Among the opponents of the Hegelian philosophy the members of the "theistic school," who have above been designated as semi-Hegelians, approximate it most closely. These endeavor, in part retaining the dialectic method, to blend the immanence of the absolute, which philosophy cannot give up and concerning which Hegel had erred only by way of over-emphasis, with the transcendence of God demanded by Christian consciousness, to establish a theism which shall contain pantheism as a moment in itself. God is present in all creatures, yet distinct from them; he is intramundane as well as extramundane; he is self-conscious personality, free creative spirit, is this from all eternity, and does not first become such through the world-development. He does not need the world for his perfection, but out of his goodness creates it. Philosophy must begin with the living Godhead instead of beginning, like Hegel's Logic, with the empty concept of being. For the categories—as Schelling had already objected—express necessary forms or general laws only, to which all reality must conform, but which are never capable of generating reality; the content which appears in them and which obeys them, can only be created by a Deity, and only empirically cognized. This is the standpoint of Christian Hermann Weisse[1] in Leipsic (1801-66), Karl Philipp Fischer[2] in Erlangen (1807-85), Immanuel Hermann Fichte[3] (1797-1879; 1842-65 professor in Tübingen), and the follower of Schleiermacher, Julius Braniss in Breslau (1792-1873). The following hold similar views, influenced, like Weisse and K. Ph. Fischer, by Schelling: Jacob Sengler of Freiburg (1799-1878; The Idea of God, 1845 seq.), Leopold Schmid of Giessen (1808-69; cf. p. 516, note), Johannes Huber (died 1879), Moritz Carrière[4] (born 1817), both in Munich, K. Steffensen of Basle (1816-88; Collected Essays, 1890), and Karl Heyder in Erlangen (1812-86; The Doctrine of Ideas, vol. i. 1874). Chalybaeus at Kiel (died 1862), and Friedrich Harms at Berlin (died 1880; Metaphysics, posthumously edited by H. Wiese, 1885), who, like Fortlage and I.H. Fichte, start from the system of the elder Fichte, should also be mentioned as sympathizing with the opinions of those who have been named.
[Footnote 1: Weisse: System of Aesthetics, 1830; The Idea of the Godhead, 1833; Philosophical Dogmatics, 1855. His pupil Rudolf Seydel has published several of his posthumous works; H. Lotze also acknowledges that he owes much to Weisse. Rud. Seydel in Leipsic (born 1835), Logic, 1866; Ethics, 1874; cf. p. 17.]
[Footnote 2: K. Ph. Fischer: The Idea of the Godhead, 1839; Outlines of the System of Philosophy, 1848 seq.; The Untruth of Sensationalism and Materialism, 1853.]
[Footnote 3: I.H. Fichte: System of Ethics, 1850-53, the first volume of which gives a history of moral philosophy since 1750; Anthropology, 1856, 3d ed., 1876; Psychology, 1864.]
[Footnote 4: Carrière: Aesthetics, 1859, 3d ed., 1885; The Moral Order of the World, 1877, 2d ed., 1891; Art in connection with the Development of Culture, 5 vols., 1863-73.]
The same may be said, further, of Hermann Ulrici[1] of Halle (1806-84), for many years the editor of the Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, founded in 1837 by the younger Fichte and now edited by the author of this History, which, as the organ of the theistic school, opposed, first, the pantheism of the Young Hegelians, and then the revived materialism so loudly proclaimed after the middle of the century. This Zeitschrift of Fichte and Ulrici, following the altered circumstances of the time, has experienced a change of aim, so that it now seeks to serve idealistic efforts of every shade; while the Philosophische Monatshefte (founded by Bergmann in 1868, edited subsequently by Schaarschmidt, and now) edited by P. Natorp of Marburg, favors neo-Kantianism, and the Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie (begun in 1877, and) edited by R. Avenarius of Zurich, especially cultivates those parts of philosophy which are open to exact treatment.
[Footnote 1: Ulrici: On Shakespeare's Dramatic Art, 1839, 3d ed., 1868 [English, 1876]; Faith and Knowledge, 1858; God and Nature, 1861, 2d ed., 1866; God and Man, in two volumes, Body and Soul, 1866, 2d ed., 1874, and Natural Law, 1872; various treatises on Logic—in which consciousness is based on the distinguishing activity, and the categories conceived as functional modes of this—on Spiritualism, etc.]
The appearance of materialism was the consequence of the flagging of the philosophic spirit, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the dissatisfaction of the representatives of natural science with the constructions of the Schelling-Hegelian school. If the German naturalist is especially exposed to the danger of judging all reality from the section of it with which he is familiar, from the world of material substances and mechanical motions, the reason lies in the fact that he does not find it easy, like the Englishman for example, to let the scientific and the philosophico-religious views of the world go on side by side as two entirely heterogeneous modes of looking at things. The metaphysical impulse to generalization and unification spurs him on to break down the boundary between the two spheres, and, since the physical view of things has become part of his flesh and blood, psychical phenomena are for him nothing but brain-vibrations, and the freedom of the will and all religious ideas, nothing but illusions. The materialistic controversy broke out most actively at the convention of naturalists at Göttingen in 1854, when Rudolph Wagner in his address "On the Creation of Man and the Substance of the Soul" declared, in opposition to Karl Vogt, that there is no physiological reason for denying the descent of man from one pair and an immaterial immortal soul. Vogt's answer was entitled "Collier Faith and Science." Among others Schaller (Body and Soul, 1855), J.B. Meyer in a treatise with the same title, 1856, and the Jena physicist, Karl Snell,[1] took part in the controversy by way of criticism and mediation. A much finer nature than the famous leaders of materialism—Moleschott (The Circle of Life, 1852, in answer to Liebig's Chemical Letters), and Louis Büchner, with whose Force and Matter (1855, 16th ed., 1888; English translation by Collingwood, 4th ed., 1884) the gymnasiast of to-day still satisfies his freethinking needs—is H. Czolbe (1819-73; New Exposition of Sensationalism, 1855; The Limits and Origin of Human Knowledge, 1865), who, on ethical grounds, demands the exclusion of everything suprasensible and contentment with the given world of phenomena, but holds that, besides matter and motion, eternal, purposive forms and original sensations in a world-soul are necessary to explain organic and psychical phenomena.
[Footnote 1: Snell (1806-86): The Materialistic Question, 1858; The
Creation of Man, 1863. R. Seydel has edited Lectures on the Descent of
Man, 1888, from Snell's posthumous writings.]
%2. New Systems: Trendelenburg, Fechner, Lotze, and Hartmann%.