Such was the result that might fairly be read from Kant's Criticism of pare Reason,—especially if read without its supplementary sequels, and, above all, if read by those in whom feeling was stronger than thought, or who were by nature more endowed with the craving for faith than with the mind of philosophy. Such a personality appeared in J. H. Jacobi, the younger brother of a poet not undistinguished in his day. Amid the duties of public office and the cares of business, he found time to study Spinoza, the English and Scotch moralists, and above all to follow with interest the development of Kant from the year 1763 onwards. His house at Düsseldorf was the scene of many literary reunions, and Jacobi himself maintained familiar intercourse with the leaders of the literary and intellectual world, such as Lessing, Hamann, Goethe. His first considerable works were two novels, in letters,—Allwill, begun in a serial magazine in 1775, and Woldemar, begun in another magazine in 1777; both being issued as complete works in 1781. Both turn on a moral antithesis, and both leave the antithesis as they found it. Here pleads the advocate of the heart: 'it is the heart which alone and directly tells man what is good': 'virtue is a fundamental instinct of human nature': the true basis of morals is an immediate certainty; and the supreme standard is an 'ethical genius' which as it were discovered virtue and which still is a paramount authority in those exceptional situations in life when the 'grammar of virtue' fails to supply adequate rules, and where, therefore, the immediate voice of conscience must in a 'licence of sublime poesy[5]' dare, as Burke says, to 'suspend its own rules in favour of its own principles.' There, on the other hand, is the champion of reason, who declares all this sentimentalism 'a veritable mysticism of antinomianism and a quietism of immorality[6]': 'To humanity,' he says, 'and to every man (every complete man) principles, and some system of principles, are indispensable.' Woldemar concludes with the pair of mottoes: 'Whosoever trusts to his own heart is a fool,' and 'Trust love: it takes everything, but it gives everything.'
In 1780 Jacobi had his historic conversation with Lessing at Wolfenbüttel[7]. The talk turned on Spinoza. For many years the philosophy of Spinoza had seemed to vanish from the world. His name was only heard in a reference of obloquy, as if it were dangerous to be even suspected of infection with the taint of Atheism. But both Lessing and Jacobi had found him out. The former saw in him an ally in that struggle for higher light and wider views which he undertook in a spirit and with a scope hardly surmised by those he usually wrought with. Jacobi, on the contrary, saw in him personified the conjunction of all those irreligious tendencies which all philosophy in some degree exhibited: the tendency to veil or set aside God and personality. 'I believe,' says Jacobi, as he began the conversation 'in an intelligent personal cause of the world.' 'Then I am going,' replied Lessing, 'to hear something quite new': and he dryly put aside the other's rhapsody on the 'personal extra-mundane deity with the remark 'Words, my dear Jacobi, words.' Jacobi's work Letters on the doctrine of Spinoza (it appeared in 1785) was the beginning of a controversy in which Mendelssohn and Herder took part, and in which Goethe took an interest under Herders tutorship. To the exact philological study of Spinoza it did not contribute much: for the Spinoza whom Herder and Goethe saw as their spiritual forefather was transfigured in their thought to a figure to which Leibniz had almost an equal right to give his name. He upheld to them the symbol of the immanence of the divine in nature: he was the leader in the battle against 'philistine' deism and utilitarianism.
With the Kantian criticism of the pseudo-science of theology Jacobi had in one way no fault to find. That reasoning by its demonstration cannot find out God, was to him an axiomatic belief. But the 'man of feeling' felt uneasy at the trenchant methods of the Königsberg man of logic. He seemed to see the world of men and things passing under Kant's manipulation into a mere collection of phenomena and ideas of the mind. Still more was he sensible to the loss of his God. That surrogate of an argument for theism which Kant seemed to offer in the implications of the Moral Law did not give what Jacobi wanted. Mere morality is a cold and mechanical principle—he thinks—compared with that infinite life and love which we deem we have in God. The son of man, he felt, was, in virtue of an indwelling genius of conscience, supreme over the moral law: how much more, then, the Absolute and Eternal on a higher grade of being than its mechanical regularities!
If the way of reasoning will not carry us to the Absolute, still less (and that is whither Jacobi wishes to reach) to God, there must be another way: for something in him, which may be called Faith or Feeling, Spiritual Sense or Reason, proclaims itself certain of the reality both of God and Nature. There is an objective reality—outside and beyond him—yet somehow to be reached by a daring leap,—whereby, out of sheer force of will, he, shutting his eyes to the temporal and the mechanical, finds himself carried over the dividing gulf into the land of eternal life and love.
'I appeal' he says in his latest utterances[8] 'to an imperative, an invincible feeling as the first and underived ground of all philosophy and all religion,—to a feeling which lets man become aware of and alive to the fact that he has a sense for the supersensuous.' 'As it is religion which makes man man,' he continues, 'and which alone lifts him above the animals, so it also makes him a philosopher.' Such an organ for the supersensuous is what in his later writings he calls Vernunft (Reason) and distinguishes from Verstand (Understanding). 'This reason,' says Coleridge (to whom we owe this use of the terms in English) in the Friend, 'is an organ bearing the same relation to spiritual objects as the eye bears to material phenomena,' It is 'that intuition of things which arises when we possess ourselves as one with the whole and is opposed to that 'science of the mere understanding' in which 'transferring reality to the negations of reality (to the ever-varying framework of the uniform life) we think of ourselves as separated beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind, as object to subject, thing to thought, death to life.' But this Reason is even more than this. It is the direct contact with reality, which it affirms and even is. It apprehends the me and the thee, it apprehends above all the great Thee, God: apprehends, and we may even say appropriates[9]. And it apprehends them at one bound—in one salto mortale—because it is really in implicit possession of them. Call the step a miracle, if you will: you must admit, he adds, that 'some time or other every philosophy must have recourse to a miracle[10].'
And yet the asseveration rings false—it shows a womanish wilfulness and weakness in its reiteration. He has the reality; yet he has it not. 'Were a God known,' he says in one place, 'He would not be God.' He yearns with passionate longing to find the living and true: he feels himself and the Eternal clasped in one: his faith effects the reality of things hoped for. But, he adds, 'We never see the Absolute': the primal light of reason is but faint. It is but a presage—a pre-supposition—of the Everlasting. This reason, in short, needs discipline and development, it needs the ethical life to raise it: 'without morality no religiosity,' he says. 'Light,' he complains, 'is in my heart,' but at the moment I want to bring it into the understanding, the light goes out.' And yet he knows—and Coleridge repeats—'the consciousness of reason and of its revelations is only possible in an understanding.'
'There seem to be one or two motives acting upon Jacobi. The 'plain man,' especially if he be of high character and of 'noble' religiosity, has a feeling that the lust of philosophising disturbs the security of life, and endangers things which are deservedly dear to him. In such an one the 'enthusiasm of logic'—the calm pursuit of truth at all costs, so characteristic of Lessing—is inferior to the 'enthusiasm of life,'—a passion in which the terrestrial and the celestial are inextricably blended, where one clings to God as the stronghold of self, and sets personality—our human personality—in the throne of the Eternal. He will be all that is noble and good, if only he be not asked utterly to surrender self. So, too, Jacobi's God—or Absolute (for he leaves his 'non-philosophy' so far as to use both names), is rather the final aim of a grand, overpowering yearning, than a calm, self-centred, self-expanding life which carries man along with it. It would be, he feels, so very terrible, if at the last there were no God to meet us—to find the throne of the universe vacant. Avaunt philosophy, therefore! Let us cling to the faith of our nature and our childhood, and refuse her treacherous consolations! With the central proposition of Jacobi, Hegel, for one, is not inclined to quarrel. He too, as he asks and answers the question as to the issues of this and of the better life, might say
'Question, answer presuppose
Two points: that the thing itself which questions, answers,—is, it
knows;
As it also knows the thing perceived outside itself—a force
Actual ere its own beginning, operative through its course,
Unaffected by its end,—that this thing likewise needs must be;
Call this—God, then, call that—Soul, and both the only facts for me.
Prove them facts? that they o'erpass my power of proving proves
them such:
Fact it is, I know, I know not something which is fact as much.'
But when Jacobi goes on to say that it is the supreme and final duty of the true sage 'to unveil reality,'—meaning thereby that, given the feeling, he has only to
'Define it well
For fear divine Philosophy
Should push beyond her mark and be
Procuress to the Lords of Hell,'