In conclusion, I will endeavour to recapitulate the obligations which literature and science owe to the great man, whose literary biography I have attempted to sketch.
To have, in common with his illustrious brother, established a system of broad, comprehensive, synthetic criticism, by which the principles of ancient and modern art were unfolded to view—by which we were introduced into the intellectual laboratories of genius, made to assist at the birth of her mighty conceptions, and by whose plastic touch the great works of ancient and modern poetry were in a manner created anew:—to have unlocked the fountains of the old Germanic minstrelsy, and refreshed the poetry of his age with a new stream of fictions:—to have been among the first to do for philology what the Stagyrite had done for natural history; by classifying languages not according to their outward form, but their internal organization, not according to a specious, though often delusive, etymology, but according to grammatical structure: to have deciphered the mysterious wisdom of old days, and with admirable tact to have caught the spirit of the primitive world, as disclosed in its sagas and its symbols, its poetry and its philosophy: next to have evoked from the dust the better philosophy of ancient Greece, and presented her venerable form to the renewed love and respect of mankind, partly by an admirable translation of portions of Plato,[31] partly by luminous critiques, and partly again by the example of his own philosophy, in form as well as spirit so eminently Platonic: then, in the field of modern history, to have traced the rise and progress of the European states, the genius of their civil and political institutions, the causes and effects of their moral and social revolutions, with an extent of learning, a spirit of impartiality, and a depth and comprehensiveness of understanding, unsurpassed by preceding writers, and in his own age rivalled only by his illustrious countryman—Goerres: lastly, to have put the crowning glory to a life so full of glorious achievement by his last philosophical works, where a strong and broad light is thrown upon the mysteries of psychology, where the most important questions of ontology are treated with equal boldness and sublimity of thought, and magnificence of fancy, while even on physics many bright hints are thrown out, which a deeper science will know one day how to turn to account: such are the the services which this illustrious man has rendered to the cause of literature and philosophy. Living in an age which is only an epoch of momentous transition from the adolescence to the virility of the human mind, he was evidently, together with some other chosen spirits of his time, the precursor of an era of Christian philosophy, when, to use the language of a young, but very distinguished French writer,[32] "the sterile dust of futile abstractions will be swept away, and the antique faith will appear crowned with all the rays of science." "Already," continues the writer just quoted, "even infidel science, astonished at her own discoveries, which disconcert alike ideology and materialism, begins to suspect
"There are more things in heaven and earth
Than are dreamt of in that philosophy."[33]
THE
AUTHOR'S PREFACE.
The most important subject, and the first problem of philosophy, is the restoration in man of the lost image of God; so far as this relates to science.
Should this restoration in the internal consciousness be fully understood and really brought about, the object of pure philosophy is attained.
To point out historically in reference to the whole human race, and in the outward conduct and experience of life, the progress of this restoration in the various periods of the world, constitutes the object of the Philosophy of History.