It is the same scientific spirit of the time, which in the fifties led many who were weary of the idealistic speculations over to materialism, that now secures such wide dissemination and so widespread favor for the endeavors of the neo-Kantians and the positivists or neo-Baconians, who desire to see metaphysics stricken from the list of the sciences and replaced by noëtics, and the theory of the world relegated to faith. The philosophy of the present, like the pre-Socratic philosophy and the philosophy of the early modern period, wears the badge of physics. The world is conceived from the standpoint of nature, psychical phenomena are in part neglected, in part see their inconvenient claims reduced to a minimum, while it is but rarely that we find an appreciation of their independence and co-ordinate value, not to speak of their superior position. The power which natural science has gained over philosophy dates essentially from a series of famous discoveries and theories, by which science has opened up entirely new and wide outlooks, and whose title to be considered in the formation of a general view of reality is incontestable. To mention only the most prominent, the following have all posited important and far-reaching problems for philosophy as well as for science: Johannes Müller's (Müller died 1858) theory of the specific energies of the senses, which Helmholtz made use of as an empirical confirmation of the Kantian apriorism; the law of the conservation of energy discovered by Robert Mayer (1842, 1850; Helmholtz, 1847, 1862), and, in particular, the law of the transformation of heat into motion, which invited an examination of all the forces active in the world to test their mutual convertibility; the extension of mechanism to the vital processes, favored even by Lotze; the renewed conflict between atomism and dynamism; further, the Darwinian theory[1] (1859), which makes organic species develop from one another by natural selection in the struggle for existence (through inheritance and adaptation); finally, the meta-geometrical speculations[2] of Gauss (1828), Riemann (On the Hypotheses which lie at the Basis of Geometry, 1854, published in 1867), Helmholtz (1868), B. Erdmann (The Axioms of Geometry, 1877). G. Cantor, and others, which look on our Euclidean space of three dimensions as a special case of the unintuitable yet thinkable analytic concept of a space of n dimensions. The circumstance that these theories are still largely hypothetical in their own field appears to have stirred up rather than moderated the zeal for carrying them over into other departments and for applying them to the world as a whole. Thus, especially, the Darwinians[3] have undauntedly attempted to utilize the biological hypothesis of the master as a philosophical principle of the world, and to bring the mental sciences under the point of view of the mechanical theory of development, though thus far with more daring and noise than success. The finely conceived ethics of Höffding (p. 585) is an exception to the rule which is the object of this remark.
[Footnote 1: A critical exposition of the modern doctrine of development and of the causes used to explain it is given by Otto Hamann, Entwickelungslehre und Darwinismus, Jena, 1892. Cf. also, O. Liebmann, Analysis der Wirklichkeit; and Ed. von Hartmann (above, p. 610). [Among the numerous works in English the reader may be referred to the article "Evolution," by Huxley and Sully, Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed., vol. viii.; Wallace's Darwinism, 1889; Romanes, Darwin and after Darwin, i. The Darwinian Theory, 1892; and Conn's Evolution of To-day, 1886.—TR.]
[Footnote 2: Cf. Liebmann, Analysis der Wirklichkeit, 2d ed., pp. 53-59. G. Frege (Begriffsschrift, 1879; The Foundations of Arithmetic, 1884; Function and Concept, 1891; "On Sense and Meaning" in the Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. c. 1892) has also chosen the region intermediate between mathematics and philosophy for his field of work. We note, further, E.G. Husserl, Philosophy of Arithmetic, vol. i., 1891.]
[Footnote 3: Ernst Haeckel of Jena (born 1834; General Morphology, 1866; Natural History of Creation, 1868 [English, 1875] I Anthropogeny, 1874; Aims and Methods of the Development History of To-day, 1875; Popular Lectures, 1878 seq.—English, 1883), G. Jäger, A. Schleicher (The Darwinian Theory and the Science of Language, 1865), Ernst Krause (Carus Sterne, the editor of Kosmos) O. Caspari, Carneri (Morals and Darwinism, 1871), O. Schmidt, Du Prel, Paul Rée (The Origin of the Moral Feelings, 1877; The Genesis of Conscience, 1885; The Illusion of Free Will, 1885); G.H. Schneider (The Animal Will, 1880; The Human Will, 1882; The Good and III of the Human Race, 1883).]
Besides the theory of knowledge, in the elaboration of which the most eminent naturalists[1] participate with acuteness and success, psychology and the practical disciplines also betray the influence of the scientific spirit. While sociology and ethics, following the English model, seek an empirical basis and begin to make philosophical use of statistical results (E.F. Schäffle, Frame and Life of the Social Body, new ed., 1885; A. von Oettingen, Moral Statistic in its Significance for a Social Ethics, 3d ed., 1882), psychology endeavors to attain exact results in regard to psychical life and its relation to its physical basis—besides Fechner and the Herbartians, W. Wundt and A. Horwicz should be mentioned here. Wundt and, of late, Haeckel go back to the Spinozistic parallelism of material and psychical existence, only that the latter emphasizes merely the inseparability (Nichtohneeinander) of the two sides (the cell-body and the cell-soul) with a real difference between them and a metaphysical preponderance of the material side, while the former emphasizes the essential unity of body and soul, and the higher reality of the spiritual side.
[Footnote 1: Helmholtz, Virchow (born 1821), Zöllner (1834-82; On the Nature of Comets, 1872), and Du Bois-Reymond (born 1818), who, in his lectures On the Limits of the Knowledge of Nature, 1872, and The Seven World-riddles, 1880 (both together in 1882, and reprinted in the first series of his Addresses, 1886), looks on the origin of life, the purposive order of nature, and thought as problems soluble in the future, but declares, on the other hand, that the nature of matter (atoms) and force (actio in distant), the origin of motion, the genesis of consciousness (of sensation, together with pleasure and pain) from the knowable conditions of psychical life, and the freedom of the will, are absolute limits to our knowledge of nature.]
%(b) Idealistic Reaction against the Scientific Spirit.%—In opposition to the preponderance of natural science and the empirico-skeptical tendency of the philosophy of the day conditioned by it, an idealistic counter-movement is making itself increasingly felt as the years go on. Wilhelm Dilthey[1] abandons metaphysics as a basis, it is true, but (with the assent of Gierke, Preussische Jahrbücher, vol. liii. 1884) declares against the transfer of the method of natural science to the mental sciences, which require a special foundation. In spite of his critical rejection of metaphysics, Wilhelm Windelband in Strasburg (born 1848; Preludes, 1884) is, like Dilthey, to be counted among the idealists. In opposition to the individualism of the positivists, the folk-psychologists—at their head Steinthal and Lazarus (p. 536); Gustav Glogau[2] in Kiel (born 1844) is an adherent of the same movement—defend the power of the universal over individual spirits. The spirit of the people is not a phrase, an empty name, but a real force, not the sum of the individuals belonging to the people, but an encompassing and controlling power, which brings forth in the whole body processes (e.g., language) which could not occur in individuals as such. It is only as a member of society that anyone becomes truly man; the community is the subject of the higher life of spirit.
[Footnote 1: Dilthey: Introduction to the Mental Sciences, part i., 1883; Poetic Creation in the Zeller Aufsätze, 1887; "Contributions to the Solution of the Question of the Origin of our Belief in the Reality of the External World, and its Validity," Sitzungsberichte of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, 1890; "Conception and Analysis of Man in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries" in the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, vols. iv., v., 1891-92.]
[Footnote 2: Glogau: Sketch of the Fundamental Philosophical Sciences (part i., The Form and the Laws of Motion of the Spirit, 1880; part ii., The Nature and the Fundamental Forms of Conscious Spirit, 1888); Outlines of Psychology; 1884.]
If folk-psychology, whose title but imperfectly expresses the comprehensive endeavor to construct a psychology of society or of the universal spirit, is, as it were, an empirical confirmation of Hegel's theory of Objective Spirit, Rudolf Eucken[1] (born 1846), pressing on in the Fichtean manner from the secondary facts of consciousness to an original real-life, endeavors to solve the question of a universal becoming, of an all-pervasive force, of a supporting unity ("totality") in the life of spirit (neither in a purely noëtical nor a purely metaphysical, but) in a noölogical way, and demands that the fundamental science or doctrine of principles direct its attention not to cognition by itself, but to the activity of psychical life as a whole.