%1. The Philosophers of Nature.%
Henrik Steffens[1] (a Norwegian, 1773-1845; professor in Halle, Breslau, and Berlin) makes individual development the goal of nature—which is first completely attained in man and in his peculiarity or talent—and holds that the catastrophes of the spirit are reflected in the history of the earth. Lorenz Oken[2] (1779-1851; professor in Jena 1807-27, then in Munich and Zurich) identifies God and the universe, which comes to self-consciousness in man, the most perfect animal; teaches the development of organisms from an original slime (a mass of organic elements, infusoria, or cells); and looks on the animal kingdom as man anatomized, in that the animal world contains in isolated development that which man possesses collected in minute organs—the worm is the feeling animal, the insect the light animal, the snail the touch animal, the bird the hearing animal, the fish the smelling animal, the amphibian the taste animal, the mammal the animal of all senses.
[Footnote 1: Steffens, Contributions to the Inner Natural History of the
Earth, 1801; Caricatures of the Holiest, 1819-21; Anthropology, 1822.]
[Footnote 2: Oken: On the Significance of the Bones of the Skull, 1807; Text-book of the Philosophy of Nature, 1809-11, 2d ed. 1831, 3d ed. 1843; the journal Isis, from 1817. On Oken cf. C. Güttler, 1885.]
While in Steffens geological interests predominate, and in Oken biological interests, Schubert, Carus, and Ennemoser are the psychologists of the school. Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert[1] (1780-1860; professor in Erlangen and Munich) brings the human soul into intimate relation with the world-soul, whose phantasy gives form to all that is corporeal, and delights to dwell on the abnormal and mysterious phenomena of the inner life, the border-land between the physical and the psychical, on the unconscious and the half-conscious, on presentiments and clairvoyance, as from another direction also Schelling's philosophy was brought into perilous connection with somnambulism. A second predominantly contemplative thinker was Karl Gustav Carus[2] (1789-1869; at his death in Dresden physician to the king; Lectures on Psychology, 1831; Psyche, 1846; Physis, 1851), greatly distinguished for his services to comparative anatomy. Carus endows the cell with unconscious psychical life,—a memory for the past shows itself in the inheritance of dispositions and talents, just as the formation of milk in the breasts of the pregnant and the formation of lungs in the embryo betray a prevision of the future,—and points out that with the higher development of organic and spiritual life the antitheses constantly become more articulate: individual differences are greater among men than among women, among adults than among children, among Europeans than among negroes.
[Footnote 1: G.H. Schubert: Views of the Dark Side of Natural Science,
1808; The Primeval World and the Fixed Stars, 1822; History of the
Soul, 1830 (in briefer form, Text-book of the Science of Man and of the
Soul, 1838).]
[Footnote 2: Not to be confused with Friedrich August Carus (1770-1807; professor in Leipsic), whose History of Psychology, 1808, forms the third part of his posthumous works.]
%2. The Philosophers of Identity.%
It has been said of the Dane Johann Erich von Berger (1772-1833; from 1814 professor in Kiel; Universal Outlines of Science, 1817-27) that he adopted a middle course between Fichte and Schelling. The same may be asserted of Karl Ferdinand Solger (1780-1819; at his death professor in Berlin; Erwin, Four Dialogues on Beauty and Art, 1815; Lectures on Aesthetics, edited by Heyse, 1829), who points out the womb of the beautiful in the fancy, and introduces into aesthetics the concept of irony, that spirit of sadness at the vanity of the finite, though this is needed by the Idea in order to its manifestation.
In Johann Jacob Wagner[1] (1775-1841; professor in Würzburg) and in J.P.V. Troxler[2] (1780-1866) we find, as in Steffens, a fourfold division instead of Schelling's triads. Both Wagner and Troxler find an exact correspondence between the laws of the universe and those of the human mind. Wagner (in conformity to the categories essence and form, opposition and reconciliation) makes all becoming and cognition advance from unity to quadruplicity, and finds the four stages of knowledge in representation, perception, judgment, and Idea. Troxler shares with Fries the anthropological standpoint, (philosophy is anthropology, knowledge of the world is self-knowledge), and distinguishes, besides the emotional nature or the unity of human nature, four constituents thereof, spirit, higher soul, lower soul (body, Leib), and body (Körper), and four corresponding kinds of knowledge, in reverse order, sensuous perception, experience, reason, and spiritual intuition, of which the middle two are mediate or reflective in character, while the first and last are intuitive. For D. Th. A. Suabedissen also (1773-1835; professor in Marburg; Examination of Man, 1815-18) philosophy is the science of man, and self-knowledge its starting point.