosopher found himself face to face with a new dilemma analogous to the former; it was, indeed, the same dilemma, but this time it was grasped more profoundly and viewed in a more correct perspective. The study of nature necessarily leads man back to himself; he himself finds his understanding displayed in no other place than in nature perceived and thought. The whole revelation of nature is specifically human, shaped therefore by active human understanding, as we perceive it; on the other hand, this understanding is nourished solely from outside, that is, by impressions received : it is as a reaction that our understanding awakes, that is, as a reaction against something which is not man. A moment ago I called the understanding creative, but it is only so in a conditional sense; it is not able, like Jahve, to create something out of nothing, but only to transform what is given; our intellectual life consists of action and reaction: in order to be able to give, we must first have received. Hence the important fact to which I have frequently called attention, [138] quoting on the last occasion Goethe's words: "Only creative nature possesses unambiguous genius." But how am I to escape from this dilemma? What is the answer to the question, "How is experience possible?" The object points me back to the subject, the subject knows itself only in the object. There is no escape, no answer. As I said before: our knowledge of nature is the ever more and more detailed exposition of something unknowable; to this unknowable nature belongs in the first place our own understanding. But this result is by no means to be regarded as purely negative; not only have the steps leading up to it made clear the mutual relation of subject and object, but the final result means the rejection, once for all, of every materialistic dogma. Now Kant was in a position to utter the all- important truth: "A dogmatic solution of the cosmological problem is not merely uncertain but impossible." What thinking men at all times had vaguely felt -- among the Indians, the Greeks, here and there even among the Church Fathers (p. 78) and schoolmen -- what the Mystics had regarded as self-evident (p. 421) and the first scientific thinkers, Descartes and Locke, had stumbled upon without being able to interpret (p. 454), viz., that time and space are intuitive forms of our animal sense-life, was now proved by natural scientific criticism. Time and space "are forms of sentient perception, whereby we perceive objects only as they appear to us (our senses) not as they may be in themselves." [140] Further, criticism revealed that the unifying work of the understanding whereby the conception and the thought" nature" arise and exist (or to quote Bohme, "are mirrored"), that is to say, the systematic uniting of phenomena to cause and effect, are to be traced back to what Duns Scotus vaguely conceived, namely, the active elaboration of the material of experience by the human mind. Hereby the cosmogonic conceptions of the Semites which hung, and still hang, heavily on our science of religion, fell to the ground. What is the use to me of an historical religion if time is merely an intuitive form of my sense-mechanism? What is the use of a Creator as explanation of the world, as first cause, if science has shown me that "causality has no meaning at all, and no sign of its use, except in the world of sense," [141] while this idea of cause and effect, "when used only speculatively (as when we conceive a God-creator), loses every significance the objective reality of which could be made comprehensible in concreto"? [142] The realisation of this fact shatters an idol. In a former chapter I called the Israelites "abstract worshippers of idols;" [143] I think the reader will now understand why. And he will comprehend what Kant means when he says that the system of criticism is "indispensable to the highest purposes of humanity"; [144] and when he writes to Mendelssohn, "The true and lasting well-being of the human race depends upon metaphysics." Our Teutonic metaphysics free us from idolatry and in so doing reveal to us the living Divinity in our own breast. Here, it is plain, we do not merely touch upon the chief theme in this division -- the relation between philosophy and religion -- but we are in the very heart of it; at the same time what has just been said connects itself with the conclusion of the section on "Discovery," where I already hinted that the victory of a scientific, mechanical view of nature necessarily meant the complete downfall of all materialistic religion. At the same time I said: "Consistent mechanism, as we Teutons have created it, admits only of a purely ideal, that is, transcendent religion, such as Jesus Christ taught: 'The Kingdom of God is within you.''' We must now proceed to the discussion of this last and profoundest point. Goethe proclaims: "Within thee there is a universe as well!" It was one of the inevitable results of scientific thinking that this inner universe was now for the first time brought into the foreground. For the philosopher, by unreservedly including the whole human personality in nature, that is, by learning to regard it as an object of nature, gradually awoke to a realisation of two facts, first, that the mechanism of nature has its origin in his own human understanding, and secondly, that mechanism is not a satisfactory principle for the explanation of nature, since man discovers in his own mind a universe which remains altogether outside of all mechanical conceptions. Descartes and Locke, who imagined there was danger for strictly scientific knowledge in this perception, thought to overcome it by regarding this unmechanical universe as something outside of and above nature. With so lame and autocratic a compromise, there was no possibility of arriving at a living philosophy. Scientific schooling, the custom of drawing a strict separating-line between what we know and what we do not know, simply demanded the explanation: from the most direct experience of my own life I perceive -- in addition to mechanical nature -- the existence of an unmechanical nature. For clearness we may call it the ideal world, in contrast to the real; not that it is less real or less actual -- on the contrary, it is the surest thing that we possess, the one directly given thing, and in so far the outer world ought really to be called the "ideal" one; but the other receives this name because it embodies itself in ideas, not in objects. Now if man perceives such an ideal world -- not as dogma but from experience, -- if introspection leads to the conviction that he himself is not merely and not even predominantly a mechanism, if rather he discovers in himself what Kant calls "the spontaneity of freedom," something utterly unmechanical and anti-mechanical, a whole, wide world, which we might in a certain sense call an "unnatural" world, so great a contrast does it present to that mechanical rule of law with which we have become acquainted by exact observation of nature; how could he help projecting this second nature, which is just as manifest and sure as the first, upon that first nature, since science has taught him that the latter is intimately connected with his own inner world? When he does that, there grows out of the experienced fact of freedom a new idea of the Divine, and a new conception of a moral order of the world, that is to say, a new religion. It was, indeed, no new thing to seek God within our own breast and not outside among the stars, to believe in God not as an objective necessity, but as a subjective command, to postulate God not as mechanical primum mobile but to experience him in the heart -- I have already quoted Eckhart's admonition, "Man shall not seek God outside himself" (p. 401), and from that to Schiller's remark, "Man bears the Divine in himself," the warning has frequently been uttered -- but here, in the regular course of the development of Teutonic philosophy, this conviction had been gained in a special way as one of the results of an all-embracing and absolutely objective investigation of nature. Man had' not made God the starting-point, but had come to him as the final thing; religion and science had grown inseparably into each other, the one had not to be shaped, and interpreted to suit the other, they were, so to speak, two phases of the same phenomenon: science, that which the world gives me, religion, that which I give to the world. Here, however, a far-reaching remark must be made, otherwise the advantage gained in the way of introspection is liable to evaporate, and it is the business of science to hinder that. No one can, of course, answer the question, what nature may be outside of human conception, or what man may be outside of nature, hence over-enthusiastic, unschooled minds are inclined uncritically to identify both. This identification is dangerous, as may be seen from the following consideration. While the investigation of nature enables us to perceive that all knowledge of bodies, though proceeding from the apparently Concrete, the Real, yet ends with the absolutely Incomprehensible, the process in the unmechanical world is the reverse: the Incomprehensible, when we reflect upon it philosophically, lies here, not at the end of the course but immediately at the beginning. The notion and the possibility of freedom, the conceivability of being outside of time, the origin of the feeling of moral responsibility and duty, &c., cannot of themselves force their way in at the door of understanding, yet we grasp them quite well the further we follow them out into the sphere of actual and hourly experience. Freedom is the surest of all facts of experience; the Ego stands altogether outside of time, and notices the progress of time only from outer phenomena; [145] conscience, regret, feeling of duty, are stricter masters than hunger. Hence the tendency of the man who is not gifted with the metaphysical faculty to overlook the difference between the two worlds -- nature from without and nature from within, as Goethe calls them; his tendency to project freedom into the world of phenomena (as cosmic God, miracle, &c.), to suppose a beginning (which destroys the idea of time), to found morals upon definite, historically issued and therefore at all times revocable commands (which make an end of ethical law), &c. Metaphysically inclined races, such as the Aryans, never fell into this error: [146] their mythologies reveal a wonderful divination of metaphysical perception, or, as we may say with the same justice, scientific metaphysics signify the awakening into new life of far-seeing mythology; but, as history shows, this higher divination has not been able to prevail against the forcible assertions of less gifted human beings, who conclude from mere semblance and are sunk in blind historical superstition, and there is but one antidote powerful enough to save us: our scientific philosophy. This uncritical identification leads to other shallow and therefore injurious systems, as soon as, for example, in place of projecting inner experience into the world of phenomena, the latter with all its mechanism is brought into the inner world. Thus so-called "scientific" monism, materialism, &c., have arisen, doctrines which will certainly never acquire the universal importance of Judaism -- since it is too much to expect of most men that they will deny what they know most surely -- but which have nevertheless in the nineteenth century produced so much confusion of thought. [147] In view of all this -- and in contrast to all mystical pantheism and pananthropism -- it is our duty to adhere to and emphasise the division into two worlds, as it results from strictly scientifically treated experience. But the boundary-line must be drawn at the right place: to have accurately determined this place is one of the greatest achievements of our new philosophy. We must, of course, not draw that line between man and world; all that I have said proves the impossibility of this; man may turn whither he will, at every step he perceives nature in himself and himself in nature. To draw the line between the world of phenomena and the hypothetical "thing in itself" (as one of Kant's famous successors undertook to do) would from the purely scientific standpoint also be very disputable, for in that case the boundary runs outside of all experience. In so far as the unmechanical world is derived purely from inner, individual experience, which only by analogy is transferred to other individuals, we may well, for simplicity of expression, distinguish between a world in us and a world outside us, but we must carefully note that the world "outside us" comprises every "phenomenon," hence also our own body, and not it alone but also the understanding which perceives the world of bodies and thinks. This expression "in us" and "outside us" is often met with in Kant and others. But even he is open to objection; for in the first place we are -- as I said above -- involuntarily impelled, if not to transform this inner world as the Jew does to an outer cause, yet to attribute it to all phenomena as their inner world, and then it is not quite easy to see how we shall be able to divide our thinking brain into two parts; for it is this very brain which also perceives the unmechanical world and reflects upon it. It is certain that the unmechanical world is not presented from outside to the organ of understanding by a perception of the senses, but solely by inner experience, and hence it is impossible for the understanding, in view of its total lack of inventive power, to raise perception to the level of conception, and all talk on this subject must necessarily remain symbolical, that is, talk by pictures and signs: however, have we not seen that even the world of phenomena indeed gave us conceptions, but equally only symbolical ones? The "in us" and "outside us" is therefore a metaphorical way of speaking. The boundary can only be drawn scientifically, when we do not move one iota from what experience gives us. Kant seeks to attain this by the differentiation which he makes in his Critique of Practical Reason (1, 1, 1, 2) between a nature "to which the will is subordinate" and a nature "which is subordinate to a will." This definition is exactly in keeping with the above-named condition, but has the disadvantage of being somewhat obscure. We do better to hold to what is obvious. and then we should have to say: what experience presents to us is a world capable of mechanical interpretation and a world which is incapable of mechanical interpretation; between these two runs a boundary-line which separates them so completely that every crossing of it means a crime against experience: but crimes against facts of experience are philosophical lies. Following up the differentiation Kant was enabled to make the epoch-making assertion: "Religion we must seek in ourselves, not outside ourselves." [148]That means, when we change it to the terms of our definition: Religion we must seek only in the world which cannot be interpreted mechanically. It is not true that we find in the world of phenomena that can be interpreted mechanically anything that points to freedom, morality, Divinity. Whoever carries the idea of freedom over into mechanical nature destroys both nature and the true significance of freedom (p. 420); the same holds good with regard to God (p. 470); and as far as morality is concerned an unprejudiced glance suffices -- in spite of all heroic efforts of the apologists from Aristotle to Bishop Butler's famous book on the Analogy between Revealed Religion and the Laws of Nature -- to show that nature is neither moral nor sensible. The ideas of goodness, pity, duty, virtue, repentance, are just as strange to her as sensible, symmetrical, appropriate arrangement. Nature capable of mechanical interpretation is evil, stupid, feelingless; virtue, genius and goodness belong only to nature which cannot be mechanically interpreted. Meister Eckhart knew that well and therefore uttered the memorable words: "If I say, God is good, it is not true; rather I am good, God is not good. If I say also, God is wise, it is not true: I am wiser than he." [149] Genuine natural science could leave no doubt concerning the correctness of this judgment. We must seek religion in that nature which cannot be mechanically interpreted. I shall not attempt to give an account of Kant's theory of morals and religion, that would take me too far and has, besides, been done by others; I think I have performed my special task if I have succeeded in clearly representing on the most general lines the genesis of our new philosophy; that prepares the ground for a clear-sighted, sure judgment of the philosophy of the eighteenth century. Only towards the end of the nineteenth century has Kant been made really comprehensible to us, and that, in characteristic fashion, especially by the stimulus of brilliant natural investigators; and the view of religion, which was not yet perfectly, indeed in many ways invalidly, but at any rate for the first time clearly expressed by him, was so much beyond the comprehensive powers of his or our contemporaries, and anticipated to such a degree the development of Teutonic intellectual gifts, that an appreciation of it belongs rather to the division dealing with the future than to that dealing with the past. Let me add a few words only by way of general guidance. [150] Science is the method, discovered and carried out by the Teutons, of mechanically looking at the world of phenomena; religion is their attitude towards that part of experience which does not appear in the shape of phenomena and therefore is incapable of mechanical interpretation. What these two ideas -- science and religion -- may mean to other men does not here matter. Together they form our philosophy. In this philosophy which rejects as senseless all seeking after final causes, the basis of the attitude of man towards himself and others must be found in something else than in obedience to a world-ruling monarch and the hope of a future reward. As I have already hinted (p. 290) and now have proved, side by side with a strictly mechanical theory of nature there can only be a strictly ideal religion, a religion, that is, which confines itself absolutely to the ideal world of the Unmechanical. However limitless this world of the unmechanical may be -- a world the stroke of whose pinions frees us from the impotence of appearance and soars higher than the stars, whose powers enable us with a smile to face the most painful death, which imparts to a kiss the charm of eternity, and in a flash of thought bestows redemption -- it is nevertheless confined to a definite sphere, namely, our inner self, the boundaries of which it may never cross. Here, therefore, in our own heart, and nowhere else, must the foundations of a religion be sought. "To have religion is the duty of man to himself," says Kant. [151] From considerations which I cannot here repeat, Kant warmly cherishes, as everyone knows, the thought of a Godhead, but he lays great stress on this, that man has to regard his duties not as duties towards God, which would be but a broken reed on which to lean, but as duties towards himself. What in our case unites science and religion to a uniform philosophy of life is the principle that it is always experience that commands; now God is not an experience, but a thought, and in fact an undefinable thought which can never be made comprehensible, whereas man is to himself experience. Here therefore the source has to be sought, and so the autonomy of will (i.e., its free independence) is the highest principle of all morality. [152] An action is moral only in so far as it springs solely from the innermost will of the subject and obeys a self-given law; whereas hope of reward can produce no morality nor can it ever restrain from the worst vice and crime, for all outward religion has mediations and forgivenesses. The "born judge," that is to say man himself, knows quite well whether the feeling of his heart is good or bad, whether his conduct is pure or not, hence "that self-judgment which seeks to penetrate to the deeper recesses or to the very bottom of the heart, and the knowledge of self thus to be gained are the beginning of all human wisdom.... It is only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge that paves the way for the ascent into heaven." [153] In regard to this autonomy of will and this ascension into heaven, I beg the reader to refer to the passage in the chapter on the Entrance of the Teutons into the History of the World (see vol. i. p. 549 f.), where I briefly alluded to Kant's gloriously daring idea. But there is still a link wanting in the chain, to enable us to grasp the religious thought completely. What is it that has given me so high an opinion of that which I discovered on my descent into the abyss of the heart? It is the perception of the high dignity of man. For the first step necessary to bring us to the truly moral standpoint is to root out all the contempt of Self and of the human race which the Christian Church -- in contrast to Christ -- (see vol. i. p. 7) has nurtured. The inborn evil in the heart of man is not destroyed by penance, for that again clings to the outer world of appearance, but by fixing our attention on the lofty qualities in our own hearts. The dignity of man grows with his consciousness of it. It is of great importance that Kant is here in exact agreement with Goethe. Well known is Goethe's theory of the three reverences -- for what is above us, for what is equal to us, and for what is below us -- from which arise three kinds of genuine religion; but true religion arises from a fourth "highest reverence," that is, reverence for Self; it is only when he has reached this stage that man, according to Goethe, attains the highest pinnacle that he is capable of attaining. [154] I have referred to this theme in the passage mentioned above, at the same time also quoting Kant; I must now supplement what was there said by one of the greatest and most glorious passages of all Kant's writings; it forms the only worthy commentary to Goethe's religion .of reverence for Self. "Now I set forth man as asking himself: What is that in me which enables me to sacrifice the inmost lures of my impulses and all wishes that proceed from my nature, to a law which promises me no advantage in return and no penalty if I transgress it: which indeed, the more sternly it commands and the less it offers in return, the more I reverence it? This question stirs our whole soul in amazed wonder at the greatness and sublimity of the inner faculty in man and the insolubility of the mystery which it conceals (for the answer: 'it is freedom,' would be tautological, because it is freedom itself that creates the mystery). We can never tire of directing our attention to it and admiring in ourselves a power which yields to no power of nature.... Here is what Archimedes wanted, but did not find: a firm point on which reason could place its lever, and that without applying it to the present or to a future world, but merely to its inner idea of freedom (which immovable moral law provides as a sure foundation) in order by its principles to set in motion the human will, even in opposition to all nature." [155] It is manifest that this religion presents a direct contrast to the mechanical view. [156] Teutonic science teaches the most painfully exact fixing of that which is present and bids us be satisfied with that, since it is not by hypothesis or tricks of magic that we can learn to master the world of phenomena but only by accurately, indeed slavishly, adapting ourselves to it; Teutonic religion, on the other hand, opens up a wide realm, which slumbers as a sublime ideal in our inmost soul, and teaches us: here you are free, here you are yourselves nature -- creative, legislative; the realm of ideals of itself has no existence, but by your efforts it can truly come into life; as "phenomenon" you are indeed bound to the universal law of faultless mechanical necessity, but experience teaches you that you possess autonomy and freedom in the inner realm; -- use them! The connection between the two worlds -- the seen and the unseen, the temporal and the eternal -- otherwise undiscoverable, lies in the hearts of you men yourselves, and by the moral conception of the inner world the significance of the outer world is determined; conscience teaches you that every day; it is the lesson taught by art, love, pity, and the whole history of mankind; here you are free, as soon as you but know and will it; you can transfigure the visible world, become regenerate yourselves, transform time to eternity, plough the Kingdom of God in the field -- Be this then your task! Religion shall no longer signify for you faith in the past and hope for something future, nor (as with the Indians) mere metaphysical perception -- but the deed of the present! It you but believe in yourselves, you have the power to realise the new "possible Kingdom"; wake up then, for the dawn is at hand! Who could fail to be at once struck with the affinity between the religious philosophy of Kant -- won by faithful, critical study of nature -- and the living heart of the teaching of Christ? Did not the latter say, the Kingdom of God is not outside you, but within you? But the resemblance is not limited to this central point. Whoever studies Kant's many writings on religion and moral law will find the resemblance in many places; for example, take their attitude to the officially recognised form of religion. We find in both the same reverential clinging to the forms regarded as sacred. united to complete independence of intellect, which, breathing upon a thing that is old, transforms it into a thing that is new. [157] For example, Kant does not reject the Bible. but he values it not on account of what we "take out" of it, but because of what we put into it with moral thought." [158] And though he has no objections to Churches" of which there are several equally good forms," yet he has the courage frankly to say: "To look upon this statutory service (the historical methods of praise and Church dogmas) as essential to the service of God and to make it the first condition of divine pleasure in man is a religious delusion, the adherence to which is a false service, i.e., a worship of God directly contrary to that true service demanded of Him." [159] Kant, therefore, demands a religion If in spirit and in truth," and faith in a God "whose kingdom is not of this world" (that is, not of the world of phenomena). He was, moreover, well aware of this agreement. In his book on religion, which appeared in his seventieth year, he gives in about four pages a concise and beautiful exposition of the teaching of Christ, exclusively according to the Gospel of St. Matthew, and concludes: Here now is a complete religion ... illustrated moreover by an example, although neither the truth of the doctrines nor the dignity and nobility of the teacher needed any further attestation." [160] These few words are very significant. For however sublime and elevating everything which Kant has achieved, in this direction, may be, it resembles more, I think, the energetic, undaunted preparation for a true religion than the religion itself; it is a weeding out of superstition to give light and air to faith, a sweeping aside of false service to make true service possible. There is an absence of any visible picture, of any parable. Such a title even as Religion within the Limits of mere Reason makes us fear that Kant is on the wrong track. As Lichtenberg warns us: "Seek to make your account with a God whom reason alone has set upon the throne! You will find it is impossible. The heart and the eye demand their share in Him." [161] And yet Kant himself had said: "To have religion is the duty of man to himself." But as soon as he points to Christ and says: "See, here you have a complete religion! Here you behold the eternal example!" -- the objection no longer holds good; for then Kant is, as it were, a second John, "who goes before the Lord and prepares the way for Him." It was to this -- to a purified Christianity -- that the new Teutonic philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century impelled all great minds. For Diderot I refer to vol. i. p. 336; Rousseau's views are well known; Voltaire, the so-called sceptic, writes:
I have already referred to Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre; Schiller wrote in the year 1795 to Goethe: "I find in the Christian religion virtualiter the framework of all that is Highest and Noblest, and the various manifestations of it which we see in life appear to me to be so repellent and absurd, because they are unsuccessful representations of this Highest." Let us honestly admit the fact; between Christianity, as forced upon us by the Chaos of Peoples, and the innermost soul-faith of the Teutons there has never been any real agreement, never. Goethe could sing boldly:
And now comes forward an experienced pastor and assures us -- as we had long suspected -- that the German peasant has really never been converted to Christianity. [163] A Christianity such as we cannot accept has only now become possible; not because it needed a philosophy, but because false doctrines had to be swept aside, and a great all- embracing, true philosophy of life founded -- a philosophy from which each will take as much as he can, and in which the example and the words of Christ will be within the reach of the meanest as well as of the cleverest. With this I look upon my makeshift bridge, as far as philosophy of life including religion is concerned, as finished. My exposition has been comparatively minute, because upon such points the utmost clearness could alone help the reader and keep his attention on the alert. In spite of its length the whole is only a hasty sketch in which, as has been seen, science on the one hand and religion on the other have claimed all our interest; these two together make up a living philosophy of life, and without that we possess no culture; pure philosophy, on the contrary, as a discipline and training of the reason, is merely a tool, and so there is no place for it here. As regards the prominence given at the end to Immanuel Kant, I have been influenced by my desire to be as simple and clear as possible. I think I shall have convinced the reader that our Teutonic philosophy is not an individual caprice, but the necessary result of the powerful development of our racial qualities; never will a single individual, however great, really "complete" such a universal work, never will the anonymous power of a single personality, working with the inevitableness of nature, show such all-round perfection that everyone must recognise such an individual as a paragon and prophet. Such an idea is Semitic, not Teutonic; to us it seems self-contradictory, for it presupposes that personality in its highest potentiality -- genius -- becomes impersonal. The man who really reverences pre-eminent intellectual greatness will never be a slave to party, for he lives in the high school of independence. Such a gigantic life-work as that of Kant, "the Herculean work of self-knowledge," as he calls it himself, demanded special gifts and made specialisation necessary. But what does that signify? The man who thinks Kant's talent one-sided, [164] must really be in possession of an exceptionally many-sided intellect. Goethe once said that he felt, when reading Kant, as if he were entering a bright room; truly very great praise from such lips. This rare luminous power is a consequence of his remarkable intensity of thought. When we intellectual pigmies walk in the brilliant light created by Kant, it is easy enough to note the boundary of the shadow that is not yet illuminated; however, but for this one incomparable man we should even to-day look upon the shadow as daylight. I had another reason for specially emphasising Kant. The unfolding of our Teutonic culture, that is, the sum of our work from 1200 to 1800, has found in this man a specially pure, comprehensive and venerable expression. Equally important as natural philosopher, thinker, and teacher of morals -- whereby he unites in his own person several great branches of our development -- he is the first perfect pattern of the absolutely independent Teuton who has put aside every trace of Roman absolutism, dogmatism and anti- individualism. And just as he has emancipated us from Rome, so he can -- whenever we please -- emancipate us from Judaism; not by bitterness and persecution, but by once for all destroying every historical superstition, every cabalisticism of Spinoza, every materialistic dogmatism (dogmatic materialism is only the converse of the same thing). Kant is a true follower of Luther; the work which the latter began Kant has continued. _______________ Notes: 1. See especially vol. i, pp. 213 f., 411 f., 471. 2. I shall not copy what is to be found in the textbooks on the history of philosophy, for the very reason that there is none that would suit my purpose here. But I should like once for all to refer to the well-known, excellent handbooks to which I owe much in my account. It is to be hoped that at no too distant date Paul Deussen's Allgemeine Geschichle der Philosophie mit besonderer Berucksichtigung der Religion will be so far advanced as at least partially to fill the gap which has been so keenly felt by me while writing this section. The very fact that he takes religion also into account proves Deussen's capacity to perform the task and his long study of Indian thought is a further guarantee. Meanwhile I recommend to the less experienced reader the short Skizze einer Geschichte der Lehre vom Idealen und Realen which begins the first volume of Schopenhauer's Parerga und Paralipomena: in a few pages it offers a brilliantly clear survey of Teutonic thought at its best, from Descartes to Kant and Schopenhauer. The best introduction to general philosophy that exists is in my opinion (and as far as my limited knowledge extends) Friedrich Albert Lange's Geschichte des Materialismus: this author takes a special point of view and hence the whole picture of European thought from Democritus to Hartmann becomes more vivid, and in the healthy atmosphere of a frank partiality challenging contradiction we breathe much more freely than under the hypocritical impartiality of masked Academic authorities. 3. See p. 322. 4. See p. 178. 5. See the remarks on "not-knowing" as the source of all increase of experience, p. 272, and on the sterilising effects of universalism, p. 276. 6. Cf. vol. i. p. 414. It is very important to note in addition that Thomas Aquinas also must seek support from the Semites and in many passages links on to Jewish philosophers -- Maimonides and others. See Dr. J. Guttmann: Das Verhaltnis des Thomas von Aquino zum Judentum und judischen Litteratur (Gottingen, 1891). 7. Here we are reminded of Rousseau's remark: "Quel plus sur moyen de courir d'erreurs en erreurs que la fureur de savoir tout?" (Letter to Voltaire, 10.9.1755). 8. Cf. p. 128. 9. Cf. vol. i. p. 32. 10. As I do not wish to repeat myself, I refer the reader to vol i. pp. 501 f. and 244, note on Abelard. 11. I quote from the Jena edition, 1591, fol. 329; in the new widespread selections we do not find this passage nor the others "dealing with the Scholastics as a whole" where Luther sighs when he thinks of his student days, when "fine, clever people were burdened with the hearing of useless teachings and the reading of useless books with strange, un-German, sophistical words...." 12. Pfeiffer's edition. 1857, p. 626. What is here uttered negatively is expressed in the fifty-third saying, concerning the seven grades of contemplative life, as a positive theory: "Unde soder Mensch also in sich selber gat, so vindet er got in ime seiber" ("If so man then enters into himself, he findeth God in himself"). 13. See the section Critique of all Speculative Theology and also the last of the Prolegomena to every Future System of Metaphysics. 14. See p. 132 and cf. the conclusion of the note on p. 96. 15. Von dem Missbrauch der Messe, Part III. 16. Cf. The Vorrede auf die Epistel Pauli an die Romer. 17. See, for example, Paul Sabatier: Vie de S. Francois d'Assise, 1896, chap. iv. 18. Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen, pp. 22, 25. 19. Quoted from Schopenhauer: Uber den Willen in der Natur (Section on Physische Astronomie). 20. Sermon at the Feast of the Epiphany, 1492. 21. Concerning the German people as a whole Lamprecht testifies that "the basis of its attitude to Christianity was mystical" (Deutsche Geschichte, 2nd ed. vol. ii. p. 197). This was absolutely true till the introduction by Thomas Aquinas of obligatory rationalism, supplemented later by the materialism of the Jesuits. 22. The theologian Adalbert Merx says in his book, Idee und Grundlinien einer allgemeinen Geschichte der Mystik, 1893. p. 46: "One fact in mysticism is firmly established, that it so completely possesses, reveals and represents the fact of experience in religion, religion as a phenomenon ... that a real philosophy of religion without historical knowledge of mysticism is out of the question." 23. Pfeiffer's edition, p. 162. 24. See vol. i. p. 187. 25. It was not till after his death that his doctrines were condemned as heretical and his writings so diligently destroyed by the Inquisition that most of them are lost. 26. See pp. 44 and 89. 27. De Imitatione Christi, Book III. chap. ii. 28. See, for example, Mysterium magnum, oder Erklarung uber das erste Buch Mosis, chap. xix. § I. 29. See pp. 48 and 129. The extraordinary popularity of Erigena's Division of Nature in the thirteenth century (see pp. 274 and 341) shows how universal was the longing to get rid of this frightful product of Oriental imagination. Luther, in spite of all orthodoxy, is often inclined to agree with Erigena, he, too, writes in his Vierzehn Trostmittel i. I., "Man has hell within himself." 30. See p. 111, &c. 31. The Jesuits are only more consistent than the others. I remember seeing a German girl of twelve years of age lying in convulsions after a lesson on religion. The Lutheran Duodecimo-Pope had inspired the innocent child with such terror of hell. Teachers of this kind should be cited before a criminal court. 32. Pensees philosophiques xvii. 33. Cf. the Twelfth Tractate and the glossary to it. Francis of Assisi also laid almost no stress on hell and very little on heaven (Sabatier, as above, p. 308). 34. See vol. i. p. 569. 35. I remind the reader that Walfila could not translate the ideas hell and devil into Gothic, since this fortunate language knew no such conception (p. 11). Hell was the name of the friendly goddess of death, as also of her empire, and points etymologically to bergen (to hide), verhullen (to conceal), but by no means to Ifernum (Heynu); Teufel has been formed from Diabolus. 36. Der Weg zu Christo, Book VI §§ 36, 37. This conception is Indo-European and proves at once the race of the author. When the Persian Omar Khayyam sent out his soul to get knowledge, it returned with the news, "I myself am Heaven and Hell" (Rubaiyat). 37. Mysterium magnum, 8, 18. 38. Sendbrief dated 18.1.1618, § 10. 39. Mysterium magnum 8, 24. 40. Cf., for example, the short work of Dr. Albert Peip: Jakob Bohme, 1860, p. 16 f. 41. Cf. Der Weg zu Christo, Book V. chap. viii., and Von Christo Testament des Heiligen Abendmahles, chap. iv, § 24. "A proper Christian brings his holy Church with him into the congregation. His heart is the true Church, where he should worship. Though I go to church for a thousand years and to sacrament every week and be absolved daily: if I have not Christ in me, all is false and useless vanity, a worthless, futile thing, and not forgiveness of sins" (Der Weg zu Christo, Book V. chap. vi. § 161. Concerning preaching he says: "The Holy Ghost preaches to the holy hearer from all creatures; in all that he sees he beholds a preacher of God" (§ 14). 42. Traume eines Geistersehers, &c., Part I. 3. 43. Cf. the remarks on p. 240 f. (vol. i.) 44. Uber die Fortschritte der Metaphysik III. 45. Critique of Pure Reason (Explanation of the Cosmological Idea of Freedom). 46. Religion innerhalb der Greuzen der blossen Vernunft, Part 8. Div 2, Point 3 of the General Note. 47. Traume eines Geistersehers, Teil 2, Hauptstuck 3. 48. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 3rd section. 49. See vol. i. p. 85 f. 50. Sermon 95, in Pfeiffer's edition. 51. Beschreibung der drei Prinzipien gottlichen Wesens, chap. xiv. § 85. 52. Whoever regards time as eternity and eternity as present time is freed from all conflict. 53. Cf. De immenso et innumerabilibus I. II., and Del infinito, universo e mondi, towards the end of the First Dialogue. Here by the intuition of genius the same thing is discovered as was established two hundred years later by the brilliant critical judgment of Kant, who says: "Nature and freedom can be attributed without contradiction to the same thing, but in different connections, at one time to the thing as it appears at another to the thing itself" (Prolegomena, § 53). 54. Spruch 43. Cf., too, Sermon 13, where he says that all works shall be done "without any why." "I say verily, as long as you do works not from an inward motive but for the sake of heaven or God or your eternal salvation, you are acting wrongly." 55. Cf. the whole work on Die Freiheit eines Christenmenschen. How new and directly anti-Roman this thought appeared is very clear from Hans Sachs' Disputation zwischen einem Chorherrn und Schuchmacher (1524), in which the shoemaker especially defends, as being "Luther's idea," the doctrine that "good works are not done to gain heaven or from fear of hell. 56. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Division I. Cf., too, the concluding part of the Traume eines Geistersehers, and especially the beautiful interpretation of the passage in Matthew xxv. 35-40, a proof that in the eyes of God only those actions have a value which a man performs without thinking of the possibility of reward. This interpretation is found in his Religion inner halb der Grenzen, Section 4, Part 1., close of first division. 57. De div. naturae 5, 36. 58. Sabatier, loc. cit. p. 382. 59. By this song Francis proves himself a pure Teuton in absolute contrast to Rome. Among the Aryan Indians we find farewell songs of pious men, which correspond almost word for word to that of Francis. Cf. the one translated by Herder in his Gedanken einiger Brahmanen:
60. "That thou art also": i.e., man's recognition of himself. 61. Cf., too, p. 106, note 2. 62. Die drei Principien gottlichen Wesens, chap. viii. § 12. 63. Croonian Lecture, delivered in London on March 16, 1893. 64. Hirschel, Geschichte der Medicin, 2nd ed. p. 208. Here the reader will find a detailed appreciation of Paracelsus, from which some of the following facts are taken. 65. Cf. Kahlbaum; Theophrastus Paracelsus, Basel, 1894, p. 63. This lecture brings to light much new material which proves how false were the charges brought against the great man -- drunkenness, wild life, &c. The fable that he could not write and speak Latin fluently is also disproved. 66. It is noteworthy that the idea and term "Experience" (Erfahrung) were introduced into German thought and the German language by Paracelsus, the mystic (cf. Eucken: Terminologie, p. 125). 67. In the lecture mentioned above Virchow proves that Glisson and not Haller originated the doctrine of irritability. 68. Cf. p. 322 f. 69. Quoted from Heinrich von Stein: Entstehung der neusren Aesthetik, 1886, p. 353f. 70. Traume eines Giestersehers, Teil i. Hauptsts 2. 71. If ye dare, thus armed, to ascend the last pinnacle of this height give me your hand and open your eyes freely to survey the wide field of nature.... Rejoice, thou sublimest of nature's creatures! Thou feelest the power to follow her in the loftiest thought to which she soared in the act of Creation. Here pause in peace, turn back thine eyes, probe, compare, and take from the lips of the muse the sweet full certainty that thou seest and art no dreamer of dreams. 72. Mysterium pansophicum 8, Text, § 9. 73. Mysterium magnum, chap. xxxv. § 24. 74. Tractatus de immortalitate animae. (I quote from F. A. Lange.) 75. Cf. especially Paulsen: Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts, 2nd ed. i. 73 f. 76. De monarchia iii. 15. 77. Sonetti e canzoni (in the third part). The first to prove the invalidity of the pretended gift of Constantine were the famous humanist Lorenzo Valla and the lawyer and theologian Krebs (see vol. i. p. 562). Valla also denounced the secular power of the Pope in whatever form, for the latter was vicarius Christi et non eliam Caesaris (see Dollinger: Papstfabeln, 2nd ed. p. 118). 78. All the first great Humanists of Germany are anti-scholastic -- (Lamprecht, as above, iv. p. 69). It is not right to reproach men like Erasmus, Coornhert, Thomas More, &c., for not joining the Reformation later. For such men were in consequence of their humanistic studies intellectually far too much in advance of their time to prefer a Lutheran or Calvinistic dogmatism to the Romish. They rightly felt that scepticism would always come to terms more easily with a religion of good works than with one of faith; they anticipated -- correctly as it turned out -- a new era of universal intolerance, and thought that it would be more feasible to destroy one single utterly rotten Church from within than several Churches which from the humanistic standpoint were just as impossible, but had been steeled by conflicts. Regarded from this high watch-tower the Reformation meant a new lease of life to ecclesiastical error. 79. The Indologists were the real humanists of the nineteenth century. Cf. my small work Arische Wellanschauung, 1905. 80. Cf. vol. i. p. 264. 81. It would be extremely profitable and illuminating, though out of place here, to consider how inevitably our various modern languages have influenced the philosophies which are expressed by them. The English language, for example, which is richer almost than any other in poetical suggestive power, cannot follow a subtle thought into its most secret windings; at a definite point it fails, and so proves itself suitable only for sober, practical empiricism or poetical raptures; on both sides of the line separating these two spheres it remains too far from the boundary-line itself to be able to pass easily, to float backwards and forwards, from the one to the other. The German language, though less poetical and compact, is an incomparably better instrument for philosophy; in its structure the logical principle is more predominant, and its wide scale of shades of expression allows the finest distinctions to be drawn; for that reason it is suited both for the most accurate analysis and the indications of perceptions that cannot be analysed. In spite of their brilliant talents the Scottish philosophers have never risen above the negative criticism of Hume; Immanuel Kant, of Scottish descent, received the German language as his birthright and could thus create a philosophy which no skill can translate into English (cf. vol. i. p. 298). 82. See the article Genie in the Encyclopedie: one must read the whole six pages of the article. Interesting remarks on the same subject in Diderot's essay De la poesie dramatique. 83. Kalligone, Part II. v. 1. 84. Lettre a M. de Scheyb, 15 Juillet 1756. 85. Dictionnaire de Musique and Discours sur la vertu la plus necessaire aux heros. 86. Anthropologie, § 87c. 87. By "nature philosophy" we understand in the first place the childlike and childish materialism, the use of which, "as manure to enrich the ground for philosophy" (Schopenhauer), cannot be denied, and in the second place its opposite, the transcendental idealism of Schelling, the good of which is, I suppose, to be estimated according to the old aesthetic dogma, that a work of art is to be valued the more highly the less it serves any conceivable purpose. 88. Cf. the remarks on p. 89 (vol. i.) and under "Science," p. 303 f. (vol. ii.). 89. This assertion I take from the Discours de la conformite de la fut avec la raison, § 12, of Leibniz. At a later period Luther expressed the opinion: "I venture to say that a potter has more knowledge of the things of nature than is to be found in those books (of Aristotle)." See his Sendschreiben an den Ade, Punkt 25. 90. Discours de la methode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la verite dans les sciences, Part I. 91. The system of Leibniz is a last heroic effort to enlist scientific method in the service of an historical, absolute theory of God, which in reality destroys all scientific knowledge of nature. In contrast to Thomas Aquinas, this attempt to reconcile faith and reason proceeds from reason, not from faith. However, reason here means not only logical ratiocination, but great mathematical principles of true natural science; and it is just because there is in Leibniz an insuperable element of empirical, irrefutable truth, while Thomas operates only with shadows, that the absurdity of Leibniz' system is more apparent. A man who was so absolutely ignorant of nature as Thomas could mislead himself and others by sophisms; but Leibniz was forced to show that the supposition of a double kingdom -- Nature and Supernature -- is altogether impossible, and that simply because he was familiar with the mathematical and mechanical interpretation of natural phenomena. Thereby the brilliant attempt of Leibniz became epoch-making. As a metaphysician he belongs to the great thinkers; that is proved by the one fact that he asserted the transcendental ideality of space and sought to prove it by profound mathematical and philosophical arguments (see details in Kant: Metaphysiche Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft, 2nd Section, Theorem 4, Note 2). His greatness as a thinker in pure natural science is proved by his theory that the sum of forces in nature is unchangeable, whereby the so-called law of Conservation of Energy, of which we are so proud as an achievement of the nineteenth century, was really enunciated. No less significant is the extremely individualistic character of his philosophy. In contrast to the All-pervading Unity of Spinozism (an idea which was repugnant to him), "individuation," "specification" is for him the basis of all knowledge. "In the whole world there are not two beings incapable of being distinguished," he says. Here we see the genuine Teutonic thinker. (Particularly well discussed in Ludwig Feuerbach's Darstellung der Leibnizschen Philosophie, § 3). 92. We must also note the fact that Hume would scarcely have attained his philosophical results without the achievements of the philosophical thought around him, particularly those of the French scientific "sensualists" of his time. In many ways Hume seems to me to have more affinity with such Italian Humanistic sceptics as Pomponazzi and Vanini than with the genuine group of those who observe nature and draw their philosophy therefrom. 93. Immanuel Kant in seinen letzten Lebensjahren, 1804, p. 25; new edition by Alfons Hoffmann, 1902, p. 298. 94. Note in the Preface to the second edition. 95. Untersuchung uber die Deutlichkeit der Grundsatze der naturlichen Theologie und der Moral, second Thought. 96. Teil 2, Hauptstuck 7. 97. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Abschnitt 2, Teil 1. 98. Uber den Gemeinspruch: das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht fur die Praxis, 1. 99. Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, St. 1 (Note to Introduction). 100. Alphonse de Candolle: Histoire des sciences et des savants depuis deux siecles, 1885, p. 10. 101. In a company of university teachers some years ago I heard a discussion on psychological-physiological themes; starting from the localisation of the functions of speech in Broca's brain convolution, one learned gentleman expressed the opinion that every single word was "localised in a particular cell"; he ingeniously compared this arrangement with a cupboard possessing some few thousand drawers, which could be opened and shut at will (something like the automatic restaurants to-day). It sounded quite charming and not a bit less plausible than the command in the fairy-tale, "Table, be spread." As my positive knowledge in regard to histology of the brain was derived from lectures and demonstrations attended years before, and was consequently very limited, and as I had made a practical study only of the rough outlines of the anatomy of this organ, I begged the gentleman in question to give me more definite information, but it turned out that he had never been in a dissecting hall in his life, and had never seen a brain (except in the pretty woodcuts of text-books): hence he had no idea at all of the boundary-line between the known and the unknown. 102. See p. 278. 103. Vortrage zum Entwurf einer Einleitung in die vergleichende Anatomie, ii. 104. See pp. 182, 277. 105. Uber die asthetische Erziehung des Menschen, Bf. 9. 106. The fact that Descartes, who "explains by principles of physics all mental phenomena of animal life" (see Principia Philosophiae, Part II. 64, as also the first paragraph), ascribed for reasons of orthodoxy a "soul" to man, signifies all the less for his system of philosophy, as he postulates the complete separation of body and soul, so that there is no connection of any kind between them, and man, like every other phenomenon of sense, must be able to be explained mechanically. It is time that commentators stopped their wearisome prating about "Cogito, ergo sum"; it is not psychological analysis, that is Descartes' strong point; on the contrary, he has here, with the unblushing assurance of genius, to the never-ceasing terror of all logical nonentities, pushed aside right and left the things that might make a man pause, and so forced his way to the one great principle that all interpretation of nature must necessarily be mechanical, at least if it is to be comprehensible to the brain of man (at any rate of the homo europaeus). (For more details I refer the reader to the essay on Descartes in my Immanuel Kant.) 107. Thomas Aquinas actually ascribes such a shadowy existence to animals. He says "The unreasoning animals possess an instinct implanted in them by divine reason, and through it they have inner and outer impulses resembling reason." We see what a gulf separates these automata of Thomas from those of Descartes; for Thomas -- like his followers of to-day, the Jesuit Wasmann, and the whole Catholic theory of nature -- endeavours to make animals out to be machines, in order that it may still be possible to maintain the Semitic delusion that nature was created solely for man, whereas Descartes stands for the great conception, that every event must be interpreted as a mechanical process, the vital phenomena of animals and men no less than the life of the sun. 108. Essay on the Human Understanding, Book iv. chap. 3, § 23. 109. Meditations metaphysiques, 6. The first quotation is from the 2nd section, the second from the last. 110. Loc. cit. Book IV. chap. iii. § 26. and chap. xix. § 4. In these theological subterfuges of the first pioneers of the new Teutonic philosophy lies the germ of the later dogmatic assumption of Schelling and Hegel of the identity of thought and being. What in the case of these pioneers had only been a rest by the wayside and at the same time a way of escape from the persecution of fanatical priests, was now made the corner-stone of a new absolutism. 111. Metaphysishe Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft, last paragraph. 112. Descartes: Traite du monde ou de la lumiere, chap. i. 113. See especially the 6th Meditation and in Les passions de I'dme, §§ 4, 17, &c. 114.
Critique of Pure Reason
(Concerning the Final Aim of the Natural 115. Essay, Book II. chap. xxvii. § 27, but especially Book IV. chap. ii. §6. 116. We must not identify this scientific philosophical thought (as accepted by Kant and others, see above, vol. i. p. 90) with the ravings of a Schelling concerning "spirit" and "matter;" for thought is a definite fact of experience, which is known to us only in association with equally definite, perceptible, organic mechanical processes; on the other hand, "spirit" is so vague a conception that anyone can use it for all kinds of charlatanism. When Goethe (evidently under Schelling's influence) on March 24, 1828. writes to Chancellor von Muller, "Matter can never exist without spirit, nor spirit without matter," it would be well to make the same comment as Uncle Toby; "That's more than I know, sir!" 117. Book IV. chap. x; § 10. 118. C'est le privilege du vrai genie, et surtout du genie qui ouvrr une carriere, de faire impunement de grandes fautes" (Voltaire). 119. A Treatise of Human Nature. Introduction. The dilemma of Descartes and Locke is adopted by Hume in his introduction as an evident result of exact thinking, and he says that every hypothesis which undertakes to reveal the last grounds of human nature is to be at once rejected as presumptuous and chimerical. Instead of attempting, as they did, a hypothetical solution, be remains systematically sceptical regarding these "grounds." 120. As Kant is the pre-eminent representative of the purely scientific mode of answering, and ignorant or malicious scribes still mislead the public by asserting that the philosophy of Fichte and Hegel is organically related to Kant's, whereby all true comprehension and all serious deepening of our philosophy becomes impossible. I call the attention of the unphilosophic reader to the fact that Kant in a solemn declaration in the year 1799 designated Fichte's doctrine as a "perfectly untenable system," and shortly afterwards also declared that between his "critical philosophy" (critical reflection upon the results acquired by scientific investigation of corporeal and of thinking nature) and such "scholasticism" (so he terms Fichte's philosophy) there is no affinity whatever. Long before Fichte began to write, Kant had provided the philosophical refutation of this neo-scholasticism, for it breathes from every page of his Critique of Pure Reason, see especially § 27 of the Analytik der Begriffe, and cf. the splendid little book, dated 1796, Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie. 121. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. 122. A Treatise of Human Nature I. 4, 5. 123. Essay, Book IV. chap. ii. §§ 1 and 7; chap. xvii. § 14; chap. xii. § 7. 124. Essay, Book IV. chap. iv. § 9 f. 125. Essay, Book II. chap. xiii. § 15; chap. xxiii. §§ 22 and 29. 126. Gedanken von der wahren Schatzung der lebendigen Krafte, Preface, §7. 127. That which
disturbs your soul 128. See on this subject Kant's remarks against Schlosser in the 2nd Division of the Traktat zum ewigen Frieden in der Philosophie: "He objected to critical philosophy, which he fancies he knows, although he has only looked at its final conclusions, which he was bound to misunderstand, because he had not diligently studied the steps that led up to them." 129. In the above-mentioned work. Part II. § 8. I scarcely need say that Kant neither attacks faith in God nor religion, the book in question and all his later work prove the contrary; from the historical Jahve of the Jews, however, he here once for all dissociates himself. As far as an historical creation is concerned, Kant has expressed himself clearly enough: "A creation as one event among other phenomena cannot be admitted, as its possibility would at once destroy the unity of experience" (Critique of Pure Reason, second analogy of experience). 130. Die Natur (from the series Zur Naturwissenschaft im Allgemeinen). 131. P. 433 f. 132. See Kant's three masterly Recensionen von Herder's Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. 133. See pp. 419, 424. 134. Prolegomena zu einer jeden kunftigen Metaphysik, § 36. 135. We may stimulate the optical nerve as we will, the impression is always "light," and so in the case of the other senses. 136. Spruche in Prosa, uber Naturwissenschaft, 4. 137. Schriften, ed. 1844, vol. ix. p. 34. 138. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. ii. chap. xvii. 139. See especially vol. i. p. 267, vol. ii. pp. 273, 326. 140. Prolegomena, § 10. 141. Critique of Pure Reason. (Of the impossibility of a cosmological proof of the existence of God.) Twenty years before Kant had written: "How am I to understand that, because something is, something else should be? I am not going to be satisfied with the words Cause and Effect" (Versuch. den Begrift der negativen Grossen in die Weltweisheit einzufuhren, Division 3, General Note). 142. Loc. cit. (Critique of all speculative theology.) 143. Vol. i. p. 240. 144. Erklarung gegen Fichte (conclusion). 145. Growing older is noted only by seeing others grow old or by the coming on of feebleness, i.e., by something outward; hours can pass as a moment, a few seconds may unfold the complete image of a lifetime. 146. See vol. i. pp. 229, 437, vol. ii. p. 23. 147. It is remarkable how affinity between these two errors -- uncritically projecting inner experience into the world of phenomena and bringing the outer world into inner experience -- manifests itself in life: theists become in the twinkling of an eye atheists, a strikingly common thing in the case of Jews, since, if they are orthodox (and even when they have become Christians) they are convinced, genuine theists, whereas with us God is always in the background and even the orthodox mind is filled by the Redeemer or the Mother of God, the saints or the sacrament. I should never have dreamt that theistic conviction could be so firmly rooted in the brain had I not had occasion, in the case of a friend, a Jewish scholar, to observe the genesis and obstinacy of the apparently opposite "atheistical" conception. It is absolutely impossible ever to bring home to such a man what we Teutons understand by Godhead, religion, morality. Here lies the hard insoluble kernel of the "Jewish problem." And this is the reason why an impartial man, without a trace of contempt for the in many respects worthy and excellent Jews, can and must regard the presence of a large number of them in our midst as a danger not to be under-estimated. Not only the Jew, but also all that is derived from the Jewish mind, corrodes and disintegrates what is best in us. And so Kant rightly reproached the Christian Churches for making all men Jews, by representing the importance of Christ as lying in this, that He was the historically expected Jewish Messiah. Were Judaism not thus inoculated into us, the Jews in flesh and blood would be much less dangerous for our culture than they are. 148. Religion, 4 Stuck, 1 Teil, 2 Abschnitt. 149. Predigt, 99. 150. I refer for supplementary facts to my book: Immanuel Kant, die Personlichket uls Einfuhrung in das Werk, 1905, Bruckmann. 151. Tugendlehre, § 18. 152. Kant defines: "Autonomy of will is that quality of will by which a will (independently of any object willed) is a law to itself." See Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten II. 2. 153. Kant writes not "zur Himmelfahrt" but "zur Vergotterung," but owing to the common usage of this word in ordinary speech misunderstanding might easily arise. Schiller says, "The moral will makes man divine" (Anmut und Wurde; and Voltaire, "Si Dieu n'est pas dans nous, il n'exista jamais" (Poeme sur la Loi Naturelle). Profound is also Goethe's thought: "Since God became man, in order that we poor creatures of sense might grasp and comprehend Him, we must see to it especially that we do not again make Him God." (Brief des Pastors *** an den neuen Pastor zu ***.) 154. Wanderjahre, Bk II. chap. i. 155. From the book: Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie (1796). 156. Naturally also to Ethics as "science"; on this see p. 64 note. 157. See vol. i. p. 221. 158. Der Streit der Fakultaten, I Division, supplement. 159. Die Religion, u.s.w. Section 4, Part 2, Introduction. The title of the 3rd section of this part is amusing: "Concerning Priesthood as a Regiment in the False Service of the Good Principle." 160. Section 4, Part I, Division I. In this exposition there is an interpretation which will not be very acceptable to the "regiment of false service"; the words. "wide is the gate and broad is the path that leadeth to destruction, and they are many that walk thereon," he interprets as referring to the Churches! 161. Politische Bemerkungen. 162. It redounds to the honour of the Germans to have hated Christianity! 163. Paul Gerade: Meine Hoebachtungen und Erlebnisse als Dorfpastor, 1895. In an essay in the Nineteenth Century, January 1898, entitled The Prisoners of the Gods, by W. B. Yeats, it is clearly proved that in all Catholic Ireland the belief in the old (so-called heathen) gods is still alive; the peasants, however, mostly fear to utter the word "Gods"; they say "the others" or simply "they," or "the royal gentry," seldom does one hear the expression "the spirits." 164. I should here like to defend Kant against the reproach of repellent one-sidedness which has been spread by Schopenhauer's writings. Schopenhauer asserts in his Grundlage der Moral, § 6, that Kant will have nothing to do with pity, and quotes passages which Kant certainly meant to express something different, since they are directed solely against pernicious sentimentality. Kant may have underestimated the principle of pity upon which J. J. Rousseau, and, following him, Schopenhauer, laid such stress, but he has by no means failed to recognise it. The touchstone in this case is his attitude to animals. In the Jugendlehre, § 17, we read that violence and cruelty to animals "is quite contrary to the duty of man towards himself, for thereby sympathy with the sufferings of animals is blunted in man." This standpoint of kindness to animals as a duty to self and the principle inculcated, that of "gratitude" towards domestic companions, seems to me very lofty. Concerning vivisection, this so-called "loveless, indifferent" and certainly strictly scientific man says, "Painful physical experiments merely for the sake of speculation are abhorrent."
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