From men like Fr. Schlegel (1772-1829), whose valid protest against the sharp separation of speculative philosophy from the æsthetical, social, and ethical life, assumed the "standpoint of irony," little real result in the discovery of truth could be expected. But Schleiermacher (1768-1834), in spite of that mixture of unfused elements which has made his philosophy "a rendezvous for the most diverse systems," contributed valuable factors to the century's philosophical development, both of a negative and of a positive character. This thinker was peculiarly fortunate in the enrichment of the conception of experience as warranting a justifiable confidence in the ontological value of ethical, æsthetical, and religious sentiment and ideas; but he was most unfortunate in reviving and perpetuating the unjustifiable Kantian distinction between cognition and faith in the field of experience. On the whole, therefore, the Faith-philosophy and the Romantic School can easily be said to have contributed more than a negative and modifying influence to the development of the philosophy of the nineteenth century. Its more modern revival toward the close of the same century, and its continued hold upon certain minds of the present day, are evidences of the positive but partial truth which its tenets, however vaguely and unsystematically, continue to maintain in an æsthetically and practically attractive way.
The admirers of Kant strove earnestly and with varied success to remedy the defects of his system. Among the earlier, less celebrated and yet important members of this group, were K. G. Reinhold (1758-1823), and Maimon (died, 1800). The former, like Descartes, in that he was educated by the Jesuits, began the attempt, after rejecting some of the arbitrary distinctions of Kant and his barren and self-contradictory "Thing-in-itself," to unify the critical philosophy by reducing it to some one principle. The latter really transcended Kant in his philosophical skepticism, and anticipated the Hamiltonian form of the so-called principle of relativity. Fries (1773-1843), and Hermes (1775-1831)—the latter of whom saw in empirical psychology the only true propædeutic to philosophy—should be mentioned in this connection. In the same group was another, both mathematician and philosopher, who strove more successfully than others of this group to accept the critical standpoint of Kant and yet to transcend his negative conclusions with regard to a theory of knowledge. I refer to Bolzano (Prague, 1781-1848), who stands in the same line of succession with Fries and Hermes, and whose works on the Science of Religion (4 vols. 1834) and his Science of Knowledge (4 vols. 1837) are noteworthy contributions to epistemological doctrine. In the latter we have developed at great length the important thought that the illative character of propositional judgments implies an objective relation; and that in all truths the subject-idea must be objective. In the work on religion there is found as thoroughly dispassionate and rational a defense of Catholic doctrine as exists anywhere in philosophical literature. The limited influence of these works, due in part to their bulk and their technical character, is on the whole, I think, sincerely to be regretted.
It was, however, chiefly that remarkable series of philosophers which may be grouped under the rubric of a "rational Idealism," who filled so full and made so rich the philosophical life of Germany during the first half of the last century; whose philosophical thoughts and systems have spread over the entire Western World, and who are most potent influences in shaping the development of philosophy down to the present hour. Of these we need do little more than that we can do—mention their names. At their head, in time, stands Fichte, who—although Kant is reported to have complained of this disciple because he lied about him so much—really divined a truth which seems to be hovering in the clouds above the master's head, but which, if the critical philosophy truly meant to teach it, needed helpful deliverance in order to appear in perfectly clear light. Fichte, although he divined this truth, did not, however, free it from internal confusion and self-contradiction. It is his truth, nevertheless, that in the Self, as a self-positing and self-determining activity, must somehow be found the Ground of all experience and of all Reality.
The important note which Schelling sounded was the demand that philosophy should recognize "Nature" as belonging to the sphere of Reality, and as requiring a measure of reflective thought which should in some sort put it on equal terms with the Ego, for the construction of our conception of the Being of the World. To Schelling it seemed impossible to deduce, as Fichte had done, all the rich concrete development of the world of things from the subjective needs and constitutional forms of functioning which belong to the finite Self. And, indeed, the doctrine which limits the origin, existence, and value of all that is known about this sphere of experience to these needs, and which finds the sufficient account of all experience with nature in these forms of functioning, must always seem inadequate and even grotesque in the sight of the natural sciences. Both Nature and Spirit, thought Schelling, must be allowed to claim actual existence and equally real value; while at the same time philosophy must reconcile the seeming opposition of their claims and unite them in an harmonious and self-explanatory way. In some common substratum, in which, to adopt Hegel's sarcastic criticism, as in the darkness of the night "all cows are black,"—that is in the Absolute, as an Identical Basis of Differences,—the reconciliation was to be accomplished.
But the constructive idealistic movement, in which Fichte and Schelling bore so important a part, could not be satisfied with the positions reached by either of these two philosophers. Neither the physical and psychological sciences, nor the speculative interests of religion, ethics, art, and social life, permitted this movement to stop at this point. In all the subsequent developments of philosophy during the first half or three quarters of the nineteenth century, undoubtedly the influence of Hegel was greatest of all individual thinkers. His motif and plan are revealed in his letter of November 2, 1800, to Schelling, namely, to transform what had hitherto been an ideal into a thoroughly elaborate system. And in spite of his obvious obscurities of thought and style, there is real ground for his claim to be the champion of the common consciousness. It is undoubtedly in Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807), that the distinctive features of the philosophy of the first half of the last century most clearly define themselves. The forces of reflection now abandon the abstract analytic method and positions of the Kantian Critique, and concentrate themselves upon the study of man's spiritual life as an historical evolution, in a more concrete, face-to-face manner. Two important and, in the main, valid assumptions underlie and guide this reflective study: (1) The Ultimate Reality, or principle of all realities, is Mind or Spirit, which is to be recognized and known in its essence, not by analysis into its formal elements (the categories), but as a living development; (2) those formal elements, or categories to which Kant gave validity merely as constitutional forms of the functioning of the human understanding, represent, the rather, the essential structure of Reality.
In spite of these true thoughts, fault was justly found by the particular sciences with both the speculative method of Hegel, which consists in the smooth, harmonious, and systematic arrangement of conceptions in logical or ideal relations to one another; and also with the result, which reduces the Being of the World to terms of thought and dialectical processes merely, and neglects or overlooks the other aspects of racial experience. Therefore, the idealistic movement could not remain satisfied with the Hegelian dialectic. Especially did both the religious and the philosophical party revolt against the important thought underlying Hegel's philosophy of religion; namely, that "the more philosophy approximates to a complete development, the more it exhibits the same need, the same interest, and the same content, as religion itself." This, as they interpreted it, meant the absorption of religion in philosophy.
Next after Hegel, among the great names of this period, stand the names of Herbart and Schopenhauer. The former contributes in an important way to the proper conception of the task and the method of philosophy, and influences greatly the development of psychology, both as a science that is pedagogic to philosophy, and as laying the basis for pedagogical principles and practice. But Herbart commits again the ancient fallacy, under the spell of which so much of the Kantian criticism was bound; and which identifies contradictions that belong to the imperfect or illusory conceptions of individual thinkers with insoluble antinomies inherent in reason itself. In spite of the little worth and misleading character of his view of perception, and the quite complete inadequacy of the method by which, at a single leap, he reaches the one all-explanatory principle of his philosophy, Schopenhauer made a most important contribution to the reflective thought of the century. It is true, as Kuno Fischer has said, that it seems to have occurred to Schopenhauer only twenty-five years after he had propounded his theory, that will, as it appears in consciousness, is as truly phenomenal as is intellect. It is also true that his theory of knowledge and his conception of Reality, as measured by their power to satisfy and explain our total experience, are inflicted with irreconcilable contradictions. Neither can we accord firm confidence or high praise to the "Way of Salvation" which somehow Will can attain to follow by æsthetic contemplation and ascetic self-denial. Yet the philosophy of Schopenhauer rightly insists upon our Idealistic construction of Reality having regard to aspects of experience which his predecessors had quite too much neglected; and even its spiteful and exaggerated reminders of the facts which contradict the tendency of all Idealism to construct a smooth, regular, and altogether pleasing conception of the Being of the World, have been of great benefit to the development of the latter half of the nineteenth century.
In estimating the thoughts and the products of modern Idealism we ought not to forget the larger multitude of thoughtful men, both in Germany and elsewhere, who have contributed toward shaping the course of reflection in the attempt to answer the problems which the critical philosophy left to the nineteenth century. It is a singular comment upon the caprices of fame that, in philosophy as in science, politics, and art, some of those who have really reasoned most soundly and acutely, if not also effectively upon these problems, are little known even by name in the history of the philosophical development of the century. Among the earlier members of this group, did space permit, we should wish to mention Berger, Solger, Steffens, and others, who strove to reconcile the positions of a subjective idealism with a realistic but pantheistic conception of the Being of the World. There are others, who like Weisse, I. H. Fichte, C. P. Fischer, and Braniss, more or less bitterly or moderately and reasonably, opposed the method and the conclusions of the Hegelian dialectic. Still another group earned for themselves the supposedly opprobrious but decidedly vague title of "Dualists," by rejecting what they conceived to be the pantheism of Hegel. Still others, like Fries and Beneke and their successors, strove to parallel philosophy with the particular sciences by grounding it in an empirical but scientific psychology; and thus they instituted a line of closely connected development, to which reference has already been made.
Hegel himself believed that he had permanently effected that reconciliation of the orthodox creed with the cognition of Ultimate Reality at which his dialectic aimed. In all such attempts at reconciliation three great questions are chiefly concerned: (1) the Being of God; (2) the nature of man; (3) the actual and the ideally satisfactory relations between the two. But, as might have been expected, a period of wild, irregular, and confused contention met the attempt to establish this claim. In this conflict of more or less noisy and popular as well as of thoughtful and scholastic philosophy, Hegelians of various degrees of fidelity, anti-Hegelians of various degrees of hostility, and ultra-Hegelians of various degrees of eccentricity, all took a valiant and conspicuous part. We cannot follow its history; but we can learn its lesson. Polemical philosophy, as distinguished from quiet, reflective, and critical but constructive philosophy involves a most uneconomical use of mental force. Yet out of this period of conflict, and in a measure as its result, there came a period of improved relations between science and philosophy and between philosophy and theology, which was the dawn, toward the close of the nineteenth century, of that better illumined day into the middle of which we hope that we are proceeding.
Before leaving this idealistic movement in Germany, and elsewhere as influenced largely by German philosophy, one other name deserves mention. This name is that of Lotze, who combined elements from many previous thinkers with those derived from his own studies and thoughts,—the conceptions of mechanism as applied to physical existences and to psychical life, with the search for some monistic Principle that shall satisfy the æsthetical and ethical, as well as the scientific demands of the human mind. This variety of interests and of culture led to the result of his making important contributions to psychology, logic, metaphysics, and æsthetics. If we find his system of thinking—as I think we must—lacking in certain important elements of consistency and obscured in places by doubts as to his real meaning, this does not prevent us from assigning to Lotze a position which, for versatility of interests, genial quality of reflection and criticism, suggestiveness of thought and charm of style, is second to no other in the history of nineteenth century philosophical development.