History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion

by Adam Storey Farrar

Lecture VII. Free Thought: In Germany Subsequently To 1835; And In France During The Present Century.

Matt. xiii. 52.

Every scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.

The last lecture was brought to a close before we reached the final forms assumed by German theology. In the present one we must complete the narrative; and afterwards carry on the history of free thought in France, as affected by the influence of German literature, from the period at which the narrative was previously interrupted to the present time.

We have noticed the traces of the reaction in favour of orthodoxy, which was produced in Germany by the influence of Schleiermacher. We treated the philosophical side of the movement, the vindication of the distinctness of religion and ethics; and also witnessed the improved tone in the critical, tending, if not to the recognition of a supernatural character in the holy scriptures, yet to a more spiritual appreciation of their literary characteristics, and of the psychological peculiarity of the facts recorded. We adverted also, in conclusion, to a rival philosophical influence, springing from the teaching of Hegel, which assisted the reaction by seeking [pg 263] a philosophical reconstruction of religion, though from a different point of view from Schleiermacher.

It was this school which gave origin to the subsequent movements in Germany. The sudden alteration in German thought induced by Strauss, which ushers in the modern period, arose from the union of the philosophical principles of this school with the criticism of that of De Wette. We must therefore endeavour to understand this movement, which forms the turning point between the reaction before described, which is the second of the three general divisions made of this portion of history,[802] and the forms which succeed constituting the third division. Hegel,[803] a name almost as important in its influence on the German mind as that of Goethe, has been already mentioned[804] as the last of that band of philosophers which strove to develop the mental as distinct from the material principle, presented in Kant's philosophy. Kant had completed the process of turning man's search inward, which Descartes had begun. Philosophy became psychology; the discovery of the limits of knowledge, rather than of the nature of the thing known. We have seen that Fichte and Schelling, not content with this result, had sought, though by opposite processes, to escape from this limited knowledge; to attain an ontology as well as a psychology. All philosophy aims at attaining a knowledge of reality, either à posteriori by means of generalisation, or à priori from the data of mind. These two philosophers strove to attain it by the latter mode; but their method either lacked system, or failed in its results: their philosophy was poetry rather than logic. Hegel followed in their steps, but adopted a basis which admitted of being developed in a formal system. The logical rigour of his method, and the encyclopædic [pg 264] grasp which it gave over knowledge, partly accounted, as in the case of Spinoza or of Wolff, for its popularity. The universe was to be interpreted from the mind; the laws of thought were the laws of things. The microcosm and the macrocosm were one; thought, and the mind that thinks; or, more truly, both were phases of the universal mind which was unfolding. The mind of man could transcend the limits of the finite and phenomenal; and, being able to apprehend the idea, the νοούμενον, absolutely, without condition, thus possessed the solution of any branch of universal knowledge by an à priori process. The problem of philosophy was, to find the laws of this evolution in thought, to catch the ideal when it strives to become immanent and to manifest itself in the actual.

Without attempting here to explain the kind of threefold process, ([35]) according to which this evolution takes place, it is better, as in the case of the former philosophies named, to exhibit the influence of the general method rather than the effects of particular theories inculcated by it.

The method had many advantages, in displacing a low materialism, in stimulating loftiness of conception, and generating an historic study of every subject, by its view of the universe as a development; and also created a largeness of sympathy with differing views, by regarding all things as in transition, relative, true only in reference to their contradictory; and by considering all hypotheses to contain a germ of right, and to be the result of partial views of truth; but it will also be obvious, that the method had its evil effects. For, when applied to any department, it produced a disposition to seize the principle, the idea, of which the concrete is the embodiment; to descend from the type upon the individual. Its method was deductive and idealistic; giving being to abstractions, like the realism of the middle ages. It lost the fact in the principle; it personified the genus. Philosophy became a vast mythology.

When applied to Christianity, for example, it did [pg 265] not attempt to find a philosophic ground for it psychologically in the human aspirations, as Schleiermacher had done,[805] but objectively in the dogma. It discovered the ideal truth in religion, and regarded Christianity and Christ as being the manifestation of the effort of the great Spirit of the universe to convert the idea into act; the symbol which expressed the speculative truth of the essential unity of the ideal and the real, of the divine and the human. Like the ancient Gnosticism, it believed in dogmatic Christianity, because it descended upon it from an á priori principle, in which it found the explanation of it. Religion and philosophy were reconciled, because religion was made a phase of philosophy.

This system was taught by its founder at Berlin from about 1820 to 1830, contemporary with that of Schleiermacher; and the learned theologian Marheinecke[806] is the name best known of those who applied it to theology. It was regarded at that time as an instrument of orthodoxy.[807] It had the advantage over [pg 266] the old rationalism, in that while using similarity of method in seeking to explain mysteries, it did not pare them down, but absorbed them in principles of philosophy; and over the school of Schleiermacher, in that it was less subjective, less a matter of feeling, supplying a doctrine and not merely a spirit; and therefore it satisfied the longing of the mind for dogmatic truth, and at the same time more readily linked itself, ecclesiastically with churchlike and corporate tendencies, and politically with conservative and autocratic ones. Yet it is easy to see that its spirit was really far less Christian than Schleiermacher's. For it not only confused again philosophy and religion, which his system had severed, but it proudly claimed to explain doctrines rationally where his had only sought to appropriate them intuitionally. It verged towards pantheism. It was in danger of losing the historic fact in the idea; of encouraging, as it is now sometimes called, the “ideological tendency;”[808] whereas with Schleiermacher, the historic belief had only been regarded as less important than the emotional apprehension. Its à priori spirit created also a depreciation of the investigations which had been pursued by the critical school. It gave encouragement to the study of history; but it was to the history of philosophy, not to the investigations conducted by historical criticism.