The effort of philosophical thinking, as already remarked, was not now to either sustain or disprove the Divine Existence or the mode of that existence, as expressed in the Orthodox Christian creeds; but its aim was more especially to set forth the modes of divine existence independent of theological conceptions. Is the Absolute to be apprehended as "Will," "finding its completion in the intuition of perfect attainment?" Or "Reason," "comprehending itself as the eternal process of the world and finding that all is Good?" Or "Feeling," "which apprehends the unity of things in a single and immediate act of self-consciousness?" Or merely "Blind Energy," "which seems in a cross-section of time, as viewed by the average spectator, to have a definite direction, but which in reality has neither a "whence nor whither;" and no other goal than the meaningless eternal oscillation between states of motion and states of rest." ("Typical Modern Conceptions of God"—by Joseph Alexander Leighton—1901—Introduction, p. 8.)
2. Modern Schools of Philosophy: So extensive is the period now under consideration, and so numerous the voices to be heard, that one cannot hope in three lessons—to which space it is necessary that we limit ourselves—to convey, even by quotation from typical philosophers of the period, an adequate idea of the conceptions of God that have obtained. It will be necessary for the individual student personally to take up the subject in private study if he feels the necessity of wide knowledge on the speculations of men on the Supreme Being and His modes of existence.
Meantime, the numerous teachers of this period may be grouped under general descriptive terms which relate either to their methods of thought or the result of their thinking, sometimes to both.
"In the wave of philosophical inquiry which swept over Europe in the middle of the seventeenth century, and is regarded as the beginning of a new, scientific age of the world, there were two controlling, but divergent forces, those, namely, represented by Bacon and Descartes, the first the founder of the experimental, and the latter the idealistic or dogmatic method of philosophizing. From the former (Bacon), we may trace a continuous influence through Locke, Berkeley, Hume down to Mill, Spencer, Darwin and Huxley; from the latter (Descartes), the development of the modern idealism represented by Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Lotze." (Introduction to the Works of Spinoza, p. 5.)
From this it will appear that our modern philosophers are mainly divided, as to their methods of thought, into Empirics and Idealists.
(a) Empiricism: "The empirical character, or method; reliance on direct, and especially individual, observation and experience, to the exclusion of theories or assumed principles, and sometimes of all reasoned processes, inductive or deductive. The doctrine that all knowledge is derived from the senses, or experience through the senses, or at least from the perception of simple historical fact; experientialism; opposed to intuitionalism. Empiricism, as its name imports, affirms that all our knowledge comes from experience, and is therefore subject to all the imperfections and limitations of experience." (Standard Dictionary.)
(b) Idealism: "Idealism—that explanation of the world which maintains that the only thing absolutely real is mind; that all material and all temporal existences take their being from mind, from consciousness that thinks and experiences; that out of consciousness they all issue, to consciousness are presented, and that presence to consciousness constitute their entire reality and entire existence." (Prof. Howison, Conceptions of God,—1902—p. 84.)
(c) Rationalism: In philosophy means, "the doctrine that reason furnishes certain elements that underlies experience, and without which experience is impossible; opposed to empiricism or experientialism." (Standard Dictionary.) "In metaphysics, the doctrine of a priori cognitions; the doctrine that knowledge is not all produced by the action of outward things upon themselves, but partly arises from the natural adaption of the mind to think things that are true.
"The form of Rationalism which is now in the ascendant, resembles the theory of natural evolution in this, that the latter finds the race more real than the individual, and the individual to exist only in the race; so the former looks upon the individual reason as but a finite manifestation of the universal reason." (Cent. Dict.)
(d) Rationalistic Elements and Methods: A fine description of rationalistic elements and method of philosophizing, is given in one of Ernest Haeckel's latest works.