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HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 

WITH ESPECIAL REFERENCE TO 

FORMATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF ITS 
PROBLEMS AND CONCEPTIONS 

BY 

DR. W. WINDELBAND 

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF STRASSBUI 

AUTHORISED TRANSLATION BY 

JAMES H. TUFTS, PH.D., 

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 

Second Edition, Revised and EnlarQ 

Nefo 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 
1914 

All rights reserved 

COPYRIGHT, 1893, 1901. 

BY MACMILLAN AND CO. 

Set up and electrotyped September, 1893. Reprinted January. 
1895; January, 1896; November, 1898 ; September, 1901; July, 1905; 
July. 1907; July, 1910; July, 1914. 

J. S. Gushing & Co. - Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 

TRANSLATOR S PREFACE. 

REGARDED simply as a historical discipline, the history of thought 
might fairly claim a prominent place in education, and an equal 
share of the attention now given to comparative and historical 
studies. The evolution of an idea is in itself as interesting and 
valuable an object of study as the evolution of a word, of an insti 
tution, of a state, or of a vegetable or animal form. 

But aside from this interest which it has in common with other 
historical sciences, the history of philosophy has a peculiar value of 
its own. For the moment we attempt any serious thinking in any 
field, natural science, history, literature, ethics, theology, or any 
other, we find ourselves at the outset quite at the mercy of the 
words and ideas which form at once our intellectual atmosphere 
and the instruments with which we must work. We cannot speak, 
for example, of mind or matter, of cause or force, of species or indi 
vidual, of universe or God, of freedom or necessity, of substance or 
evolution, of science or law, of good or true or real, without involv 
ing a host of assumptions. And the assumptions are there, even 
though we may be unconscious of them, or ignore them in an effort 
to dispense with metaphysics. To dispense with these conceptions 
is impossible. Our only recourse, if we would not beg our questions 
in advance, or remain in unconscious bondage to the instruments of 
our thought, or be slaves to the thinking of the past generations 
that have forged out our ideas for us, is to " criticise our categories." 
And one of the most important, if not the only successful, means to 
this end is a study of the origin and development of these categories. 
We can free ourselves from the past only by mastering it. We 
may not hope to see beyond Aristotle or Kant until we have stood 

vi Translator s Preface. 

on their shoulders. We study the history of philosophy, not so 
much to learn what other men have thought, as to learn to think. 

For an adequate study of the history of thought, the main requi 
sites are a careful study of the works of the great thinkers a 
requisite that need not be enlarged on here, although such study is 
a comparatively recent matter in both Britain and America, with a 
few notable exceptions and a text-book to aid us in singling out 
the important problems, tracing their development, disentangling 
their complications, and sifting out what is of permanent value. To 
meet this second need is the especial aim of the present work, and, 
with all the excellencies of the three chief manuals already in use, 
it can scarcely be questioned that the need is a real one. Those 
acquainted with the work here translated (W. Windelband s Ge- 
schichte der Philosophic, Freiburg i. B., 1892) have no hesitation in 
thinking that it is an extremely valuable contribution toward just 
this end. The originality of its conception and treatment awaken 
an interest that is greater in proportion to the reader s acquaintance 
with other works on the subject. The author shows not only 
historical learning and vision, but philosophical insight ; and in his 
hands the comparative treatment of the history of thought proves as 
suggestive and fruitful as the same method applied to other subjects 
in recent times. A work like the present could only have been 
written with some such preparation as has come in this case from 
the previous treatment of Greek and Modern Philosophy at greater 
length, and in presenting it to English readers I am confident that 
it will meet the wants, not only of special students of philosophy, 
but also of all who wish to understand the development of thought. 
Teachers will, I think, find it very valuable in connection with 
lecture courses. 

As regards the work of the Translator, little need be said. He 
has tried like many others to make a faithful translation into 
intelligible English, and is fully conscious that it has been with 
varying success. Of course translation in the strict sense is often 
impossible, and I cannot hope to have adopted the happiest com 
promise or found the most felicitous rendering in all cases. 
"Being" (spelled with a capital) is used for " Sein." Where the 
German " Form " seemed to differ enough from the ordinary English 

Translator s Preface. vii 

sense of the word to make "form" misleading, I have spelled it 
"Form," and the same course has been taken with "Real," " Re- 
alitat," where the German seemed to desire to distinguish them from 
"wirklich," which has been translated sometimes by "real," some 
times by "actual." " Vorstellung" is usually rendered by "idea," 
following Locke s usage, except in connection with the system of 
Leibniz, where "representation " is necessary to bring out his thought. 
"Idee," in the Platonic and Kantian use, is rendered "Idea" (spelled 
with a capital). The convenient word "Geschehen" has no exact 
counterpart, and has been variously rendered, most frequently per 
haps by "cosmic processes." In the additions made to the bibliog 
raphy, no attempt has been made to be exhaustive ; I have simply 
tried to indicate some works that might aid the student. It is 
scarcely necessary to say that any corrections or suggestions will 
be gratefully received and utilised if possible. Material in square 
brackets is added by the translator. 

In conclusion, I desire to express my indebtedness to my col 
leagues, Professors Shorey, Strong, and Cutting, and Dr. Schwill 
for helpful suggestions. My chief indebtedness, however, is to the 
critical taste and unwearied assistance of my wife. If I have in 
any degree succeeded in avoiding German idioms, it is largely due 
to her. 

JAMES H. TUFTS. 

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, 
July, 1893. 

TRANSLATOR S NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 

IN preparing this second edition all changes made by the author 
in the second German edition have been incorporated either in the 
text or in the appendix at the close. In addition, I have included a 
brief notice (pp. 663-670) of certain aspects of recent English 
thought, which naturally have more interest for the readers of 
this translation than for those of the original. 

& JAMES H. TUFTS. 

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, 
May, 1901. 

AUTHOR’S PREFACE. 

AFTER many painful delays and interruptions I now present at 
last the conclusion of the work whose first sheets appeared two 
years ago. 

The reader will not confuse this with the compendiums which 
have very likely sometimes been prepared by dressing out lecture 
notes on the general history of philosophy. What I offer is a 
serious text-book, which is intended to portray in comprehensive 
and compressed exposition the evolution of the ideas of European 
philosophy, with the aim of showing through what motives the 
principles, by which we to-day scientifically conceive and judge 
the universe and human life, have been brought to consciousness 
and developed in the course of the movements of history. 

This end has determined the whole form of the book. The 
literary-historical basis of research, the biographical and biblio 
graphical material, were on this account necessarily restricted to 
the smallest space and limited to a selection that should open the 
way to the best sources for the reader desiring to work farther. 
The philosophers own expositions, too, have been referred to in the 
main, only where they afford a permanently valuable formulation 
or rationale of thoughts. Aside from this there is only an occa 
sional citation of passages on which the author supports an inter- 
. pretation differing from that ordinarily adopted. The choice of 
material has fallen everywhere on what individual thinkers have 
produced that was new and fruitful, while purely individual turns 
of thought, which may indeed be a welcome object for learned 
research, but afford no philosophical interest, have found at most 
a brief mention. 

ix 

x Author s Preface. 

As is shown even by the external form of the exposition, chief 
emphasis has been laid upon the development of what is weightiest 
from a philosophical standpoint: the history of problems and concep 
tions. To understand this as a connected and interrelated whole 
lias been my chief purpose. The historical interweaving of the 
various lines of thought, out of which our theory of the world and 
life has grown, forms the especial object of my work, and I am 
convinced that this problem is to be solved, not by any a priori 
logical construction, but only by an all-sided, unprejudiced investi 
gation of the facts. If in this exposition a relatively large part 
of the whole seems to be devoted to antiquity, this rests upon the 
conviction that for a historical understanding of our intellectual 
existence, the forging out of the conceptions which the Greek mind 
wrested from the concrete reality found in Nature and human life, 
is more important than all that has since been thought the 
Kantian philosophy excepted. 

The task thus set required, however, a renunciation which no 
one can regret more than myself. The purely topical treatment 
of the historical movement of philosophy did not permit of giving 
to the personality of the philosophers an impressiveness corre 
sponding to their true worth. This could only be touched upon 
where it becomes efficient as a causal factor in the combination and 
transformation of ideas. The aesthetic fascination which dwells in 
the individual nature of the great agents of the movement, and 
which lends its especial charm to the academic lecture, as well as 
to the more extended exposition of the history of philosophy, had 
to be given up here in favour of a better insight into the pragmatic 
necessity of the mental process. 

Finally, I desire to express at this place also my lively gratitude 
to my colleague, Dr. Hensel, who has not only aided me with a 
part of the proofs, but has also essentially increased the usefulness 
of the book by a subject index. 

WILHELM WINDELBAND. 

STRASSBURG, November, 1891. 

AUTHOR S PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 

A LARGE edition of my History of Philosophy had been exhausted 
more than two years ago, and in the meantime its use had been 
further extended by English and Russian translations. This per 
mits me to assume that the new treatment which I gave to the 
subject has filled an existing gap, and that the synoptical and criti 
cal method which I introduced has gained approval so far as the 
principle is concerned. While therefore I could leave the book 
unchanged in its main outlines when preparing this new edition, I 
could be all the more careful in making evidently needed improve 
ments and in fulfilling certain specific requests. 

Under the head of improvements I have undertaken such correc 
tions, condensations, and expansions upon particular points as are 
requisite for a text-book which seeks to represent the present condi 
tion of investigation, and in this work the literature which has 
appeared since the first edition has been utilised. In consequence 
of the great condensation of material the exposition had become 
sometimes difficult to follow, and 1 have aimed in many cases to 
give more fluent form to the expression by breaking up some of the 
longer sentences, and occasionally omitting what was of merely sec 
ondary importance. 

A desire has been expressed by readers of the book for a more 
extended notice of the personalities and personal relations of the 
philosophers. In the preface to my first edition I had myself 
recognised the justice of this demand, but had disclaimed the inten 
tion of satisfying it because the special plan of my work and the 
necessary limitations of space prevented. Now I have sought to 
fulfil this demand so far as it has seemed possible within the 
limit of my work, by giving brief and precise characterisations of 
the most important thinkers. 

A desire for a more extended treatment of the philosophers of the 
nineteenth century has also been reckoned with. The few pages 
originally accorded to the subject have been expanded to three times 
the former compass, and I hope that although one will miss one 

xi 

xii Author s Preface. 

topic and another another, it will nevertheless be possible to gain a 
fairly complete general view of the movements of philosophy down 
to the more immediate present, in so far as this is to be expected 
from a history of principles. 

Finally, I have remade the subject index, and so expanded it 
that in connection with the text it may, as I hope, have the value of 
a dictionary of the history of philosophy. This gives to my work a 
second distinctive feature; namely, that of a work of reference of 
a systematic and critical sort. 

By all these expansions the size of the book has been considerably 
increased, and I express here to my esteemed publisher, Dr. Siebeck, 
my heartiest gratitude for the cordial response with which he has 
made possible these essential improvements. 

WILHELM WINDELBAND. 

STRASSBURG, September, 1900. 

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION. 

PAGE 

1. Name and Conception of Philosophy 					   1 
2. The History of Philosophy 						   8 
3. Division of Philosophy and of its History 				  18 

PART I. 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE GREEKS. 
INTRODUCTION 							  23 
CHAPTER I. THE COSMOLOGICAL PERIOD 27 
4. Conceptions of Being :						  31 
5. Conceptions of the Cosmic Processes or Becoming ... 			  47 
6. Conceptions of Cognition 						  57 

CHAPTER II. THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERIOD 				  66 
7. The Problem of Morality 						  72 
8. The Problem of Science 						  87 

CHAPTER III. THE SYSTEMATIC PERIOD 					  99 
9. Metaphysics grounded anew by Epistemology and Ethics . 		104 
10. The System of Materialism 						109 
11. The System of Idealism 						116 
12. The Aristotelian Logic 						132 
13. The System of Development 					139 

PART II. 
THE HELLENISTIC-ROMAN PHILOSOPHY. 
INTRODUCTION 							155 

CHAPTER I. THE ETHICAL PERIOD 					159 
14. The Ideal of the Wise Man 						163 
15. Mechanism and Teleology .						178 
16. The Freedom of the Will and the Perfection of the Uni 
verse 									190 
17. The Criteria of Truth 						197 

xiii. 

xiv Contents. 

PAGE 

CHAPTER II. THE RELIGIOUS PERIOD 210 
18. Authority and Revelation 219 
19. Spirit and Matter 229 
20. God and the World 235 
21. The Problem of the World s History 255 

PART III. 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 
INTRODUCTION 263 

CHAPTER I. FIRST PERIOD 270 
22. The Metaphysics of Inner Experience 276 
23. The Controversy over Universals 287 
24. The Dualism of Body and Soul 301 

CHAPTER II. SECOND PERIOD 310 
25. The Realm of Nature and the Realm of Grace .... 318 
26. The Primacy of the Will or of the Intellect 328 
27. The Problem of Individuality .337 

PART IV. 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

INTRODUCTION 348 
CHAPTER I. THE HUMANISTIC PERIOD 352 
28. The Struggle between the Traditions 357 
29. Macrocosm and Microcosm 366 

CHAPTER II. THE NATURAL SCIENCE PERIOD 378 
30. The Problem of Method 383 
31. Substance and Causality 399 
32. Natural Right 425 

PART V. 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT. 

INTRODUCTION 437 

CHAPTER I. THEORETICAL QUESTIONS 447 
33. Innate Ideas 449 
34. Knowledge of the External World 466 
35. Natural Religion 486 

Contents xv 

CHAPTER II. PRACTICAL QUESTIONS 500 
36. The Principles of Morals 502 
37. The Problem of Civilisation 518 

PART VI. 
THE GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. 
INTRODUCTION 529 

CHAPTER I. KANT S CRITIQUE OF THE REASON 532 
38. The Object of Knowledge 537 
39. The Categorical Imperative 551 
40. Natural Purposiveness 559 

CHAPTER II. THE DEVELOPMENT OF IDEALISM 568 

41. The Thing-in-itself 573 
42. The System of Reason 590 
43. The Metaphysics of the Irrational 615 

PART VII. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
INTRODUCTION 623 

44. The Controversy over the Soul 634 
45. Nature and History 648 
46. The Problem of Values 660 

APPENDIX 683 

INDEX . . 699 

HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. 

INTRODUCTION. 

1. The Name and Conception of Philosophy. 

R. Haym, Art. Philosophic in Ersch und Griiber s Encyclopadie, III. Abth., 

Bd. 24. 

W. Windelband, Praeludien (Freiburg i. B., 1884), 1 ff. 
A. Seth, Art. Philosophy in Erie. Brit. ] 
G. T. Ladd, Introduction to Philosophy. N.Y. 1891.] 

BY philosophy present usage understands the scientific treatment 
of the general questions relating to the universe and human life. 
Individual philosophers, according to the presuppositions with 
which they have entered upon their work, and the results which 
they have reached in it, have sought to change this indefinite idea 
common to all, into more precise definitions, 1 which in part diverge 
so widely that the common element in the conception of the science 
may seem lost. But even the more general meaning given above is 
itself a limitation and transformation of the original significance 
which the Greeks connected with the name philosophy, a limita 
tion and transformation brought about by the whole course of the in 
tellectual and spiritual life of the West, and following along with 
the same. 

1. While in the first appearance in literature 2 of the words 
&lt;t&gt;iXoar (f&gt;flv and &lt;f&gt;iXoo-o&lt;f&gt;ia the simple and at the same time indefinite 
meaning, " striving after wisdom," may still be recognised, the word 
" philosophy " in the literature after Socrates, particularly in the 
school of Plato and Aristotle, acquired the fixed significance accord- 

1 Cited in detail in Ueberweg-Heinze, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philoso 
phic, I. 1. [Eng. trans. Ueberweg s History of Philosophy, trans, by G. S. 
Morris. N.Y. 1871.] 

2 Herodotus, I. 30 and 50 ; Thucydides, II. 40 ; and frequently also even in 
Plato, e.g. Apol. 29 ; Lysis, 218 A ; Symp. 202 E ff. 

1 

2 Introduction. 

ing to which it denotes exactly the same as the German word 
" Wissenschaft." l According to this meaning philosophy in general 2 
is the methodical work of thought, through which we are to know 
that which "is"; individual "philosophies" are the particular sci 
ences in which individual realms of the existent are to be investi 
gated and known. 3 

With this first theoretical meaning oi the word " philosophy " a 
second was very early associated. The development of Greek 
philosophy came at the time when the naive religious and ethical 
consciousness was in process of disintegration. This not only 
made the questions as to man s vocation and tasks more and more 
important for scientific investigation (cf. below, Part I. ch. 2), but 
also made instruction in the right conduct of life appear as an 
essential aim, and finally as the main content of philosophy or 
science. Thus philosophy in the Hellenistic period received the 
practical meaning of an art of life, based upon scientific principles* 
a meaning for which the way had already been prepared by the 
Sophists and Socrates. 

In consequence of this change, purely theoretical interest passed 
over to the particular " philosophies," which now in part assumed 
the names of their special subjects of research, historical or belong 
ing to natural science, while mathematics and medicine kept all the 
more rigorously that independence which they had possessed from 
the beginning with relation to science in general. 5 The name of 
philosophy, however, remained attached to those scientific efforts 
which hoped to win from the most general results of human knowl 
edge a conviction for the direction of life, and which finally culmi 
nated in the attempt (made by Neo-Platonism) to create from such 
a philosophy a new religion to replace the old that had been lost. 6 

1 A conception which it is well known is of much greater compass than the 
English and French " science." [In this translation the words " science" and 
" scientific " are used in this larger sense. The term " natural science " will be 
used for the narrower meaning which "science " alone often has. If it should 
serve to remind the beginner that philosophy and scientific thought should be 
one, and that natural science is not aii of science, it may be of value.] 

2 Plato, Bfp. 480 B ; Aristotle, Met. VI. 1, 102(5 a 18. 

3 Plato, Theiet. 1431). Aristotle sets the doctrine " of Being as such" (the 
later so-called Metaphysics) as "First Philosophy" over against the other 
"philosophies," and distinguishes further theoretical and practical "philoso 
phy." In one passage (Met. I. 6, 987 a 29) he applies the plural &lt; /&gt;tXo &lt; ro0/ai also 
to the different systems of science which have followed in historical succession, 
as we should speak of the philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, etc. 

* Cf. the definition of Epicurus in Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. XI. 169, and on 
the other hand that of Seneca, Epist. 89. 

5 Cf. below, Part I. 

G Hence Proclus, for example, would prefer to have philosophy called 
theology. 

1.] Name and Conception of Philosophy. 3 

There was at first little change in these relations, when the remains 
of ancient science passed over into the culture of the present peoples 
of Europe as the determining forces of their intellectual life. Con 
tent and task of that which the Middle Ages called philosophy coin 
cided with the conception held by later antiquity. 1 And yet the 
meaning of philosophy underwent an essential change by finding 
philosophy s task already performed, in a certain sense, by religion. 
For religion, too, afforded not only a sure conviction as a rule for 
the guidance of personal life, but also in connection with this, a gen 
eral theoretical view of all reality, which was the more philosophical 
in its character, as the dogmas of Christianity had been formulated 
entirely under the influence of ancient philosophy. Under these 
circumstances, during the unbroken dominance of Church doctrine, 
there remained for philosophy, for the most part, only the position 
of a handmaid to ground, develop, and defend dogma scientifically. 
But just by this means philosophy came into a certain opposition to 
theology as regards method ; for what the latter taught on the 
ground of divine revelation, the former was to win and set forth by 
means of human knowledge. 2 

But the infallible consequence of this relation was, that the freer 
individual thinking became in its relation to the Church, the more 
independently philosophy began the solution of the problem which 
she had in common with religion ; from presentation and defence of 
doctrine she passed to its criticism, and finally, in complete inde 
pendence of religious interests, sought to derive her teaching from 
the sources which she thought she possessed in the "natural light" 
of human reason and experience. 3 The opposition to theology, as 
regards methods, grew in this way to an opposition in the subject 
matter, and modern philosophy as " world-wisdom " set itself over 
against Church dogma. 4 However manifold the aspects which this 
relation took on, shading from a clinging attachment to a passionate 
conflict, the office of " philosophy " remained always that which 

1 Cf., for example, Augustine, Solil. I. 7 ; Conf. V. 7; Scotus Erigena, De 
Div. Pra&gt;dest. I. 1 (Migne, 358) ; Anselm Proslog., ch. 1. (Migne, I. 227) ; 
Abelard, Introd. in Theol. II. 3 ; Raymundus Lullus, De Quinque Sap. 8. 

2 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol. I. 32, 1 ; Contr. Gent. I. 8 f., II. 1 ff. ; 
Duns Scotus, Op. Ox. I. 3, qu. 4 ; Durand de Pounjain, In Sent. Prol., qu. 8 ; 
Raymundus of Sabunde, Theol. Natur. Prooem. 

3 Laur. Valla, Dialect. Disp. III. 9 ; B. Telesio, De Nat. Rer. Prooem. ; Fr. 
Bacon, De Awjm, III. 1 (Works, Spedding, I. 539 = 111. 336); Taurellus, 
Philos. Triumph. I. 1 ; Paracelsus, Paragr. (ed. Huser) II. 23 f. ; G. Bruno, 
Delia Causa, etc., IV. 107 (Lagarde, I. 272) ; Hobbes, De Corpor. I. (Works, 
Molesworth, I. 2 and 6 f.). 

4 Characteristic definitions, on the one hand, in Gottsched, Erste Griinde dcr 
gesammten Weltweisheit (Leips. 1756), pp. 97 ff. ; on the other hand, in the 
article Philosophie, in the Encyclopedie (Vol. XXV. pp. 632 ff.). 

4 Introduction. 

antiquity had assigned to it, to supply from scientific insight a 
foundation for a theory of the world and of human life, where relig 
ion was no longer able to meet this need, or at least to meet it alone. 
In the conviction that it was equal to this task, the philosophy of 
the eighteenth century, like that of the Greeks, considered it its 
right and duty to enlighten men with regard to the nature of things, 
and from this position of insight to rule the life of the individual 
and of society. 

In this position of self-security philosophy was shaken by Kant, 
who demonstrated the impossibility of a philosophical (i.e. meta 
physical) knowledge of the world beside of or above the individual 
sciences, and thereby restricted once more the conception and the 
task of philosophy ; for after this quitclaim the realm of philosophy, 
as a particular science, was narrowed to just that critical consideration 
by Reason of itself, from which Kant had won his decisive insight, and 
which needed only to be extended systematically to activities other 
than that of knowing. With this function could be united what 
Kant 1 called the universal or cosmical conception of philosophy, 
its vocation in the practical direction of life. 

It is, to be sure, far from true that this new and apparently final 
conception of philosophy gained universal acceptance at once. It is 
rather the case that the great variety of philosophical movements of 
the nineteenth century has left 110 earlier form of philosophy unre- 
peated, and that a luxuriant development of the " metaphysical 
need " 2 even brought back, for a time, the inclination to swallow up 
all human knowledge in philosophy, and complete this again as an 
all-embracing science. 

2. In view of these mutations through which the meaning of the 
word " philosophy " has passed in the course of time, it seems im 
practicable to pretend to gain a general conception of philosophy from 
historical comparison. None of those brought forward for this 
purpose 3 apply to all those structures of mental activity which 
lay claim to the name. Even the subordination of philosophy under 
the more general conception " science " is questionable in the case 
of those types of teaching which place a one-sided emphasis on the 

1 Critique of Pure Reason, A. 839 ; B. 866. 

2 Schopenhauer, World as Will and Idea, Vol. II. ch. 17. 

3 Instead of criticising particular conceptions it is sufficient here to point to 
the widely diverging formulas in which the attempt has been made to perform 
this impossible task : cf., for example, only the introductions to works such as 
those of Erdinann, Ueberweg, Kuno Fischer, Zeller, etc. All these conceptions 
thus determined apply only in so far as the history of philosophy has yielded 
the result which they express, but they do not apply with reference to the inten 
tions expressed by the philosophers themselves. 

1.] Name and Conception of Philosophy. 5 

practical significance of their doctrine : ! still less can we define 
the subject-matter and form of philosophy considered as a special 
science, in a way that shall hold good for all cases. For even aside 
from the primitive or the revived standpoint for which philosophy 
is a universal science, 2 the attempts to limit it are extremely vari 
ous. The problems of natural science form at first almost the sole 
objects of interest for philosophy, then for a long period are in 
cluded in its scope, and do not separate from it until modern times. 
History, on the other hand, has remained an object of indifference to 
most philosophical systems, and has emerged as an object of philo 
sophical investigation relatively late and in isolated cases. Meta 
physical doctrines, again, in which the centre of philosophy is 
usually sought, we see either pushed one side at important turning- 
points in history or declared to be entirely impossible 3 ; and if at 
times the ability of philosophy to determine the life of the indi 
vidual or of society is emphasised, a proud standpoint of pure theory 
has renounced such a menial occupation. 4 

From still another side it has been claimed that philosophy treats 
the same subjects as the other sciences, but in another sense and by 
another method ; but neither has this specific characteristic of form 
historical universality. That there is no such acknowledged his 
torical method would of course be no objection if only the endeavour 
after such a method were a constant characteristic of all philoso 
phies. This is, however, so far from being the case that in fact 
many philosophers imprint on their science the method of other 
disciplines, e.g. of mathematics or of investigation of nature, 5 while 
others will have nothing at all to do with a methodical treatment of 
their problems, and regard the philosophic activity as analogous to 
the creations of genius in art. 

3. From these circumstances is explained also the fact that there 
is no fixed relation of philosophy to the other sciences, which is capa 
ble of a definition valid for all history. Where philosophy presents 
itself as the universal science, the other sciences appear only as its 
more or less distinctly separated parts. 6 Where, on the contrary, 
philosophy is assigned the task of grasping the results of the par- 

1 So in the case of the majority of the philosophers of later antiquity. 

2 As for Chr. Wolf ; cf. his Logica, 29 ff. 

3 This is especially the case where philosophy is regarded solely as "science 
of cognition." Cf., e.g., W. Hamilton in his notes to Reid s works, II. 808. 
Among the French at the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of this cen 
tury, philosophy = analyse de I entendement humain. 

4 E.g. with Plotinus. 

5 So Descartes and Bacon. 

6 So, for example, in the Hegelian system. 

6 Introduction. 

ticular sciences in their general significance, and harmonising them 
into a comprehensive knowledge of the world, we have as the result 
peculiarly complex relations : in the first place, a dependence of 
philosophy upon the existing condition of insight reached in the par 
ticular disciplines a dependence which expresses itself principally 
in the furtherance of philosophy by the prominent advances made 
by individual sciences; 1 in the next place, an influence in the 
opposite direction, when philosophy takes part in the work of the 
particular sciences. This action is felt as help or as hindrance, 
according as the philosophical treatment of the questions embraced 
under the particular disciplines sometimes contributes valuable 
factors for their solution, by means of its wider range of vision and 
its tendency toward unity, 2 but at other times presents itself only 
as a duplication which, if it leads to like results, appears useless, or 
if it wishes to furnish other results, dangerous. 3 

From what has been said it is evident farther, that the relations 
of philosophy to the other activities of civilisation are no less close than 
its relation to the individual sciences. For the conceptions arising 
from the religious and ethical and artistic life, from the life of the 
state and of society, force their way everywhere, side by side with 
the results won from scientific investigation, into the idea of the 
universe which the philosophy of metaphysical tendencies aims to 
frame ; and the reason s valuations ( Werthbestimmunyen) and stand 
ards of judgment demand their place in that idea the more vigor 
ously, just in proportion as it is to become the basis for the practical 
significance of philosophy. In this way humanity s convictions and 
ideals find their expression in philosophy side by side with its 
intellectual insights ; and if these convictions and ideals are regarded, 
erroneously often, as gaining thereby the form of scientific intelli 
gence, they may receive under certain circumstances valuable clari 
fication and modification by this means. Thus this relation also of 
philosophy to general culture is not only that of receiving, but also 
that of giving. 

It is not without interest to consider also the mutations in external position 
and social relations which philosophy has experienced. It may be assumed that 
science was from the first, with perhaps a few exceptions (Socrates), pursued in 
Greece in closed schools. 4 The fact that these, even at a later time, had the form 

1 As the influence of astronomy upon the beginnings of Greek, or that of 
mechanics upon those of modern, philosophy. 

2 The Protestant theology of the nineteenth century stands in this relation 
to German philosophy. 

3 Cf. the opposition of natural science to Schelling s philosophy of nature. 

4 H. Diels, Ueber die altesten Philosophenschulen der Griechen in Philos. 
Aufsatze zum Jubilaum E. Zeller s, Leips. 1887, pp. 241 ff. 

l.J Name and Conception of Philosophy. 7 

of societies with religious laws ! would not in itself alone, in view of the religious 
character of all Greek judicial institutions, prove a religious origin of these 
schools, but the circumstance that Greek science worked out its contents directly 
from religious ideas, and that certain connections with religious cults present 
themselves unmistakably in a number of directions, 2 makes it not improbable 
that the scientific societies sprang originally from religious unions (the Mys 
teries) and continued in a certain connection with them. But when the scien 
tific life had developed to complete independence, these connections fell away 
and purely scientific schools were founded as free unions of men who, under the 
guidance of persons of importance, shared with each other the work of research, 
exposition, defence, and polemic, 3 and at the same time had an ethical bond in 
a common ideal of the conduct of life. 

With the advent of the larger relations of life in the Hellenistic and Roman 
period, these unions naturally became loosened, and we frequently meet writers, 
especially among the Romans, who are active in the field of philosophy in a 
purely individual way, neither members of a school nor professional teachers. 
Such were Cicero, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. Not until the latest period of 
antiquity were the ties of the schools drawn more closely again, as in Neo- 
Pythagoreanism and Neo-Platonism. 

Among the Romanic and Germanic peoples the course of events has been not 
unlike that in the ancient world. The science of the Middle Ages also appears 
in the train of the Church civilisation ; it has its seats in the cloister-schools, and 
is stimulated toward independent development primarily by questions of religious 
interest. In it, too, the oppositions of various religious orders, such as the Do 
minicans and Franciscans, assert themselves for a time, and even the freer 
scientific associations out of which the universities gradually developed, had 
originally a religious background and an ecclesiastical stamp. 4 Hence there 
was always but a slight degree of independence with reference to Church doc 
trine in this corporate philosophy of the universities, and this held true on into 
the eighteenth century for the Protestant universities also, in the foundation 
and development of which ecclesiastical and religious interests had a foremost 
place. 

On the other hand, it is characteristic of the "world-wisdom" or secular 
philosophy which was gaining its independence at the beginning of the modern 
period, that those who bring and support it are not at all men of the schools, 
but men of the world and of life. An escaped monk, a state-chancellor, a 
cobbler, a nobleman, a proscribed Jew, a learned diplomat, independent men of 
letters and journalists, these are the founders of modern philosophy, and in 
accord with this, their work takes for its outer form not the text-book or the 
deposit of academical disputations, but the free literary production, the essay. 

Not until the second half of the eighteenth century did philosophy again 
become corporate, and domesticated in the universities. This took place first 
in Germany, where the most favourable conditions were afforded by the rising 
independence of the universities, and where a fruitful interchange between 
teachers and students of the university was beneficial to philosophy also. 5 

1 v. Wilamowitz-Mollendorf, Antigonos von Karystos (Philol. Stud. IV. 
Berlin, 1881, pp. 263 ff.). 

2 The Pythagoreans, as is well known, offer a pre-eminent example of this ; 
but sympathies with the Apollo cultus are plain enough in the Platonic Academy 
also. Pfleiderer has lately sought to bring the apparently isolated Heraclitus 
into connection with the Mysteries (E. Pfleiderer, Heraklit von Ephesus. 
Berlin, 1886). 

3 Cf. II. Usener, Ueber die Organisation der wissenschaftlichen Arbeit im 
Alte.nhum (Preuss. Jahrb., Jahrg. LIII., 1884, pp. 1 ff.), and E. Heitz, Die Philo- 
sophenschulen Athens (Deutsche Revue, 1884, pp. 826 ff.). 

4 Cf. G. Kaufmann, Geschichte der deutschen Universitdten 1. pp. 98 ff. (Stuttg. 
1888). 

5 Schelling has erected the finest monument to the ideal conception of science 
in the activity of German universities, in his Vorlesunyen uber die Methode des 
akademischen Studiums (2. and 3. Vorlesung. Ges. Werke, I. Abth., Vol. 5, 
pp. 223 ff.). 

8 Introduction. 

From Germany this spread to Scotland, England, Franco, and Italy, and in gen 
eral it may be said that in the nineteenth century the seat of philosophy is essen 
tially to be sought in the universities. 1 

In conclusion, the share of the various peoples in the development of philoso 
phy deserves a brief mention. As with all developments of European culture, 
so with philosophy, the Greeks created it, and the primitive structure of 
philosophy due to their creative activity is still to-day an essential basis of the 
science. What was added in antiquity by the mixed peoples of Hellenism and 
by the Romans does not, in general, amount to more than a special form and 
practical adaptation of the Greek philosophy. Only in the religious turn which 
this last movement took (cf. below, Part II. ch. 2) do we find something essen 
tially new which sprang from the harmonising of national differences in the 
Roman Empire. The scientific culture of the Middle Ages was also international, 
as is implied in the universal employment of the Latin language. It is with 
modern philosophy that the special characters of particular nations first present 
themselves as of decisive influence. While the traditions of mediaeval scholas 
ticism maintain themselves most vigorously and independently in Spain and 
Portugal, the Italians, Germans, English, and French supply the first movements 
of the new science which reached its highest point in the classical period of 
German philosophy. Compared with these four nations, the rest stand almost 
entirely in a receptive attitude ; a certain independence is noticeable, if any 
where, in more recent time among the Swedes. 

2. The History of Philosophy. 

The more varied the character assumed by the problems and con 
tent of philosophy in the course of time, the more the question 
rises, what meaning there can be in uniting in historical investiga 
tion and exposition products of thought which are not only so 
manifold, but also so different in kind, and between which there 
seems to be ultimately nothing in common but the name. 

For the anecdotal interest in this checkered diversity of vari 
ous opinions on various things, which was perhaps formerly the 
chief motive of a " History of Philosophy," stimulated too by the 
remarkable and strange nature of many of these views, cannot 
possibly serve as the permanent centre of a genuine scientific disci 
pline. 

1. At all events, however, it is clear that the case stands other 
wise with the history of philosophy than with that of any other 
science. For with all these the field of research remains fixed, on 
the whole at least, however many the variations to which its extent, 
its separation from a still more general field, and its limitation with 
reference to neighbouring fields, may be subject in the course of his 
tory. In such a case there is no difficulty in tracing the develop 
ment of knowledge over a field which can be determined in this 
way, and in eventually making just those variations intelligible as 
the natural consequences of this development of insight. 

1 The best evidence for this statement is afforded by just the passionate 
attacks which Schopenhauer directed against the relation between philosophy 
and the universities. 

2.] The History of Philosophy. 9 

Quite otherwise, however, in the case of philosophy, which has 
no such subject-matter common to all its periods, and whose " his 
tory," therefore, sets forth no constant advance or gradual approxi 
mation to a knowledge of the subject in question. Rather, it has 
always been emphasised that while in other sciences, a quiet build 
ing up of knowledge is the rule, as soon as they have once gained 
a sure methodical footing after their rhapsodical beginnings, a 
rule which is interrupted only from time to time by a sudden new 
beginning, in philosophy the reverse is true. There it is the 
exception that successors gratefully develop what has been already 
achieved, and each of the great systems of philosophy begins to 
solve its newly formulated problem ab ovo, as if the other systems 
had scarcely existed. 

2. If in spite of all of this we are still to be able to speak of a " his 
tory of philosophy," the unity of connection, which we find neither 
in the objects with which philosophers busy themselves, nor in the 
problems they have set themselves, can be found only in the common 
work which, they. Jtane accomplished in spite of all the variety in their 
subject-matter and in the purposes with which they have worked. 

But this common product, which constitutes the meaning of the 
history of philosophy, rests on just the changing relations which 
the work of philosophers has sustained in the course of history, not 
only to the maturest results of science in general and of the special 
sciences in particular, but also to the other activities of European 
civilisation. For was it that philosophy had in view the project of 
a general scientific knowledge of the universe, which she would win 
either in the role of universal science, or as a generalising compre 
hension of the results of the special sciences, or was it that she 
sought a view of life which should give a complete expression to 
.the highest values of will and feeling, or was it finally that with a 
clearly defined limitation of her field she made reason s self-knowl 
edge her goal, the result always was that she was labouring to 
bring to conscious expression the necessary forms and principles in 
which the human reason manifests its activity, and to transfer these 
from their original form of perceptions, feelings, and impulses, into 
that of conceptions. In some direction and in some fashion every 
philosophy has striven to reach, over a more or less extensive field, 
a formulation in conception of the material immediately given in 
the world and in life; and so, as these efforts have passed into his 
tory, the constitution of the mental and spiritual life has been 
step by step disclosed. The History of Philosophy is the process in 
tvhich European humanity has embodied in scientific conceptions its 
views of tlie world and its judgments of life. 

10 Introduction. 

It is this common fruit of all the intellectual creations which 
present themselves as " philosophies," which alone gives to the 
history of philosophy as a genuine science its content, its problem, 
and its justification. This, too, is the reason why a knowledge of 
the history of philosophy is a necessary requirement, not only for 
all scholarly education, but for all culture whatever ; for it teaches 
how the conceptions and forms have been coined, in which we all, 
in every-day life as well as in the particular sciences, think and 
judge the world of our experience. 

The beginnings of the history of philosophy are to be sought in the historical 
compositions (for the most part lost) of the great schools of antiquity, especially 
the Peripatetic School. As we may see in the examples given by Aristotle, 1 
these works had the critical purpose of preparing for the development of their 
own views by a dialectical examination of views previously brought forward. 
Such collections of historical material were planned for the various fields of 
science, and doxographies 2 in philosophy arose in this way side by side with 
histories of particular disciplines, such as mathematics, astronomy, physics, etc. 
As inclination and power for independent philosophic thought later declined, 
this literature degenerated into a learned scrap-book work, in which were mingled 
anecdotes from the lives of the philosophers, individual epigrammatic sayings, 
and sketches of their doctrines. 

Those expositions belonging to the modern period which were based upon 
the remains of ancient tradition had this same character of collections of curiosi 
ties. Such were Stanley s 3 reproduction of Diogenes Laertius, and Brucker s 
works. 4 Only with time do we find critical discernment in use of the sources 
(B thle,* Fulleborn 6 ), a more unprejudiced apprehension of the historical 
significance of individual doctrines (Tiedemann, Degerando 8 ), and systematic 
criticism of these upon the basis of the new standpoint (Tennemann, 9 Fries, 10 
and Schleiermacher 11 ). 

It was, however, through Hegel 12 that the history of philosophy was first 
made an independent science, for he discovered the essential point that the 

1 E.g. in the beginning of the Metaphysics. 

2 More in detail on these below. 

3 Th. Stanley, The History of Philosophy. Lond. 1685. 

4 J. J. Brucker, Historia Critica Philosophic. 5 vols. Leips. 1742ff. Insti- 
tutiones Historian Philnsophice. Leips. 1747. 

5 J. G. Buhle, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie. 8 vols. Gottingen, 
179(5 ff. 

6 G. G. Fiilleborn, Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie. 12 Studien. 
Ziillichau, 1791 ff. 

7 D. Tiedemann, Geist der Speculativen Philosophie. 7 vols. Marburg, 
1791 ff. 

8 De Gerando, Histoire Comparee des Systemes de Philosophie. 2d ed. in 
4 vols. Paris, 1822f. 

9 W. G. Temiemann, Geschichte der Philosophie. 11 vols. Leips. 1798 ff. 
Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie fur den akademischen Unterricht. 
Leips. 1812. [Eng. trans. 1833 and 1852.] 

1[) J. Fr. Fries, Geschichte der Philosophie. 2 vols. Halle, 1837 ff. 

" Fr. Schleiermacher, Geschichte der Philosophie, from his literary remains 
in the Coll. Works. III. Abth., 4 Bd., 1 Th. Berlin, 1839. 

12 Cf. the introductions of the Phanomenologie des Geistes, of the lectures on 
the Philosophy of History, and those on the History of Philosophy. Ges. Werke, 
Bd. II. pp. 62 ff.; IX. pp. 1 1 ff. ; XIII. pp. 11-134. In Hegel s works the Geschichte 
der Philosophie, edited from his lectures by Michelet, occupies Vols. XIII. -XV. 
Berlin, 1833-36. [Lectures on the History of Philosophy, by G. W. Hegel. 
Trans, by E. S. Haldaue in 3 vols. Vol. 1. Lond. 1892.] On his standpoint 

2.] The History of Philosophy. 11 

history of philosophy can set forth neither a motley collection of opinions of 
various learned gentleman " de omnibus rebus et de qnibusdam aZns," nor a 
constantly widening and perfecting elaboration of the same subject-matter, but 
rather only the limited process in which the "categories" of reason have suc 
cessively attained distinct consciousness and reached the form of conceptions. 

This valuable insight was, however, obscured and injured in the case of Hegel 
by an additional asumption, since he was convinced that the chronological order 
in which the above " categories " have presented themselves in the historical 
systems of philosophy must necessarily correspond with the logical and syste 
matic order in which these same categories should appear as "elements of 
truth " in the logical construction of the final system of philosophy (i.e. in 
Hegel s view, his own). The fundamental thought, right in itself, thus led to 
the mistake of a construction of the history of philosophy under the control of a 
philosophical system, and so to a frequent violation of historical fact. This 
error, which the development of a scientific history of philosophy in the nine 
teenth century has set aside in favour of historical accuracy and exactness, arose 
from the wrong idea (though an idea in logical consistence with the principles of 
Hegel s philosophy) that the historical progress of philosophical thought is due 
solrly, or at least essentially, to an ideal necessity with which one "category" 
pushes forward another in the dialectical movement. In truth, the picture of 
the historical movement of philosophy is quite a different one. It depends not 
solely upon the thinking of "humanity " or even of the " Weltyeist," but just 
as truly upon the reflections, the needs of mind and heart, the presaging thought 
and sudden flashes of insight, of philosophising individuals. 

3. The history of philosophy, considered as such a sum-total, in 
which the fundamental conceptions of man s views of the world and 
judgments of life have been embodied, is the product of a great 
variety of single movements of thought. And as the actual motives 
of these movements, various factors are to be distinguished, both in 
the setting of the problems and in the attempts at their logical 
solution. 

The logical, pragmatic factor is no doubt sufficiently important. 
For the problems of philosophy are in the main given, and this is 
shown by the fact that they are constantly recurring in the histor 
ical movement of thought as the " primeval enigma of existence," 
and are ever anew demanding imperiously the solution which has 
never completely succeeded. They are given, however, by the 
inadequacy and internal contradictions of the material which con 
sciousness presents for philosophical consideration. 1 But just for 

stand G. O. Marbach, Lehrbuch der Geschichte Philosophic (2. Abth. Leips. 
1838 ff.), C. Hermann, Geschichte der Philosophic in praymatischer Behandlung 
(Leips. 1867), and in part also the survey of the entire history of philosophy 
which J. Braniss has published as the first (only) volume of a Geschichte der 
Philosophie seit Kant (Breslau, 1842). In France this line is represented by V. 
Cousin, Introduction a VHistoire de la Philosophie (Paris, 1828 ; 7th ed. 1872) ; 
Histoire Generals de la Philosophie (12th ed., Paris, 1884). 

1 More precisely, this inadequacy, which cannot here be more exactly devel 
oped, and which can be fully brought out only in a system of epistemology, 
consists in the circumstance that that which is given in experience never meets 
completely the conceptional demands which, in elaborating the same according 
to the inner nature of the reason, we set up, at first naively and immediately, 
and later with reflective consciousness. This antinomism (or failure to meet 
the laws of thought) can be escaped by ordinary life, or even by experiential 

12 Introduction. 

this reason this material contains the real presuppositions and the 
logical constraining forces for all rational reflection upon it, and 
because from the nature of the case these are always asserting 
themselves anew in the same way, it follows that not only the chief 
problems in the history of philosophy, but also the chief lines along 
which a solution is attempted, are repeated. Just this constancy 
in all change, which, regarded from without, makes the impression 
that philosophy is striving fruitlessly in ever-repeated circles for 
a goal that is never attained, proves only this, that the problems 
of philosophy are tasks which the human mind cannot escape. 1 
And so we understand how the same logical necessity in repeated 
instances causes one doctrine to give birth to another. Hence prog 
ress in the history of philosophy is, during certain periods, to be 
understood entirely pragmatically, i.e. through the internal necessity 
of the thoughts and through the " logic of things." 

The mistake of Hegel s mentioned above, consists, then, only in his wishing to 
make of a factor wliich is effective within certain limits, the only, or at least 
the principal, factor. It would be the opposite error to deny absolutely the 
"reason in history," and to see in the successive doctrines of philosophy only 
confused chance- thoughts of individuals. It is rather true that the total content 
of the history of philosophy can be explained only through the fact that the 
necessities existing in the nature of things assert themselves over and over in 
the thinking of individuals, however accidental the special conditions of this 
latter may be. On these relations rest the attempts made to classify all philo 
sophical doctrines under certain types, and to establish a sort of rhythmical 
repetition in their historical development. On this basis V. Cousin 2 brought 
forward his theory of the four systems, Idealism, Sensualism, Scepticism, Mys 
ticism ; so too August Comte 3 his of the three stages, the theological, the meta 
physical, and the positive. An interesting and in many ways instructive 
grouping of philosophical doctrines about the particular main problems is 
afforded by A. Renouvier in his Esquisse d une Classification Systematique 
des Doctrines Philosophiques (2 vols., Paris, 1885 f.). *A school-book which 
arranges the philosophical doctrines according to problems and schools has been 
issued by Paul Janet and Seailles ; Histoire de la Philosophic ; les problemes et 
les ecoles (Paris, 1887). 

4. But the pragmatic thread very often breaks off in the history 
of philosophy. The historical order in particular, in which prob 
lems have presented themselves, shows almost a complete absence 

science, by working with auxiliary conceptions, which indeed remain problem 
atical in themselves, but which, within certain bounds, suffice for an elaboration 
of the material of experience that meets our practical needs. But it is just in 
these auxiliary conceptions that the problems of philosophy inhere. 

1 In this way the results of Kant s investigations on " The Antinomy of Pure 
Reason " ( Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Dialectic, second sec.) might 
be historically and systematically extended ; cf. W. Windelband, Geschichte der 
neueren Philosophic, II. 95 f. 

2 Cf. Note 12, p. 10. 

3 A. Comte, Cours de Philosophic Positive I. 9, with which Vols. V. and VI. 
are to be compared as the carrying out of the scheme. Similar thoughts are 
also found in D Alembert s Discours Preliminaire in the Encyclopedic. 

$2.] The History of Philosophy. U 

of such an immanent logical necessity. Here, on the contrary, 
another factor asserts itself which may best be designated as the 
factor contributed by the history of civilisation. For philosophy 
receives both its problems and the materials for their solution from 
the ideas of the general consciousness of the time, and from the 
needs of society. The great conquests and the newly emerging 
questions of the special sciences, the movements of the religious 
consciousness, the intuitions of art, the revolutions in social and 
political life, all these give philosophy new impulses at irregular 
intervals, and condition the directions of the interest which forces, 
now these, now those, problems into the foreground, and crowds 
others for the time being aside ; and no less do they condition also 
the changes which questions and answers experience in course of 
time. Where this dependence shows itself with especial clearness, 
we have under certain circumstances a philosophical system appear 
ing, that represents exactly the knowledge which a definite age has 
of itself ; or we may have the oppositions in the general culture of 
the age finding their expression in the strife of philosophical sys 
tems. And so besides the constant dependence upon the essential 
character of the subject-matter the pragmatic factor there pre-, 
vails also a necessity growing out of the history of civilisation, or 
current state of culture, which warrants a historical right of exist 
ence to structures of thought in themselves untenable. 

This relation also was first brought to notice in a greater degree than before 
by Hegel, although the "relative truth" which he ascribes to the particular 
systems has with him at the same time a systematic meaning, owing to his 
dialectical fundamental thought. On the other hand, the element due to the 
history of civilisation has been best formulated among his successors by Kuno 
Fischer, 1 who has also availed himself of it in most brilliant manner in his expo 
sition of the subject. He regards philosophy in its historical unfolding as the 
progressive self-knowledge of the human mind, and makes its development 
appear as constantly conditioned by the development of the object which in it 
is attaining self-knowledge. Although this applies to a number of the most 
important systems, it is yet but one of the factors involved. 

The influences from the history of civilisation which condition the statement 
and solution of philosophic problems, afford an explanation in most cases of an 
extremely interesting phenomenon which is of great importance for understand 
ing the historical development ; viz. the complication or interweaving of prob 
lems. For when interest is directed chiefly on certain lines of thought, it is 
inevitable, according to psychological laws, that associations will be formed 
between different bodies of thought, associations which are not based on the 
subject-matter, and so, that questions which in themselves have nothing to do 
with each other become blended and made to depend upon each other in their 
solution. An extremely important and very often recurring example of this is 
the intermingling of ethical and aesthetic interests in the treatment of theoretical 
problems. The well-known fact of daily life that men s views are determined 
by their wishes, hopes, fears, and inclinations, that their theoretical are condi- 

1 Kuno Fischer, Geschichte der neueren Philosophic, I. 1, Einleitung I.-V. 
trans, by J. P. Gordy, Descartes and his School, N.Y. 1887]. 

14 Introduction. 

tioned by their ethical and aesthetic judgments ( Urtheile durch ihre Beurthei- 
lungen), this fact is repeated on a larger scale in their views of the universe, 
and has even been able to rise so high in philosophy that what had been pre 
viously involuntarily practised, was proclaimed (by Kant) an epistemological 
postulate. 

5. Meanwhile the historical process we are tracing owes all its 
variety and multiplicity of forms to the circumstance that the de 
velopment of ideas and the formulation of general beliefs into 
abstract conceptions are accomplished only through the thinking 
of individual personalities, who, though rooted ever so deeply with 
their thought in the logical connection and prevalent ideas of a 
historical period, always add a particular element by their own 
individuality and conduct of life. This individual factor in the 
development of the history of philosophy deserves so great atten 
tion for the reason that those who have borne the leading part in 
the movement have shown themselves to be marked, independent 
personalities, whose peculiar nature has been a determining in 
fluence, not merely for the selection and combination of problems, 
but also for working out the conceptions to furnish solutions, both 
in their own doctrines and in those of their successors. That history 
is the kingdom of individualities, of details which are not to be 
repeated and which have value in themselves, is shown also in the 
history of philosophy : here, too, great personalities have exercised 
far-reaching and not exclusively beneficial influences. 

It is clear that the above-mentioned complication of problems is brought 
about by the subjective relations in which individual philosophers stand, in a 
much greater degree than by the occasions presented in the general conscious 
ness of a time, of a people, etc. There is no philosophical system that is free 
from this influence of the personality of its founder. Hence all philosophical 
systems are creations of individuality, presenting in this respect a certain re 
semblance with works of art, and as such are to be understood from the point of 
view of the personality of their founder. The elements of every philosopher s 
Weltanschauung grow out of the problems of reality which are ever the same, 
and out of the reason as it is directed to their solution, but besides this out of 
the views and ideals of his people and his time ; the form and arrangement, 
however, the connection and valuation which they find in the system, are condi 
tioned by his birth and education, his activity and lot in life, his character and 
his experience. Here, accordingly, the universality which belongs to the other 
two factors is often wanting. In the case of these purely individual creations, 
aesthetic charm must take the place of the worth of abiding knowledge, and the 
impressiveness of many phenomena of the history of philosophy rests, in fact, 
only upon the magic of their "poetry of ideas" (Begriffsdichtung). 

In addition, then, to the complication of problems and to the ideas determined 
by fancy and feeling, which are already enough to lead the general conscious 
ness astray, there are in the case of individuals similar, but purely personal, 
processes to lend to the formation and solution of problems still more the char 
acter of artificiality. We cannot fail to recognise that philosophers have often 
gone about struggling with questions which have no basis in reality, so that all 
thought expended upon them was in vain, and that, on the other hand, even in 
connection with the solution of real problems, unfortunate attempts in the a 
priori construction of conceptions have slipped in, which have been hindrances 
rather than helps toward the issue of the matter. 

2.] The History of Philosophy. 15 

The wonderful feature in the history of philosophy remains just this, that 
out of such a multitude of individual and general complications there has yet 
been on the whole laid down that outline of universally valid conceptions for 
viewing the world and judging life, which presents the scientific significance of 
this development. 

6. Investigation in the histor;/ of philosophy has accordingly the 
following tasks to accomplish: (1) To establish with precision what 
may be derived from the available sources as to the circumstances 
in life, the mental development, and the doctrines of individual 
philosophers ; (2) from these facts to reconstruct the genetic pro 
cess in such a way that in the case of every philosopher we may 
understand how his doctrines depend in part upon those of his 
predecessors, in part upon the general ideas of his time, and in part 
upon his own nature and the course of his education ; (3) from 
the consideration of the whole to estimate what value for the total 
result of the history of philosophy belongs to the theories thus 
established and explained as regards their origin. 

With reference to the first two points, the history of philosophy 
is a philologico-Jiistorical, with reference to the third element it is a 
critico-ph ilosoph ical science. 

(a) To establish its facts the history of philosophy must proceed to a careful 
and comprehensive examination of the sources. These sources, however, vary 
greatly at different times in their transparency and fulness. 

The main sources for investigation in the history of philosophy are of course 
the icorks of the philosophers themselves. For the modern period we stand 
here upon a relatively safe footing. Since the discovery of the art of printing, 
literary tradition has become so well established and clear that it offers in gen 
eral no difficulties of any kind. The writings which philosophers have pub 
lished since the Renaissance are throughout accessible for the research of 
to-day. The cases in which questions of genuineness, of the time of origina 
tion, etc., give rise to controversies are extremely seldom ; a philological criti 
cism has here but a narrow field for activity, and where it can enter (as is the 
case in part in reference to the different editions of Kant s works), it concerns 
solely subordinate, and in the last instance indifferent, points. Here, too, we are 
tolerably sure of the completeness of the material ; that anything of weight is 
lost, or still to be expected from later publication, is scarcely to be assumed ; if 
the sharpened philological attentiveness of the last decades has brought us new 
material for Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Maine de Biran, the philosophical outcome 
has been only vanishing in comparison with the value of what was already 
known. At most it has concerned the question of supplementing our knowl 
edge, and this must continue to be its province. The importance of occasional 
expressions in letters has been specially felt here, for these are adapted to sh&lt; d 
more light on the individual fa,ctor in the historical development of philosophy. 

With the sources of the Medieval Philosophy the case stands less favourably. 
These have in part (a small part, to be sure) still only a manuscript existence. 
V. Cousin and his school have rendered valuable service in publishing the 
texts, and in general we may be convinced that for this period also we possess 
material, which has indeed gaps, but is on the whole adequate for our purpose. 
On the other hand, our knowledge of the Arabian and Jewish philosophy of the 
Middle Ages, and so of the influence of those systems on the course of Western 
Thought, is still very problematical in details ; and this is perhaps the gap most 
sorely felt in our investigation of the sources for the history of philosophy. 

Much worse still is the situation as regards the direct sources for Ancient 
Philosophy. Of the original works, we have preserved, to be sure, the most 

15 Introduction. 

important : the fundamental portion of the works of Plato and Aristotle, though 
even these are often doubtful in form. Besides these we have only the writings 
of later time, such as those of Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, the Church Fathers, 
and the Neo-Platonists. By far the greater part of the philosophical writings 
of antiquity is lost. In their stead we must content ourselves with the frag 
ments which the accident of an incidental mention in the writings of extant 
authors has kept for us, here too often in a questionable form. 1 

If, nevertheless, success has been attained in gaining a view of the develop 
ment of the ancient philosophy, clearer than that of the mediaeval, presenting a 
picture whose accuracy extends even to details and is scientifically assured, this 
is due not only to the unremitting pains of philologists and philosophers in 
working through their material, but also to the circumstance that beside the 
remains of the original works of the philosophers there are preserved also, as 
secondary sources, remains of historical records made in antiquity. The best, 
indeed, of these also is lost: namely, the historical works which arose from the 
learned collection made by the Peripatetic and Stoic schools at the end of the 
fourth and in the third century B.C. These works passed later through many 
hands before they were preserved for us in the extant compilations prepared in 
the Roman period, as in the Placita Philosophorum,* going by the name of 
Plutarch, in the writings of Sextus Empiricus, 8 in the Deipnosophistce of Athe- 
nseus, 4 in the treatise of Diogenes Laertius, irepl /StW Soy/j.d.rwv KO.I diroOeyndruv 
TU&gt;V ti&gt; &lt;t&gt;i\off&lt;Ht&gt;l$ ev8oKifj.rjffdi&gt;Tui&gt;, 5 in the collections of the Church Fathers, and 
in the notes of the Commentators of the latest period, such as Alexander Aphro- 
disias, Themistius, and Simplicius. H. Diels has given an excellent, and thor 
ough treatment of these secondary sources of ancient philosophy, Dxographi 
Grceci (Berlin, 1879). 

Where the condition of the sources is so doubtful as is the case over the 
entire field of ancient philosophy, critical ascertainment of the facts must go 
hand in hand with examination of the pragmatic and genetic connection. For 
where the transmission of the material is itself doubtful we can reach a decision 
only by taking a view of the connection that shall accord with reason and 
psychological experience. In these cases it becomes the task of the history of 
philosophy as of all history, after establishing a base of operations in that which 
is assured by the sources, to proceed to ascertain its position in those regions 
with which tradition finds itself no longer directly and surely in touch. The 
historical study of philosophy in the nineteenth century may boast that it has 
fulfilled this task, to which it was stimulated by Schleiermacher, by the labours 
of H. Hitter, who.se Geschi&lt;-hte der Philosophic (12vols., Hamburg, 1829-53) is 
now, to be sure, antiquated, Brandis and Zeller for the ancient philosophy ; 
and of J. E. Erdmann and Kuno Fischer for the modern. Among the many 
complete expositions of the history of philosophy by far the most trustworthy 
in these respects is J. 5. Erdmann s Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophic, 
2 vols. (3d ed.), Berlin, 1878 ; [Erdmann s History of Philosophy, trans, ed. by 
W. S. Hough, Loud, and N.Y., 1890]. 

An excellent bibliography of the entire history of philosophy, assembling the 
literature in exhaustive completeness and good arrangement, is to be found in 
Ueberweg s Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, 4 vols., 8th ed., ed. by 
M. Heinze (Berlin, 1894-98). [Ueberweg s History of Philosophy, trans, from 
the 4th ed. by G. S. Morris (N. Y. 1871), contains additions, but of course does not 

1 The collections of fragments of particular authors are mentioned under the 
notices of the individual philosophers. It would be desirable if they were all as 
excellent as Usener s Epicurea. Of the fragments of the Pre-Socratics W. F. 
A. Mullach has published a careful collection, which, however, is no longer 
adequate in the present condition of research (Fragmenta Philosophorum 
Grcecorum) . 

2 Plut. Moralia, ed. Dubner, Paris, 1841 ; Diels, Dox., pp. 272 ff. ; [Plutarch s 
Morals, Miscellanies, and Essays, ed. by Goodwin, Boston, 1870 ; trans, also in 
the Bohn Lib.]. 

Ed. Bekker, Berlin, 1847. 
4 G. Kaibel, Leips. 1888-90. 
6 Ed. Cobet, Paris, 1850. 

2.] The History of Philosophy. 17 

give the bibliography of recent works.] Under the general literature may also 
be mentioned, R. Eucken, Die Lebensanschauunf/en tier qrossen Denker (Leips. 
1890). 

(6) Explanation of facts in the history of philosophy is either pragmatic (logi 
cal), or based on the history of civilisation, or psychological, corresponding to the 
three factors which we have set forth above as determining the movement of 
thought. Which of these three modes of explanation is to be applied in individ 
ual cases depends solely upon the state of the facts with regard to the trans 
mission of material. It is then incorrect to make either one the sole principle 
of treatment. The pragmatic method of explanation is dominant with those 
who see in the entire history of philosophy the preparation for a definite system 
of philosophy ; so with Hegel and his disciples (see above, p. 10 f. ); so from a 
Herbartian standpoint with Chr. A. Thilo, Kurze pragmatische (Jesc.hichte der 
Philosophic, (2 pts. ; Coethen, 1876-80). Kuno Fischer and W. Windelband 
have emphasised in their interpretation of modern philosophy, the importance 
of considering the history of civilisation and the problems of the individual 
sciences. 

The purely biographical treatr c \-nt which deals only with successive person 
alities is quite inadequate as a scientific exposition or the history of philosophy. 
This mode of treatment is represented in recent time by the treatise of G. H. 
Lewes, The History of Philosophy from Thale.s to the Present Day (2 vols., 
Lond. 1871), a book destitute of all historical apprehension, and at the same 
time a party composition in the spirit of the Positivism of Comte. The works 
of the French historians (Damiron, Ferraz) are inclined to take this form of 
a separate essay-like treatment of individual philosophers, not losing from sight, 
however, the course of development of the whole. 1 

(c) The most difficult task is to establish the principles according to which the 
critical philosophical estimate of the individual doctrines must be made up. 
The history of philosophy, like all history, is a critical science ; its duty is not 
only to record and explain, but also to estimate what is to ccunt as progress 
and fruit in the historical movement, when we have succeeded in knowing and 
understanding this. There is no history without this critical point of view, and 
the evidence of a historian s maturity is that he is clearly conscious of this point 
of view of criticism ; for where this is not the case he proceeds in the selection 
of his material and in his characterisation of details only instinctively and 
without a clear standard. ^ 

It is understood, of course, that the standard of critical judgment must not be 
a private theory of the historian, nor even his philosophic conviction ; at least 
the employment of such a standard deprives the criticism exercised in accord 
ance with it of the value of scientific universality. He who is given to the 
belief that he possesses the sole philosophical truth, or who comes to this field 
imbued with the customs of the special sciences in which, no doubt, a sure result 
makes it a very simple 3 matter to estimate the attempts which have led to it, 
such a one may well be tempted to stretch all forms that pass before him upon 
the Procrustes-bed of his system ; but he who contemplates the work of thought 
in history, with an open historical vision, will be restrained by a respectful 
reverence from reprimanding the heroes of philosophy for their ignorance of the 
wisdom of an epigone. 4 

1 A. Weber, History of Philosophy, is to be recommended as a good text-book 
(5th French ed., Paris, 1891). [Eng. tr. by Thilly, N.Y. 1896.] 

2 This applies in every domain of history, in the history of politics and of 
literature, as well as in that of philosophy. 

8 As an example of this it may be noticed that the deserving author of an 
excellent History of the Principles of Mechanics, Ed. Duhring, has developed 
in his Kritische Geschichte der Philosophic (3d ed., Berlin, 1878) all the caprice 
of a one-sided judgment. The like is true of the confessional criticism passed 
by A. Stockl, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophic (2 vols., 3d ed., Mainz, 
1889). 

4 It is impossible to protest enough against the youthful conceit with which 
it was for a time the fashion in Germany to look down with ridicule or insult 
from the " achievements of the present " upon the great men of Greek and Ger- 

18 Introduction . 

In contrast with this external method of pronouncing sentence, the scientific 
history of philosophy must place itself upon the standpoint of immanent criti 
cism, the principles of which are two : formal logical consistency and intellectual fruitfulness. 

Every philosopher grows into a certain set of ideas, and to these his thinking 
remains bound, and is subjected in its development to psychological necessity. 
Critical investigation has to settle how far it has been possible for him to bring 
the different elements of his thinking into agreement with each other. The 
contradiction is almost never actually present in so direct a form that the same 
thing is expressly maintained and also denied, but always in such a way that 
various positions are put forward which, only by virtue of their logical conse 
quences, lead to direct contradiction and really irreconcilable results. The dis 
covery of these discrepancies is formal criticism ; it frequently coincides with 
pragmatic explanation, for this formal criticism has been performed in history 
itself by the successors of the philosopher in question, and has thus determined for them their problems. 

Yet this point of view alone is not sufficient. As purely formal it applies 
without exception to all attested views of a philosopher, but it gives no criterion 
for decision on the question, in what the philosophical significance of a doctrine 
really consists. For it is often the case that philosophy has done its work just 
in conceptions which must by no means be regarded as in themselves perfect 
or free from contradiction ; while a multitude of individual convictions, which 
there is no occasion to oppose, must remain unnoticed in a corner, so far as our 
historical survey is concerned. In the history of philosophy great errors are 
weightier than small truths. 

For before all else the decisive question is : what has yielded a contribution to 
the development of man s conception of the universe and estimate of life? In 
the history of philosophy those structures of thought are the objects of study 
which have maintained themselves permanent and living as forms of apprehen 
sion and norms of judgment, and in which the abiding inner structure of the 
human mind has thus come to clear recognition. 

This is then the standard, according to which alone we can decide also which 
among the doctrines of the philosophers concerning, as they often do, so 
many various things are to be regarded as properly philosophical, and which, 
on the other hand, are to be excluded from the history of philosophy. Investi 
gation of the sources has of course the duty of gathering carefully and com 
pletely all the doctrines of philosophers, and so of affording all the material for 
explaining their genesis, whether from their logical content, or from the history 
of civilisation, or from psychological grounds ; but the purpose of this laborious 
work is yet only this, that the philosophically indifferent may be ultimately 
recognised as such, and the ballast then thrown overboard. 

It" is especially true that this point of view must essentially determine selec 
tion and presentation of material in a text-book, which is not to give the investi 
gation itself, but to gather up its results. 

3. Division of Philosophy and of its History. 

It cannot be our purpose here to propose a systematic division of 
philosophy, for this could in no case possess universal validity his 
torically. The differences which prevail in the course of the histori 
cal development, in determining the conception, the task, and the 
subject-matter of philosophy, involve so necessarily and obviously a 
change also in the divisions, that this needs no especial illustration. 
The oldest philosophy knew no division at all. In later antiquity 

man philosophy ; this was mainly the haughtiness of an ignorance which had 
no suspicion that it was ultimately living only by the thoughts of those whom it 
was abusing and despising. 

3.] Division of Philosophy and of its History. 19 

a division of philosophy into logic, physics, and ethics was cur 
rent. In the Middle Ages, and still more in modern times, the 
first two of these subjects were often comprised under the title, 
theoretical philosophy, and set over against practical philosophy. 
Since Kant a new threefold division into logical, ethical, and 
sesthetical philosophy is beginning to make its way, yet these 
various divisions are too much dependent upon the actual course 
of philosophy itself to make it worth our while to recount them 
here in detail. 

On the other hand, it does commend itself to preface the historical 
exposition with at least a brief survey of the entire circuit of those 
problems which have always formed the subject of philosophy, how 
ever varied the extent to which they have been studied or the value 
that has been attached to them, a survey, therefore, for which no 
claim is made to validity from a systematic point of view, but which 
is determined only by the purpose of preliminary orientation. 

1. Theoretical problems. Such we call those which refer, in part to 
our knowledge of the actual world, in part to an investigation of the 
knowing process itself. In dealing with the former class, however, 
the general questions which concern the actual taken as a whole are 
distinguished from those which deal with single provinces of the 
actual. The former, viz. the highest principles for explaining the 
universe, and the general view of the universe based on these prin 
ciples, form the problem of metaphysics, called by Aristotle first, i.e. 
fundamental, science, and designated by the name now usual, only on 
account of the position which it had in the ancient collection of the 
Aristotelian works " after physics." On account of his monothe 
istic view of the world, Aristotle also called this branch of knowl 
edge theology. Later writers have also treated rational or natural 
theology as a branch of metaphysics. 

The special provinces of the actual are Nature and History. In 
the former, external and internal nature are to be distinguished. 
The problems presented to knowledge by external nature are called 
cosmological, or, specially, problems of natural philosophy, or perhaps 
physical. The investigation of internal nature, i.e. of consciousness 
and its states and activities, is the business of psychology. The phil 
osophical consideration of history remains within the borders of 
theoretical philosophy only if it be limited to the investigation of 
the laws that prevail in the historical life of peoples ; since, how 
ever, history is the realm of man s purposeful actions, the questions 
of the philosophy of history, so far as this deals with the end of the 
movement of history viewed as a whole, and with the fulfilment of 
this end, fall under the head of practical problems. 

20 Introduction. 

Investigation directed upon knowledge itself is called logic (in 
the general sense of the word), and also sometimes noetic. If we 
are occupied with the question how knowledge actually arises, this 
psycho-genetic consideration falls in the province of psychology. If, 
on the other hand, we set up norms or standards according to which 
our ideas are estimated as regards their worth for truth, we call 
these logical laws, and designate investigation directed upon them 
as logic in the narrower sense. The application of these laws gives 
rise to methodology, which develops the prescriptions for a systematic 
ordering of scientific activity with reference to the various ends of 
knowledge. The problems, finally, which arise from the questions 
concerning the range and limit of man s knowing faculty and its 
relation to the reality to be known, form the subject-matter of 
epistemology or theory of knowledge. 

H. Siebeck, Geschichte dcr Psyrhologie, Vol. L, in two parts (Gotha, 1880-84), 
incomplete, extending into the scholastic period. 

K. Prantl, Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande, 4 vols. (Leips. 1855-70), 
brought down only to the Renaissance. 

Fr. Harms, Die Philosophic in ihrer Geschichte. I. "Psychologic"; II. 
"Logik" (Berlin, 1877 and 1881). 

[K. Adamson, The History of Psychology (in prep.).] 

2. Practical problems are, in general, those which grow out of the 
investigation of man s activity, so far as it is determined by ends. 
Here, too, a psycho-genetic treatment is possible, which falls under 
psychology. That discipline, on the other hand, which considers 
man s action from the point of view of the ethical norm or stand 
ard, is ethics or moral philosophy. By morals (Moral) in the narrower 
sense is usually understood the proposal and grounding of ethical 
precepts. Since, however, all ethical action has reference to the 
community, there are attached to morals or ethics, in the narrower 
sense, the philosophy of society (for which the unfortunate name 
sociology seems likely to become permanent), and the philosophy of 
law or right. Further, in so far as the ideal of human society con 
stitutes the ultimate meaning of history, the philosophy of history 
appears also in this connection, as already mentioned. 

To practical problems, in the broadest sense of the word, belong 
also those which relate to art and religion. To designate philosoph 
ical investigation of the nature of the beautiful and of art, the name 
(Esthetics has been introduced since the end of last century. If phi 
losophy takes the religious life for its object, not in the sense of 
itself intending to give a science of the nature of the deity, but in 
the sense of an investigation with regard to man s religious behaviour, 
we call this discipline philosophy of religion. 

tJ.J Division of Philosophy and of its History. 21 

Fr. Schleiermacher, Grundlinien einer Kritik der bisheriyen Sittenlehre (col 
lected works, III., Vol. I., Berlin, 1834). L. v. Henning, Die Principle*, der 
Ethik in historischer Entwickluny (Berlin, 1825). Fr. v. liaumer, Die ye- 
schichtliche Entirickluny der Beyriffe von Staat, Recht, und Politik (Leips., od 
ed., 18(51). E. Feuerlein, Die philos. Sittenlehre in ihren yeschichtlichen Haitpt- 
formen (2 vols., Tubingen, 1857-59). P. Janet, Histoire de la philosophic 
morale et politique (Paris, 1858). \V. Whewell, History of Moral Science 
(Edinburg, 1868). H. Sidgwick, Th? Method* &lt;&gt;f Ethics, 4th ed. (Lond. and 
N.Y. 1890). [Outlines of the History nf Ethics, by same author (Lond. and 
N.Y., 3d ed., 1892). J. Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory (2d ed., Oxford 
and N.Y. 1886).] Th. Ziegler, Geschichte der Ethik, 2 vols. (the third not yet 
appeared; Strassburg, 1881-8&lt;$). K. Kostlin. Geschichte der Ethik (only the 
beginning, 1 vol., Tubingen, 1887). [J. Bonar, Philosophy and Economics in 
their Historical Relations (Lond. and N.Y. 1893). 1). G. Ritchie, The History 
of Political Philosophy (in prep.).] 

K. Ziminennann, Geschichte der Aesthetik (Vienna, 1858). M. Schasler, 
Kritische. Geschichte der Aesthetik (Berlin, 1871). [B. Bosanquet, The History 
of ^Esthetics (Lond. and N.Y. 1892). W. Knight, The Philosophy of the B&lt;au- 
tiful (an outline of the history, Edin. and N.Y. 1891). Gay ley and Scott, A 
Guide to the Literature of ^Esthetics, Univ. of California, and Introd. to the 
Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism (Bost. 1899) have bibliographies.] 

J. Berger, Geschichte der Religionsphilosophie (Berlin, 1800). [Piinjer, 
History of the Christian Philosophy of Reliyion (Vol. I., Edin. and N.Y. 1887) 
O. Pfleiderer, The Philosophy of Religion, trans, by Menzies (Lond. 1887). Mar 
tineau, A Study of Religion (2 vols., 1888), and Seat of Authority in Religion. 
1890). J. Caird, Introd. to the Philos. of Reliyion (1880). E. Caird, Evolu 
tion of Reliyion (2 vols., Lond. and N.Y. 1893).] 

The division of the history of philosophy is usually connected with 
that current for political history, so as to distinguish three great 
periods, Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern Philosophy. Yet the 
sections made in this way are not so favourable for the history of 
philosophy as they perhaps are for political history. Other points 
of division must be made, equally important as regards the nature 
of the development ; and, on the other hand, the transition between 
the Middle Ages and modern times demands a shifting of the point 
of division on either side. 

In consequence of this, the entire history of philosophy will here 
be treated according to the following plan of division, in a manner 
to be more exactly illustrated and justified in detail by the exposi 
tion itself : 

(1) Tfie Philosophy of the Greeks: from the beginnings of 
scientific thought to the death of Aristotle, from about 600 to 
322 B.C. 

(2) Hellenistic-Roman Philosophy: from the death of Aristotle 
to the passing away of Neo-Platonism, from 322 B.C. to about 
500 A.D. 

(3) Mediaeval Philosophy : from Augustine to Nicolaus Cusanus, 
from the fifth to the fifteenth century. 

(4) The Philosophy of the Renaissance : from the fifteenth to the 
seventeenth century. 

22 Introduction. 

(5) The Philosophy of the Enlightenment: from Locke to the 
death of Lessing, 1689-1781. 

(6) The German Philosophy : from Kant to Hegel and Herbart, 
1781-1820. 

(7) The Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. 

PART I. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE GREEKS. 

Chr. A. Brandis, Handbuch der Geschichte der griechisch-romischen Philosophic. 
3 pts. in 6 vols. Berlin, 1835-66. 

Same author, Geschichte der Entwickelungen der griechischen Philosophic und 
Hirer Nachwirkungen im romischen Rciche. 2 pts. Berlin, 1862-66. 

Ed. Zeller, Die Philosophic der Griechen. 3 pts. in 5 vols. 1st vol. in 5th, 
2 vol. in 4th, 3-5 vols. in 3d ed. Leips. 1879-93. [Trans., with the excep 
tion of the portion on the concluding religious period, as six works: Pre- 
Socratic Philosophy (2 vols.), Socrates and the Socratic Schools, Plato and 
the Older Academy, Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics (2 vols.), Stoics, 
Epicureans, and Sceptics, History of Eclecticism, chiefly by S.F. Alleyne and 
O. J. Reichel. Lond. and N.Y., Longmans.] 

A. Schwegler, Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie. Ed. by K. Kostlin. 3d 
ed. Freiburg, 1882. 

L. Striimpell, Die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie. 2 pts. Leips. 
1854-61. 

W. Windelband, Geschichte der alten Philosophie. 2d ed. Munich, 1894. 
[History of Ancient Philosophy, trans, by H. E. Cushman, N.Y., 1899. J 

Hitter et Preller, Hixtoria philosophies grcKco-romanoK (Grcecce). In 8th ed. 
Edited by Wellman. Gotha, 1898. An excellent collection of the most 
important sources. 

[A. W. Benn, The Greek Philosophers. 2 vols. Lond., 1883. The Philoso 
phy of Greece. Lond. 1898.] 

Th. Gomperz, Griechische Denker. Vienna, 1897. [Trans, by L. Magnus. 
Greek Thinkers. Lond. and N.Y., 1900.] 

IF by science we understand that independent and self-conscious 
work of intelligence which seeks knowledge methodically for its 
own sake, then it is among the Greeks, and the Greeks of the sixth 
century B.C., that we first find such a science, aside from some 
tendencies among the peoples of the Orient, those of China and 
India 1 particularly, only recently disclosed. The great civilised 

1 Even if it be conceded that the beginnings of moral philosophy among the 
Chinese rise above moralising, and especially those of logic in India above inci 
dental reflections on the scientific formation of conceptions, on which we shall 
not here pronounce, these remain so remote from the course of European 
philosophy, which forms a complete unity in itself, that a text-book has no 
occasion to enter upon them. The literature is brought together in Ueber- 
weg, I. 6. 

23 

24 The Philosophy of the Greeks. 

peoples of earlier antiquity were not, indeed, wanting either in an 
abundance of information on single subjects, or in general views of 
the universe ; but as the former was gained in connection with prac 
tical needs, and the latter grew out of mythical fancy, so they 
remained under the control, partly of daily need, partly of religious 
poetry ; and, as was natural in consequence of the peculiar restraint 
of the Oriental mind, they lacked, for their fruitful and independent 
development, the initiative activity of individuals. 

Among the Greeks, also, similar relations existed until, at the time 
mentioned, the mighty upward movement of the national life unfet 
tered the mental powers of- this most gifted of all peoples. For this 
result the democratic development of constitutions which in passion 
ate party struggle tended to bring out independence of individual 
opinions and judgments, and to develop the significance of person 
ality, proved even more favourable than the refinement and spiritual- 
isation of life which increasing wealth of trade brought with it. 
The more the luxuriant development of individualism loosened the 
old bonds of the common consciousness, of faith, and of morals, and 
threatened the youthful civilisation of Greece with the danger of 
anarchy, the more pressing did individual men, prominent by their 
position in life, their insight, and their character, find the duty 
of recovering in their own reflection the measure that was becoming 
lost. This ethical reflection found its representatives in the lyric 
and gnomic poets, especially, however, in the so-called seven wise men. 1 
It could not fail to occur, also, that a similar movement, in which 
individual opinions asserted their independence, should trench upon 
the religious life already so varied, in which the opposition between 
the old mystery-cults and the aesthetic national mythology stimu 
lated the formation of so many special types. 2 Already in the cos- 
mogonic poetry the poet had dared to portray the heaven of the 
myths according to his own individual fancy ; the age of the seven 
sages began to read its ethical ideals into the gods of the Homeric 
poetry, and in the ethico-religious reformation attempted by Pythag 
oras, 3 coming as it did in the outer form of a return to the old strict 
ness of life, the new content which life had gained came all the more 
clearly to view. 

1 The "seven sages," among whom Thales, Bias, Pittacus, and Solon are 
usually named, while with regard to the rest tradition is not agreed, must not, 
with the exception of Thales, be regarded as representatives of science. Diog. 
Laert. I. 40 ; Plato, Protag. 343. 

2 Cf. E. Rohde (Psyche, 2d ed., 1897) for the influence of religious ideas. 

3 Phcrecydcs of Syrus is to be regarded as the most important of these cos- 
mogonic poets ; he wrote in prose at the time of the first philosophies, but his 
mode of thought .is still mythical throughout, not scientific. Fragments of his 
writings collected by Sturz (Leips. 1834). 

The Philosophy of the Greeks. 25 

From such conditions of fermentation the science of the Greeks 
to which they gave the name philosophy was born. The independ 
ent reflection of individuals, aided by the fluctuations of religious 
fancy, extended itself from the questions of practical life to the 
knowledge of Nature, and there first won that freedom from exter 
nal ends, that limitation of knowledge to itself, which constitutes 
the essence of science. 

All these processes, however, took place principally in the outly 
ing parts of Greek civilisation, in the colonies, which were in advance 
of the so-called Mother-country in mental as in material develop 
ment. In Ionia, in Magna Graecia, in Thrace, stood the cradles of 
science. It was only after Athens in the Persian wars had assumed 
together with the political hegemony the mental as well, which she 
was to keep so much longer than the former, that Attic soil, conse 
crated to all the muses, attracted science also. Its advent was at 
the time of the Sophists ; it found its completion in the doctrine 
and school of Aristotle. 

It was in connection with the disinterested consideration of 
Nature that reflection first rose to the scientific construction of 
conceptions. The result of this was that Greek science devoted all 
the freshness of youthful joy and knowledge primarily to the prob 
lems of Nature, and in this work stamped out fundamental concep 
tions, or Forms of thought, for apprehending the external world. In 
order to turn the look of philosophy inward and make human action 
the object of its study, there was first need, for one thing, of subse 
quent reflection upon what had, and what had not, been, accomplished 
by this study of Nature, and, for another thing, of the imperious 
demands made by public life on science now so far matured as to be 
a social factor. The effect of this change might for a time seem to 
be to check the pure zeal for research which had marked the begin 
nings, but after positive results had been reached in the field of the 
knowledge of man s inner nature this same zeal developed all the 
more vigorously, and led to the construction of those great systems 
with which purely Greek philosophy reached its consummation. 

The philosophy of the Greeks divides, therefore, into three periods : 
a cosmological, which extends from about 600 to about 450 B.C. ; an 
anthropological, which fills out about the second half of the fifth 
century B.C. (450-400) ; and a systematic, which contains the 
development of the three great systems of Greek science, those of 
Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle (400-322). 

The philosophy of the Greeks forms the most instructive part of the whole 
history of philosophy from a theoretical point of view, not only because the 
fundamental conceptions created in it have become the permanent foundations 

26 The Philosophy of the Greeks. 

for all further development of thought, and promise to remain such, but also 
because in it the formal presuppositions contained in the postulates of the 
thinking Keason itself, attained sharp formulation as set over against the mate 
rial of knowledge, which, especially at the beginning, was still relatively small 
in amount. In this the Greek philosophy has its typical value and its didactic 
importance. 

These advantages appear already in the transparency and simplicity of the 
entire development, which enable us to see the inquiring mind at first turned 
outward, then thrown back upon itself, and from this point of view returning 
to a deeper apprehension of reality as a whole. 

There is, therefore, scarcely any controversy with regard to this course of 
the general development of Greek philosophy, though different expositions have 
located the divisions between the periods at different points. Whether Socrates 
is made to begin a new period, or is placed together with the Sophists in the 
period of Greek Enlightenment, depends ultimately only on whether the result 
(negative or positive), or the object-matter of the philosophising, is regarded as 
of decisive importance. That, however, Democritus must in any case be sepa 
rated from the " Pre-Socratics " and assigned to the great systematic period 
of Greek Philosophy, has been proved by the Author in his survey of the 
History of Ancient Philosophy, ch. V., and the objections which the innovation 
has encountered have not sufficed to convince him of any mistake. 

CHAPTER I. THE COSMOLOGICAL PERIOD. 

S. A. Byk, Die vorsokratische Philosophic der Griechen in ihrer organischen 

Gliederung. 2 Parts. Leips. 1875-77. 
[J. Biirnet, Early Greek Philosophy. Lond. 1892.] 

THE immediate background for the beginnings of Greek philoso 
phy was formed by the cosmogonic poetry, which aimed to present 
in mythical garb the story of the prehistoric ages of the given 
world, and so, in the form of narratives of the origination of the 
universe, made use of prevailing ideas as to the constant mutations 
of things. The more freely individual views developed in this pro 
cess, the more the time factor in the myth retreated in favour of the 
emphasising of these abiding relations; and the question finally 
emerged : " What is then the original ground of things, which out 
lasts all temporal change, and how does it change itself into these 
particular things, or change these things back into itself ? " 

The solution of this question was first attempted in the sixth 
century by the Milesian School of natural philosophy, of which 
Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes are known to us as the 
three chief representatives. Information of many kinds, which had 
long been publicly accumulating in the practical experience of the 
sea-faring lonians, stood at their disposal, as well as many true 
observations, often of an acute sort. They kept in touch, also, no 
doubt, with the experience of the Oriental peoples, especially the 
Egyptians, with whom they stood in so close relation. 1 Knowledge 
from these various sources was brought together with youthful zeal. 
The chief interest fell upon physical questions, particularly upon 

1 The influence of the Orient upon the beginnings of Greek philosophy has 
been overestimated by Glabisch (Die Religion und die Philosophic in ihrer 
weltgeschichtlichen Entwicklung, Breslau, 1852) and Roth (Geschichte unserer 
abendldndischen Philosophic, 2 Vols., Mannheim, 1858 ff.). In the case of 
information upon particular fields such influence is certainly to be recognised ; 
on the other hand, the scientific conceptions are throughout independent works 
of Greek thought. 

27 

28 The Philosophy of the Greeks. [PART I. 

the great elementary phenomena, to explain which many hypotheses 
were thought out. Besides this, interest turned chiefly to geo 
graphical and astronomical problems, such as the form of the earth, 
its relation to the sidereal heavens, the nature of the sun, moon, 
and planets, and the manner and cause of their motion. On the 
other hand, there are but feeble indications of a zeal for knowledge 
applied to the organic world and man. 

Such were the objects of experience studied by the first "philosophy." It 
stood quite far removed from medical science, which, to be sure, was limited to 
technical information and proficiency in the art, and was handed down as a 
secret doctrine, guarded in priest-like fashion in orders and schools, such as 
those of Rhodes, Gyrene, Crotona, Cos, and Cnidus. Ancient medicine, which 
aimed expressly to be an art and not a science (so Hippocrates), came into 
contact with philosophy when this was an all-embracing science, only at a late 
period and quite transiently. Cf. Haser, Lehrbuch dcr Geschichte der Medicin, 
I. (2d ed., Jena, 1875). 

So also the beginnings of mathematics go along independently beside those of 
ancient philosophy. The propositions ascribed to the Milesians make the im 
pression of individual pieces of information picked up and put together, rather 
than of results of genuine research, and are quite out of relation with their 
doctrines in natural science and philosophy. In the circles of the Pythagoreans, 
also, mathematical studies were at first evidently pursued for their own sake, to 
be drawn all the more vigorously into the treatment of general problems. Cf. 
G. Cantor, Geschichte der Mathematik, I. (Leips. 1880). 

The efforts of the Milesians to determine the nature of the one 
world-ground had already in the case of Anaximander led beyond 
experience to the construction of a metaphysical conception to be 
used for explanation, viz. the Sjrupov, and thereby drew science away 
from the investigation of facts to the consideration of conceptions. 
While Xenophanes, the founder of the Eleatic School, drew the con 
sequences which result for the religious consciousness from the 
philosophical conception of the unity of the world, Heraditus, in 
hard struggle with ideas that were obscure and religiously coloured, 
analysed destructively the presupposition of an abiding substance, 
and allowed only a law of change to stand as ultimate content of 
knowledge. All the more sharply, on the other hand, did the Eleatic 
School, in its great representative, Parmenides, shape out the con 
ception of Being until it reached that regardless boldness of formu 
lation which, in the following generation of the School, was defended 
by Zeno, and softened down in some measure only by Melissus. 

Very soon, however, a series of efforts appeared, which brought 
anew into the foreground the interest in explanatory natural science 
that had been thrust aside by this development of the first meta 
physical antitheses. In behalf of this interest more comprehensive 
efforts were made toward an enrichment of knowledge ; this time, 
more than in the case of previous observations, questions and 
hypotheses from the organic and physiological realms were kept in 

CHAP. 1.] The Cosmological Period. 29 

mind ; and the attempt was made to mediate with explanatory 
theories between the opposing conceptions of Heraclitus and Par- 
menides. 

Out of these needs arose, about the middle of the fifth century, 
side by side, and with many reciprocal relations, positive and polem 
ical, the theories of Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Leucippus, founder 
of the Atomistic School of Abdera. The number of these theories 
and their well-known dependence upon one another prove that in 
spite of the distance by which individual men and schools found 
themselves separated, there was already a great vigour in exchange 
of thought and in literary activity. The picture of this life takes 
on a much fuller form as we reflect that tradition, in sifting its 
material, has obviously preserved only the memory of what was 
most important, and that each of the names remaining known to 
us indicates, in truth, an entire circle of scientific activity- 

The Pythagoreans, during this same period, occupied a peculiar 
position at one side. They also took up the metaphysical problem 
given by the opposition between Heraclitus and the Eleatics, but 
hoped to find its solution by the aid of mathematics, and, by their 
theory of numbers, as whose first literary representative Philolaus is 
known, added a number of most important factors to the further 
movement of thought. The original purpose or tendency of their 
league made itself felt in their doctrines, in that, in fixing these, 
they conceded a considerable influence to considerations of (ethical 
or aesthetic) worth. They indeed attempted a scientific treatment 
of ethical questions as little as did the entire philosophy of this 
period, but the cosmology which they based upon their astronomical 
ideas, already widely developed with the help of mathematics, is 
yet at the same time permeated by aesthetic and ethical motives. 

Of the Milesian School only three names Thales, Anaximander, and An- 
aximenes have been handed down to us. From this it appears that the school 
flourished in what was then the Ionic capital during the entire sixth century, 
and perished with the city itself, which was laid waste by the Persians in 494, 
after the battle of Lade. 

Thales, sprung from an old merchant family, is said to have predicted the 
solar eclipse in 585, and survived the invasion of the Persians in the middle of 
the sixth century. He had perhaps seen Kgypt, and was not deficient in mathe 
matical and physical knowledge. So early an author as Aristotle did not know 
writings from him. 

Anaximander seems to have been little younger. Of his treatise vepl ^tfo-eojs 
a curious fragment only is preserved. Of. Neuhiiuser (Bonn, 1883). Biisgen, 
Ueber das lirtipov des A. (Wiesbaden, 1867). 

It is difficult to determine the period of Anaximenes. It falls probably about 
560-500. Almost nothing of his work irepl 0i/o-eojs remains. 

Aside from that given by Aristotle (in the beginning of the Metaphysics) we 
owe our meagre information concerning the theories of the Milesians chiefly to 
the Commentary of Simplicius. Cf. H. Hitter, Geschirhte der jonischen Philos- 
ophie (Berlin, 1821) ; K. Seydel, Der Fortschritt der Metaphysik unter den altes- 
ten jonischen Philosophen (Leips. 1861). 

30 The Greeks: Cosmological Period. [PART I. 

At the head of the Eleatic School, Xenophanes, who at all events was 
concerned in its establishment, is generally placed. Born about 570 in Colophon, 
he fled in 540, in consequence of the Persian conquest of Ionia, and gained a 
living as wandering poet. At last, in Elea, founded by the lonians who fled into 
Magna Grsecia, he found a permanent dwelling. He died after 480. The frag 
ments of his partly gnomic, partly philosophical, sayings have been collected by 
Karsten (Amsterdam, 1835). Concerning him see Fr. Kern (Naumburg, 1804, 
Oldenburg, 1807, Danzig, 1871, Stettin, 1874 and 1877) and J. Freudenthal (Bres- 
lau, 1880). 

Parmenides, an Eleatic of renowned family, who was not a stranger to the 
Pythagorean society, wrote about 470. The fragments of his didactic poem 
have been collected by Peyron (Leips. 1810) and H. Stein (Leips. 1864). [Met. 
tr. in Jour. Spec. Phil, IV.] The lost treatise of Zeno (about 490-430) was 
probably the first which was separated into chapters and arranged dialectically. 
He, too, came from Elea. 

Melissos, on the contrary, was the Samian general who conquered the Athe 
nians in 442. Concerning his personal connection with the Eleatic school nothing 
io Known. A. Pabst, De M. j ruyweutiK ^iioiiu, iSb9;. 

The unimportant fragments of the Eleatics are in a measure supplemented by 
the accounts of Aristotle, Simplicius, and others. The pseudo-Aristotelian work, 
De Xenephone, Zenone, Gorgia (Arist., Berl. ed., 974 ff.), which must be used 
with great discretion, gives an account in the first chapter probably of Melissos ; 
in the second, from confusedly intermingling sources, of Zeno ; in the third, of 
Gorgias. 

Heraclitus of Ephesus ("the Obscure"), about 530-470, disgusted with the 
ever-growing power of the democracy, gave up the high position which was his 
by birth, and in the moody leisure of the last decade of his life, wrote a treatise 
which was pronounced difficult of comprehension even by the ancients, while 
the fragments of it which we possess are often very ambiguous. Collected and 
edited by P. Schuster (Leips. 1873) and J. By water (Oxford, 1877). Cf. Fr. 
Schleiermacher (Ges. W-, III. Abth., Bd. 2, pp. 1-146); J. Bernays ( Ges. Abhand- 
Inngen, Bd. I., 1885); F. Lasalle (2 Bde., Berlin, 1858); E. Pfleiderer (Berlin, 
1880). [G. T. W. Patrick, Heraclitus in Am. Jour. Psy., I., 1888, contains trans, 
of the Fr. ] 

The first Dorian in the history of philosophy is Empedocles of Agrigentum, 
about 490-430, a priestly and prophetic personality, much regarded in his char 
acter as statesman, physician, and worker of miracles. He had, too, relations 
with the Sicilian school of orators, of which the names of Korax and Tisias are 
familiar ; and besides his Ka.Oa.piJ.oL (Songs of Purification) has left a didactic 
poem, the fragments of which have been published by Sturz (Leips. 1805), 
Karsten (Amsterdam, 1838), and Stein (Bonn, 1852). 

Anaxagoras of Klazomene (500 till after 430) settled, toward the middle 
of the fifth century, in Athens, where he made friends with Pericles. In 434 
he was accused of impiety and obliged to leave the city, and founded a school 
in Lampsacus. Schaubach (Leips. 1827) and Schorn (Bonn, 1829) have col 
lected the fragments of his treatise, irepi &lt;j&gt;taew. Cf. Breier (Berlin, 1840), 
Zevort (Paris, 1843). 

So little is known of the personality of Leucippus, that even in ancient 
times his very existence was doubted. The great development of the atomistic 
theory by Democritus (see ch. 3) had completely overshadowed its founder. 
But traces of Atomism are to be recognised with certainty in the entire structure 
of thought after Parmenides. Leucippus, if not born in Abdera, yet active 
there as head of the school out of which Protagoras and Democritus went later, 
must have been contemporary with Empedocles and Anaxagoras, even though 
somewhat older. Whether he wrote anything is uncertain. Cf. Diels, Verh. 
der Stett. Philol. Vers. (1886). A Brieger, Die Urbewegung der Atome (Halle, 
1884); II. Liepmann, Die Mechanik der leucipp-demokritischen Atome (Leips. 
1885). 

The Pythagorean Society first appeared in the cities of Magna Graecia as 
a religious-political association toward the end of the sixth century. Its founder 
was Pythagoras, of Samos, who, born about 580, after long journeys, which 
probably led him toward Egypt also, made the aristocratic city of Crotona the 
starting-point of a reform movement which had for its aim a moral and religious 

CHAP. 1, 4.] Conceptions of Being. 31 

purification. We are first apprised of the internal relations of the society 
through subsequent narratives (Jamblichus, De Vita Pythagorica, and Porphyrius, 
De Vita Pythagorce published by Kiesling (Leips. 1815-16), whose trustworthiness 
is doubtful. It seems, however, to be certain that already the old society imposed 
definite duties upon its members, even for private life, and introduced tlie prac 
tice of working in common at intellectual pursuits, especially at music and 
mathematics. In consequence of its political position (in regard to which 
B. Krische, Gottingen, 1830) the external conditions of the society assumed at 
first a very favourable form, inasmuch as, after the plunder of the democratic 
Sybaris, 509, Crotona won a kind of hegemonic influence in Magna Gnecia. 
In time, however, the Pythagoreans became the losers in the bitter party 
struggles of the cities, and often suffered bitter persecution, by which the 
society was finally destroyed in the fourth century. 

To Pythagoras himself, who died about 500, we can trace back no philosoph 
ical writings, although the subsequent myth-making process sought so strenu 
ously to make him the idol of all Hellenic wisdom. (E. Zeller in Vortr. u. 
Abhandl., I., Leips. 1865.) Plato and Aristotle knew only of a, philosophy of 
the Pythagoreans. Philolaus, who seems to have been somewhat younger than 
Empedocles and Anaxagoras, appears as the most prominent representative of 
this philosophy. Almost nothing is known of the circumstances of his life, and 
the fragments of his treatise (ed. by Boeckh, Berlin, 1819 ; cf. C. Schaar- 
schmidt, Bonn, 1864) lie under considerable suspicion. 

Of the remaining adherents of the society, only the names are known. The 
latest representatives came into so close relations with the Platonic Academy 
that, as regards their philosophy, they may almost be said to have belonged to 
it. Among them Archytas of Tarentum, the well-known savant and statesman, 
should be mentioned. Concerning the very doubtful fragments attributed to 
him, cf. G. Hartenstein (Leips. 1833), Fr. Petersen (Zeitschr. f. Alterthumsk ; 
1836), O. Gruppe (Berlin, 1840), Fr. Beckman (Berlin, 1844). 

The reports concerning the teaching of the Pythagoreans, especially in the later 
accounts, are clouded by so many additions from foreign sources, that perhaps 
at no point in ancient philosophy is it so difficult to determine the actual facts 
in the case as here, even if we sift out the most trustworthy, namely Aristotle 
and his best taught commentators, notably Simplicius, many dark points and 
contradictory statements remain, particularly in details. The reason for this 
lies probably in the fact that in the school, which for a time was widely extended, 
various trends of thought ran side by side, and that among these the general fun 
damental thought first brought forward perhaps by Philolaus, was worked out 
in different ways. It would be of great service to attempt such a separation. 

H. Ritter, Geschichte der pythagoreischen Philosophic (Hamburg, 1826) ; 
Rothenbucher, Das System der Pt/thagoreer nach Aristoteles (Berlin, 1867) ; 
E. Chaignet, Pythagore et la philosophic pythaqoricienne (2 vols., Paris, 
1873). 

4. The Conceptions of Being. 

The fact that things of experience change into one another was 
the stimulus to the first philosophical reflections, and wonder l at 
this must indeed have arisen early among a people so mobile and 
with so varied an experience of Nature as the lonians. To this 
fact, which furnished the fundamental motive of its reflection, the 
Ionic philosophy gave liveliest expression in Heraclitus, who seems 
to have been unwearied 2 in seeking the most pointed formulations 
for this universal mutability of all things, and especially for the 
sudden changes of opposites into each other. But while myth gave 

1 Cf. upon the philosophical value of the Oavudieiv, Arist. Met. I. 2, 982 b 12. 

2 Fragm. (Schust.) 41-44, 60, 63, 67. 

32 The Greeks : Cosmological Period. [PART I. 

to this view the garb of a fabled account of the formation of the 
world, science asked for the abiding ground of all these changes, 
and fixed this question in the conception of the cosmic matter, or 
l{ world-8tuff" ( Weltstoff"), which experiences all these transforma 
tions, from which all individual things arise, and into which they 
become again transformed (d/&gt;x&gt;?)- In this conception l was tacitly 
contained the presupposition of the unity of the world; whether the 
Milesians 2 already sought to justify this we do not know. It was a 
later eclectic straggler 3 who first attempted to justify this Monism 
by the transformation of all things into one another, and by the 
inter-connection of all things without exception. 

1. That, however, a single cosmic matter, or world-stuff, lies at 
the basis of the entire process of nature, appears in ancient tradi 
tion as a self-evident presupposition of the Ionic School. The only 
question was to determine what this elementary matter was. The 
nearest course was then to seek for it in what was given in experi 
ence, and so Thales declared it to be water; Anaximenes, air. To 
this choice they were probably determined only by the mobility, 
changeability, and apparent inner vitality 4 of water and air. It is 
evident, too, that the Milesians thought little in this connection of 
the chemical peculiarities of water and air, but only of the states 
of aggregation 5 concerned. While the solid appears in itself dead, 
moved only from without, the liquid and volatile make the impres 
sion of independent mobility and vitality f. and the monistic prepos 
session of this first philosophising was so great that the Milesians 
never once thought of asking for a reason or ground of this cease 
less change of the cosmic matter, but instead assumed this as a self- 
intelligible fact a matter of course as they did all change or 
occurrence ; at most they described its individual forms. The cos 
mic matter passed with them for something in itself living : they 
thought of it as animated, just as are particular organisms, 6 and for 
this reason their doctrine is usually characterised from the stand 
point of the later separation in conceptions as Hylozoism. 

1 Which Aristotle in the Met. I. 3, 983 b 8, has defined, not without the 
admixture of his own categories. 

2 The expression dpx 1 ?? which, moreover, bears in itself the memory of the 
chronological fancies of the Cosmologists, is said by Simplicius to have been 
used first by Anaximander. 

3 Diogenes of Apollonia. Cf. Simpl. Phys. (D.) 32 r 151, 30, and Arist. Gen. et 
Corr. I. 6, 322 b 13. 

* Schol. in Arist. 514 a 33. 

5 For vSwp, vyp6v is frequently substituted. With regard to the dijp of Anaxi 
menes the accounts are such that the attempt has been made to distinguish his 
metaphysical "air" from the empirical : Hitter, I. 217 ; Brandis, I. 144. 

6 Plut. Plac. I. 3 (Doxogr. D. 278). Perhaps this is intended in the conjec 
ture of Aristotle, Met. I. 3, 983 b 22. 

()nAi . 1, 4.] Conceptions of Being : The Milesians. 33 

2. If we ask, however, why Anaximenes, whose doctrine, like 
that of Thales, seems to have kept within the bounds of experience, 
substituted air for water, we learn l that he believed air to have a 
characteristic which water lacked, a characteristic, too, which his 
predecessor Anaximander had postulated as indispensable for the 
conception of primitive matter, viz. that of infinity. As motive for 
this postulate of Anaximander there is related the argument that a 
finite cosmic matter would exhaust itself in the ceaseless succession 
of productions. 2 But Anaximander had also seen that this demand 
made by the conception of the apxy could not be satisfied by any 
matter or substance which we can perceive, and had on this account 
transferred the cosmic matter beyond experience. He maintained 
boldly the reality of an original ground of things, possessing all the 
properties that are necessary, if we are to derive the changes in the 
world of experience from something itself abiding and raised above 
change, even though such a ground might not be found in experi 
ence. He drew from the conception of the dpx^ the consequence, 
that though no object of experience corresponds to this conception, 
we must yet, to explain experience, assume such a conception behind 
it as real and conditioning it. He therefore called the cosmic mat 
ter "the Infinite" (TO obrapov), and ascribed to it all the qualities 
postulated in the conception of the apx&gt;j that is, that it had never 
begun to be, and was imperishable, inexhaustible, and indestructible. 

The conception of matter, thus constructed by Anaximander is, 
nevertheless, clear only in the respect that it is to unite within it 
spatial infinity and the quality of being without beginning or end 
in time, and thus the mark of the all-embracing and all-determin 
ing; 3 on the other hand, with reference to its qualitative deter 
mination, it cannot be made clear what the philosopher intended. 
Later accounts give us to understand that he expressly maintained 
that the original matter was qualitatively undetermined or indefinite 
(dd/aio-Tos), 4 while the statements of Aristotle 5 speak more for the 
assumption of a mixture of all kinds of matter known in experience, 
a mixture completely adjusted or equalised, and therefore as a 
whole indifferent or neutral. The most probable view here is, that 
Anaximander reproduced in the form of an abstract conception the 

iSimpl. Phys. (D.) 6 24, 26. 

2 Plut. Plac. I. 3 (Doxogr. D. 277) ; Arist. Phys. III. 8, 208 a 8. 

3 Arist. Phys. III. 4, 203 b 7. 

4 Schol. in Arist. 514 a 33 ; Herbart, Einleitung in die Philosophic (Ges. 
W., I. 196). 

5 Me.t. XII. 2, 1069 b 18, and especially Phys. I. 4, 187 a 20. Cf. also Simpl. 
Phys. (D.) 33 r 154, 14 (according to Theophrastus) . This much-treated contro 
versy will be spoken of more in detail below ( 6). 

34 The Greeks : Cosmological Period. [PART. X 

unclear idea of the mythical chaos which was "one" and yet also 
" all." This he did by assuming as the cosmic matter an infinite, 
corporeal mass, in which the various empirical substances were so 
mixed that no definite quality could be ascribed to it as a whole. 
For this reason, however, the separation of the individual qualities 
out of this self-moved matter could no longer be regarded as properly 
a qualitative change in it. With this view the conception of the 
unity of the world as regards quality would be given up, to be sure, 
and an essential preparation made for the later development. 

3. Still another predicate was given by Anaxirnander to the In 
finite, TO Otiov, the divine. As a last remembrance of the religious 
home in which scientific reflection arose, it shows for the first time 
the inclination of philosophers, constantly recurring in history, to 
view as " Deity " the highest conception which theory has led them 
to use for explaining the world, and so to give it at the same time 
a sanction for the religious consciousness. Anaximander s matter is 
the first philosophic conception of God, the first attempt, and one 
which remains still entirely within the physical, to strip the idea 
of God of all mythical form. 

But while the religious need thus maintained itself in the deter 
mination of metaphysical conception, the possibility of an influence 
of the results of science upon the religious life was brought nearer, the 
more these results met and responded to an impulse which hitherto 
had been dominant only in an obscure and uncertain manner within 
that life. The transformation which the Greek myths had undergone, 
as well in the import given them in cosmogonic fancy as in that given 
to their ethical interpretation, tended everywhere toward a mono 
theistic culmination (Pherecydes, Solon); and to this movement 
its final result, a clearly outspoken monism, was now proffered by 
science. 

This relation was brought to expression by Xenophanes, not a 
thinker and investigator, but an imaginative disciple of science, 
strong in his convictions, who brought the new teaching from East 
to West and gave it a thoroughly religious colouring. His mainte 
nance of monotheism, which he expressed as enthusiastic intuition in 
the saying, 1 that whithersoever he looked all was constantly flowing 
together for him into one Nature (/uW cis &lt;wriv), took on at once, 
however, that sharp polemis turn against the popular faith, by which 
he is principally characterised in literature. The scorn, which he 
poured out with abundant wit over the anthropomorphism of myth 
ology, 2 the anger with which he pursued the poets as the portrayers 

1 Timon in Sext. Emp. Pyrrh. Hyp. I. 224. 2 Clem. Alex. Strom. V. 601. 

CHAP. 1. 4.] Conceptions of Being : Xenophanes. 35 

of these divine figures provided with all the weaknesses and vices of 
human nature, 1 these rest upon an ideal of God which will have 
the Supreme Being regarded as incomparable with man in both 
bodily and mental characteristics. When he passes to positive at 
tributes, Xenophanes becomes more obscure. On the one hand, the 
deity as ev KCU vav is identified with the universe, and to this " World- 
God " are then ascribed all the predicates of the Milesian a.pxn 
(eternity, existence that has not become what it is, imperishability) ; 
on the other hand, qualities are ascribed to the deity, some of which 
are spatial, as the spherical form, while others are psychical func 
tions. Among these latter the omnipresence of the knowing activity 
and of the rational guidance of things is expressly mentioned. In 
this respect the World-God of Xenophanes appears only as the 
highest among the rest of " gods and men." 

While here a predominantly theological turn of philosophy is 
already manifested, the exchange of the point of view of metaphysics 
and natural science taken by Anaximander, for the religious point 
of view of Xenophanes shows itself in two essential deviations. 
The conception of the World-God is for the latter an object of 
religious reverence, and scarcely a means for understanding Nature. 
The Colophonian s sense for knowledge of Nature is slight, his ideas 
are in part very childlike, and, as compared with those of the Mile 
sians, undeveloped. And so for his views, the characteristic of 
infinity, which Milesian science regarded as necessary in the cosmic 
matter, could be dispensed with ; on the contrary, it seemed to him 
more in accordance with the dignity of the divine Nature, 2 to think 
of this as limited within itself, as entirely shut up or complete, con 
sequently as regards its spatial aspect, spherical. And while the 
Milesians thought of the original ground of things as ever in motion 
spontaneously, and as characterised by living variety in its inter 
nal structure, Xeuophanes struck out this postulate hitherto in use- 
for the explanation of Nature, and declared the World-God to be 
immovable and perfectly homogeneous in all its parts. How, indeed, 
he thought that the variety of individual things whose reality he 
did not doubt, could be reconciled with this view, must remain 
uncertain. 

4. As was required by the conception of change, the Milesian 
conception of the World-substance had united without clear discrim 
ination two essential elements : the one that of a substance re 
maining like itself, the other that of independent or self-subsistent 

1 Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. IX. 193. 

2 Ilippol. Ref. I. 14 (Doxogr. I). 565). In other passages, again, it is said 
that he would have the deity thought neither limited nor unlimited (?). 

36 The Greeks : Cosmological Period. [PART I. 

changeability. In the thought of Xenophanes the first element was 
isolated ; the same process took place for the second through Hera 
clitus, His doctrine presupposes the work of the Milesians, from 
the conclusion of which it is separated by a generation, in this way : 
their effort to determine or define in conceptions an abiding world- 
ground has been recognised as hopeless. There is nothing abiding, 
either in the world or in its constitution taken as a whole. Not 
only individual things, but also the universe as a whole, are involved 
in perpetual, ceaseless revolution: all flows, and nothing abides. We 
cannot say of things that they are ; they become only, and pass away 
in the ever-changing play of the movement of the universe. That, 
then, which abides and deserves the name of deity, is not a thing, 
and not substance or matter, but motion, the cosmic process, Becom 
ing itself. 

To meet a strong demand that seems made by this turn to abstrac 
tion, Heraclitus found help in the sensuous perception in which this 
motion presented itself to him : that of fire. / The co-operation of 
this in the conversion of things of Nature into each other had been 
already noticed by the Milesians ; to this may have been added 
ancient Oriental mystical ideas, which contact with the Persians 
made especially accessible to the lonians of that day.; But when 
Heraclitus declared the world to be an ever-living fire, and Fire, 
therefore, to be the essence of all things, he understood by this apxn 
not a material or substance which survived all its transformations, 
but just the transforming process itself in its ever-darting, vibrating 
activity (ziingelnde), the soaring up and vanishing which corre 
spond to the Becoming and passing away. 1 

At the same time, however, this idea takes on a still firmer form, 
in that Heraclitus emphasised much more strongly than the Mile 
sians the fact that this change is accomplished in accordance with 
definite relations, and in a succession that remains always the same. 2 
This rhythm of events (which later times have called the uniformity 
of Nature under law) is therefore the only permanent ; it is termed 
by Heraclitus the destiny (ei/Ma/o/ue vi;), the order (8iip;), the reason 
(Ao yo?) of the world. These predicates, in which physical, ethical, 

1 The difficulty of ascribing to such a motion without any substrate, to a mere 
Becoming, the highest reality and the capacity to produce things, was evidently 
very much less for undeveloped thought not yet conscious of its categories than 
for later apprehension. The conception of Becoming as fire, hovering between 
the symbolic and the real meaning of the term, was supported by the use of 
language which treats of functions and relations as also substantives. But 
Heraclitus does not disdain to let the dim idea of a World-substance stand in the 
background in his metaphors (of the clay kneaded ever anew, of the drink 
continually stirred). 

2 Further in detail on this point in the following section. 

CHAP. 1, 4.] Conceptions of Being : Heraclitus, Parmenides. 37 

and logical order in the world appear as still identified, prove only 
the undeveloped state of thought which does not yet know how to 
separate the different motives. The conception, however, which 
Heraclitus has grasped with complete clearness, and carried though 
with all the strength of his austere personality, is that of order, a 
conception, nevertheless, whose validity was for him as much a 
matter of conviction as of knowledge. 

5. In evident opposition to this theory of the Ephesian, the con 
ception of Being was worked out by Parmenides, the head of the 
Eleatic School, and the most important thinker of this period. Yet 
it is not easy to reconstruct his formulation of this conception from 
the few fragments of his didactic poem, the quite unique character 
of which consists in the union of dryest abstraction with grand and 
rich imagery. That there is a Being (O-TI yap etvai), is for the Ele 
atic a postulate of such cogent evidence that he only states this 
position without proving it, and that he explains it only by a nega 
tive turn of thought which first discloses to us completely the sense 
in which we are to understand his main thought. " Non-being " 
(py cfvcu), he adds, or that which "is" not (TO firj eov), cannot be 
and cannot be thought. For all thought is in relation to a some 
thing that is, which forms its content. 1 This view of the correla 
tive nature of Being and consciousness leads so far with Parmenides 
that the two, thought and Being, are declared to be fully identical. 
No thought to whose content Being does not belong, no Being 
that is not thought : thought and Being are the same. 

These propositions, which look so abstractly ontological if we con 
sider only the words, take on quite another meaning when we con 
sider that the fragments of the great Elean leave no doubt as to 
what he desired to have regarded as " Being " or that which " is." 
This was corporeality, materiality (TO TrAe ov). For him, " being" and 
"filling space" are the same. This "Being," this function of filling 
space, is precisely the same in the case of all that " is " ; there is, 
therefore, only the one, single Being which has no internal distinc 
tions. " Non-being," or what is not [has not the attribute of Being], 
means, accordingly, incorporeal ity, empty space (TO KCVO V). This 
double meaning of the emu (Being) employed by Parmenides, ac 
cording to which the word means at one time " the full " and at an 
other time " Reality," leads then to the proposition that empty space 
cannot be. 

Now for the nai ve, sensuous way of looking at things which 
lurks even in these principles of Parmenides, the separateness of 

1 Fr., ed. Karsten, vv. 94 ff. 

38 The Greeks : Gosmological Period. [PART I. 

bhings, by virtue of which they present themselves in their plurality 
and multiplicity, consists in their separation by empty space ; and, 
on the other hand, all that takes place in the corporeal world, i.e. 
all motion, consists in the change of place which the " full " experi 
ences in the "empty" (or the "Void"). If, therefore, the Void is 
not real or actual, then the plurality and motion of individual things 
cannot be real. 

The number and variety of things presented in co-existence and 
succession by experience had given the Milesians occasion to ask 
for the common abiding ground of which all these things were 
metamorphoses. When, however, the conception of cosmic sub 
stance or world-stuff has culminated with Parmenides in the con 
ception of Being, there seems so little possibility of uniting these 
individual things with it, that reality is denied them, and the one 
unitary Being remains also the only being. 1 The conception formed 
for the purpose of explanation has so developed internally that to 
maintain it involves the denial of that which was to be explained 
by it. In this sense the Eleatic doctrine is acosmism : the mani- 
foldness of things has sunk in the All-one : the latter alone " is," 
the former are deception and seeming. 

According to Parmenides, however, we are to predicate of the 
One that it is eternal, has never come into being, is imperishable, 
and especially (as Xenophanes had maintained) that it is through 
and through one in kind, one with itself, without any distinctions 
or differences, i.e. completely homogeneous and absolutely unchange 
able. He follows Xenophanes also in regarding the One as limited, 
complete, and definitive. Being is then a well-rounded sphere, per 
fectly homogeneous within itself, and this only and unitary world- 
body is at the same time the world-thought, 2 simple, excluding all 
particulars from itself : TO yap TrAe ov eo-ri VOT//WI. 

6. All these attempts, in part fantastic, in part regardlessly 
abstract, were needed in order to gain the presuppositions for the 
development of the first usable conceptions for apprehending Nature. 
For important as were the motives of thought that had come to 
recognition therein, neither the world-stuff or cosmic matter of the 
Milesians, nor the "Fire-Becoming" of Heraclitus, nor the Being of 
Parmenides were available for explaining Nature. Now the imper 
fection of the first had become clear through the contrast which 

1 A great role in these considerations of the Eleatics is obviously played by 
the ambiguities in language, by which, on the one hand, the fv means both 
numerical unity and also qualitative unity or simplicity, while the verb elvai has 
not only the function of the copula, but also the meaning of " Reality." 

2 Hence, terms like " materialism " and " idealism " do not apply to this naive 
identification of consciousness and its object, the corporeal world. 

CHAP. 1, 4.] Conceptions of Being : Empedocles. 39 

separated the two latter as by a gulf, and with the recognition of 
this, occasion was given for the more independent investigators of 
the next period to separate in their conceptions the two motifs 
(being and becoming), and by setting them over against one another 
to think out new forms of relation, out of which permanently valua 
ble categories for the knowledge of Nature resulted. 

These mediating attempts have in common, on the one hand, the 
recognition of the Eleatic postulate that that which " is " must be 
thought throughout not only as eternal, without a beginning and 
imperishable, but also as homogeneous, and as regards its qualities 
unchangeable ; on the other hand, however, they assent also to the 
thought of Heraclitus that an undeniable reality belongs to Becom 
ing and change (Geschehen), and so to the manifoldness of things. 
Common to them, also, in their adjustment of these two needs of 
thought is the attempt to assume a plurality of beings, each of which 
should satisfy for itself the postulate of Parmenides ; while, on 
the other hand, by changing their spatial relations, they were to 
bring about the changeful variety of individual things which expe 
rience shows. If the Milesians had spoken of qualitative changes 
of the cosmic substance or matter, the Eleatic principle had ex 
cluded the possibility of it ; if, nevertheless, change ought to receive 
recognition, as with Heraclitus, and be attributed to Being itself, 
it must be reduced to a kind of change which leaves untouched 
the qualities of the existent. Such a change, however, was think 
able only as a change of place, i.e. as motion. The investigators of 
Nature in the fifth century maintained, therefore, with the Eleatics, 
the (qualitative) unchangeableness of the existent, but against the 
Eleatics, its plurality and motion ; 1 with Heraclitus, they insisted 
upon the reality of occurrence and change, and against Heraclitus, 
upon the Being of permanent and unchangeable substances as under 
lying and producing the same. Their common view is this : there 
is a plurality of existing beings which, unchangeable in them 
selves, make the change and variety of individual things compre 
hensible. 

7. This principle seems to have been asserted first and in its 
most imperfect form by Empedodes, in a form, however, that was 
widely influential historically. He put forward as " elements " 2 the 
four which are still current in the popular modes of thought, earth, 

1 Later (Plato, Theaet. 181 D ; Arist. var. Zoc.), d\Xo/w&lt;m (qualitative change) 
and irepHfropd (change of place) are contrasted as species of Klvijffis or /iera/SoXij. 
In reality this is done here, though the terms are as yet lacking. 

2 Instead of the later expression o-roixeta, we find in Empedocles the more 
poetic term " roots of all things," 

40 The Greeks : Cosmological Period. [PART I. 

water, air, and fire. 1 Each of these is according to this system, 
without beginning and imperishable, homogeneous and unchange 
able, but at the same time divisible into parts, and in these parts 
capable of change of place. Out of the mixture of the elements 
arise individual things, which in turn cease to exist when the mix 
ture is separated into the elements ; to the kind of mixture made 
are due the various qualities of individual things, which are often 
different from the properties of the elements themselves. 

"At the same time the note of unchangeableness and a deviation 
from the Milesian Hylozoism assert themselves in the system of 
Empedocles .to the extent that In- could not assign independent ca 
pacity of motion to these material elements which experience only 
changing states of motion and mechanical mixings. On this account 
he was obliged to seek a ccw.se of motion independent of the four 
elements. As such a cause he designated love and hate. The out 
come, however, of this first attempt to set over against a dead matter, 
deprived by abstraction of all motion of its own, the force which 
moves it, as a metaphysically independent something, was very 
obscure. Love and hate are, with Empedocles, not mere properties, 
functions, or relations of the elements, but rather independent 
powers set over against them ; but how we are to think the reality 
of these moving forces is not disclosed in any satisfactory way in the 
fragments. 2 Only this seems certain, that in fixing the dual nature 
of the principle of motion the thought was also operative that two 
distinct causes, love and hate, were requisite to account for the 
good and the evil in the change of things of our experience, 3 a first 
indication that determinations of " worth " or value are beginning 
to be introduced into the theory of Nature. 

8.! Empedocles thought it possible to derive the special qualities 
of individual things from the proper mixture of the four elements : 
whether he attempted so to derive them, and if so, how, we do not 
indeed know. This difficulty was avoided by Anaxagoras, who, 
from the Eleatic principle that nothing that is can arise or pass 
away, drew the conclusion that as many elements must be assumed 

1 Aside from dependence upon his predecessors, his selection was evidently 
due to the inclination to regard the different states of aggregation as the original 
essence of things. No importance seems to have attached to the number four, 
in this. The dialectical construction which Plato and Aristotle gave for this is 
quite remote from the thought of the Agrigentine. 

2 If &lt;pi\ia and veZVos are occasionally counted by the later recorders as fifth 
and sixth dpx 1 ? of Empedocles, we must not infer from this that he regarded 
them as substances. His obscure and almost mythical terminology rests, for 
the most part, upon the fact that conceptions standing for functions are substan 
tives in language. 3 Arist. Met. I. 4, 984 b 32. 

4 He called them a-ir^iara (seeds of things), or also simply xP nf J - aTa (sub 
stances). 

CHAP. 1, 4.] Conceptions of Being : Anaxagoras. 41 

as there are simple substances in the things of experience, meaning 
by simple substances those which on repeated division always sep 
arate into parts qualitatively the same with their wholes^ Such 
elementary substances were later, in accordance with his definition, 
called homoiomeriai. At that time, however, when only mechanical 
division or change of temperature were known as means of investi 
gation, this conception of element (in principle entirely correspond 
ing to the conceptions of the chemistry of to-day) applied to the 
greater part of the substances given in experience, 1 and on that ac 
count Anaxagoras maintained that there were countless elements dif 
fering in form, colour, and taste. He held that they were present 
throughout the entire universe in a very finely divided state. Their 
coming together or compounding (o-uyK/oio-is) constitutes the arising, 
their separation (SiaKpions) the passing away, of individual things. 
There is, accordingly, something of every substance present in every 
thing: it is only for our sensuous apprehension that the individual 
thing takes on the properties of that substance or of those sub 
stances which may be present in a preponderating degree. 

The elements, as the true being, are regarded now by Anaxagoras 
also as eternal, without beginning or end, unchangeable, and though 
movable in space, yet not in motion of themselves. Here, too, then, 
we must ask for a force which is the cause of motion. Since, how 
ever, this force must be regarded as existent, a something that is, 
Anaxagoras hit upon the expedient of assigning it to a special, 
single sort of matter or elementary substance. This force-element 
or motive-matter (Bewecjuitgsstojf) is conceived to be the lightest and 
most mobile of all elements. In distinction from all the others it is 
that one of the homoiomeriai which alone is in motion of itself, and 
communicates this its own motion to the rest ; it moves itself and 
the rest. To determine the inner nature of this " force-substance," 
however, two lines of thought unite : the property of originating mo 
tion is, for the naive mode of looking at things, the surest sign of the 
animate; this exceptional kind of matter, then, which is self-moved? 
must be animate matter or " soul-stuff" (Seelenstojf), its quality 
must be animate or psychical. 2 And, secondly, a power is known 
through its effect : if, now, this motive-matter is the cause of the 
formation of the world, to bring about which it has separated out 
the remaining idle elements, then we must be able to know its 
nature from this which it has accomplished. But the universe, in 
particular the regular revolution of the stars, makes the impression 

1 According to the fragments of Anaxagoras, bones, flesh, and marrow also ; 
on the other hand, the metals. 

2 [The Greek ^v^t and German Seele include both these meanings.] 

42 The G-reeks : Cosmological Period. [PART I. 

of beautiful and purposive order (/cotr/uos). Such a mastering of 
gigantic masses in a harmonious system, this undisturbed circling 
of countless worlds, on which Anaxagoras turned his wondering 
contemplation, it seemed to him could be the result only of a mind 
arranging the movements according to ends, and ruling them. For 
this reason he characterised the force-substance as Reason (vous) or 
as " Thought-stuff." 

The vovs of Anaxagoras is then a stuff or substance, a corporeal 
element, homogeneous, unproduced, and imperishable, diffused in a 
finely divided state throughout the universe ; different from the 
other substances, however, not only in degree, as being the finest, 
lightest, and most mobile, but also in essence, since it alone is self- 
moved, and by virtue of its own motion moves the other elements in 
the purposive way which we recognise in the order of the world. 
This emphasising of the order in the universe is a Heraclitic element 
in the teaching of Anaxagoras, and the conclusion drawn from the 
ordered movements to a rational cause of them, acting according to 
ends, is the first instance of the ideological explanation of nature. 1 
With this procedure a conception of worth ( Werthbegriff) namely, 
beauty and perfection is made a principle of explanation in the 
theoretical field also. 

9. The Atomism of Leucippus developed from the Eleatici concep 
tion of Being in a direction opposite to that just traced. While 
Empedocles maintained that some, and Anaxagoras that all, qualities 
were metaphysically primitive, the founder of the school of Abdera 
remained in accord with the position of Parmenides, that no "Being" 
belongs to any of all the various qualitative determinations exhibited 
by experience, and that the sole property of Being is the property of 
filling space, corporeality, TO TrXt ov. If now, however, the plurality of 
things, and the mutations taking place among them as they come 
and go, were to be made intelligible, then instead of the single world- 
body, with no internal distinctions which Parmenides had taught, a 
plurality of such must be assumed, separated from one another, not 
by other Being, but by that which is not Being, Non-being: i.e. by the 
incorporeal, by empty space. This entity, then, which is Non-being [i.e. 
not Being in the true sense], must have in its turn a kind of Being, 
or of metaphysical reality ascribed to it, 2 and Leucippus regarded it 

1 As such he was praised by Plato (Phced. 97 B), and overestimated by 
Aristotle (Met. I. 3, 984 b). Cf., however, 5. The moderns (Hegel) have 
added the further over-estimate of seeking to interpret the *oDs as an immate 
rial principle. But the fragments (Simpl. Phys. (D.) 33 T 156, 13) leave no 
doubt that this lightest, purest element, which does not mingle with the rest, 
but only plays about them and moves them as living force, was also a space 
filling matter or stuff. 2 Plut. Ado. Col. 4, 2, 1109. 

CHAP. 1, 4.] Conceptions of Being : Leueippus, Zeno. 43 

as the unlimited, the aTrtipov, in contrast with the limitation which 
Being proper possesses, according to Parmenides. Leueippus, there 
fore, shatters in pieces the world-body of Parmenides, and scatters 
its parts through infinite space. Each of these parts, however, is, 
like the absolute Being of Parmenides, eternal and unchangeable, 
without beginning, indestructible, homogeneous, limited, and indi 
visible. Hence these portions of Being are called atoms, aro/iot; 
and for the reasons which had led Anaximander to his concept 
of the aarttpov Leueippus maintained that there were countless 
numbers of such atoms, infinitely varied in form. Their size must 
be taken as imperceptibly small, since all things in our experience 
are divisible. Since, however, they all possess only the one like 
quality of filling space, differences between them can be only quan 
titative ; differences in size, form, and situation. 

Out of such metaphysical considerations grew the concept of the 
atom, which has proved so fruitful for the theoretical science of 
Nature just because, as was evident already in the system of Leu 
eippus, it contains the postulate that all qualitative differences 
exhibited by Nature are to be reduced to quantitative. The things 
which we perceive, Leueippus taught, are combinations oF~afoirn? ; 
they arise when atoms unite, and pass away when they part. The 
properties which we perceive in these complexes are only seeming 
or appearance ; there exist in truth only the determinations of size, 
form, arrangement, and situation of the individual atoms which 
constitute Being. 

Empty space is, accordingly, the presupposition as well for the 
uniting and separating of atoms as for their separateness and shape. 
All " becoming," or change, is in its essence motion of atoms in space. 
If we ask for the ground of this motion of the atoms, 1 since space 
as properly not a true Being cannot be allowed as cause, and 
Atomism recognises nothing as actual except space and the atoms, 
this ground can be sought only in the atoms themselves; i.e. the 
atoms are of themselves in motion, and this, their independent mo 
tion, is as truly without beginning and end as is their being. And as 
the atomj are indefinitely varied in size and form, and completely 
independent of one another, so their original motions are infinite in 
variety. They fly confusedly about in infinite space, which knows 
no above and below, no within and without, each for itself, until 
their accidental meeting leads to the formation of things and worlds. 
The separation between the conceptions of matter and moving force 

1 Arist. Phys. VIII. 1, 252 a 32, says of the Atomists that they did not ask as 
to the origin of motion as a matter of course, for they declared motion itself 
to be causeless (cf. Met. I. 4). 

44 The Greeks: Cosmological Period. [PART I. 

which Empedocles and Anaxagoras, each in his way, had attempted r 
was thus in turn abolished by the Atomists. They ascribed to the 
particles of matter the capacity, not indeed of qualitative change 
(dAAotWis), but of independent motion (KIV-TJO-IS in the narrower sense r 
equivalent to Trtpt^opa), and took up again in this sense the principle 
of Milesian hylozoism. 

10. In opposition to these pluralistic systems, JZenn, the friend 
and disciple of Parmenides, sought to defend the Eleatic doctrine by 
setting forth the contradictions in which the assumption of a plural 
ity of Beings is involved. As regards size, he pointed out, it fol 
lows that the totality of Being must be on the one hand infinitely 
small, on the other hand infinitely great: infinitely small, because 
the combination of any number whatever of parts, each of which is 
to be infinitely small, never yields anything more than an infinitely 
small sum ; l infinitely great, on the contrary, because the bound 
ary which is to separate two parts must itself be an existent some 
thing, i.e. spatial magnitude, which again is itself separated from 
the two parts by a boundary of which the same holds true, and so 
on in infinitum. From the latter argument, which was called that 
from dichotomy (the IK Sixo-ro/uas), Zeno reasoned also that as 
regards number, what is must be unlimited, while, on the other hand, 
this complete Being, not in process of becoming, is to be regarded 
also as numerically limited [i.e. as complete]. And just as with the 
assumption of the " many," so the position that empty space ~is real 
is held to refute itself by a regress ad infinitum : if all that is is in 
space, and thus space is itself an existing entity, then it must itself 
be in a space, and this last likewise, etc. When the concept of the 
infinite, to which the Atomists had given a new turn, became thus 
prominent, all the enigmas involved in it for the contrasting points 
of view of intellect and sense-perception became prominent also, and 
Zeno used them to involve in a reductio ad absurdum the opponents 
of the doctrine of the one, self-limited Being. 

/ This dialectic, however, cut both ways, as was shown in the Ele 
atic School itself, by the fact that a cotemporary of Zeno, Melissus, 
who shared his opinions, saw himself forced to declare that the 
Being of Parmenides was as unlimited in space as in time. For as 
Being can arise neither from other Being nor from Non-being, so 
it can be limited neither by existing Being (for then there must be 
a second Being), nor by a non-existent (for then this non-existent 
must be) : a line of argument more consistent from a purely theo- 

1 The argument can be directed only against Atomism, and applies to this 
weakly. 

CHAP. 1, 4.] Conceptions of Being : Pythagoreans. 45 

retical point of view than the position of the master, which had 
been influenced by determinations of worth. 

11. The Pythagoreans took a mediating position in these ques 
tions : for this, as for their other doctrines, they were happily fitted 
by their employment with mathematics, and by the manner in which 
they prosecuted this study. Its chief direction seems to have been 
arithmetical ; even the geometrical knowledge ascribed to them (as 
the well-known proposition named after Pythagoras) amounts to a 
linear representation of simple relations between numbers (3 2 + 4 2 
= 5 2 , etc.). It was not, however, in the general relations of construc 
tions in space only that the Pythagoreans found numbers to be the 
determining principles ; the same was found to be true also in such 
phenomena of the corporeal world as they were chiefly engaged 
with. Their theoretical investigations concerning music taught them 
that harmony was based upon simple numerical relations of the 
length of the strings (octave, third, fourth), and their knowledge 
of astronomy, which was far advanced, led them to the view that 
the harmony prevailing in the motions in the heavenly bodies had, 
like the harmony in music, 1 its ground in an order, in accordance 
with which the various spheres of the universe moved about a com 
mon centre at intervals fixed by numbers. Suggestions so various 
as these mentioned seem to have united to evoke in a man like 
Philolaus the thought, that the permanent Being which philosophy 
was seeking was to be found in numbers. In contrast with the 
changing things of experience mathematical conceptions possess as 
regards their content the marks of a validity not subject to time 
they are eternal, without beginning, imperishable, unchangeable, 
and even immovable ; and while they thus satisfy the Eleatic postu 
late for Being, they present, on the other hand, fixed relations, 
that rhythmical order which Heraclitus had demanded. Thus, then, 
the Pythagoreans found the abiding essense of the world in the 
mathematical relations, and in particular in numbers, a solution 
of the problem more abstract than the Milesian, more capable of 
"being represented to perception or imagination than the Eleatic, 
clearer than the Heraclitic, more difficult than those offered by 
cotemporary mediating attempts. 

The Pythagorean doctrine of numbers, as carried out by them, was 
attached partly to the numerous observations they had made on the 
arithmetical relations, partly to analogies which they discovered or 
sometimes artificially introduced, between numerical and philosophi 
cal problems. The definite nature of each individual number and 

1 Out of this analogy arose the fantastic idea of the harmony of the spheres. 

46 The Greeks: Cosmological Period. L I&gt;AHT J - 

the endlessness of the number series must indeed have at first sug 
gested that reality belongs as well to the limited as to the unlimited, 
and by transferring this thought into the geometrical sphere the 
Pythagoreans came to recognise, in addition to the elements as the 
limited, a Reality as belonging also to space as the unlimited void. 
They thought of the elements, however, as determined by the forms 
of the simple solids : fire by the tetrahedron, earth by the cube, 
air by the octahedron, water by the icosahedron, and a fifth material, 
aether, which they added as the celestial element to the four terres 
trial elements assumed by Empedocles, by the dodecahedron. 1 In 
these conceptions the prevailing idea was this : corporeality, or the 
essential quality of bodies, consists in the mathematical limitation 
of the unlimited, in the shaping out of space into forms. Mathemati 
cal forms are made the essence of physical reality. 

The Pythagoreans further believed that in the antithesis between 
the limited and the unlimited they recognised the antithesis found 
in numbers between the odd and the even ; 2 and this antithesis was 
again identified with that between the perfect and the imperfect, 
the good and the bad, 3 in this last case not without the influence of 
old ideas connected with the religious faith of the oracles. Their 
Weltanschauung becomes thus dualistic: over against the limited, 
odd. perfect, and good stands the limitless, even, imperfect, and bad. 
As, however, both principles are united in the number one, 4 which 
has the value of an even as well as of an odd number, so in the 
world as a whole these antitheses are adjusted to form a harmony. 
The world is harmony of numbers. 

Some of the Pythagoreans, 5 moreover, sought to trace out through 
the various realms of experience that fundamental antithesis, in the 
assumption of which all the school were agreed, and so a table of ten 
pairs ofopposites came into existence: viz. limited and unlimited 
odd and even one and many right and left male and female 
at rest and in motion straight and curved light and dark 

1 While the main line of the Pythagoreans thus followed Empedocles, a later, 
Kcphantus, conceived of this limitation of space in the sense of Atomism. 

2 The reason presented for this, viz. that even numbers permit of bisection 
to infinity (?), is indeed very questionable and artificial (Simpl. Phys. D. 105 r 
455, 20). 

8 Nor must we here overlook the factor which had already asserted itself with 
Xenophanes and Pannenides, viz. that to the Greek the conception of measure 
was one that had a high ethical worth ; so that the infinite, which derides all 
measure, must to him appear imperfect, while the definite or limited (ireTepao-- 
tdvov) was necessarily regarded as more valuable. 

* Arist. Met. I. 5, 986 a 19. 

5 Or men standing in close relations with Pythagoreanism, such as the physi 
cian Alcmaeon, a perhaps somewhat older contemporary of Philolaus. Cf. 
Arist. Met. I. 5, 980 a 2-2. 

CHAP. 1, 5.] Conception* of Cosmic Processes. 47 

good and bad square and oblong or with unequal sides. This is 
evidently a collection put together without system, to fill out the 
sacred number ten, but an attempt at an articulation may at least be 
recognised. 

In accordance, then, with this or a similar scheme the Pythagoreans 
exerted themselves to make an order of things corresponding to the 
system of numbers, by assigning the fundamental conceptions in 
every department of knowledge to various numbers, and on the other 
hand by adjudging to every individual number, but especially to those 
from one to ten, determining significance in the various spheres of 
reality. The fantastic nature of the symbolic interpretation into 
which they fell in doing this must yet not cause us to overlook the 
fact that the attempt was therewith made to recognise an abiding order 
of things which could be grasped and expressed in conceptions, and to 
find the ultimate ground of this order in mathematical relations. 

Nor did it escape the notice of the Pythagoreans themselves, 
notably of the later members of the school, that numbers could not 
be called the principles (a-jx&lt;u) of things in the same way in which 
the term is applied to the various " stuffs," or kinds of matter, to the 
elements, etc., that things have not arisen out of them, but are 
formed according to them; and perhaps they best and most effec 
tively express their thoughts when they say that all things are 
copies or imitations of numbers. With this conception the world of 
mathematical forms was thought as a higher, more original reality, 
of which the empirical reality was held to be only a copy : to the 
former belonged abiding Being ; the latter was the contrasted world 
of Becoming and change. 

5. Conceptions of Cosmic Processes. 1 

E. Hardy, Der Bfgriff der Physis in yriechisr.hen Philosophic, I. Berlin, 1884. 

As the fact of change that is, the cosmic processes furnished 
the most immediate occasion for reflection upon the abiding Being, 
so, on the other hand, the various conceptions of Being had 
as their ultimate aim only to make the processes of Nature intel 
ligible. This task was indeed occasionally forgotten, or set aside, 
in the development of the conceptions of Being, as by the Eleatics ; 
but immediately afterward the further progress of thought proved 
to be determined all the more by the renewed attention given to 

1 [Geschehen. I have translated this word variously by "change," "occur 
rence," "event," "taking place," "coming to pass," "becoming," etc. The 
last, which is ordinarily used for the Greek yiyvofuu seems hardly broad enough. The German means any natural process or event.] 

48 The Greeks : Cosmological Period. [PART I. 

Becoming and change, and by the need of so thinking Being that 
Becoming and change could not only be reconciled with it, but also 
be made intelligible by it. Hand in hand, then, with ideas of Being, 
go those of Becoming, the two in constant relation to one another. 

1. To the lonians the living activity of the world was something 
so much a matter of course that they never thought of asking for 
a cause of it. Naive Hylozoism could have in view only the explana 
tion of a particular occurrence or cosmic process. Explanation, 
however, consists in reducing what is striking not a matter of 
course or intelligible in itself to such simpler forms of occur 
rence as seem to need no explanation, inasmuch as they are most 
familiar to our perception. That things change their form, their 
qualities, their working upon one another, seemed to the Mile 
sians to require explanation. They contented themselves in this 
with conceiving these changes as condensation or rarefaction of the 
cosmic matter. This latter process did not seem to them to need a 
farther explanation, though Anaximenes at least did add, that these 
changes in the state of aggregation were connected with changes in 
temperature condensation with cooling, rarefaction with growing 
warm. This contrast gave rise to the arrangement of the states of 
aggregation in a series corresponding to the degree of rarefaction 
or condensation of the primitive matter : 1 viz. fire, air, water, earth, 
(or stone). 

The Milesians used these ideas not only to explain individual 
phenomena of Nature, particularly the meteorological processes so 
important for a sea-faring people, but also to explain the develop 
ment of the present state of the world out of the prime matter. 
Thus Thales conceived water as in part rarefying to form air and 
fire, and in part condensing to form earth and stone ; Anaximenes, 
starting from air, taught an analogous process of world-formation. 
As a result of these views it was assumed that the earth resting 
on water, according to the first, on air, according to the second 
occupied the centre of the sphere of air revolving about it, and this 
sphere of air was yet again surrounded by a sphere of fire, which 
either broke through or shone through in the stars. 

In setting forth this process of ivorld-origination, which was per 
haps still regarded by Thales and Anaximander as a process occur 
ring once for all, the Milesians attached themselves closely to the 
cosmogonic poetry. 2 Not until later does the consideration seem to 

1 Hence it is intelligible that there were also physicists (not known to us by 
name) who would regard the world-stuff as an intermediate stage between air 
and water, or between air and fire. 

2 Hence, also, the designation of the world-stuff as apxt (beginning). 

CHAP. 1, 5.] Cosmic Processes : Anaximander, Heraclitus. 49 

have gained prevalence, that if to change of form a change back to 
the original form corresponds, and if, at the same time, matter is 
to be regarded as not only eternal but eternally living, it is necessary 
to assume a ceaseless process of world-formation and world-destruc 
tion, a countless number of successive worlds. 1 

2. Although these essential constituents characterise also the 
physical theories of Anaximander, he was led beyond them by his 
metaphysical conception of the airupov. The infinite, self-moved 
matter which was intended by this obscure conception was indeed, 
as a whole, to have no definite properties. It was held, however, to 
contain qualitative opposites within itself, and in its process of evolu 
tion to exclude them from itself, so that they became separate. 2 
Anaximander remained then a Hylozoist in so far as he regarded 
matter as self-moved; he had seen, however, that the differences 
must be put into it if they were to come forth out of it on occasion 
of its self-motion. If, then, as regards his doctrine of Being, he ap 
proached the later theory of a plurality of primitive substances, and 
abandoned the doctrine that the primitive matter was changeable in 
quality, he was yet entirely at one with the other Milesians as 
regards his conception of the causelessness of the cosmic process, and 
thought that by the union of the two opposites, the warm and the 
cold, which he conceived as the first to come out from the airupov, he 
could explain water. This done, he could proceed with his cosmog 
ony along the oceanic path taken by Thales. 

But besides these physical and metaphysical determinations, the 
only fragment 3 preserved from him, giving his own words, repre 
sents the perishing of things as an expiation for injustice, and so 
presents the first dim attempt to present the world-process as 
ethical necessity, and to conceive of the shadows of transitoriness, 
which rest even on the bright picture of Hellenic life, as retribution 
for sin. However doubtful the particular interpretation of this 
utterance, there is yet without doubt voiced in it the need of giving 
to physical necessity the worth of an ethical order. Here Anaxi 
mander appears as a predecessor of Heraclitus. 

3. The order of events which Heraclitus thought he could estab 
lish as the only constant amid the mutation of things, had two 
essential marks, the harmony of opposites and the circuit completed by 

1 This doctrine was supported, probably by Anaximander, certainly by 
Anaximenes. It is repeated in Heraclitus and Empedocles. 

2 The decisive passages for this very controverted question (Ritter, Seydel, 
Zeller) are Arist. Phys. I. 4, 187 a 20, and Simpl. Phys. (D.) 33 154, 14 (after 
Theophrastus) ; also the continuation of the passage in the following note. 

8 Simpl. Phys. (D.) 6 r 24, 18. Cf. Th. Ziegler, Arch. f. Gesch. d. Philos., 
I. 16 ff. 

7 

50 The G-reeks : Cosmological Period. [PART I. 

matter in its successive changes in the universe, The observation that 
everything in the world is in process of constant change was 
exaggerated by Heraclitus to the claim that everything is con 
tinually changing into its opposite. The " other " was for him eo 
ipso the opposed. The "flux of things " became transformed in his 
poetic rhetoric into a ceaseless strife of opposites, and this strife 
(TTo Ae/xos) he declared to be the father of things. All that seems to 
be for a shorter or longer time is the product of opposed motions 
and forces which in their operation maintain themselves in equilib 
rium. The universe is thus at every moment a unity divided in 
itself and again re-united, a strife which finds its reconciliation, a 
want that finds its satisfaction. The essence of the world is the 
invisible harmony in which all differences and oppositions are 
solved. The world is Becoming, and Becoming is unity of oppo 
sites. 

These antitheses, according to the view of Heraclitus, present 
themselves particularly in the two processes taking place in con 
trary directions, through which, on the one hand, fire becomes 
changed into all things, and, on the other hand, all things change 
back into fire. The same stages are passed through in both 
processes: on the "ivay downward" fire passes over, by condensation, 
into water and earth, on the "way upward" earth and water, by rare 
faction, pass over into fire ; and these two ways are alike. .Change 
and counter-change run on side by side, and the semblance of a per 
manent thing makes its appearance where for a time there is as 
nrnch counter-change upon the one way as there is change upon the 
other. The fantastic forms in which Heraclitus put these views 
envelop the essential thought of a sequence of changes taking place 
in conformity to law, and of a continual compensation of these 
changes. The world is produced from the fire in ever-repeated 
rhythm and at fixed intervals of time, and then again flashes up in 
fire, to arise from it anew, a Phoenix. 1 

In this ceaseless transformation of all things nothing individual 
persists, but only the order, in which the exchange between the 
contrary movements is effected, the laio of change, which consti 
tutes the meaning and worth of the whole. If in the struggle be 
tween opposites it seems as though something new were constantly 
arising, this new is at the same time always a perishing product. 
The Becoming of Heraclitus produces no Being, as the Being of 
Parmenicles produces no Becoming. 

1 In details his physical, and especially his astronomical, ideas are weak. 
Metaphysical inquiry is more important with him than explanatory investiga 
tion. He shares this with his opponent, Parmenides. 

CHAP. 1, 5.] Cosmic Processes : Parmenides, Empedocles. 51 

4. In fact, the doctrine of Being held by the Eleatics excluded 
with plurality and change, events or cosmic processes, also. Ac 
cording to their metaphysics an event or occurrence is incomprehen 
sible, it is impossible. This metaphysics tolerates no physics. 
Parmenides denies to time, as to space, independent reality (oXXo 
TraptK TOV edvros) : for him there is only timeless Being with no dis 
tinctions. Although Parmenides added to the first part of his didac 
tic poem, which presents the doctrine of Being, a second part which 
treats physical problems, this is yet done with the protest in advance 
that he is here presenting not truth, but the " opinions of mortals." 
At the basis of all these ordinary opinions lies the false presupposi 
tion, previously rejected, that in addition to Being there is still 
another, Non-being. All becoming, all plurality and motion, rest on 
the interaction of these opposites, which are then further designated 
as light and darkness, warmth and cold. A Weltanschauung is then 
p ortrayed in poetic imagery, in which fire shapes the dark empty 
space into corporeal structures, a mode of representation which in 
part reminds us of Heraclitus, and in part accords with the astro 
nomical teaching of the Pythagoreans. The all-ruling Fire-power 
(ufuov), as inexorable necessity (81x77), with the help of love (epws) 
forces together what is akin, working from the centre of the world 
outward. Appropriation of the doctrines of others and polemic 
against them appear in motley mixture, agreeably to the purpose of 
the whole. Over this tissue thus interwoven hovers a poetic breath 
of plastic formative power, but original research and clear concep 
tions are lacking. 

5. Ideas more definite, and more usable for explaining the par 
ticular, are found among the successors, who transformed the Eleatic 
conception of Being into the conceptions of element, homoiomerise, 
and atom, expressly for this purpose. They all declare that by 
occurrence or coming to be nothing else is to be understood than the 
motion of unchangeable corporeal particles. Empedocles and Anax- 
agoras seem still to have sought to connect with this the denial of 
empty space, a principle which they received from Parmenides. 
They ascribed to their substances universal divisibility, and re 
garded parts as capable of displacement in such a way that as these 
parts mixed and reciprocally interpenetrated, all space should be 
always filled out. The motion in the world consists, then, in this 

1 The hypothetical exposition of how the world would have to be thought if, 
in addition to Heing, Non-being, plurality, and becoming were also regarded as 
real, had, on the one hand, a polemic purpose; and on the other, it met the 
want of his disciples, who probably demanded of the master an explanation of 
his own of the empirical world. 

52 The Greeks : Cosmological Period. [PART I. 

displacement of the parts of matter, each of which is always crowd 
ing and displacing the other. Things at a distance from one another 
cannot act upon one another, except as parts of the one flow out and 
penetrate into the other. This action is the more possible in pro 
portion as the effluxes of the one body resemble in their spatial 
form the pores of the other. So at least Empedocles taught, and 
the assumption of an infinite divisibility of substances is attested in 
the case of Anaxagoras also. Another picture of occurrence more 
akin to the present way of thinking is that presented by Leucippus. 
The atoms which impinge upon each other in empty space act upon 
each other by pressure and impact, group themselves together, and 
so form greater or smaller things or masses which are not separated 
and destroyed until some impact or pressure of other masses conies 
from without. All occurrence and coming to be consists in this 
process in which atom-complexes are successively formed and 
shattered. 

/The fundamental form of world-motion in all three systems, how 
ever, is that of the vortex, of circular rotation (8tvr)). According to 
Empedocles it is brought about by the forces of love and hate acting 
among the elements ; according to Anaxagoras it is begun by the 
Keason-stuff acting according to ends, and then continues with 
mechanical consistency ; according to Leucippus it is the result 
always occurring from the collision of several atoms. I The principle 
of mechanism was with Empedocles still enveloped in myth, with 
Anaxagoras it first made a half-successful attempt to break through 
the covering, and was completely carried through only by Leucippus. 
What hindered the first two from reaching this position was the 
introduction of considerations of worth into their explanatory 
theory. The one was for tracing the good and the evil back to cor 
responding powers of mind, which were, to be sure, not ascribed to 
any being, but mythically hypostatised ; the other believed that he 
could explain the order of the whole only from the assumption that 
purposive, rationally considered impulse had originated the motions. 
Yet both came so near the position of Leucippus as to demand a 
teleological explanation for the beginning only of the vortex-motion; 
the farther course of the motions, arid thus every individual occur 
rence, they explained, as did Leucippus, purely mechanically, by the 
pushing and crowding of the particles of matter after these are once 
in motion in the manner determined. They proceeded so con 
sistently in this that they did not exclude from this mechanical 
explanation even the origination and functions of organisms, among 
which, moreover, plants are regarded as being as truly animate as are 
animals. Anaxagoras is reproached for this by Plato and Aristotle, 

CHAP. 1, 5.] Cosmic Processes : Anaxagoras, Leucippus, 53 

and an expression of Empedocles has been handed down, 1 according 
to which he taught that the animals had arisen here and there, with 
out any rule, in odd and grotesque forms, and that in the course of 
time only those fitted for life maintained themselves. The principle 
of the survival of the fittest, which plays so great a part in the 
biology of to-day, i.e. in Darwinism, is here already clearly formu 
lated. 

On the ground of these ideas, an interesting contrast discloses 
itself in the case of the three investigators, as regards their atti 
tude toward cosmogonic theories. For Empedocles and for Leu- 
cippus, namely, the process of world-formation and world-dissolu 
tion is a perpetual one ; for Anaxagoras, on the contrary, it is one 
that takes place once for all. Between the first two there is again 
the difference that Empedocles, like Heraclitus, teaches that the 
world arises and perishes in periodic alternation; while Atomism, 
on the contrary, holds that a countless number of worlds come into 
being and pass away. According to the principles of Empedocles, 
to be more explicit, there are four different states of the elements ; 
their complete intermixture, in which love alone rules, and hate is 
excluded, he calls cr^aipos 2 (sphere) ; when hate penetrates, this 
homogeneous world-sphere becomes separated into the individual 
things, until the elements are completely parted from one another ; 
and out of this separate condition love brings them again together, 
until full union is again attained. Neither in the case of complete 
mixture, nor in that of complete separation, are there individual 
things ; in both cases the Eleatic acosmism makes its appearance. 
A world of individual things in motion exists only where love and 
hate struggle with one another in mingling and separating the 
elements. 

It is otherwise with Leucippus. Some of the atoms that dart 
about irregularly in the universe strike together here and there. 
From the various impulses to motion which the individual particles 
bring with them, where such aggregations occur, there results, 
according to mathematical necessity (avdyK-rj), a whirling movement 
of the whole, which draws into itself neighbouring atoms and atom- 
complexes, and sometimes even whole " worlds," and so gradually 

1 Arist. Phys. II. 8, 198 b 29. Moreover, we find an expression already 
attributed to Anaximander, which teaches a transformation of organisms by 
adaptation to changed conditions of life : Plut. Plac. V. 19, 1 (Dox. D. 430, 15). 
For man, also, the oldest thinkers claimed no other origin than that of growth 
out of the animal world : so Empedocles in Plut. Strom, fr. 2. (Dox. D. 579, 17). 

2 Evidently not without suggestion from the Eleatic world-sphere, which this 
absolute, fully adjusted mingling of all elements, taught by Empedocles, much 
resembles. 

54 The Greeks : Cosmological Period. [PART I. 

extends. Meanwhile such a system in process of revolution is 
differentiating itself, since, by the rotation, the finer, more movable 
atoms are driven to the periphery, the more inert and massy are, 
gathered in the centre ; and so like finds its way to like, not by 
inclination or love, but through their like conformity to the law of 
pressure and impact. So there arise at various times and in differ 
ent places in the boundless universe, various worlds, each of which 
continues in motion within itself, according to mechanical law, until 
it perhaps is shattered in pieces by collision with another world, or 
is drawn into the revolution of a greater. So, the Atomists main 
tained, the sun and moon were at one time worlds by themselves, 
which subsequently fell into the greater vortex of which our earth 
is the centre. How near in principle this whole conception is to 
the natural science of to-day is obvious. 

The teleological point of view taken by Anaxagoras excludes, on 
the contrary, a plurality of worlds in time as well as a plurality of 
worlds in space. The ordering mind, which introduces the pur 
posive motion of the elements, forms just this one world only, which 
is the most perfect. 1 Anaxagoras, therefore, quite in the manner of 
the cosmogonic poetry, describes how the beginning of the world 
was preceded by a chaotic primitive condition, in which the ele 
ments were intermingled without order and without motion. Then 
came the vows, the "Reason-stuff" (Vernunflstoff } , and set it into 
ordered motion. This vortex-motion began at one point, the pole of 
the celestial vault, and extended gradually throughout the entire 
mass of matter, separating and dividing the elements, so that they 
now perform their mighty revolution in a uniformly harmonious 
manner. The teleological motive of the doctrine of Anaxagoras 
is due essentially to his admiration of the order in the stellar 
world, which, after it has performed the rotations started by the 
voCs, moves on without disturbance always in the same track. There 
is no ground for assuming that this teleological cosmology directed 
attention to the adaptation to ends in living beings, or even to the 
connected system of Nature as beneficent to man ; its gaze was fixed 
on the beauty of the starry heavens ; and what is related of the 
views of Anaxagoras on terrestrial things, on organisms, and on 
man, keeps quite within the setting of the mechanical mode of 
explanation in vogue among his contemporaries. What he said, too, 
with regard to the presence of life on other heavenly bodies, might 
just as well have come from the Atomists. 

1 This motive, fully carried out, is found in Plato, Tim. 31, with unmistak 
able reference to the opposition between Anaxagoras and the Atomists. 

CHAP. 1, 5.] Cosmic Processes : Zeno, the Pythagoreans. 55 

Accordingly, although Anaxagoras conceived of the vous as also the principle 
of animation, and thought of the particles of this substance as mingled in 
greater or lesser number with organic bodies, yet the central point in this con 
ception is that of the authorship of the astronomical world-order. The other 
side, the moment or factor of the cause of animate life, is much more energeti 
cally emphasised in the transformation which a younger eclectic natural 
philosopher, Diogenes of Apollonia, undertook to effect in the conception of 
Anaxagoras by connecting it with the hylozoistic principle of Anaximenes. 
He designated air as dpxv [first principle, primitive element], fitted it out, 
however, with the characteristics of the voOj, omniscience and force acting 
according to ends, named this "rational air" also weS^a [spirit], and found 
this formative principle in man and other organisms as well as in the universe. 
A rich physiological knowledge enabled him to carry through in detail this 
thought as applied to the structure and functions of the human body. With 
him teleology became the dominant mode of apprehending also the organic 
world. 

His fragments have been collected by Schorn (Bonn, 1829) and Panzerbieter 
(Leips. 1830). Cf. K. Steinhart in Ersch und Griiber s Encyclopddie. 

6. All these doctrines, however, presuppose the conception of 
motion as one that is intelligible of itself and in need of no further 
explanation. They thought they had explained qualitative change 
when they had pointed out as its true essence motion, whether 
between the parts of a continuously connected matter, or in empty 
space. The opposition, therefore, which the Eleatic School brought 
to bear upon all these doctrines was directed first of all against this? 
conception of motion, and Zeno showed that this could by no means 
be taken so simply, but was rather full of contradictions which inca^ 
pacitated it for serving as principle of explanation. 

Among Zeno s famous proofs of the impossibility of motion, 1 the 
weakest is that which proceeds from the relativity of the amount of 
motion, by showing that the movement of a wagon is variously esti 
mated if it is observed either from wagons also in motion but in 
different directions and at varying rates of speed, or again from two 
wagons one of which is moving and one standing still. The three 
other proofs, on the contrary, which made use of the analysis into 
discrete parts, infinitely many and infinitely small, of the space 
passed through by motion, and the time occupied by it, were 
stronger, and for a long time were not overcome. The first proof 
was with reference to the impossibility of passing through a fixed 
space. This was regarded as proved by the infinite divisibility of 
the line, since the infinite number of points which must be attained 
before reaching the goal permitted no beginning of motion. The 
same thought appears, somewhat varied, in the second argument, 
which seeks to prove the impossibility of passing through a space 
which /w.s movable boundaries. The argument (known as that of 

1 Arist. Phys. VI. 9, 239 b. 9. Cf . Ed. Wellmann, Zenon s Beweise gegen die 
Bewegung und ifire Widerlegungen (^--nkfurt a. O. 1870). 

56 The Greeks : Cosmological Period. [PART I. 

Achilles and the tortoise) is, that since the pursuer in every inter 
val or subdivision of time must first reach the point from which the 
pursued simultaneously starts, it follows that the latter will always 
be in advance, though by an interval which becomes constantly 
smaller and approaches a minimum. The third argument has refer 
ence to the infinitely small extent of the motion performed in any 
instant. According to this argument, called "the resting arrow" the 
moved body is in every instant in some one point of its track ; its 
movement in this instant is then equal to zero ; but from ever so 
many zeros no real magnitude arises. 

Together with the above-mentioned difficulties (dire/gun) with 
regard to space and plurality, these argumentations of Zeno set 
forth an extremely skilfully projected system of refuting the 
mechanical theories, especially Atomism, a refutation which was 
intended to serve at the same time as indirect proof of the correct 
ness of the Eleatic conception of Being. 

7. The number-theory of the Pythagoreans, too, was determined by 
Eleatic conceptions in so far as its procedure was, in the main, to 
demonstrate mathematical forms to be the fundamental relations 
of reality. When, however, they termed the actual world of reality 
an imitation of the mathematical forms, they thereby ascribed a sort 
of reality, even though of a derivative and secondary character, to 
individual things, and to what takes place among them. They were 
also the less inclined to withdraw from answering cosmological and 
physical questions as they were able to bring to philosophy the 
brilliant results of their astronomical investigation. They had come 
to a knowledge of the spherical form of the earth and of the heav 
enly bodies ; they were aware also that the change of day and night 
depends upon a movement of the earth itself. At first, indeed, they 
thought of this movement as a circuit performed about a central fire 
to which the earth presented always the same side, a side unknown 
to us. 1 On the other hand, they assumed that about this same cen 
tral fire there moved in concentric circles, outside the earth s track, 
successively the moon, the sun, the planets, and finally the heaven 
containing the fixed stars. They brought into this system, however, 
in a way, the metaphysical dualism which they had maintained be 
tween the perfect and the imperfect, inasmuch as they regarded the 

1 Already in Plato s time the hypothesis of the central fire was given up by 
the younger Pythagoreans, Ecphantus, Hicetus of Syracuse (and with it that 
of the " counter-earth," which had hitherto been assumed as placed between the 
central fire and the earth, invented merely to fill out the number ten), and 
instead the earth was located in the centre of the universe and provided with a 
rotation on its axis. With this latter assumption that of a resting position of 
the heaven of the fixed stars was connected. 

CHAP. 1, 6.] Conceptions of Cognition. 57 

heaven of the stars, on account of the sublime uniformity of its 
motions, as the realm of perfection ; the world " beneath the moon," 
on the contrary, on account of the unrest of its changing formations 
and motions, they regarded as that of imperfection. 

This way of looking at things runs parallel to that of Anaxagoras, 
and leads, though in another way, to the interweaving and complica 
tion of theory with considerations of worth [ethical or aesthetic 
values]. It was in connection with astronomical insight that the 
thought of an order of Nature in conformity to law dawned as clear 
knowledge upon the Grecian mind. Anaxagoras reasons from this 
to an ordering principle. Pythagoreanism finds in the heavens the 
divine rest of unchangeableness (Sichgleichbleibens) which it misses 
upon the earth. Here we have a meeting of the ancient religious 
ideas and the very different result yielded thus far by the scientific 
work of the Greeks. This latter, seeking a Permanent in the muta 
tion of occurrence, found such a permanence only in the great, simple 
relations, in the revolution of the stars, which abides ever the same. 
In the terrestrial world, with its whole change of manifold, con 
stantly intersecting motions, this uniformity remained still hidden 
from Greek science : she regarded this terrestrial world rather as a 
domain of the imperfect, the lower, which wants the sure order of 
that other world. In a certain sense this may be looked upon as 
the ultimate result of the first period, a result which had a determin 
ing influence for after time. 

What the attitude of the Pythagoreans was to the question concerning a peri 
odic change of origination and annihilation of the world is uncertain. A plurality 
of co-existing worlds is excluded in their system. In their theory of world-for 
mation and in their particular physical doctrines they concede so prominent a 
place to fire that they come very near to Heraclitus. Aristotle even places one 
of the contemporaries of Philolaus, Hippasus of Metapontum, in immediate con 
nection with Heraclitus {Met. I. 3). 

Their assumption of aether as a fifth element out of which the spherical shells 
of the heavens were formed, in addition to the four elements of Empedocles, is 
doubtless connected with the separation which they made between heaven and 
earth. It is not less difficult to decide whether they derived the elements from 
a common ground, and if so, how: according to many passages it would seem as 
if they had spoken of a progressive "attraction," i.e. in this case (cf. above, p. 
46), mathematical shaping out or forming of empty space by the ?c (one), the 
original number, which is exalted above limitation and the unlimited. Yet it 
seems, too, that in regard to these questions various views were held within the 
school side by side. 

6. The Conceptions of Cognition. 

M. Schneidewin, Ueber die Ke imp erkenntnisstheoretischer und ethischer Phi- 
losopheme bei den vorsokratischen Denkern, I hilos. Monatshefte, II. (1869), pp. 
257, 345, 429. 

H. Miinz, Die Keime der Erkenntnisstheorie in der vorsophistischen Pcriode 
der griechischen Philosophic. Vienna, 1880. 

58 The Greeks : Cosmological Period. [PART.!. 

The question, what things really are, or what is the intrinsic 
nature of things, which is already contained in the Milesian con 
ception of the apxn, presupposes that the current, original and naive 
mode of thinking of the world has been shaken, although this pre 
supposition has not come to clear recognition in consciousness. The 
question proves that reflective thought is no longer satisfied with 
the ideas which it finds current, and that it seeks truth behind or 
above them. Those ideas are given, however, through sense-per 
ception and through the involuntary elaboration of this in thought, 
an elaboration that has been transmitted from generation to 
generation, until it has became consolidated and fixed and embodied 
in language, and so forms a part of the thinker s data. When the 
individual with his reflection transcends these ideas so given and 
it is in this that philosophical activity ultimately consists he does 
it on the ground of logical needs which assert themselves as he re 
flects on the given. His philosophising, then, even though he takes 
no account of this fact, grows out of discrepancies between his expe 
rience and his thought out of the inadequacy exhibited by what 
is presented to his perception or imagination, when set over against 
the demands and presuppositions of his understanding. However 
unconscious of this its inner ground naive philosophising may be 
at the outset, attention cannot fail to be turned in time to the diver 
sity in the sources of the conflicting ideas within. 

1. The first observations, therefore, which the Grecian philosophers 
made on human knowledge concern this contrast between experience 
and reflection. The farther the explanatory theories of science 
became separated from the way of looking at things which belongs 
to daily life, the clearer it became to their authors that those 
theories sprang from another source than that of the customary 
opinions. To be sure they have not as yet much to say on this 
point. They set opinion (So a) over against truth, and this often, 
means only that their own doctrines are true and the opinions of 
others false. So much only is certain to them, that they owe their 
own views to reflection, while the mass of mankind concerning 
whose intellectual activity it is just the older philosophers, 
Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, who express themselves in 
an extremely depreciatory manner persist in the illusion of the 
senses. Only through thinking (cf&gt;poveiv, votiv, Aoyos), then, is the 
truth found ; the senses, if alone, give fraud and a lie. 1 So strong 
has reflection become in itself that it not only proceeds to con 
sequences which to the common thinking have become absolutely 

i Heracl. Frag. (Sclmst.) 11, 123; Pannen. Fray. (Karsten) 54 ff. 

CHAP. 1, 6.] Conceptions of Cognition: fferaclitus, Parmenides. 59 

paradoxical, but also maintains expressly that it is itself the sole 
source of truth as opposed to opinions. 

This, to be sure, works oddly when we notice that completely 
opposite illustrations of this same assertion are given by Heradi- 
tus and Parmenides in close succession. The former finds the 
deceit caused by the senses, and the error of the multitude, to consist 
in the illusory appearance of the Being of permanent things, which 
is presented to men by sense-perception ; the Eleatic, on the contrary, 
is zealous against the senses, because they would fain persuade us 
that there are in truth motion and change, becoming and arising, 
plurality and variety. Precisely this double form in which this 
same claim is put forward shows that it is not the result of an 
investigation, but the expression of a demand made on other 
grounds. 

Moreover, this proposition fits very differently into the general 
theories of the two great metaphysicians. The flux of all things, 
with its restless change of individual phenomena, as taught by 
Heraclitus, makes it easy to comprehend also the possibility of the 
emergence of false ideas, and the seeming of permanence and Being 
had besides a special explanation in the counter-course or opposi 
tion (IvavTLOTpoTTLa) of the two " ways," for this causes the illusion of 
permanence or Being to arise where there is just as much change in 
one direction as in the other [i.e. from primitive fire into things and 
vice versa] . On the contrary, it is quite impossible to see where the 
seat of illusion and error was to be sought in the one world-sphere 
of Parmenides, everywhere the same, which was held to be at the 
same time the one, true world-thought. The search could be only 
among individual things and their changing activities, which were 
themselves declared to be illusion, non-existent. Nevertheless 
there is no support to be found in the literature preserved, for 
supposing that this so simple a thought 1 which would have over 
thrown the entire Eleatic system, ever occurred to the investigators 
of that time. In any case, the Eleatics contented themselves with 
the assertion that all particular existence and all change were decep 
tion and illusion of the senses. 

The same naive denial of that which they could not explain seems to 
have been employed also by the successors of the Eleatics in the 
matter of the qualitative attributes of individual things. Emped- 
ocles at least maintained that all things were mixtures of the ele 
ments. The task that logically grew out of this was to show how 
the other qualities arise from the mixture of the properties of the 

1 First carried out in Plato, Sophist, 237 A. 

60 The Greeks : Cosrnological Period. [PART I. 

elements. But this he did not perform; so far as our knowledge 
extends, he did not at all set himself this task; he probably re 
garded these particular qualities as not being (objectively), and as 
a deception of the senses, just as all qualities whatever were such 
in the view of Parmenides. And so the oldest view of the Ato- 
mists, as supported by Leucippus, may well have gone just to this 
point, maintaining that in individual things only the form, arrange 
ment, situation, and motion of the constituent atoms were real, and 
that the other properties were a deceitful product of the senses, 
which here, too, found no further explanation. 1 

These difficulties were perhaps jointly influential in the mind of 
Anaxagoras when he regarded all qualities as original, and not as 
having become what they are, and accordingly postulated countless 
elements. But for him arose the opposite difficulty of showing how 
it could come about, if all was regarded as contained in all, every 
quality in every thing, that only some of these qualities seemed to 
be present in individual things. He explained this in part from the 
consideration that many of the constituent parts are imperceptible 
because of their minuteness ; hence it is only by thought that we 
can learn the true qualities of things. 2 Besides this, however, he 
seems to have followed up the thought, found already in Anaximan- 
der s idea of the airupov, that a complete mingling of definite quali 
ties yields something indefinite. So, at least, he described the 
primitive mixture of all substances which preceded the formation 
of the world as completely devoid of quality, 3 and a similar thought 
seems to have permitted him to regard the four elements of Emped- 
ocles not as primitive substances, but rather as already mixtures. 4 

The rationalism common to the pre-Sophistic thinkers assumes, 
among the Pythagoreans, the particular form of affirming that 
knowledge consists in mathematical thought. This, though in itself 
a narrowing, is yet, on the other hand, a great step in advance, in 
asmuch as there is here given for the first time a positive definition 
of "thought" as contrasted with "perception." Only through 
number, taught Philolaus, 5 is the essential nature of things to be 
known ; that is, it is when the definite mathematical relations lying 
at their basis are recognised that things are properly conceived or 

1 It is extremely improbable that the solution of the problem through the 
suojectivity of the sense-qualities, which is found in Democritus, was presented 
already by Leucippus, and therefore before Protagoras, who is universally 
regarded as the founder of this theory. 

2 Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. VII. 90 f. 

3 Frag. (Schorn) 4. From this passage the true light may, perhaps, be thrown 
upon the sense in which Anaximander designates the Awcipov as bbpiffTov. 

4 Arist. De Gen. et Corr. I. 1, 314 a 24. 
* Fray. (Mull.) 13. 

CHAP. 1, 6.] Conceptions of Cognition : Philolaus, Zeno. 61 

understood. This had been the experience of the Pythagoreans in 
music and in astronomy, and this was the object of their desire and 
effort in all other fields. When, however, they ultimately came to 
the result that this requirement could be completely met only in 
the knowledge of the perfect world of the stars, they concluded 
from this that science (&lt;ro&lt;ia) relates only to the realm of order and 
perfection, that is, to heaven, and that in the realm of the imper 
fect, of change not subject to order, i.e. on earth, only practical 
ability (dpeny) is of avail. 1 

Another positive characteristic of the "thinking" which the 
earlier investigators had set over against "perceiving," without 
closer specification, appears obscurely in the reasonings of Zeno, 
viz. conformity to logical laws. At the basis of all his attacks 
against plurality and motion lie the principle of contradiction and 
the presupposition that that can not be actual of which the same 
thing must be affirmed and also denied. This principle and presup 
position were applied with clearness and certainty, though not ab 
stractly expressed. The Eleatic theory of the world, so highly 
paradoxical, forced its supporters to enter into polemic more than 
did others, and the accounts as to Zeno s treatise, which, as it seems, 
was also logically well arranged and divided, offer a notable evi 
dence of the developed technique of refutation to which the school 
attained in consequence. To be sure, this formal training which 
prevailed in Eleatic circles does not seem to have led as yet to the 
abstract statement of logical laws. 

2. The setting over against each other of " thinking " and " per 
ceiving" arose, then, from an estimation of their relative epistemo- 
logical value (erkenntnisstheoretischen Werthbestimmung) \_i.e. from 
the postulate that one of these two forms of mental activity is 
worth more epistemologically for attaining truth]. In decided 
contradiction with this, however, stand the psychological principles 
with which these same investigators sought to apprehend the origin 
and process of knowing. For although their thinking was directed 
first and chiefly toward the outer world, man s mental activity came 
under their attention in so far as they were obliged to see in this 
activity one of the formations, or transformations, or products of 
motion, of the universe. The mind or soul and its action are then 
at this time considered scientifically only in connection with the entire 
course of the universe, whose product they are as truly as are all 
other things ; and since among the men of this period the general 
principles of explanation are everywhere as yet conceived corpore- 

1 Stob. Ed. I. 488. 

62 The Greeks : Cosmological Period. [PART I. 

ally it follows that we meet also a thorough-going materialistic 
psychology. 1 

Now mind or soul is in the first place moving force. Thales 
ascribed such a soul to magnets, and declared that the whole world 
was full of souls. The essential nature of individual souls was 
therefore sought at first in that which had been recognised as the 
moving principle in the whole. Anaximenes found it in air, 
Heraclitus and likewise Parmenides (in his hypothetical physics) 
in fire, Leucippus in the fiery atoms, 2 and Anaxagoras in the world- 
moving, rational substance, the vovs. Where, as in the system of 
Empedocles, a corporeal moving principle was lacking, the mixed 
substance which streams through the living body, the blood, was 
regarded as soul. Diogenes of Apollonia found the essence of the 
soul in the air mixed with the blood. 3 With the Pythagoreans, too, 
the individual soul could not be considered as the same with the ev 
(One) which they conceived as moving principle of the world, nor 
regarded as a part of it ; instead, they taught that the soul was a 
number, and made this very vague statement more definite by say 
ing that it was a harmony, an expression which we can only 
interpret 4 as meaning a harmony of the body ; that is, the living, 
harmonious activity of its parts. 

If now to this moving force, which leaves the body in death, were 
ascribed at the same time those properties which we to-day designate 
as " psychical," we find a clear characterisation of the specifically 
theoretical interest by which this oldest science was filled, in the 
fact that among these attributes it is that of ideation, of " knowing," 
which is almost exclusively the object of attention. 5 Of feelings 
and volitions there is scarcely incidental mention. 6 But as the 

1 Besides those characterisations of the soul, which resulted from their gen 
eral scientific theory, we find in the tradition in case of several of these men 
(Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, and the Pythagoreans) still other doc 
trines which are not only not connected with the former, but are even in con 
tradiction to them. A conception of the body as prison of the soul (&lt;rwfj.a = 
o-Tjyuo), personal immortality, recompense after death, transmigration of souls, 
all these are ideas which the philosophers took from their relations to the 
mysteries and retained in their priestly teaching, however little they accorded 
with their scientific teachings. Such expressions are not treated above. 

2 In like manner, some of the Pythagoreans declared the motes which the 
sunlight discloses in the air to be souls. 

8 Since, with reference to this, he recognised the distinction between venous and 
arterial blood, he meant by his irvev^a what the chemistry of to-day calls oxygen. 

4 Ace. to Plato, Pheedo, 85 ff., where the view is rejected as materialistic. 

6 The voOs of Anaxagoras is only knowing ; air with Diogenes of Apollonia is 
a great, powerful, eternal, intelligent body. Being with Parmenides is at the 
same time voeiv, etc. Only 0t\6ri;s and vet/coy with Empedocles are mythically 
hypostasised impulses, and these, too, have nothing to do with his psychological 
views. 

6 With this is connected the fact that .in general we cannot once speak of 

CHAP. 1, 6.] Conceptions of Cognition: Heraclitus, Anaxagoras. G3 

individual soul in so far as it is moving force was held to be a part 
of the force which moves the entire universe, so also the "knowing" 
of the individual could be conceived only as a part of the knowing 
activity of the world. 1 This is clearest in the systems of Heraclitus 
and Anaxagoras ; each individual has so much knowledge as there 
is contained in him of the general World-reason, fire with 
Heraclitus, 2 the vovs with Anaxagoras. In the case of Leucippus 
and of Diogenes of Apollonia the ideas are similar. 

This physical conception, which with Anaxagoras especially is 
purely quantitative, was given a turn by Heraclitus, in which the 
epistemological postulate again forces its way to the front, and 
asserts itself in the interest of a deeper insight and a profounder 
view. The World-reason in which the individual participates in his 
knowledge is everywhere the same ; the Aoyos of Heraclitus 3 and 
the vous of Anaxagoras, as homogenous Keason, are distributed 
through the whole universe as moving force. Knowing, then, is 
that which is common to all. It is therefore the law and order to 
which every one has to unite himself. In dreams, in personal opin 
ion, each one has his own world ; knowing is common (wo v) to 
all. By means of this characteristic, viz. that of universally valid 
law, the conception of knowing acquires a normative significance, 4 
and subjection to the common, to the law, appears as a duty 
in the intellectual realm as well as in the political, ethical, and 
religious. 5 

attempts at ethical investigation in this period. For single moralising reflections 
or admonitions cannot be regarded as beginnings of ethics. On the only excep 
tion cf. below, note 5. 

1 The expression " World-soul " was first used by Plato, or at the earliest by 
Philolaus (in the fragment which has certainly been much questioned just for 
this reason, Mull. 21). The idea is certainly present in Anaximenes, Heraclitus, 
Anaxagoras, and perhaps also among the Pythagoreans. 

2 Hence the paradoxical expression, the dryest soul is the wisest, and the 
warning to guard the soul from the wet (intoxication). 

3 Cf., for this and the following, M. Heinze, Die Lehre vom Logos in der 
griechischen Philosophic (Oldenburg, 1872). 

4 Fray. (Schust.) 123. 

5 This is the only conception in the development of pre-Sophistic thought, in 
the case of which we can speak of an attempt to propound a scientific principle 
of ethics. If Heraclitus had in mind a universal expression for all moral duties 
in speaking of this subordination to law, or at least hit upon such, he attached 
it at once to the fundamental thoughts of his metaphysics, which declared this 
law to be the abiding essence of the world. Yet attention has above ( 4) been 
called to the fact that in the conception of the world-order which hovered before 
him, he did not as yet separate consciously the different motives (especially the 
physical from the ethical), and so ethical investigation does not as yet work 
itself clear from the physical to an independent position. The same is true of 
the Pythagoreans, who expressed the conception of order by the term " harmony " 
(which also might be adopted from Heraclitus), and therefore designated virtue 
as "harmony." To be sure, they used the term "harmony" for the soul, for 
health, and for many other things. 

64 The Greeks : Cosmological Period. [PART I. 

3. If now we ask how under these assumptions the fact was 
explained that "knowledge" comes into the individual man, i.e. into 
his body, we find that the only answer offered by Heraclitus and 
the whole company of his successors is, " through the door of the 
senses." When a man is awake, the World-reason streams into his 
body through the opened senses (sight and hearing are of course 
chiefly noticed 1 ), and, therefore, he knows. This comes about, to 
be sure, only if there is besides, in the man himself, so much reason 
or soul that the motion coining from without is met by an inner 
motion ; 2 but upon this interaction, effected through the senses* 
between the outer and the inner reason knowledge rests. 

A psychological distinction, then, between perceiving and think 
ing, which, as regards their respective epistemological values, are so 
abruptly opposed, Heraclitus does not know how to state. Par- 
menides, 3 however, was just as little in a position to make such a 
distinction. 4 Rather, he expressed more sharply still the dependence 
upon bodily relations in which the thinking of the individual man is 
involved, when he said that every one so thought as the conditions 
constituted by the mixture of substances in the members of the body 
permitted, and when he found in this a confirmation of his general 
thought of the identity of corporeality and thinking in general.* 
Still more express is the testimony 6 that Empedocles declared 
thinking and perceiving to be the same, that he thought change in 
thinking as dependent upon change of the body, and that he 
regarded the constitution of the blood as of decisive importance 
for the intellectual capacity of the man. 

These two last-named thinkers did not hesitate, moreover, to make 
their conception more plain to the imagination by means of physio 
logical hypotheses. Parmenides taught in his hypothetical physics 

1 Also smell (Empedocles) and taste (Anaxagoras). Only the Atomists, and 
in particular Democritus, seem to have given value to the sense of touch. 

2 Arist. De An. I. 2, 405 a 27. 

3 Theophr. De Sens. 3 f. 

4 So, too, it is reported (Theophr. De Sens. 25) of Alcmseon, the Pythago- 
reanising physician, that he declared thought or consciousness (Sri ^"os (vt4^rt) 
to be the characteristic which distinguishes man from the other animals. But 
a more precise determination is lacking here also unless, in accordance with the 
expression, we think of something similar to the Aristotelian noivbv ai&lt;T0r)T-ripiov. 
With this would agree the circumstance that the first attempts to localise the 
particular psychical activities in particular parts of the body seem to have been 
made in the circles of the Pythagoreans and of the physicians who stood in near 
relations to them ; localising, e.g., thought in the brain, perception in the indi 
vidual organs and in the heart, and the emotions also in the latter organ. From 
them Diogenes of Apollonia, and after him Democritus, seem to have taken 
these beginnings of a physiological psychology. 

5 Frag. (Karst.) vv. 146-149. 

e Arist. De An. I. 2, 404 b 7 ; III. 3, 427 a 21 ; Met. III. 5, 1009 b 17 ; 
Theophr. De Sens. 10 f. 

CHAP. 1, 6.] Conceptions of Cognition : Parmenides, Empedocles. 65 

that like is always perceived by like, warmth without by the warmth 
in man, the cold without by the cold even in the dead body. Emped 
ocles, with the aid of his theory of effluxes and pores, carried out 
the thought that every element in our body perceives the same ele 
ment in the outer world, so as to teach that each organ is accessible 
to the impress of those substances only whose effluxes fit into its 
pores ; i.e. he derived the specific energy of the sense organs from 
relations of similarity between their outer form and their objects, 
and carried this out for sight, hearing, and smell, with observations 
which in part are very acute. 1 

This view, that like is apprehended by like, was opposed by 
Anaxagoras, on what ground it is not certain. 2 He taught that 
perception is only of opposite by opposite, warmth without by the 
cold in man, etc. 3 At all events, his doctrine also is a proof that 
these metaphysical rationalists maintained all of them in their 
psychology a crass sensationalism. 

1 Theophr. De Sens. 7. 

2 Perhaps we have here a remembrance of Heraclitus, who also explained 
perception from the tvavTiorpoTrla, motion against motion, and with whom 
opposition was the principle of all motion. 

3 Theophr. De Sens. 27 ff. It is interesting that Anaxagoras inferred from 
this that every perception is joined with pain (XI/ITT/). 

CHAPTER II. 

THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERIOD. 

G. Grote, History of Greece, VIII. (London, 1850), pp. 474-544. 

C. F. Hermann, Geschichte und System der platonischen Philosophic, I. (Heidel 
berg, 1839), pp. 179-231. 

Blass, Die attische Beredsamkeit von Gorgias bis zu Lysias. Leips. 1868. 

H. Kochly, Sokrates und seinVolk, 1855, in " Akad. Vortragen und Ileden," I. 
(Zurich, 1859), pp. 219 ff. 

H. Siebeck, Ueber Sokrates Verhaltniss zur Sophistik, in " Untersuchungen 
zur Philosophie der Griechen," 1873, 2 Aufl. (Freiburg i. B. 1888). 

W. Windelband, Sokrates in "Prseludien" (Freiburg i. B. 1884), pp. 64 ff. 

[H. Jackson, Art. Sophists, in Erie. Brit.} 

THE farther development of Greek science was determined by the 
circumstance that in the powerful, universal upward movement of 
the mental and spiritual life which the nation achieved after the 
victorious result of the Persian wars, science was torn away from 
the restraints of close schools in which it had been quietly pursued, 
and brought out upon the stage of publicity, where all was in vehe 
ment agitation. 

The circles in which scientific research was fostered had widened 
from generation to generation, and the doctrines which at first had 
been presented in smaller societies and spread abroad in writings 
that were hard to understand, had begun to filter through into the 
general consciousness. The poets, as Euripides and Epicharmus, 
began already to translate into their language scientific conceptions 
and views ; the knowledge gained by investigation of Nature had 
already been made practically effective, as by Hippodamus in his 
architecture. Even medicine, which had formerly been only an art 
practised according to traditions, became so permeated with the 
general conceptions of natural philosophy, and with the special doc 
trines, information, and hypotheses of physiological research which 
in the course of time had occupied an ever-broader space in the 
systems of science, that it became encumbered with an excessive 

CHAP. 2.] The Anthropological Period. 67 

growth of etiological theories, 1 and first found in Hippocrates the 
reformer who reduced this tendency to its proper measure and gave 
back to the physician s art its old character in contrast to scientific 
doctrine. 2 

Moreover, the Greek nation, matured by the stern experience 
which had been its lot within and without, had entered upon the 
age of manhood. It had lost its naive faith in old tradition, and 
had learned the value of knowledge and ability for practical life. 
Of science, which up to this time had followed in quiet the pure 
impulse of investigation the noble curiosity which seeks knowledge 
for its own sake the state now demanded light on the questions 
which disturbed it, counsel and help in the doubt into which the 
luxuriance of its own development in culture had plunged it. In 
the feverish emulation of intellectual forces which this greatest 
period in the world s history brought with it, the thought everywhere 
gained recognition that in every walk in life the man of knowledge 
is the most capable, the most useful, and the most successful. In 
every department of practical activity, the fruitful innovation of 
independent reflection, of individual judgment, took the place of the 
old life controlled by custom. The mass of the people was seized with 
the burning desire to make the results of science its own. v lt was espe 
cially true, however, that at this time family tradition, habituation, 
personal excellence of character and address were no longer suffi 
cient, as formerly, for the man who wished to play a political part. 
The variety of transactions and the attendant difficulties, as well as 
the intellectual status of those with whom and upon whom he would 
work, made a theoretical schooling for the political career indispen 
sable. Nowhere was this movement so powerful as in Athens, then 
the capital of Greece, and here also these desires found their fullest 
satisfaction. 

For the supply followed the demand. The men of science, the 
Sophists (&lt;ro&lt;icrrai), stepped forth out of the schools into public life, 
and taught the people what they themselves had learned or discov 
ered. They did this, indeed, partly out of the noble impulse to 
teach their fellow-citizens, 3 but it was none the less true that this 
teaching became their business. From all parts of Greece men of 
the different schools flocked toward Athens to expound their doc- 

1 This innovation in medicine began among the physicians who stood in near 
relation to .Pythagoreanism, especially with Alcmaeon. Asa literary instance 
of it, the writing which goes falsely under the name of Hippocrates, vtpl diairris, 
serves. Cf. II. Siebeck, Gesch. d. Psych. I. 1, 94 ff. 

2 Cf. principally his writings Trepi apx*^* IT)TPIKTJS and vep 

3 Cf. Protagoras in Plato, Prot. 316 d. 

68 The Philosophy of the Greeks. [PART I. 

trines, and from so expounding them in the capital as well as in 
the smaller cities, to gain honour and wealth. 

In this way it happened that in a short time not only the social 
position of science, but its own inner nature, its tendency and the 
questions for its solution, were fundamentally changed. It became 
j a social power, a determining factor in political life, as in the case 
of Pericles ; but just by this means it came into a state of dependence 
upon the demands of practical, and in particular, of political life. 

These demands showed themselves principally in the facts that 
the democratic polity demanded of politicians first of all the capac 
ity for public speaking, and that in consequence the instruction 
of the Sophists was especially sought as a preparation for public 
life, and converged more and more upon this object. Men of science 
became teachers of eloquence. 

As such, however, they lost sight of the goal of nature-knowledge, 
the vision of which had formerly hovered before the eyes of science. 
At the most they presented transmitted doctrines in the most grace 
ful and pleasing form possible. But their own investigations, if 
they were not confined to a formal routine, were necessarily directed 
toward man s thinking and ivilling, the activities which public 
speaking was designed to determine and control, toward the 
manner in which ideas and volitions arise, and the way in which 
they contend with one another and maintain their mutual rights. 
In this way Greek science took an essentially anthropological or - 
subjective direction, studying the inner activities of man, his 
ideation and volition, and at the same time lost its purely theoretical 
character and acquired a preponderantly practical significance. 1 J &lt; - 

But while the activity of the Sophists found itself brought face 
to face with the manifold character of human thought and will, 
while the teachers of eloquence were presenting the art of persua 
sion and pursuing the path upon which every opinion could be 
helped to victory, every purpose to its achievement, the question 
rose before them whether above and beyond these individual opin 
ions and purposes which each one feels within himself as a necessity 
and can defend against others, there is anything whatever that 
is right and true in itself. The question whether there is anything * 
universally valid, is the problem of the anthropological period of 
Greek philosophy, or of the Greek Enlightenment. 

For it is likewise the problem of the time, of a time in which 
religious faith and the old morality were wavering, a time when the 

1 Cicero s well-known expression (Tusc. V. 4, 10) with regard to Socrates 
holds good for the entire philosophy of this period. 

CHAI&gt;. 2.] The Anthropological Period. 69 

respect which authority had commanded sank more and more, and 
all tended towards an anarchy of individuals who had become self- 
governing. Very soon this internal disintegration of the Greek 
spirit became clearly evident in the disorders of the Peloponnesian 
war, and with the fall of Athenian supremacy the flower of Grecian 
culture withered. 

The dangers of this condition were at first decidedly increased by 
philosophy. For while the Sophists were perfecting the scientific 
development of the formal art of presentation, verification, and refu 
tation which they had to teach, they indeed created with this rheto 
ric, on the one hand, the beginnings of an independent psychology, 
and raised this branch of investigation from the inferior position 
which it had taken in the cosmological systems to the importance of 
a fundamental science, and developed, on the other hand, the prelim 
inaries for a systematic consideration of the logical and ethical norms. 
But as they considered what they practised and taught, viz. the 
skill to carry through any proposition whatever, 1 the relativity of 
human ideas and purposes presented itself to their consciousness so 
clearly and with such overwhelming force that they disowned in 
quiry as to the existence of a universally valid truth in the theoreti 
cal, as well as in the practical sphere, and so fell into a scepticism 
which at first was a genuine scientific theory, but soon became a 
frivolous play. With their self-complacent, pettifogging advocacy, 
the Sophists made themselves the mouth-piece of all the unbridled 
tendencies which were undermining the order of public life. 

The intellectual head of the Sophists was Protagoras; at least, he 
was the only one who was the author of any conceptions philosophi 
cally fruitful and significant. Contrasted with him, Gorgias, who is 
usually placed at his side, appears only as a rhetorician who occa 
sionally attempted the domain of philosophy and surpassed the 
artifices of the Eleatic dialectic. Hippias and Prodicus are only to 
be mentioned, the one as the type of a popularising polyhistor, and 
the other as an example of superficial moralising. 

To the disordered activity and lack of conviction of the younger 
Sophists, Socrates opposed faith in reason and a conviction of the 
existence of a universally valid truth. This conviction was with 
him of an essentially practical sort; it was his moral disposition, but 
it led him to an investigation of knowledge, which he anew set over 
against opinions, and whose essence he found in conceptional thought. 

Socrates and the Sophists stand, accordingly, on the ground of 

1 Cf. the well-known rbv TJTTW \6yov Kpflrria iroitiv, Aristoph. Nnl&gt; 112 ff., 
893 ff. ; Arist. Ehet. II. 24, 1402 a 23. 

70 The Philosophy of the Greeks. [PART I. 

the same common consciousness of the time, and discuss the same 
problems ; but where the Sophists with their skill and learning re 
main caught iu the confusion of the opinions of the day and end 
with a negative result, there the plain, sound sense, and the pure 
and noble personality of Socrates find again the ideals of morality 
and science. 

The strong impression which the teaching of Socrates made forced 
the Sophistic activity into new lines. It followed him in the at 
tempt to gain, through scientific insight, sure principles for the 
ethical conduct of life. While the old schools had for the most part 
become disintegrated, and had diverted their activity to the teaching 
of rhetoric, men who had enjoyed intercourse with the Athenian 
sage now founded new schools, in whose scientific work Socratic 
and Sophistic principles were often strangely intermingled, while 
the exclusively anthropological direction of their investigation 
remained the same. 

Among these schools, called for the most part " Socratic," though 
not quite accurately, the Megarian, founded by Euclid, fell most 
deeply into the unfruitful subtleties of the later Sophists. Con 
nected with this is the Elean-Eretrian School, the most unimportant. 
The fundamental contrast, however, in the conception of life which 
prevailed in the Greek life of that day, found its scientific expression 
in the teachings of those two schools whose opposition permeates all 
ancient literature from that time on: namely, the Cynic and the 
Cyrenaic, the precursors of the Stoic and Epicurean. The first of 
these schools numbers among its adherents, besides its founder 
Antisthenes, the popular figure of Diogenes. In the latter, which is 
also called the Hedonistic School, the founder, Aristippus, was suc 
ceeded by a grandson of the same name, and later by Tlieodorus, 
Anniceris, ffegesias, and Euemerus. 

The wandering teachers known as the Sophists came in part from the earlier 
scholastic societies. In the second half of the fifth century these had for the 
most part disappeared, and had given place to a freer announcement of opinions 
attained, which was not unfavourable to special research, particularly physiologi 
cal research, as in the case of Hippo, Cleidemus, and Diogenes of Apollonia, 
but which was attended by a crippling of general speculation. Only the school 
of Abdera and the Pythagorean School survived this time of dissolution. A 
society of Heracliteans which maintained itself in Ephesus appears soon to have 
fallen away into the pursuits of the Sophists, as in the case of Cratylus. 1 

From the Atomistic School came Protagoras of Abdera (about 480-410). lie 
was one of the first, and rightly the most renowned, of these wandering teachers. 
Active at various times in Athens, he is said to have been convicted of impiety 
in that city, to have fied because of this, and to have met his death in flight. Of 
his numerous treatises, grammatical, logical, ethical, political, and religious in 
their character, very little has been preserved. 

In Plato (The&lt;zt. 181 A) they are called ol ftovw. cf. Arist. Met. IV. 5, 

LIBRARY] 

CHAP. 2.] The Anthropological Period. 71 

Gorgias of Leontini (483-375) was in Athens in 427 as an envoy from his 
native city, and there gained great literary influence. In old age he lived in 
Larissa in Thessaly. He came from the Sicilian school of orators, with which 
Empedocles also had been connected. 1 

Concerning Hippias of Elis, with the exception of some opinions (among 
which are those criticised in the Platonic dialogue Hippias Major), it is known 
only that he made great parade of his "much knowledge." Of Prodicus of 
lulls, a town on the island of Ceos, the familiar allegory "Hercules at the Cross 
roads" is preserved by Xenophon, Mmwr. 11. 1,21. The remaining Sophists, 
known for the most part through Plato, are without intrinsic importance. We 
know only that this or that characteristic affirmation is put in the mouth of one 
or another. 

In forming a conception of the Sophistic doctrine we have to contend with the 
difficulty that we are made acquainted with them almost exclusively through 
their victorious opponents, Plato and Aristotle. The first has given in the Pro- 
tayoras a graceful, lively delineation of a Sophist congress, redolent with fine 
irony, in the Goryias a more earnest, in the Theatetus a sharper criticism, and 
in the Cratylus and Euthydemus supercilious satire of the Sophists methods of 
teaching. In the dialogue the Sophist, to which 1 lato s name is attached, an 
extremely malicious definition of the theories of the Sophists is attfmpted, and 
Aristotle reaches the sime result in the book on the fallacies of the Sophists 
(Ch. I. 165 a 21). 

The history of philosophy for a long time repeated the depreciatory judg 
ment of opponents of the Sophists, and allowed the word 0-o0m?s (which 
meant only a "learned man," or, if you will, a " professor") to bear the dis 
paraging meaning which they had given it. Hegel rehabilitated the Sophists, 
and thereupon it followed, as often happens, that they were for a time eve r- 
estimated, as by Grote. 

M. Schanz, Die Sophistm (Geittingen, 1867). 

Socrates of Athens (469-399) makes an epoch in the history of philosophy, 
even by his external characteristics, by his original personality, and his new 
style of philosophising. He was neither savant nor wandering teacher, le- 
longed to no school and adhered to none. He was a simple man of the people, 
the son of a sculptor, and at first busied himself with the chisel. In his ardent 
desire for knowledge he absorbed the new doctrines with which the streets of 
his native city re-echoed, but did not allow himself to be dazzled by these brill 
iant rhetorical efforts, nor did he find himself much advanced by them. His 
keen thought took note of their contradictions, and his moral earnestness was 
offended by the superficiality and frivolity of this constant effort after culture. 
He held it to be his duty to enlighten himself and his fellow-citizens concerning 
the emptiness of this pretended knowledge, and, through earnest investigation, 
to follow after truth. So, a philosopher of this opportunity and of daily life, he 
worked unremittingly among his fellow-citizens, until misunderstanding and per 
sonal intrigue brought him before the court which condemned him to the death 
that was to become his greatest glory. 

The accounts concerning him give a clear and trustworthy picture of his per 
sonality. In these accounts Plato s finer and Xenophon s coarser portrayal 
supplement each other most happily. The first in almost all his writings brings 
out the honoured teacher with dramatic vividness. Of the second we have to 
consider the Memorabilia ( \iro^vrnjMvev^a.Ta. ~ZwKparovs) and the Symposium. 
As regards his teaching, the case is more difficult, for here the presentations of 
both Xenophon and Plato are partisan writings, each laying claim to the famous 
name for his own doctrine (in the case of Xenophon a mild Cynicism). The 
statements of Aristotle are authoritative on all essential points, because of the 
greater historical separation and the freer point of view. 

E. Alberti, Sokrates (Gottingen, 1869) ; A. Labriola, La Dottrina di Socrate 
(Naples, 1871) ; A. Fouill6e, La Philosophic de Socrate (Paris, 1873). 

Euclid of Megara founded his school soon after the death of Socrates. The 
two Eristics (see below), Eubulides of Miletus, Alexinus of Klis, Diodorus 
Cronus of Caria (died 307), and Stilpo (380-300), are to be mentioned as 

1 In regard to these relationships cf. H. Diels, Berichte der Berl, Akademie, 
1884, pp. 343 ff. 

72 The Greeks : Anthropological Period. [PART I 

belonging to this school, which had only a brief existence, and later became 
incorporated with the Cynics and Stoics. The same is true of the society which 
Pheedo, the favourite pupil of Socrates, founded in his home at Elis, and which 
Menedemus soon after transplanted to Eretria. Cf. E. Mallet, Histoire de 
Vecole de Megare et des ecoles (T Elis et &lt;T Eretrie (Paris, 1845). 

The founder of the Cynic School (named after the gymnasium Cynosar- 
ges) was Antisthenes of Athens, who, like Euclid, was an older friend of 
Socrates. The singular Diogenes of Sinope is rather a characteristic by-figure 
in the history of civilisation than a man of science. In this connection Crates 
of Thebes may also be mentioned. Later this school was blended with that of 
the Stoics. 

F. Dummler, Antisthenica (Halle, 1882) ; K. W. Gottling, Diogenes der 
Kyniker, oder die Philosophie des griechischen Proletariats (Ges. Abhandl. 
I. 251 ff.). 

Aristippus of Cyrene, a Sophist and wandering teacher, somewhat younger 
than Euclid and Antisthenes, and united only for a little time with the Socratic 
circle, founded his school in old age, and seems to have left to his grandson the 
systematic development of thoughts, which, for himself, were rather a practical 
principle of life. The above-named successors (Theodoras, etc.) extend into 
the third century, and form the transition to the Epicurean School, which took 
up the remnants of the Hedonistic into itself. 

A. Wendt, De Philosophia Cyrenaica (Gottingen, 1841). 

7. The Problem of Morality. 

The reflections of the Gnomic poets and the sentences of the 
so-called seven wise men had already, as their central point, the 
admonition to observe moderation. In like manner the pessimistic 
complaints which we meet among poets, philosophers, and moralists 
of the fifth century are directed for the most part against the 
unbridled license of men, their lack of discipline and of obedience 
to law. The more serious minds discerned the danger which the 
passionate seething and foaming of public life brought with it, and 
the political experience that party strife was ethically endurable 
only where it left the order of the laws untouched, made subjection 
to law appear as the supreme duty. Heraclitus and the Pythagoreans 
expressed this with complete clearness, and knew how to attach it 
to the fundamental conceptions of their metaphysical theories. 1 

We meet here with two assumptions which even among these 
thinkers appear as self-evident presuppositions. The first is the, 
^validity of laws. The nai ve consciousness obeys the command 
without asking whence it comes or by what it is justified. Laws 
have actual existence, those of morals as well as those of the courts ; 
they are here once for all, and the individual has to follow them. 
* No one in the pre-Sophistic period thought of examining the law 
and asking in what its claim to valid authority consists. The sec 
ond assumption is a conviction which is fundamental in the moralis 
ing of all peoples and all times : viz. that obedience to the law 
brings advantage, disregard of it, disadvantage. As the result of 

1 Cf. above, p. 63, note 5. 

CHAP. 2, 7.] Problem of Morality : the Sophists. 73 

this thought admonition takes on the character of persuasive coun 
sel, 1 which is directed to the shrewdness of the one admonished as 
well as to the desires slumbering within him. 

"With the Greek Enlightenment confidence in both of these pre 
suppositions began to waver, and accordingly morality became for 
it a problem. 

1. The impulse to this came from the experiences of public life. 
The frequent and sudden change of constitutions was indeed adapted 
to undermine the authority of law. It not only took away the halo 
of unconditional, unquestioned validity from the individual law, 
but it accustomed the citizen of the democratic republic especially 
to reflect and decide upon the ground and validity of laws as he 
consulted and voted. Political law became a subject for discussion, 
and the individual set himself with his judgment above it. If, now, 
besides noting this mutation in time, attention is also given 
to the variety exhibited not only in the political laws, but also in 
the usages prescribed by customary morality in the different states 
and among different peoples, the consequence is that the worth of 
universal validity for all men can no longer be attributed to laws. 
At least this holds good in the first place for all laws made by man ; 
in any case, therefore, for political laws. 

In the face of these experiences the question arose whether there 
is anything whatever that is valid everywhere and always, any law 
that is independent of the difference between peoples, states, and 
times, and therefore authoritative for all. Greek ethics began thus 
with a problem which was completely parallel to the initial problem of 
physics. The essence of things which remains ever the same and 
survives all changes the philosophers of the first period had called 
Nature (&lt;wns) : 3 it is now asked whether there is also determined 
by this unchanging Nature (&lt;ixr) a law that is exalted above ~ 
all change and all differences, and in contrast with this it is pointed 
out that all existing prescriptions valid only for a time, and within 
a limited territory, are given and established by human institution or 
statute (Ot&ti or vo/xo&gt;). 

This contrast between Nature and institution or statute is the 
most characteristic work of the Greek Enlightenment in the forma- 

1 A typical example of this is the allegory of Prodicus, in which the choosing 
Hercules is promised golden mountains by Virtue as well as by Vice, in case he 
will intrust himself to her guidance. 

2 Hippias in Xen. Mem. IV. 4, 14 ff. 

8 Ilepi &lt;t&gt;i&gt;fffws is the title borne by the writings of all the older philosophers. 
It is to be emphasised that the constitutive mark of the concept &lt;wm was 
originally that of remaining ever like itself. The contrary of this is then the 
transient, that which occurs a single time. 

74 The Grreeks : Anthropological Period. [PART I. 

tion of conceptions. It dominates the entire philosophy of the 
period, and has from the beginning not only the meaning of a prin 
ciple of genetic explanation, but the significance of a norm or stan 
dard/or the estimation of worth. If there is anything universally 
valid, it is that which is valid " by Nature " for all men without 
distinction of people and time ; what has been established by man 
in the course of history has only historical worth, worth for a single 
occasion. That only is justly authorised which Nature determines, 
but human institution goes beyond this. The " law " (vo/ao?) tyr 
annises over man and forces him to much that is contrary to Nature. 1 
Philosophy formulated in its conceptions that opposition between a 
natural, " divine " law and the written law/ which formed the theme 
of the Antigone of Sophocles. 

^ Out of this antithesis came the problems, on the one hand, to 
establish in what this law of Nature, everywhere the same, consists; 
on the other, to understand how, in addition to this, the institutions 
of historical law arise. 

The first problem Protagoras did not avoid. In the mythical 
presentation of his thought which Plato has preserved, 2 he taught 
that the gods gave to all men in equal measure a sense of justice, and 
of ethical respect or reverence (81/07 an d &lt;"8ws), in order that in the 
struggle of life they might be able to form permanent unions for 
mutual preservation. He found, therefore, the &lt;WTO of practical 
life in primary ethical feelings which impel man to union in society 
and in the state. The carrying out of this thought in its details and 
the definition of the boundary between this which is valid by Nature 
(&lt;/&gt;uo-a) and the positive determinations of historical institution are 
unfortunately not preserved to us. 

There are, however, many indications that the theory of the 
Sophists proceeded from such fundamental conceptions to a wide- 
reaching criticism of existing conditions, and to the demand for pro 
found revolutions in social and political life. The thought was 
already at that time forcing its way forward, that all distinctions 
between men before the law rest only upon institution, and that 
Nature demands equal right for all. Lycophron desired to do away 
with the nobility. Alcidamas 3 and others 4 combated slavery from 
this point of view. Phaleas demanded equality of property as well 
as of education for all citizens, and Hippodamus was the first to 

1 Hippias in Plat. Prot. 337 C. 

2 Plat. Prot. 320 ff. Cf. A. Harpff, Die Ethik des Protagoras (Heidelberg, 
1884). 

3 Arist. lihft. I. 13, 1373 b 18. Cf. also Oral. Attic, (ed. Bekker) II. 154. 
* Arist. Pol. 1.3, 1 253 b20. 

CHAP. 2, 7.] Problem of Morality : the Sophists. 75 

project the outlines of an ideal state, constituted according to 
reason. Even the thought of a political equality of women with 
men came to the surface in this connection. 1 

If now positive legislation deviates from these demands of Nature, 
its rationale is to be sought only in the interests of those who make 
the laws. Whether this takes the form assumed in the opinion of 
Thrasymachus 2 of Chalcedon, who held that it is those in power 
who by means of the law force the subjects to do what is for their 
(the masters ) advantage, or whether it wears the contrary form as 
developed by Callicles, 3 that laws have been erected by the great 
mass of the weak as a bulwark against the power of strong person 
alities which would be superior to the individual, and that according 
to the view of Lycophron 4 all those who do no harm to others thus 
mutually assure for themselves life and property, in all these 
cases the ground of the laws lies in the interests of those who make 
them. 

2. If personal interest is therefore the ground for setting up laws, 
it is also the sole motive for obeying them. Even the moralist wishes 
to convince man that it is for his interest to accommodate himself 
to the law. From this it follows, however, that obedience to the 
law is under obligation to extend only so far as it is the indi 
viduals interest. And there are cases where the two do not coincide. 
It is not true that only subordination to law makes a man happy ; 
there are great criminals, so Polus works out the thought, 5 who 
have attained the happiest results by the most frightful misdeeds. 
Experience contradicts the claim that only right doing leads to 
happiness ; it shows rather that a shrewd conduct of life, restrained 
by no regard for right and law, is the best guaranty of good for- 
Jbune. 6 

Through such considerations the scepticism which had originally, 
as it seems, 7 been directed only toward the validity of political 
law, gradually attacked that of the moral laws as well./ What 
Polus, Callicles, and Thrasymachus propound in the Platonic dia 
logues, the Gorgias and the Republic, with regard to the concep 
tions of the just and unjust (SLKO.IOV and a8icov) has reference in 
equal measure to the moral and to the political law. This double 
reference is effected through the middle ground of the characteristics 

1 The persiflage in the Ecclesiazusce of Aristophanes can refer only to this. 

2 Plat. E?p. 338 C. 
8 Plat. Gory. 483 B. 

* Arist. Pnl. III. 9, 12801) 11. 
s In Plat. Gnrg. 471. 

6 Cf. the praise of dSuda. by Thrasymachus in Plat. Rep. 344 A. 

7 This is especially true of Protagoras, perhaps also of Hippias. 

76 The G-reeks : Anthropological Period. [ PAKT I 

of penal justice, and proves that the law of Nature is set over 
against, not only the civil law, but also the requirements of morals. 

In both respects the naturalism and radicalism of the younger 
Sophists pushed on to the extreme consequences.\ The weak may 
subject himself to the law ; he is, though, but the slupid man, serv 
ing the uses of others by so doing ; the strong, however, who is at 
the same time the wise, does not allow himself to be led astray by 
the law; he follows solely the impulse of his own nature. And this 
is the right, if not according to human law, yet according to the 
higher law of Nature. She shows in all living beings that the 
stronger should rule the weaker ; only for the slave is it becoming 
to recognise a command above himself. The free man should not 
bridle his desires, but let them have full development; according to 
human law it may be a disgrace to do injustice, according to the 
dictates of Nature it is a disgrace to suffer injustice. 2 

In such forms the individual s natural disposition, the constitution 
of his impulses, was proclaimed as law of Nature, and exalted to be 
the supreme law of action ; and Archelaus, a disciple of Anaxagoras, 
belonging to the Sophistic period, proclaimed that the predicates 
good and bad, "just" and "shameful" (Sucotov al^xpov), spring 
not from Nature, but from Institution. All ethical judging is con 
ventional. 5 

3. Religious ideas were also involved in this overthrow as a mat 
ter of course, and all the more since after their theoretical value 
had been taken away, at least in educated circles, by the cosmologi- 
cal philosophy typified by Xenophanes, they had retained recogni 
tion only as allegorical methods of presenting ethical conceptions. 
In this latter line of thought the school of Anaxagoras had been 
active for a time, especially a certain Metrodorus of Lampsacus. It 
was only a consequence of the ethical relativism of the Sophists 
when Prodicus taught that men had made to themselves gods out of 
all that brought them blessing, and when Critias declared belief in 
the gods to be an invention of shrewd statecraft. 4 If such claims 
still excited indignation among the masses and the powers of the 
official priesthood, 5 it was easy for Protagoras in the presence of 
these questions to wrap himself in the mantle of his scepticism. 6 

4. The position of Socrates with reference to this whole move 
ment presents two sides : on the one hand, he brought the principle 

1 Thrasymachus in Plat. Rep. 343 C. 

2 Callicles in Plat. Gorg. 483 A and 491 E. 

3 Diog. Laert. II. 1(5 

Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. IX. 51-54. 

6 As is shown by the condemnation of Diagoras of Melos (Aristoph. Av. 1073). 

Diog. Laert. IX. 51. 

CHAP. -2, 7.J Problem of Morality : Socrates. 77 

underlying the movement to its clearest and most comprehensive 
expression ; on the other hand, he set himself in the most vigorous 
manner against its outcome, and both these sides of his activity, 
contrary as they seem to be and much as this external opposition 
had to do with the tragic fate of the man, stand, nevertheless, in the 
most exact and rigidly consistent connection ; for just by grasping 
the principle of the Enlightenment in all its depth, and formulating 
it in its full force, did Socrates succeed in developing from it a 
positive result of wide-reaching power. 

For him, also, the time for following traditional customs without 
question is past. Independent judgment of individuals has taken 
the place of authority. But while the Sophists gave their attention 
to the analysis of the feelings and impulses which lie at the basis of 
the actual decisions of individuals, and ultimately saw themselves 
forced to adjudge to all these motives the equal right of an unfold 
ing in accordance with the necessity of Nature, Socrates, on the 
contrary, reflected upon precisely that element which was the deci 
sive factor in the culture of his tim e : namely, the practical, polit 
ical, and social significance which knowledge and spiejijce had 
achieved. Just through the process in which individuals had 
achieved independence, through the unfettering of personal passions, 
it had become evident that in all fields mans ability rests upon his 
insight. In this Socrates found that objective standard for the esti 
mation of men and their actions which the Sophists had sought in 
vain in the machinery of feelings and desires. 

Ability, then, or excellence (Tuchtigkeit, aperrj) is insight. He 
who acts according to feelings, according to presuppositions that 
are not clear, according to customs that have been handed down, /&gt;. 
may indeed occasionally hit the right thing, but he does not know 
it, he is not sure of the issue ; he who is entirely involved in delusion 
and error as to the matter in hand is certain to make mistakes ; he 
only will be able to act right who has the right knowledge of things 
and of himself. 1 Scientific knowledge (eVio-n^T;) is therefore the 
basis of all qualities which make man able and useful, of all single 
dperat . 

This insight consists, on the one hand, in an exact knowledge of the 
things to which the action is to relate. Man should understand liis 
business; as we find the able man in every business to be the one 
who has learned it thoroughly and knows the objects with which he 
has to work, so should it be also in civil and political life ; here, too, 

1 These fundamental thoughts of Socrates are reproduced by Xenophon and 
Plato in countless turns and variations. In Xenophon the passage, Mem. III. 
ch. 9, is most important for comparison; in Plato, the dialogue Protagoras. 

78 The G-reeks : Anthropological Period. [TART I. 

only insight should be trusted. 1 The individual excellences differ 
entiate themselves accordingly with reference to the objects which 
the knowledge concerns in the individual case ; 2 common to all, 
however, is not only knowledge in general, but also self-knowledge. 
Hence Socrates declared it to be his principal vocation to educate 
himself and his fellow-citizens to earnest self-examination ; the 
yvoJ& ercavTov was the watch-word of his teaching. 3 

5./ These considerations, which Socrates developed out of the 
principles by which practical ability or excellence is determined, 
became transferred by the aid of the ambiguity in the word apery, 4 
to ethical excellence also, or virtue, and so led to the fundamental 
doctrine that virtue consists in knowledge of the good* So far the 
course of thought followed by Socrates is clear and free from doubt. 
The sources become less clear when we ask what the man who was 
so strenuous to reach clearly denned conceptions intended by the 
oojd. According to Xenophon s exposition, the good (dyafloV) must 
have coincided everywhere, for his master, with the profitable or 
useful (w&lt;eAt/Aov). Virtue would then be the knowledge of what 
was suited to the end in view, or useful, in each particular instance. 
This interpretation is the easiest to attach to that analogy between 
moral virtue and the various kinds of excellence shown in daily 
life, which Socrates really taught, and the presentation given in the 
earliest Platonic dialogues, in particular the Protagoras attributes 
to Socrates this standpoint of individual advantage. Insight or dis 
cernment (here called prudence, &lt;f&gt;p6vr)&lt;ns) is a measuring art, which 
weighs exactly the benefit and the harm that will result from the 
action, and so chooses what is most to the purpose. In further agree 
ment with this view is the fact that in exact contrast with the 
Sophists, who demanded a free and uncramped development of the 
passions, Socrates emphasised no virtue so much, and exhibited none 
so fully in his own life, as that of self-control (o-ox^ocrwiy). 

But according to this interpretation the Socratic conception of 
the good would be indefinite in its content ; decision must be made 
from case to case as to what suits the end in view, or is useful, and 

1 Hence, too, the anti-democratic position, so fatal for his personal destiny, 
taken by Socrates, who demanded expressly that the most difficult and most 
responsible art, that of governing, should be practised only by those of the most 
complete discernment, and who on this account absolutely rejected the appoint 
ment of state officials by lot or popular choice. 

2 Socrates did not attempt a system of the individual excellences ; on the 
other hand, he did give by way of example definitions of courage (cf. the Platonic 
Laches), piety (Plat. Euthyphro, Xen. Mem. IV. 6, 3), justice (Mem. IV. 6, 6), 
etc. 

3 As defined by his theoretical philosophy; see 8. 

4 The same ambiguity which has given occasion to countless difficulties lies 
in the Latin virtus ; so, too, in dyaMr, bonum, good. 

CHAP. 2, 7.] Problem of Morality : Socrates. 79 

instead of the good we should again always have what is good for 
something. 1 It may be regarded as certain that Socrates strove to 
transcend this relativism, and also that by reason of the anthropo 
logical basis of his thinking he did not get beyond this position in 
the formulation of his conceptions. v His doctrine that it is better to 
suffer wrong than to do wrong, his strict conformity to law, in 
accordance with which he scorned to avoid the execution of an 
unjust sentence and preserve himself by flight for further life and 
activity, his admonition that the true meaning of life consists in 
evTrpa&a, in continual right-doing, in man s ceaseless labour for ethical 
improvement, in the participation in all that is good and beautiful 
(KaAoKdya& a), especially, however, his erotic, i.e. his doctrine that 
friendship and the relation of attachment between teacher and 
taught should consist only in a mutual striving to become good or 
constantly better through their life in common and their mutual 
furtherance of each other s aims, all this goes far beyond the con 
ception presented by Xenophon. It can be united with the stand 
point of utility only if we attribute~to Socrates the distinction 
between the true \velfare of the soul, on the one hand, and earthly 
gain, on the other, which Plato makes him set forth in the Phcedo, 
but of which we elsewhere find but slight traces, since the historic 
Socrates, even according to Plato s Apology, maintained a completely 
sceptical position with regard to personal immortality, and did not 
know the sharp Platonic separation between immateriality and cor 
poreality. Socrates teaches, indeed, even according to Xenophon, 
that man s true fortune is to be sought, not in outward goods nor in 
luxurious life, but in virtue alone : if, however, this virtue is to 
consist only in the capacity to recognise the truly useful and act 
accordingly, the doctrine moves in a circle as soon as it maintains 
that this truly useful is just virtue itself. In this circle Socrates &gt; 
remained fast ; the objective determination of the conception of the 
good which he sought he did not find. 

6. However indefinite the answer to the question as to what 
should properly form the content of that knowledge of the good 
which constitutes virtue, Socrates was at all events convinced 
and this proved much more important that this knowledge is 
in itself sufficient to cause one to do the good, and so bring happi 
ness. This proposition, which may serve as a type of a rationalis 
tic conception of life, contains two pregnant presuppositions, one 
psychological, viz. pronounced intellectualism, the other ethical, viz. 
pronounced eudcemonism. 

1 Xen. Mem. III. 8, 5. 

80 The Greeks: Anthropological Period. [PART I. 

The fundamental assumption which. Socrates thus makes is 
indeed the expression of his own reflective, judicious nature. Every 
man, he says, acts in the manner that he considers best suited for 
his end, most beneficial and most useful ; no one does that which 
he knows to be unfit for the end in view, or even fit in a lesser 
degree. If, then, virtue is knowledge of what is to the purpose, it 
follows immediately that the virtuous man acts in accordance with 
his knowledge, therefore to the purpose, rightly, in the way that is 
beneficial to him. No one does wrong knowingly and purposely : he 
only does not act rightly who has not right insight. If it sometimes 
seems as if some one acted wrongly in the face of better insight 
"against his better judgment" it must be that he was not clearly 
and surely in possession of this better knowledge, for otherwise he 
would have purposely injured himself, which is absurd. 

In. this a fundamental difference between Socrates and the 
Sophists becomes evident: the latter maintained the originality of 
the will, and on that account its warrant from Nature ; for Socrates, 
to will a thing and to regard a thing as good, profitable, and useful 
are the same thing. Knowledge determines the will without 
opposition ; man does what he holds to be best. True as it may be 
that Socrates was in error in this opinion, and that the truth lies in 
the mean between him and the Sophists, this his intellectualistic 
conception of the will came to exercise a decisive influence over all 
ancient ethics. 

Sin is, then, error. He who does a bad act does it from a mistaken 
judgment, regarding the bad, i.e. the injurious, as the good ; for every 
one believes that he is doing the good, i.e. the advantageous. Only 
because the case stands thus is there any meaning in instructing 
men ethically ; only for this reason is virtue capable of being taught. 
For all teaching addresses itself to man s knowledge. Because ma-nr 
can be taught what the good is, therefore and by this means alone 
he can be brought to the stage of right action. Were virtue not 
knowledge, it would not be capable of being taught. 

From this standpoint Socrates raised the customary morality 
taught by the popular moralising to a scientific plane. All his 
keenness, his subtlety, and dialectical dexterity were employed to 
prove against the Sophists that not only the surest, but even the 
only sure way of attaining to permanent happiness, lies in obeying 
ethical prescriptions under all circumstances, in subordination to law 
and morals. So he gives back to Authority her right. The prin- 

1 Compare in Plato the refutation of Thrasymachus in the first book of the 
Republic, which may be regarded as Socratic in its principles, but which in part 
is very weakly supported, both in form and in matter. 

CIIAI. 2, 7.] Problem of Morality : Socrates. 81 

ciple of the Enlightenment tolerates no unquestioning subjection to 
the existing state of things and requires examination of the laws ; 
but these laws sustain the examination, they evince themselves to be 
requirements made by insight into what is for the best ; and because 
it has now been recognised that it is the right course to obey them, 
unconditional obedience must be rendered. 1 Far from being in con 
flict with the institutions of law and morals, Socrates is rather the 
one who undertook to prove their reasonableness and thereby their 
claim to universal validity. 2 ^ 

F. Wildauer, Socrates 1 Lehre vom Willen. Innsbruck, 1877. 
M. Heinze, Der Euddmonismus in der griechischen Philosophic. Leips. 
1883. 

7. In addition to the psychologico-ethical presuppositions that 
the will is always directed toward what is recognised as good, 
and that therefore virtue, as -knowledge of the good, draws after it 
of itself the appropriate action, we find in the argumentations of 
Socrates the further opinion that this appropriate action of the 
virtuous man actually attains its end and makes him happy. Happi 
ness or well-being (evScu/xovia) is the necessary result of virtue. The 
intelligent man knows, and hence does, what is good for him ; he 
must then, through his doing, become happy also. This assump 
tion applies, however, only to a perfect intelligence which would 
be absolutely certain of the effects that an intended action would 
have in the connected series of the world s events. 

1 In details, as might be expected from the nature of the case, this rehabilita 
tion of the popular morals falls into trivial moralising, especially as Xenophon 
portrays it. But while Socrates hoped precisely by this means to render the 
right service to his people, it proved to be just the point where he came to the 
ground between two stools : with the Sophists and their adherents, he passed for 
a reactionary ; on the other hand, the men who, like Aristophanes, saw pre 
cisely in the questioning of the authority of law and morals in general, the dan 
gerous cancer of the time, without investigation classed him who wished to 
place this authority on a basis of reason, among those who were undermining 
it. So it was that it could come about that Socrates appeared in the Clouds of 
Aristophanes as the type of Sophistic teaching which he combated. 

2 It is hence quite alien to the principles of Socrates to demand or even to 
allow for every individual act a special examination of the grounds of the polit 
ical or ethical command If, for example, it has once been recognised as right 
to obey the ordinances of the government under all circumstances, this obedience 
must then be rendered, even if the ordinance evidently commands the unreason 
able and the unjust ; cf . Plato s Crito. If, as was true of Socrates himself, a man 
is convinced that his life is under divine guidance, and that where his insight 
does not suffice, a higher voice warns him through his feeling, at least, warns 
him away from what is wrong, then he must obey this voice. Cf. on the 
SalfjMviov, 8. The essential thing always is that a man give an account to him 
self of his doing, but the grounds on which he acts in so doing may even consist 
in such maxims as exclude an examination in individual cases. 

82 The G-reekis : Anthropological Period. [PART I. 

The transmitted expressions of Socrates, in fact, make the impres 
sion that he was convinced that man could possess that insight 
which by its operation upon his action and its consequences is 
adapted to bring about happiness, and that he might gain this 
insight through philosophy : that is, through unremitting earnest 
examination of himself, of others, and of the relations of human 
life. Investigations as to how far the world s course, which man 
cannot foresee, may cross and destroy the operation even of the best 
planned and most intelligent conduct of life, are not to be pointed 
out in the teaching of Socrates. . When we consider the slight 
degree of confidence which he otherwise had in human knowledge, 
as soon as this attempted to venture beyond establishing ethical 
conceptions and practical requirements, we can explain the above 
conviction only on the following basis he did not fear that the 
providential guidance, which was for him indeed an object not of 
knowledge, but of faith, would frustrate the beneficial consequences 
of right action. 

8. Socrates had defined virtue, the fundamental ethical concep 
tion, as insight, and this in turn as knowledge of the good, but had 
given to the concept oftHe good no universal content, and in a cer 
tain respect had left it open. This made it possible for the most 
diverse conceptions of life to introduce their views of the ultimate 
end (rcAos) of human existence into this open place in the Socratic 
concept; and so this first incomplete work in the formation of ethi 
cal conceptions at once afforded the material for a number of partic 
ular structures. 1 The most important, of these are the Cynic and 
the Cyrenaic. Both present the attempt to define the true intrinsic 
worth of the life of the individual in a universal manner. Both 
wish to show in what man s true happiness consists, how man must 
be constituted and how he must act in order to attain this with cer 
tainty ; both call this constitution or disposition through which 
participation in happiness is gained, virtue. The eudaemonistic side 
of the Socratic ethics is here developed in an entirely one-sided 
manner, and though universal validity is vindicated for the concep 
tion proposed, the point of view of the individual s happiness forms so 
exclusively the standard that the worth of all relations of public 
life even is estimated by it. In Cynicism, as in Hedonism, the Greek 
spirit is proceeding to appropriate the fruit which the conditions 

1 So indeed in the case of Xenophon and TEschines ; the philosophising cob 
bler Simon, too, seems to have have been thus dependent on Socrates. What 
the Megarian and the Elean-Kretrian schools accomplished in this respect is 
too indefinitely transmitted to us, and is too closely in contact with Cynicism, 
to deserve separate mention. 

CHAP. 2, 7.] Problem of Morality : Antixthenes. 

of life brought about by civilisation yield for the fortune of the 
individual. The criticism of the social conditions and authorities, 
begun by the Sophists, has won a fixed standard through the medi 
ating aid of the Socratic conception of virtue. 

The doctrine of virtue taught by Antisthenes 1 takes at the begin 
ning a high and specious turn at the point where the doctrine finds 
itself hopelessly entangled in the Socratic circle. He declines to 
define more closely the contents of the concept of the good, and 
declares virtue itself to be not only the highest, but the only good, 
understanding, however, by virtue essentially only the intelligent con 
duct of life. This alone makes happy, not indeed through the conse 
quences which it brings about, but through itself. The contentment 
that dwells within the right life itself is accordingly completely 
independent of the world s course : virtue is itself sufficient for 
happiness ; the wise man stands free in the presence of fate and 
fortune. 

But this Cynic conception of virtue as sufficient in itself is, as is 
shown by its further development, in nowise to be interpreted as 
meaning that the virtuous man should find his fortune in doing 
good for its own sake amid all the whims of fate. Cynicism did 
not rise to this height, however much it may sound like it when 
virtue is celebrated as the only sure possession in the vicissitudes 
of life, when it is designated as the only thing to be striven for, 
and baseness, on the contrary, as the only thing to be avoided. This 
doctrine is a postulate derived with great logical consistency from 
the Socratic principle that virtue necessarily makes happy (cf. 
above, 7), and from this postulate Antisthenes sought in turn to 
define the real contents of the concept of virtue. 

If, namely, virtue is to make happy with certainty and under all 
circumstances, it must be that conduct of life which makes man as 
independent as possible of (he course of events. Now every want and 
every desire is a bond which makes man dependent upon fortune, 
in so far as his happiness or unhappiness is made to consist in 
whether a given wish is fulfilled or not by the course of life. We 
have no power over the outer world, but we have power over our 
desires. We expose ourselves the more to alien powers, the more 
we desire, hope, or fear from them ; every desire makes us slaves of 
the outer world. Virtue, then, which makes man independent, can 
consist only in suppression of desires, and restriction of wants 
to the smallest conceivable measure. Virtue is freedom from 
wants, 2 from the standpoint of eudaemonism certainly the most 

1 Principally preserved in Diog. Laert. VI. 3 Xen. Symp. 4, 34 ff. 

84 The Greeks : Anthropological Period. [PART I. 

consistent conclusion, and one that must have appealed especially to 
men of a humble position in life such as we find the Cynics to be in 
part. 

By carrying out this thought in a radical manner the Cynics came 
to occupy a purely negative attitude toward civilisation. By aiming 
to reduce the measure of the virtuous wise man s wants to what was 
absolutely inevitable, and to regard all other strivings as pernicious 
or indifferent, they rejected all the goods of civilisation and attained 
the ideal of a state of Nature, an ideal stripped of all higher worth. 
Taking up earlier Sophistic theories and developing them farther, 
they taught that the wise man accommodates himself only to what 
Nature peremptorily demands, but despises all that appears desir 
able or worthy of obedience merely as the result of human opinion 
or institution. Wealth and refinement, fame and honour, seemed to 
them just as superfluous as those enjoyments of the senses which 
went beyond the satisfaction of the most elementary wants of hunger 
and love. Art and science, family and native land, were to them 
indifferent, and Diogenes owed his paradoxical popularity to the 
ostentatious jest of attempting to live in civilised Greece as if in a 
state of Nature, solely &lt;u o-. 

In this way the philosophising proletarian forced himself to despise 
all the good things of civilisation, from the enjoyment of which he 
found himself more or less excluded. On the other hand, he recog 
nised none of the laws to which civilised society subjected itself, as 
binding in themselves, and if there is any truth at all in the coarse 
anecdotes which antiquity relates on the subject, this class took 
pleasure in scoffing openly at the most elementary demands of 
morals and decency. This forced and, in part, openly affected nat 
uralism knows nothing any longer of BLK-TJ and aiSws (justice and rev 
erence), which the older Sophistic teaching had allowed to remain 
as natural impulses, and elicits a conception of virtue which sup 
poses that greed and lust complete the essential qualities of the 
natural man. 

Yet the Cynics were not so bad as they made themselves. 
Diogenes even preserved a remnant of respect for mental training, 
as the only thing which could free man from the prejudices of con 
ventional institutions and lead to freedom from wants by insight 
into the nothingness of the pretended goods of civilisation. He 
also conducted the education of the sons of Xeniades, a Corinthian 
Sophist, according to the principles of the Cynic naturalism, and 
not without success. 

On the whole, this philosophy is a characteristic sign of the time, 
the mark of a disposition which, if not hostile, was yet indifferent 

CHAP. 2, 7.] Problem of Morality : Aristippus. 85 

to society and had lost all comprehension of its ideal goods ; it ena 
bles us to see from within how at that time Greek society was dis 
integrating into individuals. When Diogenes called himself a 
cosmopolitan, there was in this no trace of the ideal thought of a 
community of all men, but only the denial of his adherence to any 
civilised community ; and if Crates taught that the plurality of gods 
exists only in the opinion of men, and that, " according to Nature," 
there is but one God, there is in the Cynic doctrine no trace to war 
rant the conclusion that this monotheism was for them an especially 
clear idea or even an especially deep feeling. 

9. In complete contrast with this system stands Hedonism, the 
philosophy of regardless enjoyment. Starting as did the Cynics 
from the incompleteness of the Socratic doctrine, Aristippus struck 
out in the opposite direction. He was quick to give to the concept 
of the good, a clear and simple content, that of pleasure (fi&ovrj). 
This latter conception at first does duty under the general psycholo 
gical meaning of the feeling of contentment which grows out of 
the fulfilment of every striving and wish. 1 Happiness is then the 
state of pleasure which springs from the satisfied will. If this is 
the only thing to be considered, it is a matter of indifference what 
the object of will and of gratification is ; all depends on the 
degree of pleasure, on the strength of the feeling of satisfaction. 2 
This, however, in the opinion of Aristippus, is present in the highest 
degree in the case of sensuous, bodily enjoyment which relates to 
the immediate present, to the satisfaction of the moment. If, then, 
virtue is knowledge directed toward happiness, it must enable man 
to enjoy as much and as vigorously as possible. Virtue is ability 
for enjoyment. 

Every one, to be sure, may and can enjoy ; but only the man of 
education, of intelligence, of insight the wise man understands 
how to enjoy rightly. In this we must consider not only the 
intelligent appraisal (&lt;J&gt;p6vrj&lt;Ti&lt;;) , which knows how to select, among 
the various enjoyments that present themselves in the course of 
life, those which will afford the pleasure that is highest, purest, 
least mixed with pain; we must consider also the inner self-posses 
sion of the man who is not blindly to follow every rising appetite, 
and who, when he enjoys, is never to give himself entirely up to 
the enjoyment, but is to stand above it and control it. The enjoy 
ment which makes man the slave of things is, indeed, as the Cynics 

1 Besides this, also, Xenophon not infrequently puts the idt into the mouth 
of Socrates. 

2 This, too, is a completely correct consequence from the eudsemonistic prin 
ciple. 

86 The Greeks : Anthropological Period. [PAUT I. 

say, to be rejected; but to delight in pleasure and yet not give one s 
self up to it is harder than to renounce it, as they do. Of this, 
however, man becomes capable through right insight only. 1 

On this ground the Cyrenaics, in particular the younger Aristippus 
(called /x^r/3o8t8aKTos, " mother-taught," because his grandfather s 
wisdom was transmitted to him through his mother Arete), set on 
foot systematic investigations as to the origin of the -n-dOr), the 
feelings and impulses. In a physiological psychology which was 
connected with that of Protagoras (cf. below, 8), they traced the 
varieties in feeling back to states of motion in the body : to rest 
corresponded indifference, to violent motion pain, to gentle motion 
pleasure. Besides such explanatory theories, however, this philos 
ophy of bonvivants extended to an unprejudiced general theory 
of things. For them, too, as Theodorus taught, all ethical and legal 
prescriptions were ultimately merely institutions that were valid for 
the mass of men; the educated man of enjoyment gives himself 
no trouble about them, and enjoys things when they come into his 
possession. Theodorus, who bears the surname "the Atheist," put 
aside also all religious scruples which are opposed to devotion to 
sensuous enjoyment, and the school also exerted itself in this 
interest to strip the halo from religious faith, so far as possible, as 
is proved by the well-known theory of Euemerus, who in his lepa 
avaypa&lt;f&gt;ri undertook to trace belief in the gods back to the worship 
of ancestors and veneration of heroes. 

Thus the Cyrenaics ultimately agreed with the Cynics in this, 
that they, too, regarded all that is fixed vo/iw, i.e. by the social 
convention of morals and law, as a limitation of that right to enjoy 
ment which man has by nature (&lt;uW), and which the wise man 
exercises without troubling himself about historical institutions. 
The Hedonists gladly shared the refinement of enjoyment which 
civilisation brought with it ; they found it convenient and per 
missible that the intelligent man should enjoy the honey which 
others prepared; but no feeling of duty or thankfulness bound 
them to the civilisation whose fruits they enjoyed. This same con 
dition of recognising no native land, this same turning aside from 
the feeling of political responsibility, which among the Cynics grew 
out of despising the enjoyments of civilisation, resulted for the 
Cyrenaics from the egoism of their enjoyment. Sacrifice for 
others, patriotism, and devotion to a general object, Theodorus 
declared to be a form of foolishness which it did not become the 
wise man to share, and even Aristippus rejoiced in the freedom from 

1 Cf. Diog. Laert. II. 65 ff. 

CIIAI-. 2, B.] Problem of Science : the, Sophists. 87 

connection with any state, which his wandering life afforded him.! 
The philosophy of the parasites, who feasted at the full table of 
Grecian beauty, was as far removed from the ideal meaning of that 
beauty as was the philosophy of the beggars who lay at the threshold. 
In the meantime, the principle of the expert weighing of enjoy 
ments contains an element which necessarily leads beyond that 
doctrine of enjoyment for the moment which Aristippus preached, 
and this advance was made in two directions. Aristippus himself 
had already admitted that in the act of weighing, the pleasure 
and pain which would in future result from the enjoyment 
must be taken into account ; Theodoras found that the highest good 
was to be sought rather in the cheerful frame of mind (\apa.} than 
in the enjoyment of the moment, and Anniceris came to see that this 
could be attained in a higher degree through the spiritual joys of 
human intercourse, of friendship, of the family, and of civil society 
than through bodily enjoyments. This knowledge that the enjoy 
ments afforded by the intellectual and spiritual aspects of civilisa 
tion are ultimately finer, richer, and more gratifying than those 
of bodily existence, leads directly over into the doctrine of the 
Epicureans. But, on the other hand, the Hedonistic school could 
not fail ultimately to see that the painless enjoyment to which it 
aimed to educate the man of culture is but a rare lot. In general, 
found Hegesias, he is to be accounted as already happy who attains 
the painless state, is free from actual discomfort. With the great 
mass of men discomfort, the pain of unsatisfied desires, pre 
ponderates : for them it would be better, therefore, not to live. 
The impressiveness with which he presented this brought him the 
surname Tmo-iflavaros, he persuaded to death. He is the first 
representative of eudcemonistic pessimism; with this doctrine, how-; 
ever, eudsemonism refutes itself. He shows that if happiness, 
satisfaction of wishes, and enjoyment are to be the meaning and 
end of human life, it misses this end, and is to be rejected as 
worthless. Pessimism is the last but also the annihilating con 
sequence of eudaemonism, its immanent criticism. 

8. The Problem of Science. 2 

P. Natorp, Forxchungen zur (lesrhichte des Erkemitnissproblems bei den 
Alten. Berlin, 1884. 

The Sophists were teachers of political eloquence. They were 
obliged in tlie first instance to give instruction on the nature and 

1 \en.Tfrm. TT 1, 8 ff. 

2 [ Wissemv-haft. Science, as used in this section, is nearly equivalent to 
"scientific knowledge." Sometimes the subjective aspect of the terra is promi 
nent, and sometimes the objective.] 

88 The Greeks : Anthropological Period. [PART I. 

right use of language. And while they were transforming rhetoric 
from a traditional art to a science, they applied themselves in the 
first place to linguistic researches, and became creators of grammar 
and syntax. They instituted investigations as to the parts of the 
sentence, the use of words, synonyms, and etymology. Prodicus, 
Hippias, and Protagoras distinguished themselves in this respect; 
as to the fruit of their investigations, we are only imperfectly 
informed. 

1. Our knowledge of their logical acquisitions, which with the 
exception of a few allusions are lost, is in a still more unfortunate 
condition. For, as a matter of course, the teachers of rhetoric 
treated also the train of thought in discourse. This train of thought, 
however, consists in proof and refutation. .It was then inevitable 
that the Sophists should project a theory of proof and refutation, 
and there is explicit testimony to this in the case of Protagoras. 1 
Unfortunately, there is no more precise information as to how 
far the Sophists proceeded with this, and as to whether they 
attempted to separate out the logical Forms from those elements 
which belong to the content of thought. It is characteristic that 
the little information which we have concerning the logic of the 
Sophists relates almost without exception to their emphasising of 
the principle of contradiction. To the essential nature of the advo 
cate s task, refutation was more closely related than proof. Protag 
oras left a special treatise 2 concerning Grounds of Refutation, 
perhaps his most important writing, and formulated the law of the 
contradictory opposite, so far, at least, as to say that there are with 
reference to every object two mutually opposing propositions, and 
to draw consequences from this. He thus formulated, in fact, the 
procedure which Zeno had practically employed, and which also 
played a great part in the disciplinary exercises of the Sophists, 
indeed the greatest part. 

For it was one of the main arts of these " Enlighteners " to per 
plex men as to the ideas previously regarded as valid, to involve 
them in contradictions, and when the victims were thus confused, 
to force them if possible, by logical consequences, real or manufac 
tured, to such absurd answers as to make them become ridiculous 
to themselves and others. From the examples which Plato 3 and 
Aristotle 3 have preserved, it is evident that this procedure was not 

1 Diog. Laert. IX. 51 ff. 

2 It is probable that KoTa/3dXXo^rej (sc. X67&lt;&gt;t) and Arri\oyLai are only two 
different titles of this work, the first chapter of which treated truth. 

3 Plato in the Euthydemus and in the Cratylus, Aristotle in the book "On the 
Sophistic Fallacies." 

CHAP. 2, 8.] Problem of Science : the Megarians. 89 

always any too purely logical, but was thoroughly sophistical in the 
present sense of the word. The examples show that these people 
let slip no ambiguity in speech, no awkwardness in popular expres 
sion, if out of it they might weave a snare of absurdity. The 
witticisms which result are often based merely upon language, 
grammar, and etymology ; more rarely they are properly logical ; 
quite often, however, coarse and dull. Characteristic here, too, are 
the catch-questions, where either an affirmative or negative answer, 
according to the customs and presuppositions of the ordinary mean 
ings of the words, gives rise to nonsensical consequences, unforeseen 
by the one answering. 1 

Plato has portrayed two brothers, Euthydemus and Dionysidorus, 
who practised this art of logo mac hy^r ^eristic, which had great 
success among the Athenians who were great talkers and accus 
tomed to word-quibbling. Aside from them, it was prosecuted 
principally by the Megarians, among whom the head of the school, 
Euclid, busied himself with the theory of refutation. 2 His adhe 
rents, Eubulides and Alexinus, were famous for a series of such 
catches, which made a great sensation and called forth a whole lit 
erature. 3 Among these there are two, the " Heap " and the " Bald- 
head," 4 the fundamental thought in which is to be traced back to 
Zeno, and was introduced by him into the arguments by which he 
wished to show that the composition of magnitudes out of small 
parts is impossible. In like manner, Zeno s arguments against 
motion were amplified, even if not deepened or strengthened, 4 by 
another Megarian, Diodorus Cronos. Unwearied in finding out such 
aporice, difficulties, and contradictions, this same Diodorus invented 
also the famous argument (/cupteiW) which was designed to destroy 
the conception of possibility: only the actual is possible; for a 
possible which does not become actual evinces itself thereby to be 
impossible. 6 

In another manner, also, the Sophists who were affiliated with the 
Eleatics, show an extreme application of the principle of contradic 
tion, and a corresponding exaggeration of the principle of identity. 
Even Gorgias seems to have supported his opinion that all state 
ments are false, upon the assumption that it is incorrect to predicate 

1 As a typical example, " Have you left off beating your father ? " or " Have 
you shed your horns ? " 

2 Diog. Laert. II. 107. 

8 Cf. Prantl, Gesch. der Log, I. 33 ff. 

4 Which kernel of grain by being added makes the heap ? Which hair falling 
out makes the bald head ? 

6 Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. X. 85 ff. 
6 Cic. De Fato, 7, 13. 

90 The Greeks : Anthropological Period. [PART I. 

of any subject anything else than just this subject itself; and the 
Cynics, as well as Stilpo the Megarian, made this thought their own 
There remain, accordingly, only such purely identical judgments as, 
good is good, man is man, etc. 1 As a logical consequence of this, 
judging and talking are made as impossible as were plurality and 
motion according to the Eleatic principle. As in the metaphysics 
of Parmenides, the ghost of which appears occasionally both among 
the Megarians and the Cynics (cf. below, No. 5), the lack of concep 
tions of relation permitted no combination of unity with plurality 
and led to a denial of plurality, so here the lack of conceptions of 
logical relation made it appear impossible to assert of the subject a 
variety of predicates. 

2. In all these devious windings taken by the researches of the 
Sophists concerning the knowing activity, the sceptical direction is 
manifesting itself. If on such grounds the logical impossibility of 
all formation of synthetic propositions was maintained, this showed 
that knowledge itself was irreconcilable with the abstract principle 
of identity, as it had been formulated in the Eleatics doctrine of 
Being. The doctrine of Parmenides had itself become ensnared 
past help in the dichotomies of Zeno. This came to most open 
expression in the treatise of Gorgias, which declared Being, Knowl 
edge, and Communication of Knowledge to be impossible. There is 
nothing ; for both Being, which can be thought neither as" eternal 
nor as transitory, neither as one nor as manifold, and Non-being are 
conceptions that are in themselves contradictory. _If, however, 
there were anything, it would not be knowable ; for that which is 
thought is always something else than that which actually is, other 
wise they could not be distinguished. Finally, if there were knowl 
edge, it could not be taught ; forj^verjMme has only his own ideas, 
and in view of the difference between the thoughts and the signs 
which must be employed in their communication, there is no guar 
anty of "mutual understanding. 

This nihilism, to be sure, scarcely claimed to be taken in earnest ; 
even the title of the book, irtpl ^v crews rj irepl TOV p.rj OVTO? (Concern 
ing Nature, or concerning that which is not), appears like a 
grotesque farce. The Rhetorician, trained to formal dexterity, who 
despised all earnest science and pursued only his art of speaking, 3 
indulged in the jest of satirising as empty the entire labour of philos- 

1 Plat. Thecet. 201 E. Cf. Soph. 251 B. 

2 Extracts are found partly in the third chapter of the pseudo-Aristotelian 
treatise De Xenophane, Zenone, Gorgia (cf. p. 30), in part in Sext. Emp. VII. 
65-86. 

3 Plat. Me no. 95 C. 

CHAP. 2, 8.] Problem of Science : Protagoras. 91 

ophy, and doing this ironically in the styie of Zeno s pinching-mill 
of contradictions. V But just the facts that he did this, and that his 
work found applause, show how among the men who occupied them 
selves in instructing the people, and in the circles of scientific 
culture itself, faith in science was becoming lost at just the time 
when the mass of the people was seeking its welfare in it\J This 
despair of truth is the more comprehensible, as we see how the 
serious scientific investigation of Protagoras attained the same 
result. 

E. Laas, Idealismus und Positivismus. I. Berlin, 1880. 

W. llalbfass. Die Berichte de.s Platon und Aristoteles uber Protagoras. 
Strassb. 1882. 

Sattig, Der Protagoreische Sensualismus (Zeitschrift fiir Philosophic, vols. 
86-89). 

3. The germ of the doctrine of Protagoras is found in his effort 
to explain the ideas of the human mind psycho-genetically. Insight 
into the origin and development of ideas was absolutely necessary 
for the practical aspect of a, system of ethics, and particularly for 
the cultivation of rhetoric. The statements, however, which the 
metaphysicians had occasionally uttered, were in nowise sufficient 
for the purpose, constructed as they were from general presupposi 
tions and permeated by them ; on the contrary, the observations in 
physiological psychology which had been made in the more recent 
circles of investigators who were more given to natural science, 
offered themselves as fit for the purpose. _JThinking and perceiving 
had been set over against each other from Hie point of view of 
their relative worth ; this determining element now disappeared for 
Protagoras, and so there remained for him only the view of the 
psychological identity of thinking and perceiving, a view to which 
even those metaphysicians had committed themselves as soon as 
they attempted to explain ideation from the world-process (cf. 8). 
In coiis (|U(nice of this he declared that the entire psychical life con 
sists only in perceptions. 1 This sensualism was then illustrated by 
the great mass of facts which physiological psychology had assembled 
in connection with the teaching of the physicians that were scien 
tific investigators, and by the numerous theories which had been 
brought forward with special reference to the process of the action 
of the senses. 

^ All .tlieae^however, had in common the idea that perception rests 
in the last instance upon motion, as does every process by which 
things come to be or occur in the world. In this even Anaxagoras 

1 Diog. Laert. IX. 51. 

92 The Greeks: Anthropological Period. [PART!. 

,-uid Empedocles were at one with the Atomists, from whose school 
Protagoras, as a native of Abdera, had probably gone out. This 
agreement extended still farther to the assumption, made on all 
sides, that in perception there was not only a condition of motion 
in the thing to be perceived, but also a like condition in the percip 
ient organ. Whatever view might be taken as to the metaphysical 
essence of that which was there in motion, it seemed to be acknowl 
edged as undoubted that every perception presupposed this double 
motion. Empedocles had already anticipated the doctrine that the 
inner organic motion advances to meet the outer. 1 

On this foundation 2 the Protagorean theory of knowledge is built 
up. If, that is to say, perception is the product of these two motions 
directed toward one another, it is obviously something else than the 
perceiving subject, but just as obviously it is something else than the 
object ivhich calls forth the perception. Conditioned by both, it is yet 
different from both. This pregnant discovery is designated as the 
doctrine of the subjectivity of sense-perception. 

Nevertheless, in the case of Protagoras this appears with a peculiar 
restriction. Since, like all earlier thinkers, he evidently could not 
assume a consciousness without a corresponding existent content of 
consciousness, he taught that from this double motion there was a two 
fold result : viz. perception (atcr^T/cns) in the man, and content of per 
ception (TO alo-OrjTov) in the thing. Perception is therefore indeed 
the completely adequate knowledge of what is perceived, but no knowl 
edge of the thing. Every perception is then in so far true as, at 
the instant when it arises, there arises also in connection with the 
thing the represented content, as ala-Orjrov, but no perception knows 
the thing itself. Consequently every one knows things not as 
they are, but as they are in the moment of perception for him, and 
for him only ; and they are in this moment with reference to him 
sucTTas~he represents" them to himself. This is the meaning of the 
Protagorean relativism, according to which things are for every 
individual such as they appear to him ; and this he expressed in the 
famous proposition that man is the measure of all things. 

According to this, therefore, every opinion which grows out of per 
ception is true, and yet in a certain sense, just for this reason, it is 

1 Whether these two motions were already designated by Protagoras as active 
and passive (TTOLOVV and Trd&lt;rxov), as is the case in Plato s presentation (Thecet. 
156 A), may remain undecided. At all events, such anthropological categories in 
the mouth of the Sophist are not surprising. 

2 With regard to such preparatory ideas, there is no ground to trace this 
theory of the motions which advance to meet one another, to direct connection 
with Heraclitus. Its Heraclitean element, which Plato very correctly saw, was 
sufficiently maintained by those direct predecessors who reduced all Becoming 
and change to relations of motion. 

CHAP. 2, 8.] Problem of Science : Protagoras. 93 

also false. It is valid only for the one perceiving, and for him even 
only at the momerfTw hen it arises. All universal validity forsakes 
it. _And since, according to the view of Protagoras, there is no 
other kind of ideas, and therefore no other knowledge than percep 
tion, there is for human knowledge nothing whatever that is univer- 
sally valid. This view is phenomenalism in so far as it teaches in 
this entirely definite sense a knowledge of the phenomenon, limited 
to the individual and to the moment ; it is, however, scepticism in so 
far as it rejects all knowledge which transcends that. 

How far Protagoras himself drew practical consequences from this 
principle that every one s opinion is true for himself, we do not 
know. Later Sophists concluded that, according to this, error would 
not be possible; everything, and again nothing, belongs to everything 
as attribute. In particular they concluded that no actual contradic 
tion is possible ; for since every one talks about the content of his 
perception, different assertions can never have the same object. At 
all events, Protagoras refused to make any positive statement con 
cerning what is; he spoke not of the actual reality that moves, 
but only of motion, and of the phenomena which it produces for 
perception. 

Moreover, the attempt was now made, whether by Protagoras him 
self, or by the Sophistic activity dependent upon him, to trace dif 
ferences in perception, and so also in the phenomenon, back to 
differences in this motion. It was principally the velocity of the 
motion which was considered in this connection, though the form also 
was probably regarded. 1 i It is interesting to note further that under 
the concept of perceptioi^ not only sensations and perceptions, but 
also the sensuous feelings and desires, were subsumed ; it is note 
worthy especially because to these states also an alvOrjTov, a momen 
tary qualification of the thing which produced the perception, was 
held to correspond. The predicates of agreeableness and desir 
ability receive in this way the same valuation epistemologically 
as do the predicates of sensuous qualification. What appears 
agreeable, useful, and desirable to any one is agreeable, useful, 
and desirable for him. The individual state of consciousness is 
here, too, the measure of things, and no other universally valid 
determination of the worth of things exists. In this direction 
the Hedonism of Aristippus was developed out of the Protagorean 
doctrine ; we know, teaches Aristippus, not things, but only their 

1 Doubtless we have here asserting itself the development of the Pythagorean 
theory of knowledge out of the Atomistic school, to which this reduction of the 
qualitative to the quantitative was essential (cf. above, 5), even though the So 
phist declined from principle to enter into such metaphysical theories as Atomism. 

94 The Gf-reeks : Anthropological Period. [PART I. 

worth for us, and the states (irdOr)) into which they put us. These, 
however, are rest and indifference, violent motion and pain, or gentle 
motion and pleasure. Of these only the last is worth striving for 
(cf. above, 7,9). 

4. Thus all courses of Sophistic thought issued in giving up truth 
as unattainable. Socrates, however, needed truth, and on this account 
he believed that it was to be attained if it were honestly sought for. 
Virtue is knowledge; and since there must be virtue, there must be 
knowledge also. Here for the first time in history the moral con 
sciousness appears with complete clearness as an epistemoloyical 
postulate. Because morality is not possible without knowledge, 
there must be knowledge ; and if knowledge is not here and now 
existent, it must be striven for as the lover seeks for the possession 
of the loved object. Science is the yearning, struggling love for 
knowledge, : &lt;/&gt;tA.oo-o&lt;ia, philosophy (cf. Plat. Symp. 203 E). 

Out of this conviction grow all the peculiarities of the Jk&gt;cratic * 
doctrine of science, 2 and in the first place the bounds within Avhich 
he held knowledge to be necessary and therefore possible. It is 
only a knowledge of the relations of human life that is necessary 
for the ethical life ; only for these is a knowing necessary, and 
only for these is man s knowing faculty adequate. Hypotheses as 
to metaphysics and the philosophy of Nature have nothing to do 
with man s ethical task, and they are left unconsidered by Socrates, 
so much the rather as he shared the view of the Sophists that it 
was impossible to gain a sure knowledge concerning them. Science 
is possible only as practical insight, as knowledge of the ethical 
life. 

This view was formulated still more sharply by the Sophistic 
successors of Socrates under the influence of his eudsemonistic 
principle. For both Cynics and Cyrenaics science had worth only 
so far as it affords to man the right insight which serves to make 
him happy. With Antisthenes and Diogenes science was prized 
not in itself, but as a means for controlling the desires and for 
knowing man s natural needs ; the Cyrenaics said the causes of 
perception (TO. TreTrot^Kora TO. -rrdOrj) are for us as much matters of 
indifference as they are unknowable; knowledge which leads to 
happiness has to do only with our states, which we know with 
certainty. Indifference toward metaphysics and natural science 

1 Cf. Fr. Schleiermacher, Ueber den Werth des Sokrates als Philosophen (Ges. 
W. III., Bd. 2, pp. 287 ft). 

2 [ Wisse nschaft.ilf.hre. Wiasenschaft, "scientia," "science," has here both 
, its subjective and objective sense ; knowledge as mental act, and knowledge as 

a body of truth. Hence Wissenschaftslchre means both "doctrine of science," 
i.e. science of knowledge, and "scientific doctrine" i.e. philosophy. Tr.] 

CHAP. 2, 8.] Problem of Science : /Socrates. 95 

is with Socrates, as with the Sophists, the result of employment 
with the inner nature of man. 

5. It will remain a noteworthy fact for all time that a man who 
so narrowed for himself the intellectual horizon of scientific research 
as did Socrates, should yet determine within this the. essential 
nature of science itself, in a manner so clear and so authoritative 
for all the future. \ This achievement was due essentially to his 
opposition to the relativism of the Sophists, an opposition that was 
a matter both of instinct and of positive conviction. They taught 
that there are only opinions (8o cu) which hold good for individuals 
with psycho-genetic necessity ; he, however, sought a knoudedye that 
should be authoritative for all in like manner. In contrast with 
the change and multiplicity of individual ideas he demanded the 
one and abiding which all should acknowledge. He sought the 
logical " Nature " (cuW) as others had sought the cosmological 
or ethical "Nature" (of. 7, 1), and found it in the concept or 
general notion. Here, too, the view propounded was rooted in the 
demand, the theory in the postulate. 

The ancient thinkers, also, had had a feeling that the rational 
thinking to which they owed their knowledge was something essen 
tially other than the sensuous mode of apprehending the world in 
vogue in everyday life, or than traditional opinion ; but they had 
not been able to carry out this distinction in relative worth either 
psychologically or logically. Socrates succeeded in this because 
here, too, he defined the thing in question by the work which lie 
expected it to perform. The idea that is to be more than opinion, 
that is to serve as knowledge for all, must be what is common 
in all the particular ideas which have forced themselves upon 
individuals in individual relations : subjective universal validity is 
to be expected only for the objectively universal. Hence, if there is 
to be knowledge, it is to be found only in that in which all par 
ticular ideas agree. This universal in the object-matter which 
makes possible the subjective community of ideas is the concept 
(Adyos), and science [scientific knowledge] is accordingly conceptional 
thinkingj abstract thought. The universal validity which is 
claimed for knowledge is only possible on condition that the 
scientific concept brings out into relief the common element which 
is contained in all individual perceptions and opinions. 

Hence the goal of all scientific work is the determination of the 
essential nature of conceptions, definition. The aim of investiga- 
tion is to establish ri CKUO-TOV toy, what each thing is, and to come to 
ideas of an abiding nature as over against changing opinions. 

96 The G-reeks : Anthropological Period. [PART I. 

This doctrine was in some measure prepared for by the investigations of the 
Sophists concerning the meaning of words, synonyms, and etymological rela 
tions. In the latter respect, the hypotheses of the Sophists in the beginnings of 
the philosophy of language (cf. Plato s Cratylus) extended to the question 
whether a natural or only a conventional relation obtains between words and 
their meanings (&lt;wm y 06m)- Prodicus, whom Socrates mentions with com 
mendation, seems to have been specially successful in fixing the meanings of words. 

Among the later Sophists the Socratic demand for fixed conceptions became 
forthwith fused with the Eleatic metaphysics, and with its postulate of the iden 
tity of Being with itself. Euclid called virtue, or the good, the only Being : it 
remains the same, changeless in itself, and only the names by which men call 
it differ. Antisthenes, indeed, explained the concept by the definition that it 
is this which determines the timeless Being of the thing ; l but he conceived 
this identity of the existent with itself, raised above all relations, in so bold a 
manner that he thought of every truly existing entity as capable of being defined 
only through itself. Predication is impossible. There are none but analytic 
judgments (cf. above, No. 1). Accordingly only the composite can have its 
essential elements determined in conceptions ; the simple is not to be defined. 2 
There is, then, no possibility of understanding the simple by conceptions ; it can 
only be exhibited in a sensuous presentation. The Cynics came thus from the 
Socratic doctrine of the conception to a sensualism which recognised as simple 
and original only that which can be grasped with the hands and seen with the 
eyes, and this is the ground of their opposition to Plato. 

6. The searching out of conceptions (for his purpose, indeed, only 
ethical conceptions) was accordingly for Socrates the essence of 
science, and this determined in the first place the outer form of his 
philosophising. The conception was to be that which is valid for 
all : it must then be found in common thinking\ Socrates is neither 
a solitary hypercritic nor an instructor who teaches ex cathedra, but 
a man thirsting for the truth, as anxious to instruct himself as to 
teach others. His philosophy is a philosophy of the dialogue; it 
develops itself in conversation which he was ready to begin with 
every one who would talk with him. 3 To the ethical conceptions 
which he alone was seeking for, it was indeed easy to find access 
from any object whatever of everyday business. The common 
element must be found in the mutual exchange of thoughts ; the 
SiaAoyioyxo? was the way to the Ao yos. But this " conversation " 
encountered many difficulties : the inertia of the customary mode 
of thinking, the idle desire for innovation, and the paradoxical state 
ments which were characteristic of the Sophists, the pride belong 
ing to seeming knowledge and thoughtless imitation. Into such a 
condition of things Socrates made his entrance by introducing him 
self as one eager to learn. By skilful questions he drew out the 
views of others, disclosed the defects in these views with remorse 
less consistency, and finally led the Athenian, proud of his culture, 
into the state of mind where he recognised that insight into one s 

1 \67os tffrlv 6 rb ri T,V $ (&lt;rri dri\uv : Diog. Laert. VI. 3. 

2 Plat. Theoct. 202 B. 

8 This factor united with the influence of Zeno s dialectic to stamp upon the 
succeeding philosophical literature the form of the dialogue. 

CHAP. 2, 8.] Problem of Science : Socrates. 97 

own ignorance, is the beginning of all knowledge. Whoever stood 
this test and still remained with him was taken into partnership 
in a serious effort to determine, in common thinking, the essential 
meaning of conceptions. Undertaking the direction of the conver 
sation, Socrates brought his companion step by step to unfold his 
own thoughts in clearer, less contradictory statements, and so caused 
him to bring to definite expression what was slumbering in him as 
an imperfect presentiment. He called this his art of mental mid 
wifery, and that preparation for it his irony. 

1. fbe-maieutic method has, however, still another essential 
meaning. In the process of conversation the common rational 
quality comes to light, to which all parts are subject in spite of 
their diverging opinions. The conception is not to be made, it is 
to be found ; it is already there, it requires only to be delivered from 
the envelopes of individual experiences and opinions in which it 
lies hidden. The procedure of the Socratic formation of conceptions 
is, therefore, epagogic or inductive : it leads to the generic concep 
tion by the comparison of particular views and individual sensuous 
presentations ; it decides every individual question by seeking to 
press forward to determine a general conception. This is accom 
plished by bringing together analogous cases, and by searching 
out allied relations. The general conception thus gained is then 
employed to decide the special problem proposed, and this subordi- 
nation of the particular under the general is thus worked out as the 
fundamental relation of scientific knowledge. \ 

The inductive method of procedure as employed by Socrates, 
according to Xenophon and Plato, is, to be sure, still marked by a 
childlike simplicity and imperfection. It lacks as yet caution in 
generalisation and methodical circumspection in the formation of 
conceptions. The need for the general is so lively that it satisfies 
itself at once with hastily gathered material, and the conviction of 
the determining validity of the conception is so strong that the 
individual questions proposed are decided forthwith in accordance 
with it. { But however great the gaps may be in the arguments of 
Socrates, the significance of these arguments is by no means lessened. 
His doctrine of induction has its value not for methodology, but for 
logic, and for the theoi-y of knowledge. It fixes in a way that is 
decisive for all the future that it is the task of science to strive to 
establish general conceptions from comparison of facts. 

8. While Socrates thus defined the essential nature of science as 
conceptional thought, thinking in conceptions, he also fixed the 
bounds within which science can be employed: this task is, in his 
opinion, to be fulfilled only within the domain of practical life. 

93 The Grreeks : Anthropological Period. [PART I. 

Science is, as regards its form, the formation of conceptions, and as 
regards its content ethics. 

Meanwhile the whole mass of ideas concerning Nature and all the 
connected questions and problems still persist, and though for the most 
part they are a matter of indifference for the moral life, neverthe 
less they cannot be entirely put aside. But after Socrates renounced 
the task of attaining insight into such questions through conceptions, 
it was all the more possible for him to form an idea of the universe 
that should satisfy his scientifically grounded ethical needs. 

So it comes that Socrates puts aside, indeed, aU_ natural science, 
but at the same time professes a teleological view of Nature, which 
admires the wisdom in the arrangement of the world, the adaptation 
in things, 1 and which, where understanding ceases, trusts Providence 
in faith. With this faith Socrates kept himself as near as possible 
to the religious ideas of his people, and even spoke of a plurality of 
gods, although he indeed inclined to the ethical monotheism which 
was preparing in his time. But he did not come forward in such 
matters as a reformer : he taught morality, and if he expounded his 
own faith, he left that of others untouched. 

Out of this faith, however, grew the conviction with which he 
limited the rationalism of his ethics, his confidence in the Sai/xwov. 
The more he pressed toward clearness of conceptions and complete 
knowledge of ethical relations, and the more true to himself he was 
in this, the less could he hide from himself that man in his limita 
tion does not completely succeed in this task, that there are condi 
tions in which knowledge is not sufficient for certain decision, and 
where feeling enters upon its rights. Under such conditions Soc 
rates believed that he heard within himself the daimonion, a coun 
selling and for the most part warning voice. He thought that in 
this way the gods warned from evil in difficult cases, where his 
knowledge ceased, the man who otherwise served them. 

So the wise man of Athens set faith and feeling beside ethical 
science. 

1 It is not probable that Socrates experienced any strong influence from 
Anaxagoras in this respect, for the latter s teleology relates to the harmony of 
the stellar universe, not to human life, while the considerations which are 
ascribed to Socrates, especially by Xenophon, make utility for man the standard 
for admiration of the world. Much more closely related to Socratic faith are 
the religious views of the great poets of Athens, especially the tragedians. 

CHAPTER III. 

THE SYSTEMATIC PERIOD. 

THE third, completing period of Greek science harvested the fruit 
of the two preceding developments. It appears essentially as a 
reciprocal inter -penetration of co sinolog ical and anthropological bodies of 
thought. This union appears in but a very slight degree as a neces 
sity found in the nature of the case, still less as a demand of the 
time ; rather, it is m its essentials the work of great personalities 
and of the peculiar direction taken by their knowledge. 

The tendency of the time was rather toward a practical utilisa 
tion of science : it was in accord with this tendency when research 
separated into special investigations on mechanical, physiological, 
rhetorical, and political problems, and when scientific instruction 
accommodated itself to the ideas of the ordinary man. Not only for 
the mass of the people, but for scholars as well, general questions of 
cosmology had lost the interest which in the beginning was directed 
toward them, and the fact that they were sceptically abandoned 
because of the Sophistic theory of knowledge is nowhere presented 
in the form of renunciation or lamentation. 

If, therefore, Greek philosophy turned with renewed force from 
the investigation of human thinking and willing researches with 
which it had busied itself during the time of the Enlightenment 
back to the great problems of metaphysics, and reached its greatest 
height along this path, it owes this achievement to the personal 
thirst for knowledge on the part of the three great men who 
brought in this most valuable development of ancient thought, and 
stand as its representatives, Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle. 

The creations of these three heroes of Greek thought differ from the 
doctrines of all their predecessors by reason of their systematic char 
acter. Each of the three gave to the world an all-embracing system 
of science complete in itself. Their teachings gained this character, 
on the one hand, through the all-sidedness of their problems, and on 
the other, through the conscious unity in their treatment of them. 

While each of the earlier thinkers had seized upon but a limited 

100 The Philosophy of the Greeks. [PART!. 

circle of questions, and in like manner had shown himself informed 
only in certain departments of actual reality, while especially no 
one had as yet shown interest in both physical and psychological 
investigation, these three men directed their work in like measure 
to the entire compass of scientific problems. They brought together 
what experience and observation had won ; they examined and com 
pared the conceptions which had been formed from these, and they 
brought that which up to this time had been isolated, into fruitful 
union and relation. This all-sidedness of their scientific interest 
appears in the compass and varied character of their literary activ 
ity, and the great amount of material elaborated is in part explained 
only through the vigorous co-operation of their extended schools, in 
which a division of labour in accordance with inclination and endow 
ment was allowed. 

But this work thus shared in common did not result in a mass of 
unrelated material. This was guarded against by the fact that each 
of these three men undertook and conducted the working over of the 
entire material of knowledge with a unity of purpose and method 
derived from the principle which formed his fundamental thought. 
This, indeed, led at more than one point to a one-sided conception, 
and to a kind of violation of individual domains, and thereby to 
the inter-weaving of problems in ways which do not stand criticism. 
But on the other hand, just by means of the adjustment which must 
take place in this process between the forms of cognition in differ 
ent departments of knowledge, the formation of metaphysical concep 
tions was so furthered, abstract thought was so refined and deepened, 
that in the short time of scarcely two generations the typical out 
lines of three different conceptions of the world were worked out. 
Thus the advantages and the disadvantages of philosophical system- 
building appear in like measure in the case of these men of genius 
who were the first founders of systems. 

The systematising of knowledge so that it should become an all-in 
clusive philosophical doctrine was achieved with increasing success 
by Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle, and with the last first found 
the form of an organic articulation of science into the individual 
disciplines. With this Aristotle concluded the development of Greek 
philosophy and inaugurated the age of the special sciences. 

The course of this development was more particularly this : the 
two opposing systems of Democritus and Plato arose from the 
application to cosmological and metaphysical problems, of the prin 
ciples gained through the doctrines of the Sophists and of Socrates; 
from the attempt to reconcile these opposites proceeded the conclud 
ing doctrine of Aristotle. 

CHAP. 3.] The Systematic Period. 101 

The essential feature in the work of Democritus and Plato was 
that they used the insight into the theory of knowledge, gained by 
the philosophy of the Enlightenment, to ground metaphysics anew. 
Their common dependence upon the doctrines of the cosmological 
period and upon the Sophistic teaching, in particular upon the the 
ory of Protagoras, stamps upon the two doctrines a certain parallel 
ism and a partial relationship, a relationship the more interesting, 
the deeper the contrast between the two in other respects. This 
contrast, however, is due to the fact that the Socratic teaching had 
no effect upon Democritus, while its influence on Plato was decisive ; 
hence the ethical factor is as preponderant in the system of the latter 
as it is unimportant in that of the former. Thus in parallel lines from 
the same source developed the materialism of Democritus and the 
idealism of Plato. 

From this contrast is explained, too, the difference in their work 
ing. The purely theoretical conception of science which prevails 
with Democritus did not suit the age ; his school soon disappeared. 
Plato, on the contrary, whose scientific teaching furnished at the 
same time the basis for a principle of life, had the pleasure of form 
ing in the Academy fin extensive and lasting school. But this school, 
the so-called Older Academy, following the general tendency of the 
time, soon ran out partly into special investigation, partly into pop 
ular moralising. 

Out of it rose then the great form of Aristotle, the most influential 
thinker that history has seen. The powerful concentration with 
which he caused the entire content of thought in Greek science to 
crystallise about the conception of development (eVrcXexeta) in order 
to adjust the opposition discovered between his two great predeces 
sors, made him the philosophical teacher of the future, and his system 
the most perfect expression of Greek thought. 

Democritus of Abdera (about 460-360) was educated in the scientific asso 
ciation of his home and by journeys lasting many years, led the life of a quiet, 
unassuming investigator in his native city during the turmoil of the Sophistic 
period, and remained far from the noisy activity of Athens. He did not impart 
any special ability, political or otherwise, by his teaching, but was essentially 
disposed to theoretical thought, and particularly inclined to the investigation of 
Nature. With gigantic learning and comprehensive information he united great 
clearness of abstract thought and apparently a strong inclination to simplify prob 
lems schematically. The number of his works proves that he stood at the head 
of an extended school, of which some unimportant names are preserved, yet 
nothing is more characteristic of the way in which his age turned aside from 
research that was not interesting to it than the indifference with which his sys 
tem of the mechanical explanation of Nature was met. His doctrine was forced 
into the background for two thousand years by the teleological systems, and 
prolonged its existence only in the Epicurean school, while even there it was not 
understood. 

Antiquity honoured Democritus as a great writer also, and for this reason the 
almost complete loss of his works is all the more to be lamented, as aside from 

102 The Philosophy of the Greeks. [PART L 

the numerous titles only very unimportant and in part doubtful fragments are 
extant. The most important writings seem to have been, theoretically, the Mfyas 
and Mtfcpos Sid/oxr/nos, Trepi vov and Trepi ideCiv ; practically, Trepi evOv/jil-ijs and viroOi)- 
KO.I. W. Kahl (Diedenhofen, 1889) has begun to work through the sources 
which had been collected by W. Burchard (Minden, 1830 and 1834) and Lort- 
zing (Berlin, 18/3). P. Natorp has edited the Ethics (Leips. 1893). 

Cf. P. Natorp, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Erkenntnissproblems im Alter- 
thum (Berlin, 1884); G. Hart, Zur Seelen- und Erkenntnisslehre des Demokrit 
(Leips. 1880). 

Plato of Athens (427-347), of distinguished family, had most successfully 
assimilated the artistic and scientific culture of his time when the personality of 
Socrates made so decisive an impression upon him that he abandoned his at 
tempts at poetry and devoted himself entirely to the society of the master. He 
was his truest and most intelligent, and yet at the same time his most indepen 
dent disciple. The execution of Socrates occasioned his acceptance of Euclid s 
invitation to Megara ; then he journeyed to Gyrene and Egypt, returned for a 
time to Athens, and here began to teach through his writings, and perhaps also 
orally. About 390 we find him in Magna Grsecia and Sicily, where he became 
connected with the Pythagoreans and took part also in political action. This 
brought him into serious danger at the court of the ruler of Syracuse, the elder 
Dionysius, whom he sought to influence with the help of his friend Dion ; he 
was delivered as prisoner of war to the Spartans and ransomed only by the help 
of a friend. This attempt at practical politics in Sicily was twice repeated later 
(367 and 361), but always with unfortunate results. 

After the first Sicilian journey, he founded his school in the grove Akademos, 
and soon united about him a great number of prominent men for the purpose 
of common scientific work. Yet the bond of this society was to be sought still 
more in a friendship based upon community of ethical ideals. His teaching 
activity at the beginning had, like that of Socrates, that character of a common 
search for truth which finds expression in the dialogue. It was not until his 
old age that it took on more the form of the didactic lecture. 

This life finds its aesthetic and literary embodiment in Plato s works, 1 in which 
the process itself of philosophising is set forth with dramatic vividness and 
plastic portraiture of personalities and their views of life. As works of art, the 
Symposium and the Phcedo are most successful ; the grandest impression of 
the system, as a whole, is afforded by the Republic. With the exception of the 
Apology of Socrates, the form is everywhere that of the dialogue. Yet the 
artistic treatment suffers in Plato s old age, and the dialogue remains only as 
the schematic setting of a lecture, as in the Timceus and the Laws. For the 
most part, Socrates leads the conversation, and it is into his mouth that Plato 
puts his own decision when he comes to one. Exceptions to this are not found 
until in the latest writings. 

The mode of presentation is also on the whole more artistic than scientific. It 
exhibits extreme vividness and plasticity of imagination in perfect language, but 
no strictness in separating problems or in methodical investigation. The con 
tents of any individual dialogue is to be designated only by the prominent sub 
ject of inquiry. Where abstract presentation is not possible or not in place 
Plato takes to his aid the so-called myths, allegorical presentations which utilise 
motives from fables and tales of the gods in free, poetic form. 

The transmission of his works is only in part certain, and it is just as doubtful 
in what order they originated and what relation they bear to one another. 

The following are among the most important names of those who have worked 
over these questions since Schleiermacher in his translation (Berlin, 1804 ff.) 
gave an impulse in that direction: J. Socher (Munich, 1820), C. Fr. Hermann 

1 Translated into German by Hier. Miiller, with introductions by K. Steinhart. 
8 vols. Leips. 1850-1866. As ninth volume of the series Platan s Leben, by 
K. Steinhart. Leips. 1873. [English by Jowett, third ed. 5 vols. Oxford, 
1893.] Among more recent editions, in which the paging of that of Stephanus 
(Paris, 1578), employed in citations, is always repeated, are to be noted those 
of J. Bekker (Berlin, 1816 f.), Stallbaum (Leips. 1850), Schneider and 
Hirschig (Paris: Didot, 1846 ff.), M. Schanz (Leips. 1875 ff.). 

CHAP. 3.] The Systematic Period. 103 

(Heidelberg, 1839), E. Zeller (Tiibingen, 1839), Fr. Suckow (Berlin, 1855), 
Fr. Susemihl (Berlin, 1855-50), E. Munk (Berlin, 1880), Fr. Ueberweg (Vienna, 
1801), K. Sehaarschmidt (Bonn, 1800), H. Bonitz (Berlin, 1875), G. Ttich- 
miiller (Gotha, 1870; Leipsic, 1879; Breslau, 1881), A. Krohn (Halle, 1878), W. 
Dittenberger (in Hermes, 1881), H. Siebeck (Freiburg i. B. 188!)). [H. Jack 
son in Jour. Phil., X., XL, and XIII. ; Archer-Hind s editions of Phcedo and 
TimaKus; reviewed critically by P. Shorey in Am. Jour. Philol, IX. and X.] 

[On Plato s philosophy, in addition to the above, W. Pater, Plato and Platon- 
ism (Lond. and N.Y. 1893) ; J. Martineau, in Types of Ethical 1 heorij (Lond. 
and N.Y. 1880), also in Essays; Art. Plato in Ettc. Brit., by L. Campbell ; K. L. 
Nettleship, The Theory of Education in P. s Hep., in Hellenica ; J. S. Mill in 
Essays and Discussions.] 

The writings which are considered genuinely Platonic are (a) youthful works, 
which scarcely go beyond the Socratic standpoint : Apology, Crito, Euthyphro, 
Lysis, Laches (perhaps also Charmides, Hippias Minor, and Alcibiades, I.) ; 
(b) writings to establish his position with regard to the Sophistic doctrines: 
Protagoras, Gorgias, Euthydemus, Cratylus, Meno, Thewtetus ; (c) main works 
intended to present his own doctrine : Phoidrus, Symposium, Ph&do, Philebus, 
ami t .ie Republic, whose working out, begun early and completed in successive 
strata, as it were, extended into the last years of the Philosopher s life ; (rf) the 
writin ;s of his old age : Timwus, the Laws, and the fragment of Critias. Among 
the doubtful writings the most important are the Sophist, J olitictts, and Par- 
menides. These probably did not originate with Plato, but with men of his 
school who were closely related with the Eleatic dialectic and eristic. The first 
two are by the same author. 

Cf. II. v. Stein, Sicben Bncher zur Geschichte des Platonismus (Gottingen, 
1801 ff.); G. Grote, Plato and the Other Companions of Socrates (Lond. 1805); 
A. K. Chaignet, La vie et les ecrits de Platon (Paris, 1873); E. Heitz, (0. Mullens 
Gesch. d -r griech. Lit., 2. Aufl., II. 2, 148-#55). 

Plato s school is called the Academy, and the time of its development, which 
reaches to the end of ancient thought, and which was aided by the continued 
possession of the academic grove and the gymnasium existing there, is usually 
divided into three or five periods : (1) the Older Academy, Plato s most imme 
diate circle of scholia and the succeeding generations, extending to about 200 
.c.; (2) the Middle Academy, which took a sceptical direction, and in which 
an older school of Arcesilaas and a younger school of Carneades (about 100) are 
distinguished ; (3) the New Academy, which with Philo of Larissa (about 100) 
turned back to the old dogmatism, and with Antiochus of Ascalon (about twenty- 
five years later) turned into the paths of Eclecticism. Concerning the two (or 
four) later forms cf. Part II. ch. 1. Later the Is eo-Platonic school took posses 
sion of the Ar-ademy. Cf. Part II. ch. 2. 

To the Oldsr Academy belonged men of great erudition and honourable per 
sonality. The heads of the school were Speusippus, the nephew of Plato, 
Xenocrates of Chalcedon, Polerno and Crates of Athens ; beside these, 
Philip of Opus and Heracleides from Pontic Heraclea are to be mentioned 
among the older, and Grantor among the younger members. Less closely 
related with the school were the astronomers Eudoxus of Cnidos and the 
Pythagorean Archytas of Tarentum. H. Heinze, Xenocrates (Leips. 1892). 

Aristotle of Stagira towers far above all his associates in the Academy 
(384-322). As son of a Macedonian physician, he brought with him an inclina 
tion toward medical and natural science, when, at eighteen years of age, he 
entered the Academy, in which as literary supporter and also as teacher, at first 
of rhetoric, he early played a comparatively independent part, without acting 
contrary to a feeling of reverent subordination to the master, by so doing. 
It was not until after Plato s death that he separated himself externally from the 
Academy, visiting, with Xenocrates, his friend Hermias, the ruler of Atarneusand 
Assus in Mysia, whose relative Pythias he afterwards married. After an appar 
ently transient stay at Athens and Mitylene, he undertook, at the wish of Philip 
of Maeedon, the education of the latter s son Alexander, and conducted it for 
about three years with the greatest results. After this, he lived for some years 
in his native city, pursuing scientific studies with his friend Theophrastus, and 
together with him, in the year 335, founded in Athens his own school, which 
had its seat in the Lyceum, and (probably on account of its shady walks) was 
called the Peripatetic School. 

104 The Greeks: Systematic Period. [[ ART I. 

After twelve years of the greatest activity, he left Athens on account of 
political disturbances and went to Chalcis, where he died in the following year, 
of a disease of the stomach. Cf. A. Stahr, Aristotelia, I. (Halle, 1830). 

Of the results of the extraordinarily comprehensive literary activity of Aris 
totle only the smallest part, but the most important part from the point of view 
of science, is extant. The dialogues published by himself, which in the eyes of 
the ancients placed him on a level with Plato as an author also, are lost with the 
exception of a few fragments, and so also are the great compilations which with 
the aid of his scholars he prepared for the different branches of scientific knowl 
edge. Only his scientific didactic writings, which were designed as text-books 
to be made the foundation of lectures in the Lyceum, are extant. The plan of 
execution in his works varies greatly ; in many places there are only sketchy 
notes, in others complete elaborations ; there are also different revisions of the 
same sketch, and it is probable that supplementary matter by different scholars 
has been inserted in the gaps of the manuscripts. Since the first complete edi 
tion prepared in ancient times (as it appears, on the occasion of a new discovery 
of original manuscripts) by Andronicus of Rhodes (60-50 B.C.) did not separate 
these parts, many critical questions are still afloat concerning it. 

Cf. A. Stahr, Aristotelia, II. (Leips. 1832); V. Rose (Berlin, 1854); H. Bonitz 
(Vienna, 1802 ff.); .1. Bernays (Berlin, 1863); E. Heitz (Leips. 1865 and in the 
second ed. of O. Mliller s Gesch. der griech. Lit., II. 2, 236-321); E. Vahlen 
(Vienna, 1870 ff.). 

This text-book collection, 1 as it were, is arranged in the following manner: 
(a) Logical treatises : the Categories, on the Proposition, on Interpretation, 
the Analytics, the Topics including the book on the Fallacies brought together 
by the school as "Oryanon" ; (b) Theoretical Philosophy : Fundamental Science 
(Metaphysics), the Physics, the History of Animals, and the Psychology ; to the 
three last are attached a number of separate treatises ; (c) Practical Philosophy: 
the Ethics in the Nicomachean and Eudemian editions and the Politics (which 
likewise is not complete) ; (d) Poietical or Poetical Philosophy : the Rhetoric 
and the Poetic. 

Fr. Biese, Die Philosophic des Aristoteles (2 vols., Berlin, 1835-42); A. 
Rosmini-Serbati, Aristote.le. Exposto ed Esaminato (Torino, 1858); G. II. Lewes, 
Aristotle, a Chapter from the History of Science (Lond. 1864) ; G. Grote, 
Aristotle (published from his literary remains, Lond. 1872). 

[Trans, of the Psychology by E. Wallace (Camb. 1882) ; of the Ethics, by 
Peters (Lond. 1881), Welldon (Lond. and N.Y.), Williams (Lond. 1876), Chase 
(Lond. 1877), Hatch (Lond. 1879); of the Poetics, by Wharton (Camb. 1883) ; of 
the Politics, by Welldon (Camb. 1888), Jowett (2 vols., Oxford, 1885-88) ; of 
the Rhetoric, by Welldon (Lond. and N.Y. 1886) ; also tr. of all of the above and 
of the Metaphysics, Organon, and History of Animals in the Bohn Library. 
Editions of the Politics with valuable introduction by Newman (Oxford, 1887, 
2 vols.); of the Ethics, by A. Grant. Cf. also Art. in Enc. Brit., Aristotle by 
A. Giant; T. II. Green in Works; A. C. Bradley, ASs Theory of the State, in 
Hellenica. E. Wallace, Outlines of ASs Phil, is convenient for the student.] 

9. Metaphysics grounded anew in Epistemology and Ethics. 

The great systematisers of Greek science exercised a swift but 
just criticism upon the Sophistic doctrine. They saw at once that 
among the doctrines of the Sophists but a single one possessed the 
worth of lasting validity and scientific fruitfulness the perception 
theory of Protagoras. 

1 Of the newer editions, that of the Berlin Academy (J. Bekker, Brandis, 
Rose, Usener, Bonitz), 5 vols., Berlin, 1831-70, is made the basis of citations. 
The Parisian edition (Didot) is also to be noticed (Diibner, Bussemaker, Heitz) 
5 vols., Paris, 1848-74. 

CHAP. :i, !).] The New Metaphysics. 105 

1. This, therefore, became the starting-point for Democritus and 
for Plato ; and both adopted it in order to transcend it and attack 
the consequences which the Sophist had drawn from it. Both admit 
that perception, as being itself only a product of a natural process, 
can be the knowledge of something only which likewise arises and 
passes away as transitory product of the same natural process. 
Perception then gives only opinion (Soa) ; it teaches what appears 
in and for human view (called I/O/AW in Democritus with a genuine 
Sophistic mode of expression), not what truly or really (CTC^ with 
Democritus, OVTWS with Plato) is. 

For Protagoras, who regarded perception as the only source of 
knowledge, there was consequently no knowledge of what is. That 
he took the farther step of denying Being altogether and declaring 
the objects of perception to be the sole reality, behind which there 
is no Being to be sought for, this "positivist" conclusion is not 
to be demonstrated in his case : the doctrine of "nihilism" (" there 
is no Being ") is expressly ascribed by tradition only to Gorgias. 

If, nevertheless, from any grounds whatever, a universally valid 
knowledge (71/170-117 yvw/AT? with Democritus, firuTTrjfirj with Plato) was 
to be again set over against opinions, the sensualism of Protagoras 
must be abandoned and the position of the old metaphysicians, who 
distinguished thought (oieivoia), as a higher and better knowledge, 
from perception, must be taken again (cf. 6). Thus Democritus 
and Plato both in like manner transcend Protagoras by acknowledg 
ing the relativity of perception, and looking to "thought" again for 
knowledge of what truly is. Both are outspoken rationalists. 1 

2. This new metaphysical rationalism is yet distinguished from 
the older rationalism of the cosmological period, not only by its 
broader psychological basis, which it owed to the Protagorean 
analysis of perception, but also in consequence of this, by another 
valuation of perception itself from the standpoint of the theory of 
knowledge. The earlier metaphysicians, where they could not fit 
the contents of perception into their conceptional idea of the world, 
had simply rejected them as deceit and illusion. Now this illusion 
had been explained (by Protagoras), but in such a way that while 
surrendering its universal validity the content of perception might 
yet claim at least the value of a transient and relative reality. 

This, in connection with the fact that scientific knowledge was 

1 Cf. Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. VIII. 50. The doctrine of Democritus with 
regard to "genuine " knowledge is most shaiply formulated in Sext. Emp. Adv. 
Math. VII. 139. Plato s attack upon the Protagorean sensualism is found prin 
cipally in the Thecetetus, his positive rationalistic attitude in the Phaedrus, Sym 
posium, Republic, and Phcedo. 

106 The Greeks: Systematic Period. [PART I. 

directed toward the abiding " true " Being, led to a division in the 
conception of reality, and with this the fundamental need of explana 
tory thought came to clear, explicit consciousness, a need which 
unconsciously lay at the basis of the beginnings of science. To the 
two kinds of knowledge so Democritus and Plato taught cor 
respond two different kinds of reality: to perception a changing, 
relative, transient reality or actuality ; to thought a reality homo 
geneous, absolute and abiding. For the former Democritus seems 
to have introduced the expression phenomena; Plato designates it 
as the world of generation, yeVe&lt;m : the other kind of reality Democ 
ritus calls TO, iTtfj VTa &gt; Plato, TO OVTWS 6V or ova-La [that which really 
is, or essence]. 

In this way perception and opinion gain a correctness which is 
analogous to that of scientific thought. Perception cognises chang 
ing reality as thought cognises abiding reality. To the two modes 
of cognition correspond two domains of reality. 1 

But between these two domains there exists for this reason the 
same relation, as regards their respective values, as obtains between 
the two kinds of cognition. By as much as thought, the universally 
valid act of consciousness, is above perception, the knowledge valid 
only for individuals and for the particular, by so much is the true 
Being higher, purer, more primitive, raised above the lower actuality 
of phenomena and the changing processes and events among them. 
This relation was especially emphasised and carried out by Plato 
for reasons hereafter to be unfolded. But it appears also with Democ 
ritus, not only in his theory of knowledge, but also in his ethics. 

In this way the two metaphysicians agree with the result which 
the Pythagoreans (cf. o, 7, and 6, 1) had likewise won from 
their premises, viz. the distinction of a higher and lower kind of 
reality. Nevertheless, in the presence of this similarity we are not 
to think of a dependence ; in nowise in the case of Democritus, 
who was a complete stranger to the astronomical view of the Pythag 
oreans, and scarcely in the case of Plato, who indeed later adopted 
the astronomical theory, but whose idea of the higher reality (the 
doctrine of Ideas) has an entirely different content. The case 
rather is that the common, fundamental motive which came from 
the conception of Being propounded by Parmenides, led in these 
three quite different forms to the division of the world into a 
sphere of higher and one of lower reality. 

3. The pragmatic parallelism in the motives of the two opposed 
systems of Democritus and Plato reaches a step farther, although 

1 Best formulated in Plat., Tim. 27 D ff., especially 29 C. 

CHAP. 3, !).] The New Metaphysics : Democritus, Plato. 107 

but a short step. To the world of perception belong, without doubt, 
the specific qualities of the senses, for these disclose their relativity 
in the fact that the same thing appears differently to different senses. 
But after we have abstracted these qualities, that which remains as 
an object for the knowledge of the truly actual, is primarily the 
form which things have, and both thinkers designated as the true 
essential nature of things the pure/orms (i8u). 

But it almost seems as though here they had nothing in common 
but the name, striking as this fact is ; for if Democritus understood 
by the i8u, which he also called o^ /Aura, his atom-forms, while 
Plato understood by his iSu or db-q the conceptions corresponding 
to logical species (Gattungsbegrijfe), then the apparently like state 
ment that the truly existent consists in " forms " has a completely 
different meaning in the two authors. For this reason we must 
here, too, remain in doubt as to whether we should see a parallel 
dependence upon Pythagoreanism, which, to be sure, had previously 
found the essence of things in mathematical forms, and whose influ 
ence upon the two thinkers may be assumed without encountering 
any difficulties in the assumption itself. At all events, however, if 
a common suggestion was present, it led to quite different results in 
the two systems before us, and though in both of them knowledge 
of mathematical relations stands in very close relation to knowledge 
of true reality, these relations are yet completely different with the 
respective thinkers. 

4. The relationship thus far unfolded between the two rational 
istic systems changes now suddenly to a sharp opposition as soon as 
we consider the motives from which the two thinkers transcended 
the Protagorean sensualism and relativism, and observe also the 
consequences which result therefrom. Here the circumstance be 
comes of decisive importance, that Plato ivas the disciple of Socrates, 
while Democritus experienced not even the slightest influence from 
the great Athenian sage. 

With Democritus the demand which drives him to transcend the 
position of Protagoras grows solely out of his theoretical need and 
develops according to his personal nature, the demand, namely, 
that there is a knowledge, and that this, if it is not to be found in 
perception, must be sought for in thought ; the investigator of Nat 
ure believes, as against all the Sophistic teaching, in the possibility 
of a theory that shall explain phenomena. Plato, on the contrary, 
sets out with his postulate of the Socratic conception of virtue. 
Virtue is to be gained only through right knowledge ; knowledge, 
however, is cognition of the true Being: if, then, this is not to be 
found in perception, it must be sought for through thought. For 

108 The Greeks : Systematic Period. [PAHT I. 

Plato philosophy grows, according to the Socratic principle, 1 out of 
the ethical need. But while the Sophistic friends of Socrates were 
endeavouring to give to the knowledge that constituted virtue some 
object in the form of a general life-purpose, the good, pleasure, etc., 
Plato wins his metaphysical position with one stroke, by drawing 
the inference that this knowledge in which virtue is to consist must 
be the cognition of what is truly real, the ovcno, as opposed to 
opinions which relate to the relative. In his case the knowledge 
in which virtue is to consist demands a metaphysics. 

Here, then, the ways are already parting. Knowledge of the 
truly real was for Democritus, as for the old metaphysicians, 
essentially an idea of the unchangeably abiding Being, but an idea 
by means of which it should be possible to understand the 
derivative form of reality which is cognised in perception. His 
rationalism amounted to an explanation of phenomena, to be gained 
through thought; it was essentially theoretical rationalism. For 
Plato, on the contrary, knowledge of the truly real had its ethical 
purpose within itself; this knowledge was to constitute virtue, and 
hence it had no other relation to the world given through per 
ception than that of sharply defining its limits. True Being has 
for Dernocritus the theoretical value of explaining phenomena; for 
Plato, the practical value of being the object of that knowledge 
which constitutes virtue. His doctrine is, as regards its original 
principle, essentially ethical rationalism. 

Democritus, therefore, persevered in the work undertaken in the 
school of Abdera, the construction of a metaphysics of Nature. 
With the help of the Sophistic psychology he developed Atomism 
to a comprehensive system. Like Leucippus, he regarded empty 
space and the atoms moving in it as the true reality. He then 
attempted not only to explain from the motion of these atoms 
all qualitative phenomena of the corporeal world as quantitative 
phenomena, but also to explain from these motions all mental 
activities, including that knowing activity which is directed 
toward true Being. Thus he created the system of materialism. 

Plato, however, was led to the entirely opposite result by his 
attachment to the Socratic doctrine, which proved to be of decisive 
importance for his conception of the essential nature of science. 

5. Socrates had taught that knowledge consists in general concep 
tions. If, however, this knowledge, in contrast with opinions, was 
to be knowledge of what truly, actually is, there must belong to the 
content of these conceptions that higher Being, that true essential 

1 Set forth most clearly in the Meno, 96 ff. 

CHAP. 3, 10.] $ystem of Materialism : Democritus. 109 

reality which, it was held, could be grasped only by thought, in 
contrast with perception. The "forms" of true reality, knowledge 
of which constitutes virtue, are the species or class-concepts (Gattungs- 
begrijfe), uSrj. With this consideration, the Platonic conception of 
the "Idea" first gains its complete determination. 

So understood, Plato s doctrine of Ideas presents itself as the 
summit of Greek philosophy. In it are combined all the different 
lines of thought which had been directed toward the physical, the 
ethical, the logical first principle (apx*l or &lt;w). The Platonic 
Idea, the species or class-concept, is firstly the abiding Being in the 
change of phenomena; secondly, the object of knowledge in the 
change of opinions ; thirdly, the true end in the change of desires. 

But this ovo-t a, from the nature of its definition, is not to be found 
within the sphere of what may be perceived, and everything cor 
poreal is capable of being perceived. The Ideas are then something 
essentially different from the corporeal world. True reality is 
incorporeal. The division in the conception of reality takes on 
accordingly a fixed form ; the lower reality of natural processes or 
generation (yeveo-is), which forms the object of perception, is the 
corporeal world ; the higher reality of Being, which thought knows, 
is the incorporeal, the immaterial world, TOTTOS vo^rds. Thus the 
Platonic system becomes immaterialism, or, as we call it after the 
meaning given by him to the word "Idea," Idealism. 

6. In the Platonic system, accordingly, we find perhaps the most 
extensive interweaving and complication of problems which history 
has seen. The doctrine of Democritus, on the contrary, is ruled 
throughout by the one interest of explaining Nature. However 
rich the results which this latter doctrine might achieve for this 
its proper end, results which could be taken up again in a later, 
similarly disposed condition of thought, and then first unfold their 
whole fruitfulness, at first the other doctrine must surpass this, 
all the more in proportion as it satisfied all needs of the time and 
united within itself the entire product of earlier thought. More 
points of attack for immanent criticism are perhaps offered by the 
Platonic system than by that of Democritus ; but for Greek thought 
the latter was a relapse into the cosmology of the first period, and 
it was Plato s doctrine that must become the system of the future. 

10. The System of Materialism. 

The systematic character of the doctrine of Democritus consists 
in the way in which he carried through in all departments of his 
work the fundamental thought, that scientific theory must so far 

110 The Greeks : Systematic Period. [PART I. 

gain knowledge of the true reality, i.e. of the atoms and their 
motions in space, as to be able to explain from them the reality 
which appears in phenomena, as this presents itself in perception. 
There is every indication (even the titles of his books would show 
this) that Democritus took up this task by means of investigations 
covering the entire compass of the objects of experience, and in this 
connection devoted himself with as great an interest to the psy 
chological as to the physical problems. So much the more must we 
regret that the greater part of his teachings has been lost, and 
that what is preserved, in connection with accounts of others, 
permits only a hypothetical reconstruction of the main conceptions 
of his great work, a reconstruction which must always remain 
defective and uncertain. 

1. It must be assumed in the first place that Democritus was 
fully conscious of this task of science, viz. that of explaining the 
world of experience through conceptions of the true reality. That 
which the Atomists regard as the Existent, viz. space and the par 
ticles whirring in it, has no value except for theoretical purposes. 
It is only thought in order to make intelligible what is perceived ; 
but for this reason the problem is so to think the truly real that 
it may explain the real which appears in phenomena, that at the 
same time this latter reality may " remain preserved" 1 as some 
thing that " is " in a derived sense, and that the truth which inheres 
in it may remain recognised. Hence Democritus knew very well 
that thought also must seek the truth in perception, and win it out 
of perception. 2 His rationalism is far removed from being in con 
tradiction with experience, or even from being strange to experience. 
Thought has to infer from perception that by means of which the 
latter is explained. The motive which lay at the foundation of 
the mediating attempts following the Eleatic paradox of acosmism 
became with Democritus the clearly recognised principle of meta 
physics and natural science. Yet tmfortunately nothing is now 
known as to how he carried out in detail the methodical relation 
between the two modes of cognition, and how the process by which 
knowledge grows out of perception in the particular instance was 
thought by him. 

More particularly, the theoretical explanation which Democritus 

1 The very happy expression for this is duurdfciv TO. &lt;t&gt;a.Lvt&gt;iteva. Cf. also Arist. 
Gen. et Corr. I. 832, 5 a. 

2 Hence, the expressions in which he recognised the truth in the phenome 
non ; e.g. Arist. De An. I. 2, 404 a 27, and the like. To attempt, however, to 
construe out of this a " sensualism" of Democritus, as has been attempted by 
E. Johnson (Plauen, 1868), contradicts completely the accounts with regard to 
his attitude toward Protagoras. 

CHAP. 3, 10.] System of Materialism : Democritus. Ill 

gave for the contents of perception consists, as with Leucippus, in 
the reduction of all phenomena to the mechanics of atoms. What 
appears in perception as qualitatively determined, and also as in 
volved in qualitative change (dAAoiou/xe/xov), exists "in truth" only 
as a quantitative relation of the atoms, of their order, and their 
motion. The task of science is then to reduce all qualitative to 
quantitative relations, and to show in detail what quantitative rela 
tions of the absolute reality produce the qualitative characteristics 
of the reality which appears in phenomena. Thus, the prejudice in 
favour of what may be perceived or imaged (anschaulich), as if spatial 
form and motion were something simpler, more comprehensible in 
themselves, and less of a problem than qualitative character and 
alteration, is made the principle for the theoretical explanation of 
the world. 

Since this principle is applied with complete systematic rigour 
to the whole of experience, Atomism regards the psychical life with 
all its essential elements and values as also a phenomenon, and the 
form and motion of the atoms which constitute the true Being of 
this phenomenon must be stated by the explanatory theory. Thus 
matter in its form and motion is regarded as that which alone is 
truly real, and the entire mental or spiritual life as the derived, 
phenomenal reality. With this the system of Democritus first 
assumes the character of conscious, outspoken materialism. 

2. In the properly physical doctrines, the teaching of Democritus 
presents, therefore, no change in principle as compared with that of 
Leucippus, though there is a great enrichment by careful detailed 
investigation. He emphasised still more sharply than his predeces 
sor, where possible, the thought of the mechanical necessity (dvay*^ 
which he also occasionally called Aoyos), in accordance with which 
all occurrence or change whatever takes place, and further defined 
this thought as involving that no operation of atoms upon one 
another is possible except through impact, through immediate con 
tact, and further, that this operation consists only in the change of 
the state of motion of the atoms which are also unchangeable as 
regards their form. 

The atom itself as that which " is," in the proper sense of the 
word, has accordingly only the characteristics of abstract corpore 
ality, viz. the filling of a limited space, and the quality of being 
in motion in the void. Although all are imperceptibly small, they 
yet exhibit an endless variety of forms (iSe cu or a-xrj^ra). To form, 
which constitutes the proper fundamental difference in the atoms, 
belongs in a certain sense also size ; yet it is to be observed that 
the same stereometrical form, e.y. the sphere, may appear in different 

112 The G-reeks : Systematic Period. [PART I. 

sizes. The larger the atom, the greater its mass ; for the essential 
quality of what is, is indeed materiality, space-claiming. For this 
reason Democritus asserted weight or lightness to be a function of 
size, 1 evidently yielding to the mechanical analogies of daily life. 
In connection with these terms (fiapv and KOU&lt;OV), however, we are 
not to think of the falling motion, but solely of the degree of mechani 
cal movability or of inertia. 2 Hence it was also his opinion that as 
the atom-complexes whirled about, the lighter parts were forced out 
ward, while the more inert with their inferior mobility were gath 
ered in the middle. 

The same properties communicate themselves as metaphysical 
qualities to things which are composed of atoms. The form and 
size of things is produced by the simple summation of the form and 
size of the component atoms ; though in this case, the inertia is not 
dependent solely upon the sum total of the magnitudes of the atoms, 
but upon the greater or less amount of empty space that remains 
between the individual particles when they are grouped together. 
The inertia depends therefore upon the less or greater degree of 
density. And since the ease with which particles may be displaced 
with reference to one another depends upon this interruption of the 
mass by empty space, the properties of hardness and softness belong 
also to the true reality that is known by thought. 

All other properties, however, belong to things not in them 
selves, but only in so far as motions proceeding from things act 
upon the organs of perception ; they are " states of perception as it 
is in process of qualitative change." But these states are also 
conditioned throughout by the things in which the perceived prop 
erties appear, and here the arrangement and the situation which the 
atoms have taken with reference to each other in the process of 
composition are of principal importance. 3 

While, then, form, size, inertia, density, and hardness are properties 
of things eTefl, i.e. in truth, all that is perceived in them by the indi 
vidual senses as colour, sound, smell, taste, exists only vo/x,o&gt;or 0eW, 
i.e. in the phenomenon. This doctrine, when taken up anew in the 
philosophy of the Kenaissance (cf. Part IV. ch. 2) and later, was 

1 As the most extensive exposition for this and for the following topic The- 
ophr. De Sens. 61 ff. (Dox. D. 516) is to be compared. 

2 It is scarcely to be decided now whether the motion of their own, which 
Atomism ascribed to all the atoms as primitive and causeless, was thought of 
by Democritus as conditioned already by the size or mass, so that the greater 
had, even from the beginning, possessed less velocity. At all events, these 
determinations held good for him within the sphere of the mechanical operation 
of the atoms on one another. What is larger can be pushed with greater diffi 
culty ; what is smaller can be pushed more easily. 

Cf. Arist. Gen. et Corr. I. 2, 315 b 6. 

CHAP. 3, 10.] System of Materialism : Democritus. 113 

designated as distinguishing between the primary and secondary 
qualities of things, and it is desirable to introduce this expression 
here, since it corresponds throughout to the metaphysical and episte- 
mological sense in which Democritus made the Frotagorean doctrine 
useful for his own purpose. While the Sophist would make all 
properties secondary and relative, Democritus admitted this only for 
the qualities perceived by special senses, and set over against these 
the quantitative determinations as primary and absolute. He there 
fore designated also as " genuine knowledge " the insight into the 
primary qualities to be won through thought, while, on the contrary, 
perception which is directed toward the secondary qualities he 
termed " obscure knowledge " (yvrjo-ir) O-KOTIT; yvw/i??)- 

3. The secondary qualities appear accordingly as dependent 
upon the primary ; they are not, however, dependent upon these 
alone, but rather upon the action of these upon the percipient 
agent. But in the atomistic system that which perceives, the mind 
or soul, can consist only of atoms. To be more explicit, it consists, 
according to Democritus, of the same atoms which constitute also 
the essence of fire: namely, the finest, smoothest, and most mobile. 
These are indeed scattered also through the whole world, and in so 
far animals, plants, and other things may be regarded as animate, as 
having souls, but they are united in largest numbers in the human 
body, where in life a fire-atom is placed between every two atoms of 
other sorts, and where they are held together by breathing. 

Upon this presupposition, then, analogous, as we see, to the older 
systems, Democritus built up his explanation of phenomena from 
the true essence of things. That is, perception, and with it the 
secondary qualities, arises from the action of things upon the fire- 
atoms of the soul. The reality which appears is a necessary result 
of the true reality. 

In carrying out this doctrine Democritus took up and refined the 
theories of perception advanced by his predecessors. The effluxes 
(cf. above, 6, 3) which proceed from things to set in motion the 
organs and through them the fire-atoms, he called images (a8o&gt;A.a), 
and regarded them as infinitely small copies of the things. Their 
impression upon the fire-atoms is perception, and the similarity 
between the content of this perception and its object was held to be 
secured thereby. Since impact and pressure are the essence of all 
the mechanics of the atoms, touch is regarded as the most primitive 
sense. The special organs, on the contrary, were regarded as capable 
of receiving only such images as corresponded to their own forma 
tion and motion, and this theory of the specific energy of the sense 
organs was worked out very acutely by Democritus. From this it 

114 The G-reekis: Systematic Period. [?ART I. 

followed also that in case there were things whose effluxes could 
not act upon any one of the organs, these would remain imperceptible 
for the ordinary man, and for these perhaps " other senses " might 
be accessible. 

This theory of images appeared very plausible to ancient thought. 
It brought to definite expression, and indeed to a certain extent 
explained, the mode of representing things which is still common 
for the ordinary consciousness, as if our perceptions were " copies " 
of things existing outside of us. If one did not ask further how 
things should come to send out such miniature likenesses of them 
selves into the world, he might think that he understood, by means 
of this theory, how our " impressions " can resemble things with 
out. For this reason this theory at once attained the predominance 
in physiological psychology, and retained its position until after the 
beginnings of modern philosophy, where it was defended by Locke. 

Its significance, however, for the conceptions in the system of 
Democritus, lies in this, that it was regarded as describing that 
motion of the atoms in which perception consists. It remained 
hidden from this materialism, which was such from principle, as 
well as from all its later transformations, that perception as a 
psychical activity is something specifically different from any and 
every motion of atoms, however determined. But in seeking out 
the individual forms of motion from which the individual percep 
tions of the special senses arise, the philosopher of Abdera caused 
many a keen observation, many a fine suggestion, to become known. 

4. It is interesting now that the same fate befell the materialistic 
psychology of Democritus as had befallen the pre-Sophistic meta 
physicians (cf. 6) : it, too, was obliged in a certain respect to oblit 
erate again the epistemological contrast between perception and 
thought. Since, that is, all psychical life is regarded as motion of 
the fire-atoms, 1 and since the motion of atoms in the connected sys 
tem of the universe is conditioned by contact and impact, it follows 
that thought, which knows the truly real, can be explained only from 
an impression which this truly real makes upon the fiery atoms, 
explained therefore itself only through the efflux of such images. 
As a psychological process, therefore, thought is the same as percep 
tion, viz. impression of images upon fire-atoms; the only difference 
is that in the case of perception the relatively coarse images of the 
atom-complexes are active, while thought, which apprehends true 
reality, rests upon a contact of the fire-atoms with the finest images, 
with those which represent the atomic structure of things. 

i Arist. De An. I. 2, 405 a 8. 

C HAP. ;5, lo.] System of Materialism : Democrifus. 115 

Odd and fantastic as this sounds, the indications are yet all in 
favour of the supposition that Democritus drew this conclusion from 
the presuppositions of his m ierialistic psychology. This psychol 
ogy knew no independent, internal mechanism of ideas or conscious 
states, but only an arising of ideas through the motion of atoms. 
Hence it regarded ideas that were evidently deceptive as also 
" impressions," and sought for these the exciting images. Dreams, 
e.g. were traced back to e?Sa&gt;A.a. which had either penetrated into the 
body in the waking state and on account of their weak motion had 
previously produced no impression, or had first reached the fiery 
atoms in sleep, evading the senses. A mysterious ("magnetic," or 
" psychic," we should say to-day) action of men upon one another 
appeared comprehensible on this hypothesis, and an objective basis 
was given to faith in gods and demons by assuming giant forms in 
infinite space from which corresponding images proceeded. 

In correspondence with this Democritus seems to have thought of 
" genuine knowledge " as that motion of the fire-atoms which is pro 
duced by the impression of the smallest and finest images, those 
which represent the atomic composition of things. This motion is, 
however, the most delicate, the finest, the gentlest of all that which 
comes nearest to rest. With this definition the contrast between per 
ception and thought was expressed in quantitative terms quite in the 
spirit of the system. The coarse images of things as wholes set the 
fiery atoms into relatively violent motion and produce by this means 
the "obscure insight " which presents itself as perception ; the finest 
images, on the contrary, impress upon the fiery atoms a gentle, fine 
motion which evokes the "genuine insight" into the atomic structure 
of things, i.e. thought. In consideration of this, Democritus com 
mends the thinker to turn away from the world of the senses, quite 
in contrast with the mode of thought which would develop truth out 
of perception. Those finest motions assert their influence only where 
the coarser are kept back ; and where too violent motions of the 
fiery atoms take place, the result is false ideation, the dAAo^poveiv. 1 

5. This same quantitative contrast of strong and soft, violent 
and gentle motion, was laid by Democritus at the basis of his ethical 
theory also. 2 In so doing he stood with his psychology completely 
upon the iutellectualistic standpoint of Socrates in so far as he 
transposed the epistemological values of ideas immediately into 
ethical values of states of will. As from perception only that 

1 Theophr. De Sens. 58 (Dox. D. 515). 

2 The resemblance with the theory of Aristippus ( 7, 9) is so striking, that 
the assumption of a causal connection is scarcely to be avoided. Yet it may be 
that we should seek for this rather in a common dependence upon Protagoras, 
than in the interaction of Atomism and Hedonism upon each other. 

116 The Greeks : Systematic Period. [PART I. 

obscure insight follows which has for its object the phenomenon 
and not the true essence, so also the pleasure which arises from the 
excitation of the senses is only relative (VO/AW), obscure, uncertain 
of itself, and deceitful. The true happiness, on the contrary, for 
which the wise man lives "according to nature" (^uo-ei), the iv8unfj.o- 
via, which is the end (TC XOS) and measure (ovpos) of human life, must 
not be sought in external goods, in sensuous satisfaction, but only 
in that gentle motion, that tranquil frame (tueo-rw), which attends 
upon right insight, upon the gentle movement of the fiery atoms. 
This insight alone gives to the soul measure arid harmony (V/A/AC- 
rpia), guards it from emotional astonishment (aflau/xacna), lends it 
security and imperturbability (drapa^ta, dtfa/x/fta), the ocean-calm 
(yaXvyVr/) of the soul that has become master of its passions through 
knowledge. True happiness is rest (lyo-uxia), and rest is secured only 
by knowledge. Thus Democritus gains as the cap-stone of his 
system his personal ideal of life, that of pure knowledge, free 
from all wishes ; with this ideal, this systematic materialism cul 
minates in a noble and lofty theory of life. And yet there is in it 
also a tendency which characterises the morals of the age of the 
Enlightenment : this peace of mind resting upon knowledge is the 
happiness of an individual life, and where the ethical teachings of 
Democritus extend beyond the individual, it is friendship, the rela 
tion of individual personalities to one another, that he praises, 
while he remains indifferent as regards connection with the state 

11. The System of Idealism. 

The origin and development of the Platonic doctrine of Ideas is 
one of the most difficult and involved, as well as one of the most 
effective and fruitful, processes in the entire history of European 
thought, and the task of apprehending it properly is made still 
more difficult by the literary form in which it has been transmitted. 
The Platonic dialogues show the philosophy of their author in 
process of constant re-shaping : their composition extended through 
half a century. Since, however, the order in which the individual 
dialogues arose has not been transmitted to us and cannot be estab 
lished absolutely from external characteristics, pragmatic hypotheses 
based on the logical connections of thought must be called to our aid. 

1. In the first place there is no question that the opposition 
between Socrates and the Sophists formed the starting-point for 
Platonic thought. Plato s first writings were dedicated to an 
affectionate and in the main, certainly, a faithful presentation of 
the Socratic doctrine of virtue. To this he attached a polemic 

CHAP. 3, 11.] System of Idealism : Plato. 117 

against the Sophistic doctrines of society and knowledge. marked by 
increasing keenness, but also by an increasing tendency toward 
establishing his own view upon an independent basis. The Platonic 
criticism of the Sophistic theories, however, proceeded essentially 
from the Socratic postulate. It admitted fully, in the spirit of 
Protagoras, the relativity of all knowledge gained through percep 
tion, but it found just in this the inadequacy of the Sophistic theory 
for a true science of ethics. 1 The knowledge which is necessary for 
virtue cannot consist in opinions as they arise from the changing 
states of motion in subject and object, nor can it consist of a 
rational consideration and legitimation of such opinions gained by 
perception ; 2 it must have a wholly different source and wholly 
different objects. Of the corporeal world and its changing states 
Plato held to thh view of Protagoras in its entirety there is no 
science, but only perceptions and opinions ; it is accordingly an 
incorporeal world that forms the object of science, and this world 
must exist side by side with the corporeal world as independently 
as does knowledge side by side with opinion. 3 

Here we have for the first time the claim of an immaterial reality, 
brought forward expressly and with full consciousness, and it is 
clear that this springs from the ethical need for a knowledge that 
is raised above all ideas gained by sense-perception. The assump 
tion of immateriality did not at first have as its aim, for Plato, the 
explanation of phenomena : its end was rather to assure an object 
for ethical knowledge. The idealistic metaphysics, therefore, in its 
first draft * builds entirely upon a new foundation of its own, with 
out any reference to the work of earlier science that had been 
directed toward investigating and understanding phenomena ; it is 
an immaterial Eleatism, which seeks true Being in the Ideas, with 
out troubling itself about the world of generation and occurrence, 
which it leaves to perception and opinion.* 

To avoid numerous misunderstandings we must, nevertheless, 
expressly point out that the Platonic conception of immateriality 
(do-cu/LiaTov) is in nowise coincident with that of the spiritual or 
psychical, as might be easily assumed from the modern mode of 
thinking. For the Platonic conception the particular psychical 

1 On this point, the Thecetetus brings together the whole criticism of the 
Sophistic doctrine. 

2 Soa dX^Tjs /JXTO. \6yov, Thecet. 201 E. (Probably a theory of Antisthenes.) 

3 Arist. Met. I. (5, 987 a 32 ; XIII. 4, 1078 b 12. 

4 As set forth in the dialogues Fhaxlrus and the Symposium. 

5 Investigations as to theoretical and natural science are first found in the 
latest dialogues. 

(i To which the Neo- Pythagorean and Neo-PIatonic transformation of the 
doctrine of Ideas gave occasion. Cf. Ft. II. ch. 2, 18. 

118 The Greeks : Systematic Period. [PART I. 

functions belong to the world of Becoming, precisely as do those of 
the body and of other corporeal things ; and on the other hand, in 
the true reality the " forms " or " shapes " of corporeality, the Ideas 
of sensuous qualities and relations, find a place precisely as do those 
of the spiritual relations. The identification of spirit or mind and 
incorporeality, the division of the world into mind and matter, is un- 
Platonic. The incorporeal world which Plato teaches is not yet the 
spiritual. 

Rather, the Ideas are, for Plato, that incorporeal Being which is 
known through conceptions. Since, that is, the conceptions in which 
Socrates found the essence of science are not given as such in the 
reality that can be perceived, they must form a " second," " other " 
reality, different from the former, existing by itself, and this imma 
terial reality is related to the material, as Being to Becoming, as the 
abiding to the changing, as the simple to the manifold in short, 
as the world of Parmenides to that of Heraclitus. The object of 
ethical knowledge, cognised through general conceptions, is that 
which " is " in the true sense : the ethical, the logical, and the phys 
ical apx&gt;i (ground or first principle) are the same. This is the point 
in which all lines of earlier philosophy converge. 

2. If the Ideas are to be " something other " than the percep 
tible world, knowledge of them through conceptions cannot be found 
in the content of perception, for they cannot be contained in it. 
With this turn of thought, which corresponds to the sharper separa 
tion of the two worlds, the Platonic doctrine of knowledge becomes 
much more rationalistic than that of Democritus, and goes also 
decidedly beyond that of Socrates ; for while the latter had devel 
oped the universal out of the opinions and perceptions of individuals 
inductively, and had found it as the common content in these opin 
ions and perceptions, Plato does not conceive of the process of 
induction in this analytical manner, but sees in perceptions only the 
suggestions or promptings with the help of which the soul bethinks 
itself of the conceptions, of the knowledge of the Ideas. 

Plato expressed this rationalistic principle in the form that phil 
osophical knowledge is recollection (dva/^cris). He showed in the 
example of the Pythagorean proposition l that mathematical knowl 
edge is not extracted from sense-perception, but* that sense-percep 
tion offers only the opportunity on occasion of which the soul 
recollects the knowledge already present within her, that is, knowl 
edge that has purely rational validity. He points out that the pure 
mathematical relations are not present in corporeal reality ; on the 

1 Me.no, 80 ff. 

CHAP. 3, 11.] System of Idealism: Plato. .119 

contrary, the notion of these relations arises in us when similar 
figures of perception offer but the occasion therefor, and he extended 
this observation, which is completely applicable to mathematical 
knowledge, to the sum total of scientific knowledge. 

That this reflection upon what is rationally necessary should be 
conceived of as recollection is connected with the fact that Plato, 
as little as any of his predecessors, recognises a creative activity of 
the consciousness, which produces its content. This is a general 
limit for all Greek psychology ; the content for ideas must somehow 
be given to the " soul " ; hence, if the Ideas are not given in perception, 
and the soul nevertheless finds them in herself on occasion of per 
ception, she must have already received these Ideas in some way or 
other. For this act of reception, however, Plato finds only the 
mythical representation, 1 that before the earthly life the souls have 
beheld the pure forms of reality in the incorporeal world itself, that 
the perception of similar corporeal things calls the remembrance 
back to those forms forgotten in the corporeal earthly life, and that 
from this awakes the philosophical impulse, the love of the Ideas 
(l/o&lt;os), by which the soul becomes raised again to the knowledge 
of that true reality. Here, too, as in the case of Democritus, it is 
shown that the entire ancient rationalism could form no idea of 
the process of thought except after the analogy of sensuous percep 
tion, particularly that of the sense of sight. 

What Socrates in his doctrine of the formation of conceptions had 
designated as induction, became transformed, therefore, for Plato, 
into an intuition that proceeds by recollecting (crwaywy . /), into re 
flection upon a higher and purer perception (Anschauun&lt;j). This 
pure perception, however, yields a plurality of ideas corresponding 
to the multiplicity of objects which occasion such perceptions, and 
from this grows the further task for science to know also the rela 
tions of the Ideas to each other. This is a second step of Plato s 
beyond Socrates, and is specially important for the reason that it led 
shortly to the apprehension of the logical relations beticeen concep 
tions. It was principally the relations of the subordination and co 
ordination of concepts to which Plato became attentive. The 
division of the class-concepts or logical genera into their species 
played a great part in his teaching. 2 The possibility or impossibility 
of the union of particular conceptions is brought more exactly into 

1 Phcedr. 246 ff. 

2 Of. Phile.b. 16 C. Yet this dividing process is not anywhere especially promi 
nent in the writings that are certainly Platonic. It is handled with the pedantry 
of a school in the Sophist and Politicus. Antiquity preserved "definitions" 
and " divisions " from the Platonic school. In Athenwus* II. f&gt;9 C, is an instance 
of mockery, by a comic poet, at this academical concept-splitting. 

120 The Grreeks: Systematic Period. [PART I. 

consideration, 1 and as a methodical aid he recommended the hypo 
thetical method of discussion, which aims to examine a tentatively 
proposed conception by developing all the possible consequences 
that would follow from the possibility of its union with conceptions 
already known. 

These logical operations taken as a whole, by means of which the 
Ideas arid their relations to one another (KOLWVLO) were to be found, 
Plato denoted by the name dialectic. What is found in his writings 
concerning it has throughout a methodological character, but is not 
properly logical. 

3. The doctrine of knowledge as recollection stood, however, in 
closest connection with Plato s conception of the relation of Ideas to 
the world of phenomena. Between the higher world of ouo-io. and the 
lower world of y/eo-is, between what is and what is in process of 
Becoming, he found that relation of similarity which exists between 
archetypes (TrapaSeiy^aTa) and their copies or images (ctSwAa) . In this, 
too, a strong influence of mathematics upon the Platonic philosophy 
is disclosed : as the Pythagoreans had already designated things as 
imitations of numbers, so Plato found that individual things always 
correspond to their class-concepts only to a certain degree, and that 
the class-concept is a logical ideal which none of its empirical 
examples comes up to. He expressed this by the conception of 
imitation (/ou/x^o-is). It was thus at the same time established that 
that second world, that of the incorporeal Ideas, was to be regarded 
as the higher, the more valuable, the more primitive world. ) 

Yet this mode of representing the matter gave rather a deter 
mination of their respective values than a view that was usable for 
metaphysical consideration : hence Plato sought for still other desig 
nations of the relation. The logical side of the matter, according to 
which the Idea as class-concept or species represents the total uni 
tary extent or compass, of which the individual things denote but a 
part, appears in the expression participation (/u.&lt;$eis)&gt; which means 
that the individual thing but partakes in the universal essence of the 
Idea ; and the changing process of this partaking is emphasised by 
the conception of presence (-n-apova-La) . The class-concept or species 
is present in the thing so long as the latter possesses the qualities 
which dwell in the Idea. The Ideas come and go, and as these now 
communicate themselves to things and now again withdraw, the 
qualities in these things which are like the Ideas are successively 
changed to the eye of perception. ) 

The precise designation of this relation was, for Plato, an object 

1 Phcedo, 102 ff. 

CHAP. 3, 11.] System of Idealism: Plato. 121 

of only secondary interest, provided only the difference between 
the world of Ideas and the corporeal world, and the dependence of 
the latter upon the former, were recognised. 1 Most important and 
sufficient for him was the conviction that by means of conceptions 
that knowledge which virtue needs of what truly and really is, could 
be won. 

A. Peipers, Ontologia Platonica. Leips. 1883. 

4. But the logico-metaphysical interest which Plato grafted upon 
the Socratic doctrine of knowledge carried him far beyond the 
master as regards the contents of this doctrine. The general 
characteristics which he developed for the essence of the Ideas 
applied to all class-concepts, and the immaterial world was therefore 
peopled with the archetypes of the entire world of experience. So 
many class-concepts, so many Ideas ; for Plato, too, there are count 
less " forms." In so far criticism 2 was right in saying that Plato s 
world of Ideas was the world of perception thought over again in 
conception. 

In fact, according to the first draft of the Platonic philosophy, 
there are Ideas of everything possible, of things, qualities, and 
relations ; of the good and the beautiful as well as of the bad and 
the ugly. Since the Idea is denned methodologically, in a purely 
formal way, as class-concept, every class-concept whatever belongs 
to the higher world of pure forms ; and in the dialogue Parmenides, 3 
not only was Plato s attention called by a man schooled in the 
Eleatic Sophistic doctrine to all kinds of dialectical difficulties 
which inhere in the logical relation of the one Idea to its many 
copies, but he was also rallied, spitefully enough, with the thought 
of all the foul companions that would be met in his world of pure 
conceptual forms. 

Plato s philosophy had no principle that could serve as a weapon 
against such an objection, nor is there in the dialogues any intima 
tion that he had attempted to announce a definite criterion for the 
selection of those class-concepts that were to be regarded as Ideas, 
as constituents of the higher incorporeal world. Nor do the ex 
amples which he adduces permit such a principle to be recognised ; 
we can only say that it seems as if in course of time he continually 
emphasised more strongly the attributes expressing worth (as the 
good arid the beautiful), the mathematical relations (greatness and 
smallness, numerical determinations, etc.), and the types of species 
in the organic world, while, on the contrary, he no longer reckoned 

1 Phcedo, 100 D. 2 Arist. Met. I. 9, 990 b 1. 3 Farm. 130 C. 

122 The G-reeks : Systematic Period. [?AKT I. 

among the Ideas mere concepts of relation, especially negative 
notions and things made by human art. 1 

5. Our knowledge of the systematic connection and order which 
Plato intended to affirm in the realm of Ideas remains ultimately as 
obscure as that in regard to the preceding point. Urgent as he was 
to establish co-ordination and subordination among the conceptions, 
the thought of a logically arranged pyramid of conceptions which 
must culminate in the conception that was most general and poorest 
in content seems not to have been carried out. A very problematical 
attempt to set up a limited number (five) of most general concep 
tions 2 is presented in the Sophist (254 ff.). But these attempts, 
which tend toward the Aristotelian doctrine of the categories, are 
not to be traced back with certainty to Plato himself. 

With him we find, rather, only the doctrine presented in the 
Philebus, as well as in the Republic, that the Idea of the Good is the 
highest, embracing, ruling, and realising all others. Plato defines 
this Idea as regards its content as little as did Socrates; he de 
termined it only by means of the relation, that it should represent 
in its content the highest absolute end of all reality, of the incor 
poreal as of the corporeal. The subordination of the other Ideas 
to this highest Idea is accordingly not the logical subordination of 
a particular under the general, but the teleological of the means to 
the end. 

In the latest period of his philosophising, concerning which we 
have only intimations in the Laws and in critical notices of Aris 
totle, 3 and in the teachings of his nearest successors, the imperfec 
tion of this solution of the logical problem seems to have led Plato 
to the unfortunate thought of developing the system of Ideas ac 
cording to the method of the Pythagorean number-theory. The 
Pythagoreans also, to be sure, had the purpose of attaching the 
abiding arrangements of things symbolically to the development of 
the number series. But that was only a makeshift, because they 
had as yet no idea of the logical arrangement of conceptions : hence, 
when Plato, in connection with his other thoughts, fell back upon 
this makeshift, designated the Idea of the Good as the /, the One, 
and attempted to derive from it the duality (Suas) of the Infinite or 
Indefinite, and the Measure (aTrupov and Wpas, = even and odd ; cf. 
4, 11), and from this, further, the other Ideas in such a way as to 
present a series of the conditioning and the conditioned, neither 

1 Cf. also Arist. Met. XII. 3, 1070 c 18. 

2 Being, rest, motion, sameness (ravrdr^} and otherness (erepirrjs), i.e. the 
division of Being into the resting (owrfa), ever the same with itself, and the 
moved (ytvetris}, in process of constant change. 

3 Cf. A Trendelenburg, Platonis -de Ideis et Numeris Doctrina (Leips. 1826). 

CHAP. 3, 11.] System .of Idealism : Plato. 123 

this deplorable construction nor the fact that men like Speusippus, 
Xenocrates, Philippus, and Archytas undertook to carry it out in 
detail, would be worth more particular mention, were not this just 
the point to which the speculation of the Neo-Pythagoreans and the 
Neo-Platonists became attached. For by this gradation which Plato 
thus began within the ouon a the world of true reality, the division 
in the conception of reality, which had developed out of the opposi 
tion between perception and thought, became multiplied, and thus 
dualism was again abolished. For when to the One, or the Idea of 
the Good, was ascribed the highest absolute reality, and to the vari 
ous strata of the world of Ideas, a reality of constantly decreasing 
worth in proportion as they were removed from the One in the 
system in numbers, there arose from this a scale of realities which 
extended from the One down to the lowest reality, that of the 
corporeal world. Fantastic as this thought may be, it yet evinced 
its force and influence in the development of thought, even to the 
threshold of modern philosophy. Its power, however, lies doubtless 
in all cases in its amalgamation of attributes of worth with these 
various grades of reality. 

6. While as metaphysics, the doctrine of Ideas fell into such seri 
ous difficulties, it was carried out in an extremely happy, simple, and 
transparent manner in that domain which formed its proper home, 
that of ethics. For the systematic elaboration of this, however, 
Plato needed a psychology, and that, too, of another sort than the 
psychology which had arisen in previous science, out of the presup 
positions of natural philosophy, and with the aid of individual per 
ceptions or opinions. When, in contrast with this, he developed 
his psychology from the postulates of the doctrine of Ideas, the 
result was of course a purely metaphysical theory which stood and 
fell with its postulate, yet it was at the same time, by reason of the 
import of the doctrine of Ideas, a first attempt to understand the 
psychical life from within, and in accordance with its internal char 
acter and articulation. 

The conception of the soul or mind was in itself a difficulty * in 
the dualism of the doctrine of Ideas. For Plato, also, "soul" was 
on the onejiand the living element, that which" is moved of itself 
and moves othej^thjngsTand on~theother hand, that which perceives, 
knows, and wills. As principle of life and of motion, the soul 
belmig^tlierefore, to the J^werjvorld^of Becoming, and in this it 
remains when it perceives and directs_its jiesires to^id-xjbjects of 
the senses. But this same soul, nevertheless, by its true knowledge 

iPhcedo, 76 ff., 105, Phcedr. 245, Laws, X. 896. 

124 The Greeks: Systematic Period. [PART!. 

of the Ideas, becomes partaker in the higher reality of abiding Being. 
Hence it must be assigned a position bettveen the two worlds not 
the timeless, unchanged essence of the Ideas, but a vitality which 
survives change ; i.e. immortality. Here, for the first time, personal 
immortality is brought forward by Plato as a part of philosophic 
teaching. Of the proofs which the Phcedo adduces for this, those 
are most in accord with the spirit of the system which reason from 
the soul s knowledge of Ideas to its relationship with eternity ; in 
correspondence with the form of the system is the dialectic false 
conclusion that the soul cannot be or become dead, because its 
essential characteristic is life ; the most tenable of the arguments is 
the reference to the unity and substantiality which the soul evinces 
in ruling the body. 

In consequence of this intermediate position the soul must bear in 
itself the traits of both worlds ; there must be in its essence some- 
thing_which corresponds to the world of Ideas t and something 
which corresponds to the world of perception. The former is the 
rational nature (XoyicrriKov or vovs), the seat of knowledge and of the 
virtue which corresponds to it ; in the latter, the irrational nature, 
Plato made a further distinction of two elements, the nobler, which 
inclines towards the Keaamv-and-the lower, which resists it. The 
nobler he found in the arderit r spirited Will (Spirit, 0J/ios), the 
lower in the sensuous desire (Appetite, 7ri0u/Atu). Thus Reason, 
Spirit, and Appetite are the three forms of activity of the soul, the 
classes or species (etSr;) of its states. 

These fundamental psychological conceptions which had thus grown 
out of considerations of ethical worth are employed by Plato to set 
forth the moral destiny of the individual. The fettering of the 
soul to the body is at once a consequence and a punishment of 
the sensuous appetite. Plato extends the immortal existence of 
the soul equally beyond the two boundaries of the earthly life. 
The sin for the sake of which the soul is ensnared in the world of 
sense is to be sought in a pre-existent state ; its destiny in the 
hereafter 1 will depend upon how far it has freed itself in the earthly 
life from the sensuous appetite, and turned to its higher vocation 
knowledge of the Ideas. But inasmuch as the ultimate goal of the 
soul appears to be to strip off the sensuous nature, the three forms 
of activity are designated also as parts of the soul. In the Thmnis 
Plato even portrays the process of the formation of the soul out of 
these parts, and retains immortality for the rational part only. 

1 These doctrines are depicted in the form of mythical allegories which make 
use of motives from the popular faith and from the Mystery-cults. V. Phcedr. 
246 S.; Gorgias, 523 ff.; Rep. 614 ft; Phcedo, 107 ff. 

CHAP. 3, 11.] System of Idealism: Plato. 125 

It is already clear from these changing determinations that the 
relation of these three fundamental forms of the psychical life to 
the none too strongly emphasised unity of the soul s nature was not 
clearly thought out; nor is it possible to give to these conceptions 
formed from the ethical need the significance of purely psychologi 
cal distinctions, such as have since been made. 1 

7. But at all events there followed in this way, from the doctrine 
of the two worlds, a negative morals that would fly from the world, 
and in which the withdrawal from the world of sense and the spir- 
itualisation of life were praised as ideals of wisdom. It is not only 
the Phwdo that breathes this earnest disposition in its portrayal of 
the death of Socrates ; the same ethical theory prevails in such dia 
logues as the Gorgias, the Thecetetns, and, in part, the Republic. 
But in Plato s own nature the heavy blood of the thinker was 
associated with the light heart-beat of the artist, and thus while his 
philosophy lured him into the realm of bodiless forms, the whole 
charm of Hellenic beauty was living and active within him. 
Strongly as he therefore combated root and branch the theory of 
Aristippus, which would fain regard man s strivings as satisfied 
with sensuous pleasure, it was nevertheless his opinion that the 
Idea of the Good becomes realised even in the world of sense. 
Joy in the beautiful, pleasure in the sensuous imitation of the Idea, 
painless because free from the element of wishing, the development 
of knowledge and practical artistic skill, the intelligent understand 
ing of the mathematical relations which measure empirical reality, 
and the appropriate ordering of the individual life, all these were 
valued by him as at least preparatory stages and participations in 
that highest good which consists in knowledge of the Ideas, and of 
the highest among them, the Idea of the Good. In the Symposium 
and in the Philebus he has given expression to this his estimate of 
the goods of life. 

This same thought, that ethical values and standards must illu 
mine the whole circuit of human life, was used in another form by 
Plato in that presentation of the system of the virtues which he 
developed in the Republic. Here he showed that each part of the 
soul has a definite task to fulfil, and so a perfection of its own to 
reach : the rational part, in tvisdom (o-o^ia), the spirited (OvpotiSis) 
in energy of will (courage, dvSpia), the appetitive (iTnOv^-qnuov) in 

1 That the question here for Plato was essentially that of the gradation of the 
psychical from the point of view of relative worth, is shown not only in the 
employment made of these distinctions in ethics and politics, but also in such 
remarks as those which designated this triple division as characteristic for the 
different organic beings (plant, animal, man), or for the different peoplt-s, 
inhabitants of southern countries, of northern countries, and the Greeks. 

126 The Greeks: Systematic Period. [PART I. 

self-control (moderation, erw^poo-wi/) ; that, however, in addition to 
all these, as the virtue of the soul as a whole, there must be the 
right relation of these parts, complete uprightness (justice, SIKCUOOWT;). 

The true significance, however, of these four cardinal virtues, is 
first unfolded upon a higher domain, that of politics. 

8. The tendency of the doctrine of Ideas, directed as it was 
toward the general and the universal, exhibited its most perfect 
operation in the aspect now to be noticed, viz. that the ethical 
ideal of the Platonic philosophy lay not in the ability and happi 
ness of the individual, but in the ethical perfection of the species. 
True to the logical principle of the doctrine of Ideas, that which 
truly is in the ethical sense, is not the individual man, but mankind, 
and the form in which this truly existent humanity appears is the 
organic union of individuals in the state. The ethical ideal becomes 
for Plato the political, and in the midst of the time which saw the 
dissolution of Greek political life, and in opposition to those doc 
trines which proclaimed only the principle of individual happiness, 
he raised the conception of the state to an all-controlling height. 

He considered the state, however, not from the side of its empiri 
cal origin, but in reference to its task, viz. that of presenting in 
large the ideal of humanity, and of educating the citizen to that 
particular virtue which makes him truly happy. Convinced that 
his project could be realised, with force if necessary, he wove into 
its fabric not only features which he approved of the then-existing 
Greek political life, in particular those of the aristocratic Doric 
constitutions, but also all the ideals for whose fulfilment he hoped 
from the right formation of public life. 

K. F. Hermann, Ges. Abhandlungen, 122 ff. ; E. Zeller, Vortrage und Ab 
handlungen, I. 62 ff. 

If the ideal state is to present man in large, it must consist of the 
three parts which correspond to the three parts of the soul, the 
teaching class, the warrior class, and the working class. It belongs 
to the first class alone, that of the cultured (&lt;iAdo-o&lt;oi), to guide the 
state and to rule 1 (a^oi/re?) , to give laws and to watch over their 
observance. The virtue proper to this class is wisdom, insight into 
that which is for the advantage of the whole, and which is demanded 
by the ethical aim of the whole. To support this class there is the 
second class, that of the public officials (fmnovpoi ; guardians, ^uAaxts), 
which has to evince the virtue of the fearless performance of duty 
as it maintains the order of the state within and without. 

1 Hence the \oyiffTiic6v is called also riyefUMftK^v. 

CHAP. 3, 11.] System of Idealism : Plato. 127 

It is, however, obedience which holds the desires in check, self-control 
((Tw(j&gt;poa-vvrj} , that becomes the great mass of the people, the artisans 
and farmers (yew^yoi *ai S^/Aioupyoi ) , who have to care for providing 
for the external means of the states by their labour and industry. 1 
Only when each class thus does its duty and maintains its appro 
priate virtue does the nature of the state correspond to the ideal of 

justice (SiKaioavvrj) . 

The principle of aristocracy in education, which is of decisive im 
portance in the Platonic ideal of the state, appears most clearly in 
the provision that for the great mass of the third class only the 
ordinary ability of practical life is claimed, and in that this is re 
garded as sufficient for their purpose, while the education, which the 
state has the right and duty to take in hand itself in order to train 
its citizens for its own ends, is given only to the two other classes. 
By means of a constantly repeated process of selection continued 
from birth to the late years, the government causes the two upper 
classes to be continually renewed, strata by strata; and in order that 
no individual interest may remain to hold back these classes, who are 
properly the organs of the whole body, in the fulfilment of their 
task, they are to renounce family life and private property. Their 
lot is that of education by the state, absence of family relations, 
community of life and of goods. He who is to live for the ends of the 
whole, for the ethical education of the people, must not be bound to 
the individual by any personal interest. To this thought, which 
found its historic realisation in the sacerdotal state of the medieval 
hierarchy, is limited whatever of communism, community of wives, 
etc., men have professed to discover in the Platonic teaching. The 
great Idealist carries out to its extreme consequences the thought 
that the end of human life consists in moral education, and that 
the entire organisation of a community must be arranged for this 
sole end. 

9. With this a new relation between the world of ideas and the 
world of phenomena was discovered, and one which corresponded 
most perfectly to the spirit of the Platonic system : the Idea of the 
Good disclosed itself as the task, as the end (reXos), which the 
phenomenon of human life in society has to fulfil. This discovery 
became of decisive importance for the final form taken by Plato s 
metaphysical system. 

For, as first projected, the doctrine of Ideas had been precisely as 
incompetent as the Eleatic doctrine of Being to explain empirical 
reality. The class-concepts were held to give knowledge of the 

1 Hence the third part of the soul is called also the &lt;f&gt;i\oxpjna.Toi&gt;. 

128 The Greeks : Systematic Period. [PART I. 

absolute reality, 1 which, purely for itself, simple and changeless, 
without origin, and imperishable, forms a world by itself, and, as in 
corporeal, is separated from the world where things arise. Hence, 
as was demonstrated in the dialogue the Sophist, 2 in a keen polemic 
against the doctrine of Ideas, this doctrine formed no principle of 
motion, and therefore no explanation of facts, because it excluded 
from itself all motion and change. 

But however little Plato s interests may have been directed 
toward this end, the conception of the Idea as true Being ultimately 
demanded, nevertheless, that the phenomenon should be regarded, 
not only as something other, something imitative, something that 
participated, but also as something dependent. It demanded that 
the Idea be regarded as cause of occurrence and change (ama). But 
that which is itself absolutely unchangeable and immovable, and 
excludes every particular function from itself, cannot be a cause in 
the mechanical sense, but only in the sense that it presents the end 
for the sake of which the occurrence takes place. Here for the first 
time the relation between the two worlds of Being and Becoming 
(ovo-t a and yeVeo-is) is fully defined; all change and occurrence exists 
for the sake of the Idea; 3 the Idea is thejinal cause of phenomena. 

This foundation of teleological metaphysics Plato gives in the 
Philebns and in the middle books of the Republic, and adds at once a 
further culminating thought by introducing as the final cause of all 
occurrence, the world of Ideas as a whole, but in particular the high 
est Idea, to which all the rest are subordinate in the sense of means 
to end, the Idea of the Good. This, referring to Anaxagoras, he 
designates as the World-reason (vovs), or as the deity* 

Side by side with this motif taken from Anaxagoras, another of 
a Pythagorean nature appears with increasing force in a later form 
of the doctrine of Ideas, a motif in accordance with which the 
imperfection of the phenomenon is pointed out as in contrast with 
the true Being. This inadequacy, however, could not be derived 
from Being itself, and just as Leucippus, in order to understand 
plurality and motion, had declared that in addition to the Being of 

1 Symp. 211 B, avrb cca0 avrb fjxff avrov /jiovocidts del 6v. 

2 Page 246 ff. The doctrine there criticised, that of the affibfiara. etdij, can in 
accordance with the individual verbal coincidences be only the Platonic ; just 
this is a factor in the decision against the genuineness of the dialogue. Schleier- 
macher s hypothesis of a Megarian doctrine of Ideas, thought out to rescue the 
genuineness, has not shown itself tenable. 

3 Phileb. 54 C. 

4 Yet we are not to think in this case of personality, or of a spiritual being, 
but of the absolute ethical end or purpose of the world, the conception of the 
dya66v finding an exact definition as little as with Socrates. It is rather presup 
posed as being the simplest, the most comprehensible in itself. 

CHAP. 3, 11.] System of Idealism: Plato. 129 

Parmenides the Not-being was also " real," or " actual," and existent, 
so Plato saw himself forced, with like logical consistency, for the 
purpose of explaining phenomena and the inadequacy which they 
show with reference to the Ideas, to assume beside the world of 
Being or of cause, i.e. the world of Ideas and the Idea of the Good, 
a secondary or accessory cause (frvairiov) in that which has not the 
attribute of Being. Indeed, the parallelism in the two thinkers 
goes so far that this secondary can e, which is not Being (TO p.rj oV), 
is for Plato precisely the same as for Leucippus and Philulaus, viz. 
empty .space. 1 

Space was then for Plato the " nothing " out of which the world 
of phenomena is formed for the sake of the Idea of the Good, or of 
the deity. This process of formation, however, consists in taking on 
mathematical form ; hence Plato taught in the Philebus that the 
world of perception was a " mixture" of the "unlimited " (aTm/jo*), 
i.e. space, and of " limitation " (Wpas), i.e. the mathematical forms ; 2 
and that the cause of this mixture, the highest, divine world prin 
ciple, was the Idea of the Good. Space assumes mathematical for 
mation in order to become like the world of Ideas. 

The importance which mathematics had possessed from the outset 
in the development of Plato s thought finds thus at last its metaphys 
ical expression. The mathematical structures are the intermediate 
link, by means of which empty space, which is not, is able to imitate 
in phenomena the pure " forms " of the world of Ideas. Hence 
mathematical knowledge (Siuvoia), as well as purely philosophical 
knowledge (eVio-n/Vi;), has t do with an abiding essence (ovo-ta), 
and is therefore comprised together with this, as rational knowledge 
(vdr/o-is), and set over against knowledge of phenomena (Sofa). But 
occupying thus an intermediate place, it takes only the position of a 
last stage in the preparation for the wisdom of the "rulers," as set 
forth in the system of education in the Republic. 

10. The metaphysical preliminaries were now given for what 
Plato ultimately projected in the Timceus; viz. a sketch or rough 
draught of the philosophy of Nature, for which, of course, true to his 
epistemological principle, he could not claim the worth of certainty, 
but only that of probability. 3 Since, that is, he was not in a position 

1 Under the influence of the Aristotelian terminology, this secondary cause 
has been designated as "matter" (11X77), and it is only recently that modi rn 
researches have made it clear that the Platonic "matter" is simply space. Cf. 
H. Siebeck, Untersuchungen z. Philos. d. Or. (2 Aufl., Freiburg i. H. 1889). 

2 It is probable that in this case PJato transposed the numbers into the world 
of Ideas itself, but looked upon their representation in geometrical structures as 
the "limitation" added to space. 

8 The Platonic Physics is then hypothetical in like manner with that of 
Parmenides. Here, too, it would seem that regard for the demands of his dis- 

130 The Greeks: Systematic Period. [PART I. 

to carry through dialectically, and establish in conceptions this 
project of explaining occurrence from the world s end or purpose, 
Plato gave an exposition of his teleological view of Nature in mythical 
form only, a view intended only as an opinion, and not as science. 

This view, nevertheless, takes a position sharply opposed to the 
mechanical explanation of Nature, and, as this latter is set forth, we 
can scarcely suppose that Plato had any other doctrine in mind than 
that of Democritus. In opposition to the theory which makes all 
kinds of worlds arise here and there from the "accidental " (mean 
ing "purposeless" or "undesigned") meeting of "that which is in 
unordered, lawless motion," and perish again, he sets forth his own 
theory that there is only this one, most perfect and most beauti 
ful cosmos, unitary in nature and unique as regards its kind, and 
that its origin can be traced only to a reason acting according to 
ends. 

If, then, it is desired to form a theory concerning this origin, the 
ground of the world of phenomena must be sought in the telic rela 
tion of this world to the Ideas. This relation Plato expressed by 
the idea of a "world-forming God" (Srj/Aioupyds, demiurge) who 
formed or shaped out that which is not Being, i.e. space, " with 
regard to the Ideas." In this connection the Not-being is character 
ised as the indefinite plasticity which takes up all corporeal forms 
into itself (S^a/xeVr/), and yet at the same time forms the ground 
for the fact that the Ideas find no pure representation in it. This 
counter-working of the accessory cause, or of the individual acces 
sory causes, Plato designates as mechanical necessity (avay/o;). He 
takes up then the conception of Democritus as a particular moment 
into his physics, in order to explain by it what cannot be under 
stood teleologically. Divine activity according to ends and natural 
necessity are set over against each other as explaining principles, on 
the one hand for the perfect, and on the other hand for the imper 
fect in the world of phenomena. Ethical dualism passes over from 
metaphysics into physical theory. 

ciples was united with a polemical purpose. Hence there is found mingled in 
the TimceuN, a dependence upon Democritus and a combating of his views, an 
attitude like that of Parmenides toward Heraclitus. Yet the distinction is not 
to be forgotten, that the Eleatic denied the reality of the world of phenomena, 
while Plato denied only that it could be known scientifically, i.e. through con 
ceptions. In presenting his view, however, Plato goes into questions of astron 
omy, mechanics, chemistry, organic life, physiological psychology, finally even 
into those of medicine. He gives, therefore, a kind of compendious exposi 
tion of his opinions in matters of natural science, opinions which in detail are 
extraordinarily fantastic, and as compared with the exact ideas even of his 
time, inadequate ; and yet taken in their whole connection, in their relation to 
their central principle, they have exercised an effect extending far beyond the 
design of their author. 

CHAP. 3, 11.] System of Idealism: Plato. 131 

The characteristic fundamental thought of the Platonic as con 
trasted with the Atomistic physics is, that while Democritus con 
ceived of the movements of the whole as mechanical resultants of 
the original states of motion of the individual atoms, Plato, on the 
contrary, regarded the ordered motion of the universe as a whole, as 
the primitive unit, and derived every individual change or occur 
rence from this purposively determined whole. From this thought 
sprang the strange construction of the conception of the world-soul, 
which Plato characterised as the single principle of all motions, and 
thus also of all determinations of form, and likewise of all activities 
of perception and ideation in the world. 1 In fantastic, obscure ex 
position he brought forward as the mathematical " division " of this 
world-soul, his astronomical theory, which was in the main closely 
connected with that of the younger Pythagoreans, but which was 
less advanced than theirs in its assumption that the earth stood 
still. The main criterion in this process of division was the dis 
tinction between that which remains like itself (raui-oV) and that 
which changes (6a.rf.pov), a contrast in which we easily recognise 
the Pythagorean contrast between the perfect stellar world and the 
imperfect terrestrial world. 

A similar continuation of Pythagorean doctrine is contained in 
the Platonic Timceus, with reference also to the purely mathematical 
construction of the corporeal world. Here, too, the four elements 
are characterised according to the simple, regular, geometrical solids 
(cf. p. 46). But it is expressly taught that these consist of triangu 
lar surfaces, and those, too, of a right-angled sort, which are in part 
equilateral, in part so formed that the shorter side is half the length 
of the hypothenuse. The limiting surfaces of these solids, tetrahe 
dron, cube, etc., maybe thought of as composed of such right- 
angled triangles, and Plato would have the essence of space-filling, 
i.e. density or solidity of bodies, regarded as consisting in this com 
position of these limiting surfaces. By thus conceiving of physical 
bodies as purely mathematical structures, the metaphysical thought 
of the Philebus found expression also in physics, the thought, 
namely, that the phenomenal world is a limitation of space formed 
in imitation of the Ideas. These triangular surfaces, which were, 
moreover, conceived of as being indivisible, have a suspicious simi 
larity with the atomic forms ((Tx r lp MTa ) f Democritus. 

1 In this respect the Timceus, quite as does Democritus, characterises psychical 
differences by differences of motion, tracing, for example, right ideation to the 
ravrAv, merely individual perception to the Odrepov, etc. "Soul" is lor the 
Greeks at the samp time principle of motion and of perception, and just that 
(KLVTjTiKtiv and aiff8r,TiK6v, Arist. De An. I. 2, 403 b 25), and even Plato makes the 
second characteristic dependent upon the first. 

132 The G-reeks : Systematic Period. [PART I. 

12. The Aristotelian Logic. 

The breadth of plan which appeared in the systems of the two 
great antipodal thinkers, Democritus and Plato, and in accordance 
with which their doctrines were methodically developed, made it 
indispensable that there should be not only a division of labour, but 
a separation of problems. The titles of the writings of Democritus 
make it probable that he proceeded clearly and definitely in this 
respect also. Plato, to be sure, conceived his literary activity essen 
tially from the artist s point of view, but it is evident that in his 
activity as a teacher he did not fail to make that arrangement of 
problems for separate treatment which we miss in his dialogues. 
In his school the division of philosophy into dialectic, physics, 
and ethics became dominant. 

If by dialectic in this connection we are to understand essentially 
the doctrine of Ideas in its metaphysical development^ Aristotle 
made the great step in advance of prefacing the investigation of the 
subject-matter in all three departments with a preliminary study of 
the essential nature of science, a doctrine of the forms and laws of 
scientific thought. Even with the Sophists and Socrates reflection 
had begun upon the question, in what scientific activity properly 
consists, and the sharpened attention given to the inner processes 
had made it possible for the abstracting thinker to separate the 
general forms of the thought-process itself from the particular con 
tents to which this process relates at different times. All these 
beginnings and attempts for even with Plato it did not go beyond 
this were comprehended by Aristotle in his Logic, and developed 
into a complete system in which we have before us the ripe self- 
knowledge of Greek science. 

1. The immediate aim of the Aristotelian logic is, according to 
the express declarations of the philosopher, entirely methodological. 
The way is to be shown by which the goal of scientific cognition can 
be reached in all departments of knowledge. As in rhetoric the art 
of persuasion is taught, so in logic we are to learn the art of scien 
tific investigation, cognition, and proof. For this reason Aristotle 
did not reckon logic, which was his greatest creation, among the 
philosophical disciplines themselves, but treated it in his lectures 
as a propaedeutic, and for this reason his school regarded this 
study as the general instrument (opyavov) for all scientific work. 

But this preparatory study itself was made a science by Aristotle. 
Instead of bringing forward rules of practical value in individual 
cases, as may well have been the case with the Sophists, instead 
of the general fixing of a principle which had been the service of 

. 3, 12.] Tfie Aristotelian Logic. 133 

Socrates, he offers an examination of the thinking activity on all 
sides, a comprehensive examination of its regular forms. He fulfils 
the methodological task by formal logic. 

But in so doing it becomes evident that the knowledge of the 
forms of right thinking can be gained only from understanding the 
task of thought, and that in turn this task can be disclosed only 
from a definite idea of the general relation of knowledge to its 
object. Thus the Aristotelian logic is connected in the most 
intimate manner with the metaphysical presupposition which lie 
at the basis of his treatment of the other disciplines also. In 
its principle, it is thoroughly epistemological. 

2. As such, however, it has its roots in the Socratic-Platonic 
doctrine of Ideas. That which truly is, is the general or universal, 
and knowledge of this is the conception. In this respect Aristotle 
always remained a"Platontst: What llB UOmbated in the system of 
his great predecessor ] was only the Eleatic assumption of absence 
of relation, absence of relation between general and particular, 
between Ideas and phenomena, between conceptions and percep 
tions ; an absence of relation which, in spite of all his efforts, 
Plato had not overcome, even in the later phase of his teaching. 
Even as the final cause of occurrence the Ideas remained a world 
by themselves beside (-n-apd) the phenomena. This tearing apart 
(X&lt;YHV) of essence and phenomenon, of Being^and Beconmfg7Ts&gt; 
in addition to special dialectical objections, 2 the object of the chief 
reproach which Aristotle brings against the doctrine of ideas. 
While Plato had made two different worlds out of the general 
which is known by the conception, and the particular which is per 
ceived, the entire effort of /Aristotle is directed toward removing 
again this division in the conception of reality, and discovering that 
relation between Idea and phenomenon which shall make concep- 
tional knowledge able to explain what is perceived.,/ 

Out of this grows as the primary task for logic, that of recognis 
ing the true relation between the general and the particular, and hence 
this fundamental form of abstract or conceptional thought, which 
had been already recognised as fundamental by Socrates, stands in 
the centre of the Aristotelian logic. 

1 Principally in Met. I. 9, and XIII. 4. 

2 Of these, two are principally worthy of mention in passing. The one 
argues, from the logical subordination which obtains among the Ideas, that 
everything that we perceive must be subsumed under a number of Ideas ; the 
other calls attention to the difficulty that the resemblance, which, according t;&gt; 
this system exists between the Idea and *,he phenomenon, makes necessary still 
a higher general above both, etc., in injinitum (dotfpwiros avrdvepuiros T p i r o s 
&i&gt;6puiro j). 

134 The Greeks : Systematic Period. [PART I. 

The importance of this same relation grows out of still another 
course of thought. If Aristotle found any previous works that 
were preparatory for his theory of science, they consisted in the 
considerations of the Sophists with regard to the art (principally 
rhetorical) of proof and refutation. If now Aristotle asked how 
one can prove anything scientifically, i.e. in a manner universally 
valid and relating to true knowledge, he found that this could con 
sist only in the deduction of the particular from the general. To 
prove scientifically means to state the grounds for the validity of 
what is asserted, and these are to be found only in the more general 
under which the particular is subsumed. 

From this resulted the peculiar complication which constitutes 
the Aristotelian conception of science. The general, the Idea, is, 
as the true Being, the cause of occurrence and change. It is that, 
therefore, out of which and through which the perceived particular 
is to be comprehended, conceived, or explained. Science has to set forth 
how the perceived particular follows from the general which is 
known in conceptions. On the other hand, the general is in thought 
the ground by means of which and from which the particular is 
proved. Accordingly, conceiving or comprehending and proving are 
the same thing, viz. deduction of the particular from the general. 

The scientific theory of Aristotle is accordingly concentrated in 
the conception of derivation or deduction (ciTrdSa&s). Scientific 
explanation of phenomena from true Being is the same logical 
process as scientific proof : na^Aely, the deduction or derivation of 
what._isjgiyen in perception from its general ground. ^Explaining 
and proving are therefore "denoted by the same word, "deduction," 
and the right proof is that which takes as its ground the actual or 
real general cause of that which is to be proved. 1 It is, therefore, 
the task of science to exhibit the logical necessity with which the 
particular insight (of perception) follows from the general insight (of 
conception), and the particular phenomenon from the general cause. 

This characterisation of the task of science, thus developed from 
metaphysical presuppositions, experienced an essential change in 
the progress of its author s investigations. 

3. The most immediate task of logic, according to this, is to 
establish more exactly what deduction i.e. on the one hand, proof, 

1 This definition of the conception of scientific proof is obviously directed 
against the rhetorical proof of the Sophists. In the art of persuasion, all proofs 
are welcome, however external they may remain to the true nature of the case, 
provided only they are formally sufficient to bring the hearer to assent. Scientific 
proof, however, should proceed from the inner, logical necessity of the case, and 
should therefore give at the same time insight into the true cause of what is to 
be proved. 

CHAP. 3, 12.] The Aristotelian Lotjic. 135 

on the other hand, explanation properly is, or to set forth those 
forms in which thought cognises the dependence of the particular 
upon the general. This theory was given by Aristotle in the Analyt 
ics, the logical groundwork, which treats synthetically, in the first 
part, of the syllogism, in the second of deduction, proof, and concep 
tion. For in the process of analysing those activities of thought in 
which all deduction consists, there results as simple fundamental 
form the deduction of one proposition, one statement from another : 
i.e. the inference or syllogism (0-uAA.oyioyxos). 

The doctrine &lt;&gt;f the syllogism became thus the central point of the 
Aristotelian logic. To this points all that he taught (apparently 
only in the most general outlines) concerning the forms of thought 
which lie at the basis of the syllogism : out of it come all the points 
of view in his methodology. 

The outlines of this doctrine, which form the basis of traditional 
logic even to this day, are the following. The syllogism is the 
deduction of a judgment from t\vo other judgments. Since in a 
judgment one concept (the predicate) is affirmed of another concept 
(the subject), this affirmation can be grounded only by establishing 
the desired connection between the two by means of a third concept, 
the middle term (/xe o-ov). This third concept must then stand in 
some relations with the other two, and these relations must be 
expressed in two judgments, which are called the premises (irpoTa- 
&lt;ms) of the syllogism. Inference, or drawing the conclusion, con 
sists in the process of thought which, from the relations that one 
and the same concept (the middle term) sustains to two other 
concepts, discovers the relation of these two concepts to each other. 

Agreeably to its general presuppositions, the Aristotelian doctrine 
of the syllogism fixed its attention upon but one of the possible 
relations existing between concepts, the relation of the subordina 
tion of the particular under the general. The only question for this 
theory is always whether the one concept (the subject) should be 
subordinated to the other (the predicate) or not. The doctrine of 
the syllogism has to do only with the knowledge of those forms 
of thought according to which it is to be decided, with the help of 
an intermediate concept, whether a subordination of one concept under 
another occurs or not. This question Aristotle answered in an abso 
lutely exhaustive manner ; in this consists both the abiding worth 
of his doctrine of the syllogism and also the limits of its signifi 
cance. 

In correspondence with the fact just noted, Aristotle treats in his 
theory of the judgment essentially only the two elements which come 
into consideration for this end : first, Quantity, which determines 

136 The Greeks : Systematic Period. [PART I. 

the kind of subordination of the subject to the predicate as regards 
extent, and yields the distinctions of general, particular, and singu 
lar judgments; and second, Quality, according to which this sub 
ordination is either affirmed or denied, and, therefore, the relation 
either of connection or of separation is asserted as existing between 
the respective extents of the two concepts. 

The kinds or figures (^Vara) of the syllogism are, therefore, 
essentially fixed by the manner in which the relations of subordina 
tion between the concepts, which are given in the premises, deter 
mine the subordination sought in the conclusion, a relation which 
finds its external expression in the position of the middle term in 
the two premises, since this is either the subject of one premise and 
predicate of the other, or predicate of both, or subject of both. As 
the most valuable and primitive of these three figures, however, 
Aristotle consistently designated the first, because in it the principle 
of subordination is purely and clearly expressed, since the subject 
of the conclusion is subordinated to the middle term, and together 
with this, as falling within its compass, is subordinated to the predi 
cate of the major. 1 

4. But by defining inference, and so deduction, proof, and expla 
nation in this way, it followed that only propositions of a lesser 
degree of generality could be deduced from those of higher generality 
by means of this activity so essential to science. That is, by means 
of inference, we can never prove anything equally general with the 
premises, to say nothing of proving anything more general. The 
peculiar restriction of the ancient idea of the nature of thought, 
according to which thought can only apprehend and take apart 
what is given but can never produce anything new, makes its 
appearance in this feature of the Aristotelian logic. From this, 
however, it follows immediately that the deducing, proving, and ex 
plaining science may, indeed, in the individual case, be able to take 
that which has served as premise in the syllogism, and deduce it 
again as the conclusion of a still more general syllogism, but must, 
nevertheless, ultimately proceed from premises which are themselves 
capable of no further deduction, proof, and comprehension, of no 
reduction to middle terms. The truth of these ultimate premises is, 
therefore, immediate (d/utcra), not to be deduced, proved or compre 
hended. All deduction needs something primitive; all proof, a 
ground that cannot be proved ; all explaining, something given which 
cannot be explained. 

1 The details cannot be developed here. Cf. in general, F. Kanipe, Die 
Krkpnntnisstheorie des Aristotelat (Lfips. 1870); R. Eucken, Die Mctltodc drr 
aristotelischen Forschung (Berlin, 1872). 

CHAP. 3, 12.] The Aristotelian Logic. 137 

The apodictic, proving, and explaining activity of science has, 
therefore, a limit ; the ultimate grounds of proof are not to be proved ; 
the ultimate causes used in explaining are not to be explained. 
Hence if science is to fulfil its task, which consists in explaining the 
particular by means of the general, it must first press forward from 
the particular on to the general, in the case of which proving and 
explaining are forbidden by the nature of the case, because as imme 
diately certain it asserts itself as not to be deduced and not to be 
proved. Hence the processes of deducing, proving, and explaining, 
in which the ultimate task of science consists, must be preceded by 
the searching out of the starting-points for deduction, of the ultimate 
grounds of proof, and of the highest principles of explanation. The 
activity of thought involved in this last process Aristotle calls dia 
lectic, and has laid down its principles in the Topics. 

This procedure of searching out the grounds is not, in the nature of 
the case, attended by the same " apodictic certainty," as is that of 
deducing consequences from the grounds, when the latter are once 
established. Investigation proceeds from the particular given in 
perception, and from the ideas current in customary opinion (!v8oov), 
to find the general, from which the particular can then be proved 
and explained. Investigation, therefore, follows a direction the 
reverse of that taken by deduction ; the latter is deductive, the 
former inductive, epagogic. The latter proceeds, proving and 
explaining, from general to particular ; the former, searching and 
testing, from particular to general. 1 Only the completed science is 
"apodictic"; science, in its process of coming into being, is epa 
gogic. 

In all these investigations and the contrasts that appear in them, 
the chief question for Aristotle is that with regard to judgments ; 
but in connection with this he treats also concepts. As a judgment 
is proved or deduced, by being concluded from more general judg 
ments, by means of the middle term, so a concept is deduced or 
derived by being formed from a more general concept (the next 
higher class or genus, yeVos) by adding a particular characteristic 
mark or difference (8ta&lt;opa). This deduction of the concept is defini 
tion (opioyxos). As, however, the deduction of propositions ulti 
mately presupposes most general premises, which cannot be further 

1 This relation of contrariety between deduction and inquiry Aristotle ex 
pressed in the statements that that which, as regards the nature of the thing, is 
the original (irp6Ttpov rfj tpvaei), and therefore the general, is for human knowl 
edge the later, that which must be acquired (vvrepov irpds ij/xeis) ; and that, on 
the contrary, that which is for us the most immediate (irp6Ttpov irp6s ^M&lt;), the 
particular, is, according to the true essence, the derivative, the later (vvrepov TV 

138 The Greeks : Systematic Period. [PART I. 

proved, so, too, definition of lower concepts goes back ultimately to 
most general concepts which withdraw from all attempts at deduc 
tion and explanation. These concepts, also, as well as the highest 
premises of proof, must be sought inductively; 1 and it seems as 
though Aristotle looked upon the propositions of highest generality 
as the elucidations of these most general concepts. 

5. Among the text-books which Aristotle left, the two main 
logical treatises, the Analytics and the Topics, are those which are 
most nearly complete by far. 2 This may explain the fact that the 
logical demands which the Philosopher makes of science are devel 
oped so clearly and surely, while, on the other hand, his system as 
carried out in the form known to us, fulfils in but a lesser measure 
the expectations thus raised. 

For evidently we should expect that a sure statement could be 
made as to what the Philosopher declared to be those immediately 
certain, highest propositions or concepts which were to be the result 
of investigation, and the starting-point of proof and explanation. 
If, however, we ask for these, we find ourselves in great embarrass 
ment as regards the teaching of Aristotle. Of general propositions 
there is but a single principle, the principle, of contradiction, 3 which 
he set forth as an unprovable major premise, or highest principle 
for all proofs, partly in the purely logical setting that affirmation 
and denial of the same combination of concepts reciprocally exclude 
each other, partly in the metaphysical form that a thing cannot be 
the same and also not be the same. But aside from this he prefers to 
call attention to the fact that every department of knowledge has its 
own ultimate presuppositions, and does not state these more exactly. 

If, however, we seek for the highest concepts, aside from the 
reference made here also to the particular nature of individual dis 
ciplines, we have the choice between the four "principles" (apxat), 
or " causes," of the Metaphysics, and the " categories," which are 
designated as the fundamental forms of predication concerning what 
is, a choice not decided by Aristotle. In both cases we find our 
selves already in the midst of the material as opposed to the formal 
elements of his teaching. 

1 Over against determination (7rpj&lt;r0e&lt;m), as the deduction of one concept 
from the higher by adding a new mark, stands therefore abstraction (d&lt;cu&gt;f&lt;m) 
as process of formation of class-concepts, a process which, by continually 
taking away individual characteristics, gains a concept poorer in contents, but 
wi.hr in its extent. Formation of concepts is, accordingly, with Aristotle, again 
co upletely analytic, while with Plato it had been intuitive. Aristotle was the 
first to free himself from the optical analogy, in accordance with which the know 
ing process of thought had been conceived even by Democritus and Plato. 

2 In the case of the Topics, this completeness seems even to have been at 
tained. 3 Met. IV.:} ff. 

CHAP. 3, 13.] System of Development : Aristotle. 139 

13. The System of Development. 

The impression of something completely new, which the logic of 
Aristotle makes, as contrasted with all that had previously appeared 
in Greek science, rests principally upon the capacity for abstract 
thought, prestipposed in so high a degree by this separation of the 
general Forms of thought from every possible content a separa 
tion that evinced his genius. iThis genius for the formation of con 
ceptions by abstraction was evinced by Aristotle in all departments 
of his scientific work, and if the " Father of logic " became the 
philosophic teacher for two thousand years, he owes this success, 
first of all, to the sureness, clearness, and consistency with which 
he formed and defined his conceptions. 1 He fulfilled the task set by 
Socrates, and in so doing created the language of science. The funda 
mental part of the scientific conceptions and expressions everywhere 
in use, even to the present time, goes back to his formulations. 

With this inclination to abstraction is connected the further fact 
that Aristotle solved the fundamental problem of Greek philosophy 
viz. how behind the changing multiplicity of phenomena a uni 
tary and abiding Being is to be thought by means of a concept of 
relation, that of development. His two great predecessors had still 
been seeking to assign a particular content to the conception of true 
Being. Democritus had regarded the atoms and their motion, Plato 
the Ideas and their final causation, as the causes of phenomena, 
causes different from the phenomena themselves. Aristotle, how 
ever, determined the true reality that which is as the essence 
which unfolds in the phenomena themselves. He renounced the at 
tempt to think out as the cause of phenomena something different 
from them (a second world), and taught that the Being of things 
which is known in conception possesses no other reality than the 
sum total of the phenomena in which it realises itself. So regarded, 
Being (oucna) takes on the character of the essence (TO T! fy eTvai), 
which constitutes the one, only ground of its individual formations, 
but is real or actual only in these themselves, and all phenomenal 
appearance or coming into being becomes the realisation of the 
essence. This is the concept of relation by means of which Aristotle 
overcame the opposition of the Heraclitic and Eleatic metaphysics. 

1. In particular, the process of development presents itself to 
Aristotle as the relation of Form ami Matter (eTSos, p.op4&gt;ij ^77). 
Plato * had declared the world of phenomena to be a mixture of the 

1 The main outlines of the Aristotelian metaphysics develop in the simplest 
way from that, phase of the Platonic, metaphysics which is presented in the 
Philebus ;cf. above, 11, 9). Cf. ,J. C. Glaser, Die Metaphysik des Aristotelfs 
(Berlin, 1841). 

140 The Greeks: Systematic Period. [PART I 

" unlimited " and of " limitation " ; Aristotle holds to the observa 
tion that, in everything of the phenomenal world, formed matter 
lies before us. But for him this matter is, indeed, in itself indefi 
nite, and yet not purely indifferent, empty space, but a corporeal 
substratum (v-n-oKtifjitvov) ; for him, this form is not merely the 
mathematical limit, but the form determined as to its contents by 
the essence. The matter or material substratum is the possibility 
of that which, in the complete thing, has become actual or real by 
means of the form. In matter, therefore, the essential nature 
(ovo-ta) is given only potentially (Swa/na). First, and only by means 
of the form, does it exist in reality or actuality (evepyeia, actu). 
Occurrence, however, or the natural process, is that process in which 
the essence passes over from mere possibility, through form, into 
actualisation. The essence has not any second, higher reality beside 
and apart from the phenomena ; it exists only in the succession of 
its pEenomenal manifestations, by means of which it realises its 
own possibility. The universal is real or actual only in the partic 
ular; the particular is only because in it the universal realises 
itself. 

With this transformation of the doctrine of Ideas, Aristotle solves 
the fundamental problem of the theoretical philosophy of the 
Greeks, viz. that of so thinking Being or what " is " that Becoming, 
or the process of Nature (das Geschehen). may be explained from 
it. From the Hylozoism of the Milesians on to the opposing 
theories of his two great predecessors, all standpoints of Greek 
metaphysics are contained as elements in this doctrine of Aristotle. 
The Being cognised in conception is the general essence, which 
realises itself in its particular phenomenal manifestations from 
potentiality on through form, and the process of this realisation is 
motion. Being is that which comes to existence in the processes 
of Nature. This self-realisation of the essence in the phenomena, 
Aristotle calls entelechy (evTcAe xeia). 

2. The central point of the Aristotelian philosophy lies, therefore, 
in this new conception of the cosmic processes as the realisation of 
the essence in the phenomenon, and the respect in which it is op 
posed to the earlier explanation of Nature consists therefore in 
carrying through in conceptions the teleology which Plato had only 
set up as postulate, and developed in mythical, figurative form. 
While the earlier metaphysics had looked upon the mechanical 
process of pressure and impact as the typical fundamental relation 
of the cosmic processes, Aristotle regarded as this typical rela 
tion the development of organisms and man s building or forming 
activity. From these two departments he took his examples when 

CHAP. 3, 13.] System of Development : Aristotle. 141 

he wished to elucidate the metaphysical character of the cosmic 
processes. 1 

Nevertheless, the relation of form and matter is not completely 
the same in these two kinds of purposive processes, and the differ 
ence between the two asserts itself everywhere in the carrying out 
of the Aristotelian fundamental thought. In the case of organic 
processes, matter and form are the two sides, Separable only through 
abstraction, of one and the same reality identical from beginning 
to end ; even in the germ which in the process of development 
brings the essence to its unfolding, the matter is already shaped 
internally by the form. In the case of artistic construction, on the 
contrary, the material which contains possibility exists at first by 
itself, and the work of the artist with its end in view is added later 
to produce the shape by means of motion. 

| In the latter case, therefore, the development is to be regarded 
under four principles. These are the Matter, the Form, the End. and 
the Cause of what comes to pass or comes to be. 

In the former case, on the contrary, the three other principles, as 
set over against the Matter, are but different expressions for the 
same thing, since the Form constitutes the Cause and the Result of 
the process. 

We find, accordingly, that when applied to the task of science, 
this fundamental relation of form and matter is carried out in a 
twofold way : on the one hand, individual things are regarded as 
self-realising forms ; on the other hand, things in relation to one 
another are regarded, the one as matter, the other as form. These 
two applications of the fundamental principle go through the entire 
Aristotelian system side by side, and in the general principles of 
the system they sometimes so collide, that it is only by their separa 
tion that apparent contradiction can be cleared away. 

3. The former point of view yields the result, that for the Aristo 
telian conception of the world, in contrast with both that of Democ- 
ritus and that of Plato, the truly real is the individual thing, 
determined in itself by its form. To it, therefore, belongs primarily 
the name of essence or substance (ou&lt;na). / But the essence develops 
and realises itself in individual determinations, which are partly its 
states (irdOr)), partly its relations to other things * (TO. Trpds n). 
Hence knowledge has these which belong to the thing (ra o-u/n/?e/?r/- 
Kora) to predicate of it, while the individual thing itself cannot be 
predicated of anything else, i.e. in the proposition it can be only 

1 Aside from its discussion in the Metaphysics, this question is chiefly treated 
in the Physics. 

2 Met. XIV. 2, 1089 b 23. 

142 The Greeks : Systematic Period. [PAKT I 

subject mid never predicate. 1 Of these modes in which substance 
manifests itself, or of the predicates that are possible with regard 
to it, Aristotle enumerates as categories, quantity (TTOO-OV), quality 
(TTOCOV), relation (-n-pos rt), determination in space and time (TTOU, -n-orf), 
action (TTOICIV), and passion or passivity (Trao-^etv) ; and in addition, 
also, position (^to-flat) and condition (|^i/).\ This collection 
(making ten categories inclusive of substance), in which, perhaps, 
grammatical observations co-operated, is designed to present the 
highest classes or genera under which the contents of all possible 
ideas are to be subsumed. Yet Aristotle made no methodical use 
of this collection, and his doctrine of the categories acquired, there 
fore, no importance in his metaphysics, aside from the above-noted 
relation of substance to its determinations. 

When we consider how sharply Aristotle shaped out the scientific 
conception of substance in its logical and metaphysical character, 
it may appear strange at the first glance that he has announced 
neither a methodical principle nor a real principle applying to the 
nature of the thing, according to which it would be possible to de 
cide what these truly existing individual things, in his sense of the 
word, are.^ It is clear only that, on the one hand, he did not regard 
as essence everything whatever that occasionally appears in ex 
perience as a thing separate from others, and, on the other hand, 
that he ascribed this character to organic individuals, to individual 
men. It would be in the spirit of his teaching to suppose that he 
could have spoken of an " essence " only where an inner determina 
tion of form constitutes the ground of the coherence of individual 
characteristics, where, therefore, the knowledge of this essence 
solves the problem of science viz. to determine existent reality 
by the general conception in so far as the abiding individual 
thing forms the class-concept for all its particular modes of appear 
ing which show themselves in perception. 

But the Socratic-Platonic view of the problem of science brought 
with it the consequence that Aristotle defined yet again the essence 
of the individual thing as that through which the individual thing 
belongs to its class or species. \ If substance, as contrasted with its 
perceptible phenomena and attributes, presents the universal, on 
the other hand the species (yeVos, or again Platonically, eZSos) is the 
universal that realises itself in the individual substances. Here, too, 
the same relation is repeated ; the species exists only in so far as it 
realises itself in individual things as their truly existing essence, 
and the individual thing exists only as the species comes to its phe- 

1 AnaJyt. Post. I. 22, 83 a 24. 

CHAP. :5, 13. J System of Development : Aristotle. 143 

nomenal manifestation jn itL - Just for this reason the species also 
have the claim to the metaphysical significance of being essences 
(owri ai). Hy this means the conception of substance wittr Aristotle 
contains a peculiarly changeable double meaning. The substances 
proper are individual things as determined in conception, but as a 
second kind of substances (Stirrepcu own ut) we have the species 
winch constitute the e ssence of individual things, just as these latter 
constitute the essence of perceptible phenomena. 

Scientific knowledge is directed partly toward the conception of 
the individual thing, partly toward the conception of the species. 
Each of these realises itself in phenomena, and here there is found 
much which, as belonging directly to the conception (o-iyx/Je/^KOTa in 
the narrower sense), can be deduced from it, but also much which, 
as foreign to the conception, appears in the particular only incident 
ally, as a consequence of the matter in which the conception realises 
itself; and of this which is conceptionally indifferent or "accidental " 
( o-v/x/Se/Jr/Kora in the usual sense of the word) there is, according 
to the presuppositions of the Aristotelian doctrine, no " theory, 
no scientific knowledge. Hence Aristotle also and in this lies a 
characteristic limit of the ancient study of Nature disclaimed on 
principle any scientific insight into the necessity of law, with which 
even the most individual and most particular follow from the gen 
eral. This individual instance he declared rather to be something 
really accidental, not to be explained by conception, and limited 
scientific consideration to that which is valid universally (*ca0 OAOU), 
or at least for the most part (CTTL TO TroAu). 

4. In this we see decidedly a holding fast to the tradition of the 
doctrine of Ideas : the same attitude discloses itself also in another 
direction. If, that is, the relation of matter and form is affirmed 
between the different things or classes of things, each of which is 
in itself already actual as formed matter, this relation becomes 
relative in so far as the same thing which in contrast with a lower 
is to be regarded as form, appears as matter when contrasted with 
the higher. In this aspect the conception of development becomes 
the principle of an ordering of things according to their metaphysical 
values, considering these things as risiug in uninterrupted succession 
from the lowest formations of matter to the highest forms. In 
this scale every class of things is assigned its metaphysical dignity 
by means of the test that it is regarded as form of the lower and as 
the material of the higher. 

1 So, at least, they are called in the treatise on categories, the genuineness of 
which is, to be sure, not entirely uncontested ; yet the designation is quite in 
the line of Aristotle s teaching taken as a whole. 

144 The Greeks : Systematic Period. [PART I. 

This system of individual things, and of their classes, has both a 
lower and an upper limit, the former in mere matter, the latter in 
pure form. Wholly unformed matter (irpuTrj v\rj) is, of course, in 
itself, as mere possibility, not actual; it never exists without being 
somehow actualised as form. Yet it is not merely that which is not 
Being (the Platonic p.rj oV, or empty space), but the accessory cause, 
which evinces itself as such through real effects (TO ov OVK aveu, sine 
qua non). Its reality is shown in the fact that the forms do not 
completely realise themselves in individual things, and that from it 
side-workings (Trupa^vas) proceed which are without connection 
with the purposefully active form, or even in contradiction with it. 
It is, therefore, from matter that the fact is explained that the 
forms realise themselves only potentially (xara TO oWaTov) : from 
matter arises that which is conceptionally indeterminate (a-v/t/Se- 
/fyKos), or the accidental (uvTo/Aarov) , the lawless and purposeless 
in Nature. Hence the Aristotelian doctrine distinguishes, in its 
explanation of Nature, as did Plato in the Philebus, between final 
causes (TO ou ei/eKa) and mechanical causes (TO e dvayKTjs) : the former 
are the forms which realise themselves in matter ; the latter reside 
in matter, out of which proceed side-workings and counter-workings. 
Thus the cosmic processes are regarded by Aristotle ultimately 
under the analogy of the plastic artist, who finds in the hard material 
a limit to the realisation of his formative thought. This material 
is, indeed, so far related to the Idea, that the Idea can present itself 
in it, at least in general, and yet it is in so far a foreign, and thus 
an independent, element, that it in part opposes itself as a retarding 
principle to the realising of the forms. Ancient philosophy did not 
overstep this dualism between the purposive activity of the form 
and the resistance of matter ; with the demand of the teleological 
view of the world it united the naive honesty of experience, recog 
nising the necessity, purposeless and contrary to design, which 
asserts itself in the phenomena of the actual world. 

5v^ It is, on the contrary, self-evident in the case of pure form, 
since its conception is immediately connected with that of true act 
uality, that it possesses in itself the highest actuality without neeci- 
ing any matter whatever. The assumption of such a pure Form is 
necessary according to the system of Aristotle, for the reason that 
matter, as the merely possible or potential, has in itself alone no 
principle of motion or of generation.. We cannot, indeed, speak of 
a beginning of motion in time in this system of development, which 
centres about the conception of self-realising essence, since motion 
must be as eternal as Being itself, to the essential characteristics of 
which it belongs ; but yet we must point out that property in Being 

CHAP. 3, 13.] tfyttem of Development : Aristotle. 145 

which is the cause of motion. This is, however, everywhere the 
action of the form upon the matter, in which, with reference to indi 
vidual things, Aristotle distinguishes two elements, viz. an impulse 
to be formed inherent in matter, and the purposive motion proceed 
ing from the form itself. But in so far as the form is itself moved, 
it must be regarded in turn as matter for a higher form ; and, since 
the same thing is true of the latter, and so on, motion would not be 
understood if the chain of its causes did not have a first link in the 
pure Form which is itself not moved. The first mover (irpwrov /avow) 
is itself unmoved. Hence, in the case of its action upon matter, 
only the first of the two elements above mentioned comes into con 
sideration. It operates, not by means of its own activity, but only 
by means of the fact that its absolute actuality excites in matter 
the impulse to form itself according to it (the prime mover), not as 
a mechanical, but as a pure, final cause (KIVCI ws epw/jifvov, ou KLVOV- 

The prime mover, or the pure Form, means, then, in the Aristo 
telian metaphysics, quite the same thing as the Idea of the Good in 
the Platonic, and for it alone Aristotle employs all the predicates 
of the Platonic Idea. It is eternal, unchangeable, immovable, 
wholly independent, separated (^wpio-rov) from all else, incorporeal, 
and yet at the same time the cause of all generation and change. 
It is the perfect Being (fvepytia) in which all possibility is at the 
same time actuality ; of all that exists it is the highest (TO ri rjv emu 
TO TrpuJToi/) and best the deity. 1 *\ 

The highest Being or Essence, thus determined according to its 
relations, is also characterised by Aristotle as regards its content. 
Such an activity, related to no possibility, resting purely within 
itself (actiis purus}, is thought, and thought alone ; not, of course, 
that mental process which applies itself to individual things and 
their changing phenomena, but the pure thought, which is employed 
with itself and its eternal nature ; that thought which presupposes 
nothing else as an object, but has itself for its constant, unchang 
ing content, the thought of thought (J/OT/O-IS VOT/O-CWS), self-conscious 
ness. 

In these conceptions, so determined, dwells a significance of 
mighty import for the world s history. On the one hand, mono- 

1 The exposition of this course of thought from which the later, so-called cos- 
mological proof for the existence of God essentially arose, is found principally 
in the twelfth book of the Metaphysics. In his popular dialogues Aristotle 
amalgamated it with determinations of worth, by giving it the following form : 
the distinction between the imperfect and the more perfect which things of 
experience show presupposes the reality of a most perfect. Cf. Schol. in Arist. 
487 a 6. 

146 The Greeks : Systematic Period. [PART I. 

theism was herewith conceptionally formulated and scientifically 
grounded; on the other hand, it passed over from the pantheistic 
form, which it had with Xenophanes, and even still with Plato, into 
the theistic form, since God is conceived of as a self-conscious being 
different from the world. But besides this transcendence, the doc 
trine that God in the absolute mind or spirit (Geist) involves at the 
same time the metaphysical advance that the immaterial, the incor 
poreal pure Being, is made equivalent to the spiritual. Spiritual 
monotheism is the ripe fruit of Grecian science. 

This divine spirituality is conceived of in a purely intellectualistic 
manner ; its essential nature is solely thought directed upon itself. 
All doing, all willing, is directed toward an object, distinct from the 
doer or the wilier. The divine mind, as pure form, needs no object; 
he is sufficient for himself, and his knowledge of himself (fowpia), 
which has no other goal than itself, is his eternal blessedness. 
He acts upon the world, not through his motion or activity, but 
through the longing for him which the world has. The world, and 
what takes place in it, arises from the longing of matter after God. 

6. JVlatter (the merely potential) is that which is moved without 
itself moving anything; God (the solely actual) is that which moves 
without itself being moved; between the two is the entire series of 
things, which suffer motion as well as call it forth ; and these, taken 
as a whole, are designated by Aristotle as Nature (&lt;wn?; equivalent 
to "world" according to present usage). Nature is, accordingly, 
the connected system of living being* viewed as a unity, in which 
matter developing ever higher, from form to form, through all the 
multitude of its particular shapes, approaches the resting Being of 
the deity, and imitating this, potentially takes it up into itself. 

But in this connection, the graded scale of things, in the exposition 
of which the Aristotelian philosophy of Nature consists, shows a two 
fold standard for estimating relative worth. The scale is therefore 
developed in two different series, which find their union only at the 
end in a manner which is, indeed, consistent with the fundamental 
conceptions of the system, but which is, nevertheless, in itself sur 
prising. 

In the conception of the deity, according to Aristotle, there meet, 
as chief characteristics, that of Being, resting within itself, and 
remaining like itself (dtSiov), and that of spirituality or rationality 
(vous). Hence the individual "forms" of Nature take a higher 
rank in proportion as they contain the one or the other of these 
elements which constitute the highest worth. In the one line, 
the series of phenomena ascends from the unordered change of the 
terrestrial world to the ever-uniform revolution of the stars; in the 

CHAP. 3, 18.] System of Development : Aristotle. 147 

other line, we are led from the merely mechanical change of 
place to the activities of the soul and its most valuable develop 
ment, rational knowledge ; and both series have the same terminus, 
inasmuch as the stars that are in most uniform motion are con 
ceived of as the highest intelligences, the most rational spirits. 

7. In relation to the first of these two aspects Aristotle, taking 
up the astronomical views of Plato, adopted the old Pythagorean 
antithesis between the earthly and the heavenly world, and it is to 
be ascribed to the victorious influence of his philosophy that the 
maturer ideas of the later Pythagoreans did not prevail in antiquity, 
in spite of their recognition by those learned in astronomy in the 
following period. As the whole universe has the most perfect form, 
everywhere the same, that of the sphere, so among all motions 
the most perfect is the circular motion, which returns into itself. 
This belongs to the cether, the celestial element, out of which the 
stars are formed, and the transparent hollow spheres, in which the 
stars move with ever-unchanged uniformity. Farthest out, and in 
an absolute changelessness that comes nearest the divine Being, is 
the heaven of the fixed stars, beneath that the planets, the sun, and 
the moon, whose apparent deviation from the circular movement 
was explained by a complicated theory of hollow spheres placed one 
within another, the theory which Eudoxus, an astronomer sustaining 
a close relation to the Academy, and his disciple Callippus had 
propounded. 1 The stars themselves were, however, for Aristotle 
beings of superhuman intelligence, incorporate deities. They ap 
peared to him as the purer forms, those more like the deity, and 
from them a purposive, rational influence upon the lower life of 
earth seemed to proceed, a thought which became the root of 
mediaeval astrology. 

The lower " forms " of terrestrial life, on the other hand, are the 
four elements (of Empedocles), which are characterised by the ten 
dency to rectilinear motion. But rectilinear motion involves at once 
the opposition of two tendencies, the centrifugal, which belongs to 
Fire ; and the centripetal, which belongs to Earth. The first of the 
two tendencies is also attributed in a lesser degree to Air, and the 
latter in a lesser degree to Water, and so the central mass, our earth, 

1 Schiaparelli, Le Sfere Omocentriche di Endosso, CaJlippo, ed Aristotele (Mi 
lan, 1876). Cf. also (). Gruppe, Die kosmischen Systeme der Grirchen (Berlin, 
1851). As a principle of method, the following prescription for the proposal of 
these questions has been preserved from the Old Academy, typical of the math- 
ematico-metapliysical presupposition of the speculative explanation of Nature : 
viz. to discover the uniformly ordered motions of the stars by means of which 
their apparent motions may be explained (5ia&lt;ru^eiv~). Simpl. in Arist. De Coelo 
(Karst.), 119. 

148 The Greeks : Systematic Period. [PAKT I. 

in a state of rest as a whole, is composed in such a way that about 
the earthy material is disposed at first Water and then Air, while 
Fire strives toward the celestial outer world. The changing combi 
nations, however, into which the four elements enter, constitute the 
imperfect, that which cannot be conceived, that which is accidental 
in the terrestrial world. Here the side-working and counter-work 
ing of matter are stronger than in the celestial region where the 
mathematical determinateness of undisturbed circular motion real 
ises itself. 

8. In the changes of the terrestrial world, mechanical, chemical, 
and organic processes are built up upon each other in such a way 
that the higher always presupposes the lower as its condition. 
Without change of place (&lt;j&gt;opd or KI VT/O-IS in the narrowest sense), 
change of qualities (dAAoiWis) is not possible, and the organic 
transformation which consists in growth and decay (av^o-is &lt;0t&lt;n&lt;) 
is not possible without both the preceding. The higher form is, 
however, never merely a product of the lower, but is something self- 
subsistent, by means of which those lower forms can be employed 
only in a purposive manner. 

From this develops an important principle in which Aristotle is 
opposed to Democritus, a principle which the former esteemed 
very highly in regard to detailed research in natural science, and 
used a great deal, even with express mention. Aristotle protests 
against the attempt to reduce all qualitative to quantitative deter 
minations, an attempt ultimately accepted even by Plato. He 
combats the contrasting from an epistemological and metaphysical 
point of view, of secondary and primary qualities ; to the former he 
accords not a less but rather a higher reality than to the latter, and 
in the succession of " forms " the inner conceptional character or 
determination is evidently of more worth for him than the outer 
determination which is capable of mathematical expression. 2 The 
attempt of Democritus to raise to the rank of a principle for 
explaining the world the reduction of all qualitative to quantitative 
differences, found its victorious opponent in Aristotle and his doctrine 
of the " entelechies," the inner Forms of things. The keen logician 
saw that it is never possible to develop qualities analytically from 
quantitative relations, and that, on the contrary, the quality (by which 
ever sense it may be perceived) is something new, which presup 
poses the entire body of quantitative relations as its occasion only. 

1 Cf. especially the third book of the treatise De Coelo. 

2 For this reason Aristotle also characterises the elements not only by the 
different tendencies of their motions, but also by primitive qualities ; and he 
develops them out of a meeting of the contrasted pairs, warm and cold, dry and 
moist. Meteor. IV. 1, 378 b 11. 

CHAP. 3, 13.] System of Development : Aristotle. 149 

9. With logical consistency the same view is applied by Aristotle 
to the relation of the psychical and bodily activities ; the latter are 
but the matter for which the former furnish the forms. There is, 
with Aristotle, no such dependence of psychical upon corporeal func 
tions as Democritus, in accordance with the procedure of the older 
metaphysics, and even Plato, in part (in the TimiKus}, had taught. 
For Aristotle the soul is rather the entelechy of the body, i.e. the 
Form which realises itself in the motions and changes of the organic 
body. The soul is the cause of bodily formation and motion, a 
cause acting from ends ; itself incorporeal, it is yet actual or real 
only as the power moving and controlling the body. 

But the psychical life itself is also, according to Aristotle, built 
up as it were in successive grades or strata, each of which, in turn, 
presents matter for the higher. The first Form of organic life is 
the vegetative soul (Open-TiKov) , which "forms" the mechanical and 
chemical changes to the purposive functions of assimilation and 
propagation. The soul of plants is restricted to this purely physio 
logical significance of a vital force ; to this is added in the whole 
animal kingdom, 1 the animal soul, whose constitutive characteristics 
are spontaneous motion in space (KIVI/TIKW Kara TOTTOV) and sensation 

The purposive,* spontaneous motion of the animal body proceeds 
from desire (opeis), which arises from the feelings of pleasure and 
pain, in the form of an effort to procure or shun. But these pre 
suppose everywhere the idea of their object, and are at the same 
time bound together with the thought that this object is worthy to 
be striven for or to be shunned. The view of the dependence of all 
desire upon ideas, peculiar to all Greek psychology, is so strong with 
Aristotle, that he even sets forth these relations expressly, accord 
ing to the logical function of judgment and inference. In the 
practical sphere, also, there is affirmation and denial, 2 there is the 
process of drawing a conclusion from a general aim to a particular 
mode of action. 

The proper seat, or home, as it were, of the entire animal life of 
ideation is found in sensation. In the physiological psychology 
which treats this subject 8 Aristotle has used in comprehensive 

1 Aristotle s History of Animals (cf. J. B. Meyer, Berlin, 1855) treats in ex 
emplary manner, and with admirable care of detailed investigation, anatomical, 
physiological, morphological, and biological problems, and also the questions of 
system. The parallel work on plants is indeed lost, but in compensation we 
have the work of his friend and disciple Theophrastus. 

2 Eth. Nic. VI. 2, 1139 a 21. 

8 Besides the sections which treat this subject, in the treatise on the Soul, the 
smaller treatises attached to this are also to be compared, viz : on Perception, 
on Memory, on Dreams, etc. 

150 The G-reeks : Systematic Period. [PART I. 

manner all the particular information and theories which his prede 
cessors, especially Democritus, possessed on this point; but he 
overcame the common inadequacy of all earlier doctrines by conced 
ing a much greater importance to the self-activity of the soul in the 
process in which perception arises. Not satisfied to adopt the old 
theory that perception consists in a co-operation of object and sub 
ject, he pointed to the unity of consciousness (Einheitlichkeit, /itaoVr;?), 
with which the animal soul unites what is given in the individual 
perceptions of the individual senses to form collective perceptions, 
or perceptions that perceive the object as a whole, and in so doing 
grasps also the relations of number, situation, and motion. Thus 
above the individual senses we must assume the common sense 
(KOIVOV aldOriTrjpiov) / which is also the seat of recollection, both of 
the involuntary or memory (/xv?^) and the voluntary (dvi/A^crts), 
by virtue of the circumstance that in it the perceptions remain as 
imaginative representations (favraaiai) ; at the same time, however, 
it is also the seat of our knowledge of our own states. 2 

10. Vegetative and animal souls, however, form in man but the 
matter for the realisation of the Form peculiar to him, the reason 
(vovs (Woclo-0at) . By its operation, impulse (opet$) becomes will 
(f3ov\t](n&lt;i) ; imaginative representation becomes knowledge (em- 
It comes as a something new and higher ( from without," 
to all the psychical activities which develop from perception 
even among the beasts. Aristotle expressed this relation by desig 
nating the pure rational activity itself as the active reason (vow 
TTOITJTIKOS), and, on the contrary, as passive reason (vows wa^nxos), 
the material of perceptions, which arises from the bodily existence, 
furnishes possibilities and occasions for reason, and is subsequently 
worked over and formed by it. 

Accordingly the " passive " reason signifies the individual phase 
(Erscheinungsweise) given in the natural disposition of the individ 
ual man, and determined by the occasions of his personal experience, 
the "active" reason, on the contrary, signifying the pure reason 
considered as a unity in its nature and principles (principielle Ein 
heitlichkeit), common to all individuals. The latter is imperishable, 
as it is without beginning, while the former passes away with the 

1 With regard to physiological localisation Aristotle found the psychical 
activity to be attached to the vital warmth (tupvTov 0fpfj.6v), which as animating 
breath (irvevna) is mingled with the blood, and his school developed this doc 
trine still further. Cf. H. Siebeck, Zp.itschrift fitr Volkerpsycholngie, 1881, pp. 
364 ff. In consequence of this he regarded the heart as the seat of the common 
sense and so supplanted the better insight with which Alcmseon, Diogenes of 
Apollonia, Democritus, and Plato had recognised the importance of the brain. 

2 This beginning for a doctrine of inner perception is found in Arist. De. An. 
III. 2, 425 b 12. 

CHAP. 3, 13.] System of Development : Aristotle. 151 

individuals in whom it appears. Personal immortality is put in 
question by this conclusion just as in the Platonic Timceus, where 
it was claimed only for the " rational " " part " of the soul, i.e. that 
part which is everywhere alike and impersonal. It is clear that we 
have here no longer to do with empirical psychology, but with such 
doctrines as have been taken from the systematic connection of 
the whole work, and grafted upon psychology in consequence of 
ethical and epistemological postulates. 

11. In the conception of the reason as the Form peculiar to the 
human soul, Aristotle found the key to the solution of that feature 
of the ethical problem which even Plato had sought in vain, i.e. 
that of the content of the Good. Man s happiness or well-being 
(evSui/Aovta), which in Aristotle s system also is regarded as the 
supreme end of all endeavour (reXos), is, indeed, dependent in part 
upon external fortune ; it is not complete until this has afforded 
its good things ; but ethics has to do only with that which stands in 
our power (TO. &lt; r/fuv), only with the happiness which man gains 
by his own activity (irpaKrov ayaOov). Every being, however, be 
comes happy by the unfolding of his own nature and of his own 
peculiar activity man, therefore, through reason. The virtue of 
man is, accordingly, that habitude or permanent state of mind (eis) 
through which he is made capable of the practice of rational activ 
ity ; it develops out of the endowments of his natural disposition, 
and has for its fruit, satisfaction, pleasure. 

As in the animal soul impulse and perception were to be dis 
tinguished as different expressions, so, too, the reason develops 
itself, partly as rational action, partly as rational thought ; as per 
fection, on the one hand, of the character or disposition (^0os), on 
the other, of the faculty of intelligence (alaBdvta-dai in the broadest 
sense of the word). Thus there result, as the excellence or ability 
of the rational man, the ethical and the intellectual or dianoetic vir 
tues. 

12. The ethical virtues grow out of that training of the will by 
which it becomes accustomed to act according to right insight 
(&lt;povi7&lt;ns opOos Xoyos). It enables man, in his decisions, to follow 
practical reason, i.e. insight into what is correct or proper. With 
this doctrine Aristotle transcends the principles of Socrates, 
with evident regard to the facts of the ethical life : not that he 
assigned to the will a psychological independence as over against 
knowledge ; the point, rather, is, that he gave up the opinion that 
the determination of the will arising from rational insight must of 
itself be stronger than the desire arising from defective knowledge. 
Since experience often shows the reverse of this, man must gain by 

152 The Greeks : Systematic Period. [PART I. 

practice that self-control (ey/c/aaTeia) by means of which he follows 
under all circumstances that which is rationally known, even against 
the strongest desires. 1 

While to ethical virtue in general belong natural disposition, 
insight, and habitude, the individual virtues are distinguished by 
the different relations of life to which they refer. A systematic 
development of these is not given by Aristotle, but we have, rather, 
a comprehensive and delicate treatment of the individual virtues. 
The general principle is that rational insight always finds the right 
mean between the unreasonable extremes to which the natural 
impulsive life leads. Thus courage is the right mean between 
cowardice and rashness. A particularly detailed exposition is given 
to friendship 2 as the common striving for all that is good and 
beautiful, and also to justice as the basis of the political community. 

13. For Aristotle, like Plato, was convinced that the moral excel 
lence of man, since it always relates to activities which prosper in 
the life of a community, can find its fulfilment only in the life of a 
community ; for him, too, there is ultimately no perfect moral life 
outside the state, the essential end of which was considered by 
Aristotle, also, to be the ethical training of its citizens. As, never 
theless, in the case of the individual man, virtue ought to develop 
out of the natural disposition, so the political relations also are 
treated by Aristotle from the point of view, that the historically 
given relations are to be used for the highest possible fulfilment of 
that highest end. 

Every constitution is right if the government has the ethical weal 
of the community as its highest goal ; every constitution has failed 
if this is not the case. The good of the state, therefore, does not 
depend upon the external form, which is defined by the number 
of those who rule. 3 The rule of a single individual may be right 
as a kingdom (/3a&lt;nA.cia), bad if a despotism (pawi s) ; the rule 
of few may be good if an aristocracy of culture and disposition, 
if an oligarchy of birth or property, bad; the rule of all as a 
republic of law and order (TroXireta) may be good, as mob-rule 
(8r}fj.oKpaTia) , bad. With profound political intelligence, Aristotle 
brings together in these expositions the experiences of Grecian 
history, and on the ground of these enters upon the philosophy of 

1 In the polemic against the Socratic doctrine which Aristotle brings forward 
in this line, Eth. Nic. III. 1-8, are developed the first beginnings of the problem 
of freedom. 

2 In the eighth book of the Nicomachcean Ethics. 

3 A point of view which the dialogue the Statesman, passing under Plato s 
name, had already emphasised, while Plato himself in the Republic constructed 
the " bad " constitutions from psychological analogies of a predominance of the 
lower parts of the soul. 

CHAP. 3, 13.] System of Development : Aristotle. 153 

history in giving intimations as to the necessity with which individ 
ual forms of constitutions pass over into one another and develop 
out of one another. 

After these presuppositions we can understand that Aristotle 
could not think of projecting in detail the constitution of an ideal 
state in Plato s manner. He contented himself with a critical 
emphasising of those elements which had proved requisite in indi 
vidual constitutions for fulfilling the general task of the state. In 
this connection he agrees with the Platonic demand for a public 
system of education ; the ethical community must itself take the 
care of fitting for their place the elements of which it will in future 
consist, and it is the task of education (in the treatment of which 
the fragment of the Politics breaks off) to lead man out of his rude 
state of nature with the help of the noble arts, to ethical and intel 
lectual culture. 

14. To the practical activity of the reason (AoytortKov), in the 
broader sense of the word, Aristotle reckoned also " making " 
(TTOICIV) in addition to "acting" (Trpa&s) ; yet, on the other hand, 
he made so great distinction between this creative activity, which 
presents itself in art, and the action directed toward the ends of 
daily life, that he occasionally set the science of art, poietic phi 
losophy, as a third independent science, side by side with the theo 
retical and practical. Of this poietic philosophy, there is preserved 
besides the Rhetoric only the fragment of his theory of the art of 
poetry, under the name of the Poetic. This sets out, indeed, from 
principles relating to the nature of art in general, but in its particu 
lar subject offers only the outlines of a theory of tragedy. In 
this, such peculiar relations of this science of art to the two other 
principal parts of philosophy appear, that it becomes difficult to sub 
ordinate this branch under either of the other two. 

Art is imitative production, and the arts are distinguished as well 
by the objects which they imitate as by the material with which 
they imitate. The objects of poetic art are men and their actions ; 
its means are language, rhythm, and harmony. Tragedy, in particu 
lar, represents an important action as performed immediately by 
speaking and acting persons. 1 

But the purpose of this imitative representation is an ethical one : 
the passions of man, in particular in the case of tragedy, fear and 
sympathy, are to be so excited, that by their excitation and en 
hancement purification of the soul (Ka0ap&lt;ns) from these passions 
is brought about. - 

* Poet. 6, 1449 b 24. 

154 The Greeks : Systematic Period. [PAKT I. 

On the doctrine of the Catharsis, which became so important for the later 
theory of art, and on the literature concerning it, cf. A. Doring, Die Kunstlehre 
des Aristoteles (Jena, 1876). 

The attainment of this end is, however, accomplished in such 
a way, that in artistic representation the particular is brought to 
our view, not as a particular, but in its universal nature or essence. 
Art, like science, has for its object the universal in its particular 
realisation ; it offers a kind of knowledge, and with this the pleas 
ure which attends upon knowledge. 1 

15. The highest perfection of its development finally is achieved 
by the rational nature of man in knoidedge. The dianoetic virtues 
are the highest, and those which bring complete happiness. The 
activity of the theoretical reason (CTTICTT^/AOVIKOV) is directed to the 
immediate apprehension of the highest truths, i.e. of the concep 
tions and judgments which the inductive search of scientific inves 
tigation only leads up to without being able to prove, and from 
which all deduction must take its beginning (cf. 12, 4). 

But knowledge of these, the full unfolding of the " active reason " 
in man, is again designated by Aristotle as a "beholding" (Qtwpia) ; 
and with this beholding of the highest truth man gains a participa 
tion in that pure thought, in which the essence of the deity consists, 
and thus, also, in the eternal blessedness of the divine self-conscious 
ness. For this " beholding " which exists only for its own sake 
and has no ends of will or deed, this wishless absorption in the 
perception of the highest truth, is the blessedest and best of all. 

1 Poet. 9, 1451 b 5. 

PART II. 

THE HELLENISTIC-ROMAN PHILOSOPHY. 

As regards the general literature, the same works serve for this part that were 
cited at the beginning of Part I. 

WITH the age of Aristotle, Grecian civilisation stepped out 
from its national restrictions and into the great general movement 
in which the peoples of antiquity that dwelt about the Mediter 
ranean, through interchange and adjustment of their ideas, became 
fused into one common civilisation. This process began through 
the union of Oriental with Greek thought, in the Hellenistic states 
of Alexander s successors. It found its external completion in the 
Roman Empire, its internal completion in Christianity. Hellen 
ism, Romanism, and Christianity were the three stages in which the 
world s future civilisation developed from antiquity. 

The intellectually determining element in this union was Greek 
science, and herein consists its significance for the world s history. 
It became, like Greek art, the common possession of ancient civili 
sation. To it were joined step by step the highest movements in 
the inner life of the peoples, and it became the forming power for 
all the longings and impulses that lived within their souls. It 
was with the fall of its political independence, with its absorp 
tion into the Empire, that the Greek nation bought the accomplish 
ment of its task of civilisation; by their dispersal over the world 
the Greeks became the teachers of the world. 

But in connection with this entrance into more extended relations, 
Greek science experienced a separation of the different elements 
which were united in it. Together with the purely theoretical 
interest in which it had originated, and which had found so clear 
an expression in the personality and teaching of Aristotle, a practi 
cal interest had in time developed, which sought in science the 
conviction that should govern life. In Plato s philosophy the two 
were inseparately fused together, but now these two tendencies of 
science became separated. 

Scientific thought, which had come to a knowledge of its own 
processes in the Aristotelian logic, had arrived at the consciousness 

166 

156 Hellenistic- Roman Philosophy. [PART II. 

of fundamental conceptions, with the aid of which it could use the 
abundance of phenomena. The principal opposing theories of the 
interpretation of the world had developed in the great systems, and 
in this way a fixed frame or setting was formed for the scientific 
treatment of detail. But beginning, as it did, with so slightly ex 
tended a knowledge of detail, the more successful Greek science was 
in the development of principles, the more it now experienced a 
crippling, at once of metaphysical interest and metaphysical force. 

In consequence of this, however, the theoretical tendency of sci 
ence was toward details, and the fundamental scientific character of 
the Hellenistic-Roman time is erudition and the development of the 
special sciences. The individual man of science, by entrance into 
one of the great schools, gained a firm support of collective opinion, 
and a ruling principle for the treatment of separate questions and 
subjects which interested him. And indifference toward general 
metaphysical theories was the greater, the more it appeared that 
fruitful investigation in special provinces, extension of knowledge 
of facts, and comprehension of special departments of science were 
possible, independently of the strife of metaphysical systems. The 
separation of problems, which had been completed typically in the 
Aristotelian teaching and school, led necessarily to specialisation, 
and the purely theoretical interest in knowledge for its own sake 
developed, during the Hellenistic-Roman period, essentially in the 
individual sciences. The great savants of later antiquity stand, it is 
true, in loose relations with one school or another, but they always 
show themselves indifferent to metaphysics. So it happens that 
during this time production, so far as the theoretical principles of 
philosophy were concerned, was extremely small, while investiga 
tion into mathematics, natural science, grammar, philology, literary 
and general history, had rich and comprehensive results to record. 
With the great mass of those names which are reckoned as " philos 
ophers," whether heads of schools or associates in the schools, and 
which are continued in the schematic treatment of the " History of 
Philosophy," only literary-historical notices are connected, as that 
they worked specially in this or that department ; or it may be per 
sonal information, of no importance to philosophy, as that they 
attached themselves to this or that one among the earlier teachers, 
almost never do we find any formation of new and original con 
ceptions. So far as theoretical knowledge was concerned, this 
period turned the old problems of the Greeks hither and thither, 
and moved along the track which it found already laid down. 

So much the more powerfully, during these centuries of appropri 
ation and elaboration, did the practical significance of philosophy 

Hellenistic- Roman Philosophy. 157 

unfold itself. The need of a scientific doctrine of the ends of 
human life, of such a wisdom as should guarantee the happiness of 
the individual, could but become more urgent as the ideal structure 
of Greek life fell in pieces, as the religion of the people sank ever 
more and more to an external tradition, as the crumbling political 
life, robbed of its independence, no longer awakened devotion, and 
the individual in his inner life felt thrown back upon himself. 
Thus wisdom for the conduct of life became the fundamental problem 
of the philosophy which followed that of the Greeks, and the nar 
rowing in the statement of the philosophical problem which Socrates, 
and after him the Cynic and Cyrenaic schools of Sophistic thought, 
had begun, is the general character of the succeeding period. 

This did not exclude general theoretical doctrines and their 
sharply championed contests from assuming airs of great impor 
tance during this period ; but, on the -one hand, they met with no 
original interest for their own sake, and consequently developed 
only in the directions which were determined by the real end in 
view, i.e. that of wisdom for the conduct of life; on the other hand, 
they were lacking in originality, they were throughout only the old 
traditions shifted about, conditioned by the fundamental practical 
thoughts. Even such comprehensive systems as the Stoic and the 
Neo-Platonic work only with the conceptions of Greek philosophy, 
in order to gain a theoretical basis for their practical ideal. The 
key to their theoretical doctrines lies always in the fundamental 
practical conviction, and in so far they are all of them character 
istic types of the mingling of problems. 

With this predominance of practical importance is connected the 
fact that the dependence of philosophy upon the general movement 
of civilisation, which had already with the Sophists made its 
entrance into the quiet circle of disinterested investigation, became 
in the Hellenistic-Roman period a permanent phenomenon, and 
this appears most decisively in the changing attitude of this phi 
losophy toward religion. 

The development which Greek philosophy had taken, and the 
ever more sharply pronounced opposition to the religion of the 
people into which it had come, brought with it the result that 
the special task of that wisdom for the conduct of life which the 
post- Aristotelian philosophy sought, was to find a compensation for 
religious faith. The cultured world, which had lost the support 
afforded by religion, and was obliged to give up that of the state 
also, sought it in philosophy. As a result, the point of view of the 
Hellenistic-Roman wisdom for the conduct of life was primarily 
that of individual morality, and the philosophy which busied itself 

158 Hellenistic-Roman Philosophy. [PART IF. 

with this had, consequently, a thoroughly ethical stamp. The 
sharpness of the opposition of this individualistic ethics to religion 
appears most clearly among the Epicureans. But in the other 
schools, also, the doctrines of the deity have a purely ethical, or 
perhaps a theoretical interest, but none that is specifically religious. 

This essentially ethical development of philosophy reached its 
completion in Greece, especially, indeed, in Athens, which, amid all 
the spread of Greek culture eastward and westward, formed for 
centuries the centre of scientific life. But soon new centres par 
ticularly for erudite detailed investigation, arose in the great libra 
ries and museums, in Rhodes, in Pergamum, in Alexandria, in 
Tarsus, in Rome, and later, in Antioch and Byzantium. Of these, 
Alexandria became especially important, where not only did elabora- 
tive erudition experience so typical a development, that the entire 
direction of this period is generally called " literary-historical " in 
accordance with it, but where, also, the philosophical direction of 
the time experienced its decided change. 

For as time went on philosophy could not remain indifferent to 
that deep feeling of dissatisfaction which had seized the ancient 
world in the midst of all the glory of the Roman Empire. This 
huge empire offered to the peoples which it had welded together 
into a mighty unit, no compensation for the loss of their national 
independence; it granted them neither inner worth nor outer for 
tune. The draught from the life of earth had become insipid to 
ancient peoples, and they thirsted after religion. So they groped 
after the different cults and religious practices which individual 
peoples had brought with them, and the religions of the Orient 
became mixed with those of the Occident. 

Into this movement philosophy was the more drawn, the more it 
became clear that it could not satisfy the cultured man by the 
presentation of its ethical ideal of life, could not secure for him 
the promised happiness. It followed then at first, in Alexandria 
that the mingling, surging flood of religious ideas emptied itself 
into philosophy, which now sought to build up upon a scientific 
basis, not only an ethical conviction, but a religion as well. Philos 
ophy employed the conceptions of Greek science to clarify and put 
in order religious ideas, to give to the importunate demand of 
religious feeling an idea of the world that should be satisfactory 
to it, and so created the systems of religious metaphysics, in more or 
less intimate connection with the contending religions. 

Accordingly, in the Hellenistic-Roman philosophy there are two 
distinct periods to be distinguished, the ethical and the religious. 
The last century B.C. is to be designated as the time in which the 
one gradually passed over into the other. 

CHAPTER I. 

THE ETHICAL PERIOD. 

THE two schools of the great masters of Attic philosophy, the 
Academic and the Peripatetic, followed the tendency of the time 
which separated science into the two branches, ethical philosophy 
and learned investigation. While in thft first generation of the 
Academy that contemporary with Aristotle a Pythagoreanising 
metaphysics had predominated, this made room in the next period 
for popular moralising (cf. p. 101). In the Lyceum, indeed, Theo- 
phrastus, and after him, Strato, held fast to the development and 
re-shaping of the Aristotelian metaphysics, but the associates of 
Theoprastus, Diccearchus, Aristoxenus, and others, as well as Theo- 
phrastus himself, turned to literary-historical studies and to natural 
science. Later, the Peripatetics had a great share in the Alexan 
drian erudition, and the history of philosophy especially found in 
them its most industrious workers. But in philosophy itself they 
played only the conservative role of defending the system of their 
school against the attacks of the others, especially upon the ethical 
domain, and the new edition of the Aristotelian works by Androni- 
cus gave new stimulus for a zealous reproduction of his teaching. 
Paraphrases, commentaries, excerpts, and interpretations formed 
the chief occupation of the later Peripatetics. 

The Academy and Lyceum were, however, injured in their work 
ing by the two schools which were founded toward the end of the 
fourth century, and which owed their great success to the fact that 
they formulated the tendency of the time toward the practical wis 
dom of life with the clearness and impressiveness of one-sidedness : 
namely, the Stoic and the Epicurean. 

The first was founded in the STOOL TTOLKL\^ by Zeno, a native of 
Citiuin in Cyprus, and had, both in his time and in that of his suc 
cessor, Cleanthes, more likeness to Cynicism than in the time of its 
third head, Chrysippus, who succeeded in turning the school into a 
more scientific course. Epicurus, on the contrary, founded a society 
which made the Hedonistic principle, in a refined and intellect- 

159 

160 Hellenistic- Roman Philosophy. [PART II. 

ualised form, its centre, but developed only a slight degree of 
scientific vitality. While numerous adherents were won to its 
social-ethical principle then established, and to the view of the 
world connected with it, as these were continued through antiquity 
and especially in the Roman world, the school remained decidedly 
more unfruitful scientifically than the others, as well in the special 
sciences as in philosophy. Its doctrines have been presented in an 
interesting manner by the Roman poet, Lucretius. 

These four schools continued side by side in Athens for centuries, 
and in the time of the Empire they were still maintained in various 
chairs of instruction, and formed there a sort of university ; but 
only in the Academy, and here only with great gaps, can a succes 
sion of heads of the school be traced ; while the tradition in the 
case of the Stoa and the Epicureans breaks off with the first cen 
tury B.C., and for the Lyceum soon after that time. 

At first, however, these four schools contended with each other in 
the liveliest fashion during the third and second centuries B.C., and 
it was especially in ethical questions, and in metaphysical, physical, 
and logical questions only in so far as connected with the ethical, 
that they sought to bear away the palm from one another. 1 

But, moving along side by side with the dogmatic doctrines during 
the whole period was another tendency, which, like the Stoic and 
Epicurean philosophy, originated in the teaching of the Sophists : 
namely, Scepticism. It did not, indeed, take on the form of an 
association in a school, but it, too, was brought together into a system 
atic form,^ and found an ethical culmination. Such a concentration, 
in accord with the spirit of the times, of the negative results of the 
teaching of the Sophists, was achieved by Pyrrho, whose doctrines 
were set forth by Timon. This Sophistical scepticism had the 
triumph of obtaining possession of Plato s grove for a time; for, if 
the Middle Academy did not make this doctrine fully its own, it made 
it a weapon for combating Stoicism and grounding its own ethics. 
In this phase of the development of the Academy appear the two 
heads of the school, Arcesilaus and Carneades, who were separated by 
about a century. In after time, when the Academy again rejected 
Scepticism, this doctrine met with sympathy principally among the 
empirical physicians, among whom, even at the end of this period, 
^Enesidemus and Agrippa are to be mentioned. A complete collec 
tion of the doctrines of the Sceptics, made at a much later time, 
is preserved in the works of Sextus Empiricus. 

1 Cicero in his philosophical dialogues gives vivid pictures of these school con 
troversies, with a dextrous use of the original sources. 

CHAP. l.J The Ethical Period. 161 

But the deeper significance of this Scepticism was that it brought 
to expression the fundamental frame of mind which had seized the 
entire ancient civilisation as it had once seized that of Greece, a 
frame of mind at variance with the true ideal import and content of 
that civilisation ; and the same lack of the spirit of decided convic 
tion found only another form in the Eclecticism which began to 
develop in the second half of the second century. With the exten 
sion of the schools in the great relations of the life of the Koman 
Empire, the school-spirit disappeared, polemic was crippled, and the 
need of adjustment and fusion made itself felt instead. The teleo- 
logical view of the world, especially, formed the basis upon which 
Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism could agree in a common 
opposition against Epicureanism. 

The tendency toward such a fusion, toward syncretism, first awoke 
in the Stoic school, and found its most efficient supporters in Pance- 
tius and Posidonius, who supplemented the doctrine of the Stoa 
on all sides by borrowing Platonic and Aristotelian elements. In 
opposition to them stood the, New Academy, which, after Philo of 
Larissa had made an end of the sceptical episode in the develop 
ment of the school, made the attempt, through Antiochus, to unite 
philosophy, then so disunited, upon those doctrines in which Plato 
and Aristotle agree. 

Less important, because more devoid of principles, but not, there 
fore, the less significant historically, was that sort of eclecticism 
which the Romans employed in taking up Greek philosophy. This 
consisted in piecing together, from an essentially practical point of 
view, the different school systems which met their approval. This 
was the case with Cicero, Varro, and in part with the school of the 
Sextians. 

Of the Peripatetic School (the Lyceum), the co-founder himself is primarily 
to be noticed, Theophrastus of Erebus in Lesbos (about 370-287), a somewhat 
younger friend of Aristotle, who through his teachings and writings won great 
regard for the school. Of his works, the botanical, also a fragment of the 
Metaphysics, extracts from his Characters, from the treatise concerning percep 
tion, from his history of physics, and some isolated fragments are preserved 
(edited by F. Wimmer, Bresfau. 1842-62). 

With him appear Eudemus of Rhodes, Aristoxenus of Tarentum, who 
studied music historically and theoretically ( Element? der Musik, German by 
R. Westphal, Leips. 1883), Diceearchus of Messina, a learned polyhistor who 
wrote a history of Grecian civilisation (/3tos EXXdSos), and Strato of I.nmps^fiis, 
who was head of the school (287-2(&gt;!&gt;) and had as surname The Physicist." 

Among the Peripatetic doxographers, Hermippus, Notion, Satyrus, Heracleides 
Lembus (in the second c&lt; ntury B.C.), and am-&gt;iig the later commentators, 
Alexander of Aphrodisias (about 200 A.I&gt;. in Athens) are to be mentioned. 

The Middle Academy begins with Arcesilaus of Pitane in ^olia (about 
315-241), whose teachings were recorded by his pupil Lacydes, and ends with 
Carneades (in Rome, 155) and his successor Clitomachus, who died 1 10. Noth 
ing remains of their writings. The sources are, beside Diogenes Laertius, prin 
cipally Cicero and Sextus Empiricus. 

162 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Ethical Period. [PART II. 

Just as indirect and general in its character is our knowledge of the New 
Academy. Philo of Larissa was still in Rome in 87. His successor, Antio- 
chus of Ascalon, was heard by Cicero in Athens in 78. To the supporters of 
eclectic Platonism in this first, essentially ethical form belong among others 
Arius Didymus, who inclined strongly to Stoicism (in the time of Augustus), 
and Thrasyllua (under Tiberius), who prepared an edition of the works of 
Democritus and Plato, arranged according to subjects. An extensive literature 
of paraphrase and commentary connected with Plato s works also developed in 
the Academy. 

When we consider the personality of the Stoic School, we are struck by the 
frequency of the descent of its members from the Hellenistic mixed races of the 
Orient. Thus the founder, Zeno (about 340-265), came from his Cyprian home 
as a merchant to Athens, and there, taken captive by philosophy, is said to 
have absorbed the doctrines of the different schools, to found his own in the 
year 308. His principal pupil was Cleanthes of Assos in Troas, from whose 
writings a monotheistic hymn to Zeus is preserved, Stob. Eel. I. 30 (Wachs- 
muth, p. 25). The scientific head of the school was Chrysippus (280-209) of 
Soli or Tarsus in Cilicia. He is said to have written an extraordinary amount, 
but, aside from the titles, only very unimportant fragments of his works are 
preserved. Cf. G. Bagnet (Loewen, 1822). Among the literary-historical 
savants of the Stoic School, Diogenes of Babylon and Apollodorus are to be 
mentioned ; Aristarchus and Eratosthenes stood in close relation to the school. 

Paneetius (18 )-110), who was strongly influenced by the Academic scepticism 
and w.io maintained a close relation with the Roman statesmen, began the syn- 
cretistic development of the Stoa, which was completed by Posidoniusof Syrian 
Apamea (about 135-50). The latter was one of the greatest polyhistors of 
antiquity, especially in the geographico-historical dom lin. He taught in Rhodes, 
and was heard by many young Romans, among whom was Cicero. 

Concerning the Stoics of the time of the Kmpire, cf. the following chapter. 
Sources for the Stoic doctrines are Cicero and Diogenes Laertius, Book VII., in 
part also the extant writings of the Stoics of the time of the Empire, and the 
discoveries at Herculaneum. 

I). Tiedmann, System der stoischen Philosophic (3 vols., Leips. 1776) ; P. 
Weygoldt, Die Philosophic der Stoa (Leips. 1883) ; P. Ogereau, Essai sur le 
System* Philo so phique dcs Stoiciens (Paris, 1885) ; L. Stein, Die Psychologic 
der Stoa (2 vols., Berlin, 1880-88) ; [Capes, Stoicism, Lond. 1880]. 

Epicurus (341-270), born in Samos, the son of an Athenian schoolmaster, 
had already made attempts at teaching in Mitylene and in Lampsacus, before 
founding in Athens, in 306, the society which is named after his "gardens" 
(KTJTTOI, horti, as also the other schools were named after the places where they 
assembled). He was much loved as a teacher, on account of his companionable 
qualities. Of his numerous writings lightly thrown off, the proverbs (icvpiai 
3Jcu), three didactic letters, parts of his treatise irepl 0wrews (in the discoveries 
at Herculaneum), and besides only scattered fragments are preserved ; collected 
and arranged systematically by H. Usener, Epicurea (Leips. 1887). 

Among the great mass of his followers, antiquity brings into prominence his 
closest friend Metrodorus of Lampsacus ; also Zeno of Sidon (about 150) and 
1 Iuedrus (about 100 B.C.). Fhilodemus of Gadara in Coele-Syria has become a 
somewhat more distinct figure to us since a part of his writings has been found 
at Herculaneum (Hercidanensium voluminum quce supersunt, first series, Naples, 
1793 ff. ; second, 1861 ff.) ; the most valuable, irepl ffrjueiuv Kai ffrjueiwo-ewv (cf. 
Fr. Bahusch, Lyck, 1879; H. v. Arnim, Philodemea, Halle, 1888). 

The didactic poem of Tit. Lucretius Carus (98-54), De Natura Eerum, in six 
books, has been edited by Lachmann (Berlin, 1850) and Jac. Bernays (Leips. 
1852) ; [Kng. ed. with tr. of the poem by Munro, Lond. 1886. Cf. The Atomic 
Theory of Lucretius, by J. Masson, Lond. 1884]. 

Further sources are Cicero and Diogenes Laertius, in the tenth book. 

Cf. M. Guyau, La Morale d" Epicure (Paris, 1878); P. v. Gizycki, Ueber das 
Leben und die Moralphilosophie des Epikur (Berlin, 1879) ; W. Wallace, Epi 
cureanism (Lond. 1880) ; [Wallace, Art. Ep. in Enc. Brit.; W. L. Courtney, 
Efi. in Hellenica ]. 

CHAP. 1, 14.] Ideal of the Sage. 163 

Scepticism, as accords with the nature of the case, makes its appearance, 
not as a close school, but in looser form. 1 It remains doubtful whether the sys- 
tematiser of Scepticism, Pyrrho of Elis (perhaps 365-275), had any intimate 
relations with the Socratic-Sophistie school of his native city. A certain Bryso, 
who passes for the son of Stilpo, is looked upon as an intermediate link. He 
accompanied Alexander on his journey to Asia, together with a follower of 
Democritus, Anaxarchus by name. The Sillograph, Timon of 1 hlius (320-230, 
the latter part of the time at Athens) from I yrrho s standpoint derides philoso 
phers. Fragments of his writings in C. Wach.smuth, De Timone Phliasio 
(Leips. 1859). Cf. Ch. Waddington, Pijrrhon (Paris, 1877). 

The external relations of later Scepticism are very obscure and uncertain. 
JEnesidemus from Cnossus taught in Alexandria, and composed a treatise, 
Ilvppuvcioi \uyot, of which nothing remains. His life falls probably in the first 
century B.C., yet it has also been set almost two centuries later. Of Agrippa, 
nothing in detail can be established. The literary representative of Scepticism 
is the physician Sextus Empiricus. who lived about 200 A.D., and of his writ 
ings there are extant his Outline Sketches of Pyrrhonism (llvppuveioi virorvirAffeis), 
and the investigations comprehended under the name Adversus Mathematicos, 
of which Books VII.-XI. contain the exposition of the sceptical doctrine, with 
many valuable historical notices (ed. by J. Bekker, Berlin, 1842). 

Cf. K. Staudlin, Gesch. und Geist des Skepticismus (Leips. 1794-05) ; N. 
Maccoll, The Greek Sceptics (London, 18(i9) ; L. Haas, DC Philosophoruin 
Scepticorum Success ionibus ( Wiirzburg, 1875) ; [Owen, Evenings with the Scep 
tics (Lond. 1881) ; A. Seth, Art. Scepticism, in Enc. Brit.]. 

Among the Romans, the admission of philosophy at first encountered violent 
resistance; but by the beginning of the first century B.C. it was the general 
custom for the young Romans of superior rank to study in Athens or Rhodes, 
and to hear the lectures of the heads of schools, for the same end as that for which 
the Athenians had formerly heard the Sophists. The literary activity of Marcus 
Tullius Cicero (10(5-43) must be judged from the point of view of his purpose, 
which was to awaken among his countrymen an inclination for general scien 
tific culture and a comprehension of its meaning, and from this standpoint his 
work is to be highly prized. Skill in composition and grace of form excuse the 
lack of proper philosophising ability, which is shown in a selection of doctrines 
based on no philosophical principle. The main treatises are De Finibns, De 
Officiis, Tusc.ulan(K Disputationes, Acadcmica, De Natura Deorum, De Fato, 
De Divinatione. Cf. Herbart, Ueber die Philosophic des Cicero; in Works, 
XII. 1(17 ff. [Trans, of the above writings of Cicero in the Bohn. Lib.] 

His friend, M. Terentius Varro (110-27), the well-known polyhistor and 
prolific writer, was more learned, but of his labours toward the history of philos 
ophy only occasional notes are extant. 

Quintus Sextus and a son of the same name and Sotion of Alexandria are 
named as Sextians. Sotion seems to have been the intermediate link in which 
the Stoic morals were brought into union with the Alexandrian Pythagoreanism, 
and given that religious turn which characterises them in the time of the Empire. 
Some of their Sentences, discovered in a Syrian translation, have been edited 
by Gildemeister (Bonn, 1873). 

On the literary conditions of this whole period cf. R. Hirzel, Untersuchungen 
zu Cicero 1 s philosophischen Schriften (3 vols., Leips. 1877-83). 

14. The Ideal of the Wise Man. 

The fundamental ethical tendency of the philosophising of this 
entire period is still more precisely characterised by the fact that 
it is throughout individual ethics that forms the centre of investiga 
tion in this time of epigones. The elevation to the ideals of ethical 

1 Hence all reckonings by the successions of heads of the school, attempted 
in order to fix the chronology of the later Sceptics, are illusory. 

164 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Ethical Period. [PART II. 

community, in which morals culminated with both Plato and Aris 
totle, was a glorification that had become foreign to its time, of 
that through which Greece had become great, viz. the thought 
of an active, living state. This had lost power over the hearts of 
men, and even in the schools of Plato and Aristotle it found so 
little sympathy that the Academicians, as well as the Peripatetics, 
brought into the foreground the question of individual happiness 
and virtue. What is preserved from the treatise of the Academi 
cian Grantor, On Grief, 1 or from the works of Theophrastus under 
the title of Ethical Characters, stands wholly upon the footing of a 
philosophy that esteems the right appreciation of the good things 
of life to be its essential object. 

In the endless discussions on these questions in which the schools 
engaged in the following centuries, the successors of the two great 
thinkers of Attic philosophy found themselves in an attitude of 
common opposition to the new schools. Both had pursued through 
the entire circuit of empirical reality the realisation of the Idea of 
the Good, and in spite of all the idealism with which Plato 
especially strove to transcend the world of the senses, they had 
not failed to appreciate the relative value of this world s goods. 
Highly as they prized virtue, they yet did not exclude the view that 
for the complete happiness of man 2 the favour of external fortune, 
health, prosperity, etc., are requisite also, and they denied espe 
cially the doctrine of the Cynics and Stoics that virtue is not 
only the highest (as they admitted), but also the sole good. 

At all events, however, they too laboured to determine the right 
conduct of life which promised to make man happy, and while 
individual members of the schools pursued their special researches, 
the public activity, especially that of the heads of the schools 
in their polemic with their opponents, was directed to the end of 
drawing the picture of the normal man. This it was that the time 
desired of philosophy : " Show us how the man must be constituted 
who is sure of his happiness, whatever the fortune of the world 
may bring him ! " That this normal man must be called the able, 
the virtuous, and that he can owe his virtue only to insight, to 
knowledge, that he therefore must be the " wise " man, this is 
the presupposition arising from the Socratic doctrine, which is 
recognised as self-evident by all parties during this entire period ; 
and therefore all strive to portray the ideal of the wise man, i.e. 
of the man whom his insight makes virtuous, and so, happy. 

1 Cf. F. Kayser (Heidelberg, 1841). 

2 This Aristotelian view was completely assented to by Speusippus and Xen- 
ocrates of the Older Academy. 

CHAP. 1, 14.] Ideal of the Saye : JEpicurus. 165 

1. The most prominent characteristic in the conception of the 
" wise man," as determined in this period, is, therefore, imperturba 
bility (ataraxy, arapa^ia) . Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics are un 
wearied in praising this independence of the world as the desirable 
quality of the wise man: he is free, a king, a god; whatever hap 
pens to him, it cannot attack his knowledge, his virtue, his happi 
ness; his wisdom rests in himself, and the world does not trouble 
him. This ideal, as thus portrayed, is characteristic of its time; 
the normal man, for this period, is not he who works and creates 
for the sake of great purposes, but he who knows how to free him 
self from the external world, and find his happiness in himself alone. 
The inner isolation of individuals, and indifference toward general 
ends, find here sharp expression : the overcoming of the outer world 
conditions the happiness of the wise man. 

But since he has no power over the world without him, he must 
overcome it within himself; he must become master of the effects 
which it exercises upon him. These effects, however, consist in 
the feelings and desires which the world and life excite in man ; 
they are disturbances of his own nature emotions, or passions 
(irdOrj, affectus). Wisdom is shown, therefore, in the relation 

from passions or emotions, emotionlessness (apathy, aTrdOeiM, is the 
Stoic expression). To rest unmoved within one s self, this is the 
blessing of this " wisdom." 

The terms with which this doctrine is introduced in the case of 
Epicurus and Pyrrho point immediately to a dependence upon 
Aristippus and Democritus. It corresponds to the gradual trans 
formation which took place in the Hedonistic school (cf. 7, 9) that 
Epicurus, 2 who made its principle his own, and likewise designated 
pleasure as the highest good, nevertheless preferred the permanent 
frame of satisfaction and rest to the enjoyment of the moment. 
The Cyrenaics also had found the essence of pleasure in gentle 
motion; but Epicurus held that is still a "pleasure in motion"; 
and the state of painless rest, free from all wishes (17801/77 Karatrr-rj- 
fjuiTLKrj), is of higher value. Even the zest and spirit of enjoy 
ment has become lost ; the Epicurean would indeed gladly enjoy 

1 The ancient conception of the passions (Affect), extending into modern 
time (Spinoza), is accordingly wider than that of the present psychology. It is 
best denned by the Latin translation " perturbationes animi," "emotions," and 
includes all states of feeling and will in which man is dependent upon the outer 
world. 

2 As intermediate links, the younger followers of Democritus, strongly tinc 
tured with Sophistic doctrine, are named; especially a certain Nausiphanes, 
whom Epicurus heard. 

166 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Ethical Period. [PART II. 

all pleasure, but it must not excite him or set him in motion. 
Peace of soul (yaA^vior/Aos, cf. 10, 5) is all that he wishes, and he 
anxiously avoids the storms which threaten it, i.e. the passions. 

Epicurus therefore recognised the logical consistency with which 
the Cynics had characterised absence of wants as virtue and happi 
ness ; but he was far from seriously renouncing pleasure, as they 
did. The wise man must, to be sure, understand this also, and act 
accordingly, as soon as it becomes requisite in the course of things. 
But his satisfaction will be greater in proportion as the compass of 
the wishes which he finds satisfied is fuller. Just for this reason, 
he needs the insight (&lt;pov7;(ns) which not only makes it possible to 
estimate the different degrees of pleasure and pain as determined 
through the feelings, which are to be expected. in a particular case, 
but also decides whether and how far one should give place to indi 
vidual wishes. In this aspect Epicureanism distinguished three 
kinds of wants : some are natural (&lt;tW) and unavoidable, so that, 
since it is not possible to exist at all without their satisfaction, even 
the wise man cannot free himself from them ; others, again, are only 
conventional (VO/AU&gt;), artificial, and imaginary, and the wise man has 
to see through their nothingness and put them from him ; between 
the two, however (here Epicurus opposes the radically one-sided 
nature of Cynicism), lies the great mass of those wants which have 
their natural right, but are not indeed indispensable for existence. 
Hence the wise man can in case of necessity renounce them ; but 
since the satisfaction of these gives happiness, he will seek to satisfy 
them as far as possible. Complete blessedness falls to his lot who 
rejoices in all these good things in quiet enjoyment, without stormy 
striving. 

On the same ground, Epicurus prized mental joys higher than 
physical enjoyments which are connected with passionate agitation. 
But he seeks the joys of the mind, not in pure knowledge, but in 
the aesthetic refinement of life, in that intercourse with friends 
which is pervaded by wit and sentiment and touched with delicacy, 
in the comfortable arrangement of daily living. Thus the wise 
man, in quiet, creates for himself the blessedness of self-enjoyment, 
independence of the moment, of its demands and its results. He 
knows what he can secure for himself, and of this he denies himself 
nothing ; but he is not so foolish as to be angry at fate or to lament 
that he cannot possess everything. This is his " ataraxy," or im- 
passiveness : an enjoyment like that of the Hedonists, but more 
refined, more intellectual, and more blase. 

2. Pyrrhd s Hedonism took another direction, inasmuch as he 
sought to draw the practical result from the sceptical teachings of 

CHAP. 1, 14.] Ideal of the Sa&lt;/e : Pyrrho, Stoics. 167 

the Sophists. According to the exposition of his disciple, Timon, he 
held it to be the task of science to investigate the constitution 
of things, in order to establish man s appropriate relations to them, 
and to know what he may expect to gain from them. 1 But accord 
ing to Pyrrho s theory it has become evident that we can never 
know the true constitution of things but at the most can know 
only states of feelings (iraQ-tj) into which these put us (Protagoras, 
Aristippus). If, however, there is no knowledge of things, it 
cannot be determined what the right relation to them is, and 
what the success that will result from our action. This scepticism 
is the negative reverse side to the Socratic-Platonic inference. As 
there, from the premise that right action is not possible without 
knowledge, the demand had been made that knowledge must be 
I possible, so here the argument is, that because there is no knowl 
edge, right action is also impossible. 

Under these circumstances all that remains for the wise man is 
to resist as far as possible the seducements to opinion and to action, 
to which the mass of men are subject. All action proceeds, as 
Socrates had taught, from our ideas of things and their value; all 
foolish and injurious actions result from incorrect opinions. The 
wise man, however, who knows that nothing can be affirmed as to 
things themselves (&lt;!&lt;acria), and that no opinion may be assented to 
(eUaTaArji/a a), 2 restrains himself, as far as possible, from judgment, 
and thereby also from action. He withdraws into himself, and in 
the suspension (eVo^i/) 3 of judgment, which preserves him from 
passion and from false action, he finds imperturbability, rest within 
himself, ataraxy. 

This is the Sceptical virtue, which also aims to free man from the 
world, and it finds its limit only in the fact that there are, never 
theless, relations in which even the wise man, withdrawn within 
himself, must act, and when nothing else remains for him than to act 
according to that which appears to him, and according to tradition. 

3. A deeper conception of the process of overcoming the world in 
man was formed by the Stoics. At the beginning, to be sure, they 
professed quite fully the Cynic indifference toward all goods of the 
outer world, and the self-control of the virtuous wise man remained 
stamped upon their ethics also as an ineradicable feature ; "but they 

1 Euseb. Prcep. Ev. XIV. 18, 2. The doctrine of Pyrrho is shown by this to 
be in exact coincidence with the tendency of the time ; it asks, " What are we 
to do, then, if there is no knowledge ? " 

2 An expression which was probably formed in the polemic against the Stoic 
conception of KardX^is ; cf. 17. 

3 The Sceptics were called also the tyeKTiKol [" Suspenders "] with reference 
to this term, characteristic for them. 

168 Hellenistic- Roman Thought : Ethical Period. [PART II. 

soon dulled the edge of the radical naturalism of the Cynics by a 
penetrating psychology of the impulsive life, which shows a strong 
dependence upon Aristotle. They emphasise, still more than the 
Stagirite, the unity and independence of the individual soul, as con 
trasted with its particular states and activities, and so, with them, 
personality first becomes a determinative principle. The leading- 
power, or governing part of the soul (TO ^ye/xonKoj/), is, for them, not 
only that which makes perceptions out of the excitations of the 
individual organs in sensation, but also that which by its assent ! 
(cnr/Kcn-afco-i?) transforms excitations of the feelings into activities 
of the will. This consciousness, whose vocation is to apprehend 
and form its contents as a unity, is, according to its proper and 
true nature, reason (vovs) ; the states, therefore, in whichi conscious 
ness allows itself to be hurried along to assent by the violence of 
excitement contradict) in like measure, its own nature and reason. 
These states (ajffectus) are, then, those of passion (-rrdOrj) and dis 
ease of the soul ; they are perturbations of the soul, contrary to 
Nature and contrary to reason. 2 Hence the wise man, if he cannot 
defend himself from those excitations of feeling in presence of the 
world, will deny them his assent with the power of reason ; he does 
not allow them to become passions or emotions, his virtue is the 
absence of emotions (a-n-dOtia) . His overcoming of the world is his 
overcoming of his own impulses. It is not until we give our assent 
that we become dependent upon the course of things ; if we with 
hold it, our personality remains immovable, resting upon itself. If 
man cannot hinder fate from preparing for him pleasure and pain, 
he may, nevertheless, by esteeming the former as not a good, and 
the latter as not an evil, keep the proud consciousness of his self- 
sufficiency. 

Hence, in itself, virtue is for the Stoics the sole good, and on the 
other hand, vice, which consists in the control of the reason by the 
passionsyis the j&ol&^eyll, and all other things and relations are 
regarded* as in themselves indifferent (dSia&lt;o/3a). 3 But in their 

1 This assent, to be sure, even according to the Stoics, rests upon the judg 
ment ; in the case of passion, therefore, upon a false judgment, but it is yet at 
the same time the act of the will which is bound up with the judgment. Cf. 17. 

2 Diog. Laert. VII. 110: r6 n-ct0os -f) 5X0705 ACCU irapa &lt;pvffiv i/ i/x^s Klvtjff^ y 
opfii) Tr\eovd^ovffa. The psychological theory of the emotions was developed 
especially by Chrysippus. Zeno distinguished, as fundamental forms, pleasure 
and pain, desire and fear. As principles of division among the later Stoics 
there seem to have been used, partly characteristics of the ideas and judgments 
which call out the emotion, and partly the characteristics of the states of feeling 
and will which proceed from it. Cf. Diog. Laert. VII. Ill ff. ; Stob. Eel. II. 174 f. 

3 By reckoning even life in this division, they came to their well-known 
defence or commendation of suicide (^ayuy^). Cf. Diog. Laert. VII. 130; 
Seneca, Ep. 12, 10. 

CHAP. 1, 14.] Ideal of the Sage : Stoics. 169 

doctrine of goods they moderate the rigour of this principle by the 
distinction of the desirable and that which is to be rejected (TT/DOT/-/- 
fjLfva and aTTOTT/aoT/y/xeVa ) . Strongly as they emphasised in this con 
nection that the worth (d&a) which belongs to the desirable is to be 
distinguished strictly from the Good of virtue, which is a good in 
itself, there yet resulted from this, in opposition to the Cynic one- 
sidedness, an at least secondary appreciation of the good things of 
life. For since the desirable was valued for the reason that it 
seemed adapted to further the Good, and, on the other hand, the 
demerit of that which was to be rejected consisted in the hindrances 
which it prepares for virtue, the threads between the self-sufficient 
individual and the course of the world, which the Cynic paradoxical 
theory had cut, were thus more and more knit together again. The 
mean between what is desirable and what is to be rejected, the abso 
lutely indifferent, survived ultimately only in that which could be 
brought in no relation whatever to morality. 

As these distinctions, by repression of the Cynic element, gradu 
ally made Stoicism more viable and, so to speak, better able to get 
on in the world, so we may see a like modification, by means of 
which it became more usable pedagogically, in the later removal of 
the abrupt contrast which at the beginning was made between the 
virtuous wise and the vicious fools (&lt;avAoi, /u,wpot ) The wise man, 
so it was said at the beginning, is wise and virtuous entirely, and in 
everything the fool is just as entirely and universally foolish and 
sinful; there is no middle ground. If man possesses the force and 
soundness of reason, with which he controls his passions, then he 
possesses with this one virtue all the individual particular virtues J 
at the same time, and this possession, which alone makes happy, 
cannot be lost; if he lacks this, he is a plaything of circumstances 
and of his own passions, and this radical disease of his soul commu 
nicates itself to his entire action and passion. According to the 
view of the Stoics, therefore, the few sages stood as perfect men 
over against the great mass of fools and sinners, and in many decla 
mations they lamented the baseness of men with the Pharisaic 
pessimism which thus gratifies its self-consciousness. But over 
against this first opinion, which looked upon all fools as to be 
rejected alike, the consideration presented itself that among these 
fools there were always noticeable differences with regard to their 
departure from the ideal virtue, and thus between wise men and 
fools there was inserted the conception of the man who is progres 
sive and in a state of improvement (irpoKOTTTwv) . The Stoics, indeed, 

1 The Stoics also made the Platonic cardinal virtues the basis for their sys 
tematic development of their doctrine of the virtues. Stob. Ed. II. 102 ff. 

170 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Ethical Period. [PART II. 

held fast to the view that no gradual transition takes place from 
this process of improvement to true virtue, and that the entrance 
into the condition of perfection results rather from a sudden turn 
about. But when the different stages of ethical progress (TrpoKo-n-rj) 
were investigated and a state was designated as the highest stage, 
in which apathy is indeed attained, but not yet with full sureness 
and certainty, 1 when this was done, the rigorous boundary lines 
were in some measure effaced. 

4. Yet in spite of these practical concessions, the withdrawal 
of the individual personality within itself remained ultimately an 
essential characteristic in the Stoic ideal of life ; on the other hand, 
this which these Greek epigones in common regarded as the mark 
of wisdom, was nowhere so valuably supplemented as among the 
Stoics. Scepticism, so far as we can see, never desired such a pos 
itive supplementation consistently enough ; and Epicureanism 
sought it in a direction which expressed in the sharpest form the 
restriction of ethical interest to individual happiness. For the 
positive content of the wise man s peace of soul, hidden from 
the storms of the world, is, for Epicurus and his followers, at last 
only pleasure. In this they lacked, indeed, that spirited joy of the 
sensuous nature with which Aristippus had exalted the enjoyment 
of the moment and the joys of the body to be the supreme end, 
and we find, as already mentioned, that in their doctrine of the 
highest good the blase, critically appreciative epicurism of the culti 
vated man, is declared to be the content of the ethical life. To be 
sure, in his psycho-genetic explanation Epicurus reduced all pleasure 
without exception to that of the senses, or, as they said later, to 
that of the flesh; 2 but, combating the Cyrenaics, he declared 3 that 
just these derivative and therefore refined joys of the mind were far 
superior to those of the senses. He recognised very properly that 
the individual, upon whose independence of the outer world all 
hinges, is much surer and much more the master of mental than 
of material enjoyments. The joys of the body depend on health, 
riches, and other gifts of fortune, but what is afforded by science 
and art, by the intimate friendship of noble men, by the calm, self- 
contented and free from wants, of the mind freed from passions, 
this is the sure possession of the wise man, almost or wholly un 
touched by the change of fortune. The cesthetic self-enjoyment of 
the cultured man is hence the highest good for the Epicureans. 

1 Cf. the account (probably with regard to Chrysippus) in Seneca, Ep. 
75, 8 ff. 

2 Athen. XII. 546 (Us. Fr. 409) ; Plut. Ad. Col. 27, 1122 (Us. Fr. 411) ; id. 
Contr. Epic. Oral. 4, 1088 (Us. Fr. 429). :i Diog. Laert. X. 137. 

CHAI. 1, 14.] Ideal of the Saye : Epicureans, Stoics. 171 

Thus, to be sure, the coarse and sensuous in Hedonism fell away, 
and the Gardens of Epicurus were a nursery of fair conduct of life, 
finest morals, and noble employments; but the principle of indi 
vidual enjoyment remained the same, and the only difference was 
that the Greeks, in the old age of the national life, together with 
their Roman disciples, enjoyed in a more refined, intellectual, and 
delicate manner than did their youthful and manly ancestors. Only 
the content had become more valuable, because it was the content 
presented to enjoyment by a civilisation more richly developed 
and deeply lived out ; the disposition with which life s cup was 
smilingly emptied, no longer in hasty quaffing, but in deliberate 
draughts, was the same egoism, devoid of all sense of duty. Hence 
the inner indifference of the wise man toward ethical tradition and 
rules of the land, which we find here also, though with greater cau 
tion ; hence, above all, the putting aside of all metaphysical or 
religious ideas that might disturb the wise man in this self-compla 
cent satisfaction of enjoyment, and burden him with the feeling of 
responsibility and duty. 

5. To this, the Stoic ethics forms the strongest contrast. Already, 
in the thought reminding us of Aristotle ( 13, 11), that the soul 
exercises its own proper nature in the rational power with which it 
refuses assent to impulses, we may recognise the peculiar antago 
nism which the Stoics assumed in the human psychical life. For 
just what we now are likely to call the natural impulses, viz. the 
excitations of feeling and will called forth by things of the outer 
world through the senses, and referring to these things, just these 
seemed to them, as above mentioned, that which was contrary to 
nature (irapa &lt; W). Reason, on the other hand, was for them the 
" nature," not only of man, but of the universe in general. When, 
for this reason, they adopt the Cynic principles in which the moral 
is made equivalent to the natural, the same expression contains in 
this latter case a completely changed thought. As a part of the 
World-reason the soul excludes from itself, as an opposing element, 
the determination by sensuous impulses to which the Cynics had 
reduced morality : the demands of Nature, identical with those of 
reason, are in contradiction with those of the senses. 

Accordingly, the positive content of morality among the Stoics 
appears as harmony with Nature, and thus, at the same time, as a 
law which claims normative validity as it confronts the sensuous 
man (vo/xos). 1 In this formula, however, "Nature "is used in a 

1 With tliis is completed an interesting change in Sophistic terminology in 
which (7, 1) VOMOS and 0&lt;f&lt;m had been made equivalent to one another, and 
set over against &lt;PVJLS with the Stoics vj^as = ims. 

172 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Ethical Period. [PART II. 

double sense. 1 On the one hand is meant universal Nature, the 
creative, cosmic power, the world-thought acting according to 
ends (cf. 15), the Adyos; and agreeably to this meaning, man s 
morality is his subordination to the law of Nature, his willing obe 
dience to the course of the world, to the eternal necessity, and in so 
far as this World-reason is designated in the Stoic doctrine as deity, 
it is also obedience to God and to the divine law, as well as sub 
ordination to the world-purpose and the rule of Providence. The 
virtue of the perfect individual, who, as over against other indi 
vidual beings and their action upon him through the senses, ought 
to withdraw within himself, his own master, and rest within him 
self, appears thus under obligation to something universal and 
all-ruling. 

Nevertheless, since according to the Stoic conception the ^yc- 
HOVIKOV, the life-unity of the human soul, is a consubstantial part of 
this divine World-reason, the life in conformity with Nature must 
be also that which is adapted to human nature, to the essential 
nature of man ; and this, too, as well in the more general sense 
that morality coincides with genuine, complete humanity and with 
the reasonableness which is valid in like measure for all, as also in 
the special meaning, that by fulfilling the command of Nature, each 
person brings to its unfolding the inmost germ of his own individual 
essence. Uniting these two points of view, it seemed to the Stoics 
that a rationally guided consistency in the conduct of life was the 
ideal of wisdom, and they found the supreme task of life in this, 
that the virtuous man has to preserve this complete harmony with 
himself 2 in every change of life, as his true strength of character. 
The political doctrinairism of the Greeks found thus its philosophi 
cal formulation and became a welcome conviction for the iron states 
men of republican Rome. 

But whatever the particular terms in which the Stoics gave 
expression to their fundamental thought, this thought itself was 
everywhere the same, that life according to Nature and according 
to reason is a duty (KaQfjuov) which the wise man has to fulfil, a 
law to which he has to subject himself in opposition to his sensuous 
inclinations. And this feeling of responsibility, this strict conscious 
ness of the " ought," this recognition of a higher order, gives to their 
doctrine, as to their life, backbone and marrow. 

This demand also, for a life according to duty, we occasionally 
meet among the Stoics in the one-sided form, that the ethical con- 

1 Cf. Diog. Laert. VII. 87. 

2 Thus the formulas bfw\oyov/j.tvw; ry 0tf(ret fijv and 6fj.o\oyovnti ws fir have 
ultimately the same meaning. Stob. Eel. II. 132. 

CHAP. 1, 14.] Ideal of the Sage : Epicureans, Stoics. 173 

sciousness requires some things on rational, grounds, forbids the 
opposites, and declares all else to be ethically indifferent. What 
is not commanded and not forbidden, remains morally indifferent 
(dSta^o/aov), and from this the Stoics sometimes drew lax conse 
quences, which they perhaps defended more in words than in actual 
intention. But here, too, the systematic development of the theory 
created valuable intermediate links. For even if only the Good is 
unconditionally commanded, yet, in a secondary degree, the desir 
able must be regarded as ethically advisable ; and though baseness 
proper consists only in willing that which is unconditionally for 
bidden, the moral man will yet seek to avoid also that which is " to 
be rejected," Thus, corresponding to the gradation of goods, there 
was introduced a like gradation of duties, which were distinguished 
as absolute and " intermediate." So, on the other hand, with regard 
to the valuation of human actions, a distinction was made on a some 
what different basis between those actions which fulfil the demand 
of reason 1 externally these are called "befitting," conformable to 
duty in the broader sense (KaOrJKovra) and such as fulfil the de 
mand of reason solely from the intention to do the Good. Only in 
the latter case 2 is there a perfect fulfilment of duty (*aTop0u&gt;/ia), 
the opposite of which is the intention that is contrary to duty, as 
evinced in an action, sin (u^apT^a) . Thus the Stoics, proceed 
ing from the consciousness of duty, entered upon a profound and 
earnest study, extending sometimes to considerations of casuistry, 
of the ethical values of human will and action, and we may regard 
as their most valuable contribution the universally applied thought, 
that man in all his conduct, outer and inner, is responsible to a 
higher command. 

6. The great difference in apprehension of the ethical life which 
exists between the Epicureans and the Stoics, in spite of a number 
of deep and far-reaching common qualities, becomes most clearly 
manifest in their respective theories of society and of the state. In 
this, to be sure, they are both at one almost to verbal agreement in 
the doctrine that the wise man, in the self-sufficiency of his virtue, 
needs the state 3 as little as he needs any other society ; yes, that in 
certain* circumstances, he should even avoid these in the interest, 
either of his own enjoyment or of the fulfilment of duty. In this 
sense, even the Stoics, especially the later Stoics, dissuaded from 

1 S&lt;ra 6 \67os alpei iroieiv; Diog. Laert. VII. 108. 

2 For the contrast here alluded to by the Stoics Kant has made customary 
the expressions legality and morality ; the Latin distinguishes according to 
Cicero s precedent, rectum and honestum. 

8 Epic, in Flut. De.Aud. Poet. 14, 37 (Us. Fr. 548). 

174 Hellenistic- Roman Thought : Ethical Period. [PART II. 

entrance into the family life and political activity; and for the 
Epicureans, the responsibility which marriage and public activity 
bring with them was sufficient to justify a very sceptical attitude 
toward both, and especially to make the latter appear advisable for 
the wise man, only in the case where it is unavoidable, or of quite 
certain advantage. In general, the Epicureans hold to the maxim of 
their master, to live in quiet, 1 XdOf. /ftwo-as, in which the inner crum 
bling of ancient society found its typical expression. 

But a greater distinction between the two conceptions of life 
shows itself in the fact that, to the Stoics, human society appeared 
as a command of reason, which must give way only occasionally to 
the wise man s task of personal perfection, while Epicurus expressly 
denied all natural society among men, 2 and therefore reduced 
every form of social conjunction to considerations of utility. So 
the theory of friendship, which in his school was so zealously 
pledged, even to the point of sentimentality, did not find the ideal 
support which it had received in Aristotle s splendid exposition; 3 
it finds ultimately only the motives of the wise man s enjoyment of 
culture as heightened in society. 4 

In particular, however, Epicureanism carried through systemati 
cally the ideas already developed in Sophistic teaching concerning 
the origin of the political community from the well-weighed interest 
of the individuals who formed it. The state is not a natural structure, 
but has been brought about by men as the result of reflection, and 
for the sake of the advantages which are expected and received from 
it. It grows out of a compact (o-wfl^/o;) which men enter into with 
each other in order that they may not injure one another, 5 and the 
formation of the state is hence one of the mighty processes through 
which the human race has brought itself up from the savage state to 
that of civilisation, by virtue of its growing intelligence. 6 Laws, 
therefore, have arisen in every particular case from a convention as 
to the common advantage (cru/a/foW rov au^t/aoi/To?). There is 
nothing in itself right or wrong; and since in the formation of a 
compact the greater intelligence asserts itself to its own advantage 

1 Plutarch wrote against this the extant treatise (1128 ff.), el /caXws X^erai 
7-6 \dde j3ta;&lt;ras. 

2 Arrian, Epict. Diss. I. 23, 1 (Us. Fr. 525); ib. II. 20, 6 (523). 

8 Cf. 13, 12. The extensive literature on friendship is in this respect 
a characteristic sign of the time which found its chief interest in the individual 
personality and its relations. Cicero s dialogue Laelius (De Amicitia) repro 
duces essentially the Peripatetic conception. 

4 Diog. Laert. X. 120 (Us. Fr. 540). 

5 Cf. among the Kvpiai 36cu of Epicurus the terse sentences in Diog. Laert. X. 
150 f. 

6 Cf. the description in Lucretius, De Eer. Nat. V. 922 ff. , especially 1103 ff. 

CHAP. 1, 14.] Ideal of the Sage : Stoics. 175 

as a matter of course, it is for the most part the advantages of the 
wise that disclose themselves as motives in the enaction of laws. 1 
And as is the case for their origin and content, so also for their 
validity and acknowledgment, the amount of pain which they are 
adapted to hinder and pleasure which they are adapted to produce, 
is the only standard. All the main outlines of the utilitarian theory 
of society are logically developed by Epicurus from the atomistic 
assumption that individuals first exist by and for themselves, and 
enter voluntarily and with design into the relations of society, only 
for the sake of the goods which as individuals they could not obtain 
or could not protect. 

7. The Stoics, on the contrary, regarded man as already, by virtue 
of the consubstantiality of his soul with the World-reason, a being 
constituted by Nature for society, 2 and by reason of this very fact 
as under obligation by the command of reason to lead a social life, 
an obligation which admits of exception only in special cases. 
As the most immediate relation we have here also friendship, 
the ethical connection of virtuous individuals who are united in 
the common employment of proving in action the moral law. 3 But 
from these purely personal relations the Stoic doctrine at once passes 
over to the most general, to all rational beings taken as an entirety. 
As parts of the same one World-reason, gods and men together form 
one great rational living structure, a TTO\LTLKOV o-vo-T^/ta, in which 
every individual is a necessary member (/w Aos), and from this re 
sults for the human race the ideal task of forming a realm of reason 
that shall embrace all its members. 

The ideal state of the Stoics as it had been already delineated by 
Zeno, partly in a polemic parallel to that of Plato, knows, accord 
ingly, no bounds of nationality or of the historic state ; it is a 
rational society of all men, an ideal universal empire. Plutarch, 
indeed, recognised 4 that in this thought philosophy constructed as 
rational that which was historically prepared by Alexander the 
Great, and completed, as we know, by the Romans. But it must 
not remain unnoticed that the Stoics thought of this empire gjily 
secondarily as a political power ; primarily it was a spiritual unity 
of knowledge and will. 

It is comprehensible that with such a high-flying idealism the 

1 Stob." Flor. 43, 139 (Us. Fr. 530). 

2 rCiv (pva-ei iroXrrt/cwi/ fv wv: Stob. Ed. II. 226 ff. 

8 It was, to be sure, extraordinarily difficult for the Stoics to bring the need, 
which they were obliged to recognise as a fact lying at the basis of the social 
impulse, into accord with the independence of the wise man, so baldly empha 
sised by them. 

4 Plut. De Alex. M. Fort. I. 6. 

176 Hellenistic- Roman Thouyht : Ethical Period. [PART II. 

Stoics retained only a very weak interest for actual political life in 
the proper sense. Although the wise man was permitted and 
indeed charged to take part in the life of some particular state, in 
order to fulfil his duty to all even in this base world, yet both the 
particular forms of the state and the individual historical states 
were held to be ultimately indifferent to him. As to the former, 
the Stoa could not become enthusiastic for any of the characteristic 
kinds of government, but, following the Aristotelian suggestion, held 
rather to a mixed system, something such as Polybius 1 presented 
as desirable on the ground of his philosophico-historical considera 
tion of the necessary transitions of one-sided forms into each other. 
To the splitting up of mankind in different states, the Stoics op 
posed the idea of cosmopolitanism, world-citizenship, which fol 
lowed directly from their idea of an ethical community of all men. 
It corresponded to the great historical movements of the age, that 
the difference in worth between Hellenes and Barbarians, which had 
been still maintained even by Aristotle, 2 was set aside by the Stoics 
as overcome, 3 and though, in accordance with their ethical principle, 
they were too indifferent to the outer relations of position to enter 
upon active agitation for social reforms, they demanded, neverthe 
less, that justice and the universal love of man, which resulted as 
the highest duties from the idea of the realm of reason, should be 
applied also in full measure, even to the lowest members of human 
society the slaves. 

In spite of the fact, therefore, that it turned aside from the 
Greek thought of the national state, to the Stoic ethics belongs the 
glory that in it the ripest and highest which the ethical life of 
antiquity produced, and by means of which it transcended itself 
and pointed to the future, attained its best formulation. The intrin 
sic worth of moral personality, the overcoming of the world in man s 
overcoming of himself, the subordination of the individual to a 
divine law of the world, his disposition in an ideal union of spirits 
by means of which he is raised far above the bounds of his earthly 
life, and yet, in connection with this, the energetic feeling of duty 
that teaches him to fill vigorously his place in the actual world, 
all these are the characteristics of a view of life which, though 
from a scientific point of view it may appear rather as put together 
than as produced from one principle, presents, nevertheless, one of 
the most powerful and pregnant creations in the history of the 
conceptions of human life. 

1 In the extant part of the sixth book. 

2 Arist. Pol. I. 2, 1252 b 5. 

8 Seneca, Ep. 95, 52 ; cf. Strabo, I. 4, 9. The personal composition also of the 
Stoic school was from its beginning decidedly international. 

CHAP. 1, 14.] Ideal of the Sage : Stoics, Cicero. 177 

8. In a concentrated form all these doctrines appear in the con 
ception of the law of life, determined by Nature and reason fov 
all men equally, TO &lt;uW SIKCUOV, and this conception, through Cicero, 1 
became the formative principle of Roman jurisprudence. 

For, in his eclectic attachment to all the great men of Attic phi 
losophy, Cicero not only held fast objectively with all his energy 
to the thought of a moral world-order which determines with uni 
versal validity the relation of rational beings to each other, but 
he thought also with regard to the subjective aspect of the question 
in correspondence with his epistemological theory ( 17, 4) 
that this command of reason was innate in all men equally, and that 
it had grown into inseparable connection with their instinct of self- 
preservation. Out of this lex naturce, the universally valid natural 
law which is exalted above all human caprice, and above all change 
of historical life, develop both the commands of morality in general, 
and in particular those of human society, the jus naturale. But 
while Cicero proceeds to project from this standpoint the ideal form 
of political life, the Stoic universal state takes on under his hands 2 
the outlines of the Roman Empire. Cosmopolitanism, which had 
arisen among the Greeks as a distant ideal, in the downfall of their 
own political importance, becomes with the Romans the proud 
self-consciousness of their historical mission. 

But even in this theoretical development of what the state should 
be, Cicero interweaves the investigation of what it is. Not sprung 
from the consideration or the voluntary choice of individuals, it is 
rather a product of history, and therefore the ever-valid principles 
of the law of Nature are mingled in the structures of its life with 
the historical institutions of positive law. These latter develop 
partly as the domestic law of individual states, jus civile, partly as 
the law which the confederates of different states recognise in their 
relation to one another, jus gentium. Both kinds of positive law 
coincide to a large extent in their ethical content with the law of 
Nature, but they supplement this by the multitude of historical ele 
ments which in them come into force. The conceptions thus formed 
are important not only as constructing the skeleton for a new special 
science soon to branch off from philosophy ; they have also the 
significance that in them the worth of the historical for the first 
time reaches full philosophical appreciation : and at this point Cicero 

1 Two of his treatises, only partly preserved, come into consideration here, 
De Jtepublica and De Legibus. Cf. M. Voigt, Die Lehre vom jits naturale, etc. 
(Leips. 1856), and K. Hildenbrand, Geschichte und System der Bechts- und 
Staatsphilosophie, I. 523 ff. 

2 Cic. De Eep. II. 1 ff. 

178 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Ethical Period. [PART IL 

knew how to transform the political greatness of his people into a 
scientific creation. 

15. Mechanism and Teleology. 

The practice of the schools in the post-Aristotelian period sepa 
rated philosophical investigations into three main divisions, 
ethics, physics, and logic (the latter called canonic among the 
Epicureans). The chief interest was everywhere given to ethics, 
and theoretically the two others were allowed importance only so 
far as correct action presupposes a knowledge of things, and this in 
turn a clearness with regard to the right methods of knowledge. 
Hence the main tendencies of physical and logical theories are 
undoubtedly determined in this period by the ethical point of view, 
and the practical need is easily contented by taking up and re-shap 
ing the older teachings ; but yet in scientific work the great objects 
of interest, especially metaphysical and physical problems, assert 
their fascinating power, and so notwithstanding we see these other 
branches of philosophy often developing in a way that is not in full 
conformity with the nature of the ethical trunk from which they 
spring. Particularly in the case of physics, the rich development of 
the special sciences must ultimately keep general principles always 
alive and in a state of flux. 

In this respect we notice first that the Peripatetic School, during 
the first generations, made a noteworthy change in the principles for 
explaining Nature which it had received from its master. 

1. The beginning of this is found already with Theophrastus, who 
doubtless defended all the main doctrines of Aristotelianism, espe 
cially against the Stoics, but yet in part went his own ways. The 
extant fragment of his metaphysics discusses, among" the aporise, 
principally such difficulties as were contained in the Aristotelian 
conceptions of the relation of the world to the deity. The Stagi- 
rite had conceived of Nature (&lt;wns) as a being in itself alive 
(OK&gt;V), and yet had conceived of its entire motion as a (teleological) 
effect of the divine Reason ; God, as pure Form, was separated from 
the world, transcendent; and yet, as animating, first-moving power, 
he was immanent in it. This chief metaphysical problem of the 
following period was seen by Theophrastus, though his own attitude 
toward it remained fixed by the bounds of Aristotle s doctrine. On 
the other hand, he shows a more definite tendency in the closely 
connected question regarding the relation of reason to the lower 
psychical activities. The vovs was regarded, on the one hand (con 
sidered as Form of the animal soul), as immanent, inborn; on the 
other hand, in its purity, as different in essence, and as having come 

CHAP. 1, 15.] Mechanism and Teleology : Peripatetics. 179 

into the individual soul from without. Here now Theophrastus 
decided absolutely against transcendence ; he subsumed the vovs 
also as a self-developing activity, under the concept of a cosmic 
process, 1 of motion (KIVT/OTIS), and set it beside the animal soul as 
something different, not in kind, but in degree only. 

Strata proceeded still more energetically in the same direction. 
He removed completely the limits between reason and the lower 
activities of ideation. Both, he taught, form an inseparable unity ; 
there is no thought without perceptions, and just as little is there 
sense-perception without the co-operation of thought ; both together 
belong to the unitary consciousness, which he, with the Stoics, calls 
TO i/ye/ioviKov (cf. 14, 3). But Strato applied the same thought, 
which he carried out psychologically, to the analogous metaphysical 
relation also. The riyepoviKov of the Averts, also, the Reason of Nature, 
cannot be regarded as something separated from her. Whether now 
this may be expressed in the form that Strato did not think the 
hypothesis of the deity necessary for the explanation of Nature and 
its phenomena, or in the form that he postulated Nature itself as 
God, but denied it not only external resemblance to man, but even 
consciousness, 2 in any case, Stratonism, regarded from the stand 
point of Aristotle s teaching, forms a one-sidedly naturalistic or 
pantheistic modification. He denies spiritual monotheism, the con 
ception of the transcendence of God, and by teaching that a pure 
Form is as unthinkable as mere matter, he pushes the Platonic 
element in the Aristotelian metaphysics, which had remained just 
in the thought of the separation (^wpto-^os) of reason from matter, 
so far into the background that the element derived from Democ- 
ritus becomes again entirely free. Strato sees in what takes place 
in the world, only an immanent necessity of Nature, and no longer 
the working of a spiritual, extramundane cause. 

Yet this naturalism remains still in dependence upon Aristotle, in 
so far as it seeks the natural causes of the cosmic processes, not 
in the atoms and their quantitative determinations, but expressly 
in the original qualities (TTOIOT^TCS) and powers (8wa/xs) of things. 
If among these it emphasised especially warmth and cold, this was 
quite in the spirit of the dynamic conceptions held by the older 
Hylozoism, and to this, also, Strato seems most nearly related in his 
undecided, intermediate position between mechanical and teleological 
explanation of the world. Just for this reason, however, this side- 
development ran its course with Strato himself without further 
result, for it was already outrun at the beginning by the Stoic and 

1 Simpl. Phys. 225 a. 2 Cic. Acad. II. 38, 121 ; De Nat. Deor. I. 13, 35. 

180 Hellenistic- Roman Thought: Ethical Period. [PART II. 

the Epicurean physics. These both defended also the standpoint 
of the immanent explanation of Nature, but the former was as out 
spokenly teleological as the latter was mechanical. 

2. The peculiarly involved position of the Stoics, in the de 
partment of metaphysical and physical questions, resulted from 
the union of different elements. In the foreground stands the 
ethical need of deducing from a most general metaphysical prin 
ciple the content of individual morality which could no longer find 
its roots in state and nationality as in the period of Grecian great 
ness, and therefore of so shaping the conception of this principle as 
to make this deduction possible. But, in opposition to this, stood, 
as an inheritance from Cynicism, the decided disinclination to regard 
this principle as a transcendent, supersensuous, and incorporeal prin 
ciple, out of the world of experience. All the more decisive was the 
force with which the thoughts suggested in the Peripatetic philos 
ophy of Nature came forward, in which the attempt was made to 
understand the world as a living being, in purposive motion of itself. 
For all these motives, the logos doctrine of Heraclitus seemed to 
present itself as in like measure a solution of the problem, and this 
became, therefore, the central point of the Stoic metaphysics. 1 

The fundamental view of the Stoics is, then, that the entire uni 
verse forms a single, unitary, living, connected whole, and that all 
particular things are the determinate forms assumed by a divine 
primitive power which is in a state of eternal activity. Their doc 
trine is in its fundamental principles pantheism, and (in opposition 
to Aristotle) conscious pantheism. The immediate consequence of 
it, however, is the energetic effort to overcome the Platonic- Aris 
totelian dualism, 2 and remove the opposition between sensuous and 
supersensuous, between natural necessity and reason acting accord 
ing to ends, between Matter and Form. The Stoa attempts this 
through simple identification of those conceptions whose opposing 
characters, to be sure, cannot by this means be put out of the world. 

Hence it declares the divine World-being to be the primitive 
power in which are contained in like measure the conditioning laws 
and the purposeful determination of all things and of all cosmic 
processes, the World-ground and the World-mind. As actively 
productive and formative power, the deity is the Xoyos 

1 Cf. H. Siebeck, Die Umbildung der peripatetischen Naturphilosophie in die 
der Stoiker (Unters. z. Philosophie der Griechen, 2 Aufl., pp. 181 ff.). 

2 If we were obliged to conceive of the relation of Aristotle to Plato in a 
similar manner ( 13, 1-4), just in this point the Stoic philosophy of Nature 
shows a farther development in the same direction which the Peripatetic takes 
in Strato. 

CHAP. I, 15.] Mechanism and Teleology: Stoics. 181 

the vital principle, which unfolds itself in the multitude of phenom 
ena as their peculiar, particular \oyoi a-irepfjMTtKOL or formative forces. 
In this organic function, God is, however, also the purposefully 
creating and guiding Reason, and thus with regard to all particular 
processes the all-ruling Providence (-n-povouj.). The determination of 
the particular by the universe (which constitutes the dominant 
fundamental conviction of the Stoics) is a completely purposeful 
and rational order, 1 and forms as such the highest norm (V/O/AOS), 
according to which all individual beings should direct themselves in 
the development of their activity. 2 

But this all-determining " law " is for the Stoics, as it was for 
Heraclitus, likewise the all-compelling power which, as inviolable 
necessity (avdyK-r)), and so, as inevitable destiny (dpapp.^, fatum), 
brings forth every particular phenomenon in the unalterable succes 
sion of causes and effects. Nothing takes place in the world with 
out a preceding cause (ama TrpoT/yov/xeV?;) , and just by virtue of this 
complete causal determination of every particular does the universe 
possess its character of a purposeful, connected whole. 3 Hence 
Chrysippus combated in the most emphatic manner the conception 
of chance, and taught that apparent causelessness in a particular 
event could mean only a kind of causation hidden from human 
insight. 4 In this assumption of a natural necessity, admitting of no 
exceptions even for the most particular and the least important 
occurrence, a conviction which naturally found expression also in 
the form that the divine providence extends even to the smallest 
events of life, 5 the Stoic school agrees even verbally with Democ- 
ritus, and is the only school in antiquity which carried this most 
valuable thought of the great Abderite through all branches of 
theoretical science. 

In all other respects, indeed, the Stoics stand in opposition to 
Democritus and in closer relation to Aristotle. For while in the 
Atomistic system the natural necessity of all that comes to pass 
results from the motive impulses of individual things, with the 
Stoics it flows immediately from the living activity of the whole, and 

1 As the Platonic Timseus had already taught, 11, 10. 

2 The normative character in the conception of the logos appeared clearly even 
with Herar.litus ( 6, 2, p. 63, note 5). 

3 Plut. De Fnto, 11, 574. * Ib. 7, 572. 

6 Plutarch makes Chrysippus say (Comm. Not. 34, 5, 1076) that not even the 
meanest thing can sustain any other relation than that which accords with the 
decree of Zeus. Of. Cic. De. Nat. Deor. II. 65, 164. Only the circumstance 
that the Stoa limited the immediate action of the divine providence to the pur 
poseful determination of the whole, and derived from this that of the particular, 
explains such modes of expression as the well-known Magna dii curant, pama 
negligunt. Cf. 16, 3. 

182 Hellenistic- Roman Thought : Ethical Period. [PART II. 

as over against the reduction of all qualities to quantitative differ 
ences, they held fast to the reality of properties as the peculiar 
forces of individual things, and to qualitative alteration (dAAotWis, 
in opposition to motion in space). They directed their polemic 
particularly against the purely mechanical explanation of natural 
processes by pressure and impact ; but in carrying out their teleology, 
they sank from the great conception of Aristotle, who had every 
where emphasised the immanent purposiveness of the formations in 
which the Forms were realised, to the consideration of the benefits 
which flow from the phenomena of Nature to meet the needs of 
beings endowed with reason, " of gods and men." In particular, 
they exaggerated, even to ridiculous Philistinism, the demonstration 
of the manner in which heaven and earth and all that in them is, 
are arranged with such magnificent adaptation for man. 2 

3. In all these theoretical views, and just in these, the Epicureans 
are diametrically opposed to the Stoics. With the Epicureans, em 
ployment with metaphysical and physical problems had in general 
only the negative purpose 3 of setting aside the religious ideas 
through which the quiet self-enjoyment of the wise man might be 
disturbed. Hence it was the chief concern of Epicurus to exclude 
from the explanation of Nature every element that would allow a 
government of the world, guided by universal ends, to appear as 
even possible ; hence, on the other hand, the Epicurean view of the 
world was absolutely lacking in a positive principle. This explains 
the fact that Epicurus, at least, had only a sceptical shrug of the 
shoulders for all questions of natural science from which no practical 
advantage was to be gained ; and though many of his later disciples 
seem to have been less limited, and to have thought more scien 
tifically, the ruts of the school s opinion were worn too deep to 
allow the attainment of essentially broader aims. The more the 
toleological conception of Nature formed, in the course of time, the 
common ground on which Academic, Peripatetic, and Stoic doctrines 
met in syncretistic blending, the more Epicureanism insisted upon 
its isolated standpoint of negation ; theoretically, it was essentially 
anti-teleological, and in this respect brought forth nothing positive. 

It was successful only in combating the anthropological excres 
cences to which the teleological view of the world led, especially 

1 Cic. De Fin. III. 20, 67 ; De Nat. Deor. II. 53 ff. 

2 If one might trust Xenophon s Memorabilia, the Stoics had in this no less 
a man than Socrates as their predecessor; yet it seems that even in this account, 
which is tinctured with Cynicism if not worked over from the Stoic point of 
view (Krohn), the general faith of Socrates in a purposeful guiding of the world 
by divine providence has descended into the petty. Cf. 8, 8. 

8 Diog. Laert. X. 143 ; Us. p. 74. 

CHAP. 1, 15.] Mechanism and Teleology : Epicureans. 183 

with the Stoics, 1 a task which was undoubtedly not so very diffi 
cult, but to create from principles a counter-theory it was not pre 
pared. Epicurus, indeed, availed himself for this purpose of the 
external data of the materialistic metaphysics, as he was able to 
receive them from Democritus ; but he was far from attaining the 
latter s scientific height. He could follow the great Atomist only 
so far as to believe that he himself also, for explaining the world, 
needed nothing more than empty space and the corporeal particles 
moving within it, countless in number, infinitely varied in form and 
size, and indivisible ; and to their motion, impact, and pressure he 
traced all cosmic processes, and all things and systems of things 
(worlds) which arise and again perish, thereby seeking to deduce 
all qualitative differences from these purely quantitative relations. 2 
He accepted, accordingly, the purely mechanical conception of nat 
ural processes, but denied expressly their unconditioned and excep 
tionless necessity. The doctrine of Democritus, therefore, passed 
over to the Epicureans only in so far as it was Atomism and mechan 
ism ; with regard to the much deeper and more valuable principle 
of the universal reign of law in Nature, his legacy, as we have seen 
above, passed to the Stoics. 

Meanwhile, just this peculiar relation is most intimately con 
nected with the Epicurean ethics and with the decisive influence 
which that exercised upon their physics ; indeed, one may say that 
the individualising tendency taken by the ethical reflection of the 
post- Aristotelian age found its most adequate metaphysics just in 
the doctrine of Epicurus. To a morals, which had for its essential 
content the independence of the individual and his withdrawal 
upon himself, a view of the world must have been welcome which 
regarded the prime constituents of reality as completely independ 
ent, both of each other and of a single force, and regarded their 
activity as determined solely by themselves. 3 Now the doctrine of 
Democritus which taught the inevitable, natural necessity of all 
that comes to pass, contains unmistakably a (Heraclitic) element 
which removes this autonomy of individual tilings, and just to their 
adoption of this element did the Stoics owe the fact (of. 14, 5.) 
that their ethics outgrew the one-sided Cynic presuppositions with 
which they started. It is all the more comprehensible that Epi 
curus let just this element fall away ; and his conception of the 

1 Cf. especially Lucret. De Her. Xat. I. 1021 ; V. 156 ; Diog. Laert. X. 97. 

*Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. \. 4-&gt;. 

3 Thus Epicurus grounded his deviation from Democritus s explanation of the 
world by an appeal to human freedom of the will. Cf. 16, and also the cita 
tions in Zeller IV. 3 408, 1 [Eng. tr. Stoics, etc., p. 446]. 

184 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Ethical Period. [PART II. 

world as contrasted with that of the Stoa is characterised precisely 
by this, that while the latter regarded every individual as deter 
mined by the whole, he rather regarded the whole as a product of 
originally existing and likewise originally functioning individual 
tilings. His doctrine is in every respect consistent Atomism. 

Thus the system of Democritus had the misfortune to be propa- 
g ited for traditions of antiquity, and so also for those of the Middle 
Ages, in a system which indeed retained his Atomistic view, looking 
in the direction of the exclusive reality of quantitative relations 
and of the mechanical conception of the cosmic processes, but 
set aside his thought of Nature as a connected whole, regulated by 
law. 

4. Following this latter direction, Epicurus gave a new form to 
the doctrine of the origin of the world maintained by Atomism. 1 
In contrast with what had been already seen, perhaps by the 
Pythagoreans, but, at all events, by Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle, 
that in space in itself there is no other direction than that from 
the centre toward the periphery, and the reverse, he appeals to the 
declaration of the senses, 2 agreeably to his doctrine of knowl 
edge, according to which there is an absolute up and down, and 
maintains that the atoms were all originally in motion from above 
downward by virtue of their weight. But, in order to derive the 
origination of atom groups from this universal rain of atoms,, he 
assumed that some of them had voluntarily deviated from the direct 
line of fall. From this deviation were explained the impacts, the 
grouping of atoms, and, ultimately, the whirling motions which 
lead to the formation of worlds, and which the old Atomism had 
derived from the meeting of atoms which were moving about in an 
unordered manner. 3 

It is noteworthy, however, that after he had in this way spoiled 
the inner coherence of the doctrine of Democritus, Epicurus re 
nounced the voluntary choice of the atoms as a means for the 
further explanation of the individual processes of Nature, and from 
the point when the whirling motion of the atom-complexes seemed 
to him to be explained, allowed only the principle of mechanical 

1 Ps.-Plut. Plac. I. 3 ; Dox. D. 285 ; Cic. De Fin. I. 6, 17 ; Guyau, Morale 
d Epic. 74. 

* Diog. Laert. X. 60. 

8 Cf. 4, 9. It seems that later Epicureans who held fast to the sensuous 
basis of this idea and yet would exclude the voluntary action of the atoms and 
carry out more thoroughly the Democritic thought of Nature s conformity to 
law, hit upon the plan of explaining the grouping (d0poi&lt;j&gt;irfj) of the atoms on 
the hypothesis that the more massive fell faster in empty space than the " lighter" ; 
at least, Lucretius combats such theories (De Eer. Nat. II. 225 ff.). 

CHAP. 1, 15.] Mechanism and Teleology : Epicureans. 185 

necessity to stand. 1 He used, therefore, the voluntary self-determi 
nation of the atoms only as .a principle to explain the beginning of 
a whirling motion which afterwards went on purely mechanically. 
He used it, therefore, just as Anaxagoras used his force-matter, vovs 
(cf. p. 52). For upon this metaphysical substructure Epicurus 
erected a physical theory which acknowledged only the mechanics 
of atoms as explanation for all phenomena of Nature without any 
exception, and carried this out, for organisms especially, by employ 
ing for the explanation of their purposive formation the Empedo- 
clean thought of the survival of the fit. 

Lastly, the Democritic principle of natural necessity asserts itself 
in the system of Epicurus in his assumption that in the continuous 
arising and perishing of the worlds which beconle formed by the 
assemblages of atoms, every possible combination, and thus every 
form of world-construction, must ultimately repeat itself. This 
was proved in a manner which would now be put upon the basis of 
the theory of probabilities, and the result of this repetition was 
held to be, that considering the infinitude of time, nothing can 
happen which has not already existed in the same way. 2 In this 
doctrine, again, Epicurus agrees with the Stoics, who taught a plu 
rality of worlds, not co-existent, but following one another in time, 
and yet found themselves forced to maintain that these must be 
always completely alike, even to the last detail of particular forma 
tion and particular events. As the world proceeds forth from the 
divine primitive fire, so it is each time taken back again into the 
same after a predetermined period : and then when after the world- 
conflagration the primitive power begins the construction of a new 
world, this &lt;uVis (Nature), which remains eternally the same, unfolds 
itself again and again in the same manner, in correspondence with 
its own rationality and necessity. This return of all things (iraXvy- 
yivtvia or dTTOKaTao-Tcio-is) appears, accordingly, as a necessary con 
sequence of the two alternative conceptions of the Stoics, Xoyos and 

5. The theoretical ideas of these two main schools of later an 
tiquity are accordingly at one only in being completely material- 

1 Hence in a certain" sense it might be said, from the standpoint of present 
criticism, that the difference between Democritus and Epicurus was only a rela 
tive one. The former regards as an unexplained primitive fact the direction 
which each atom has from the beginning, the latter regards as an unexplained 
primitive fact a voluntary deviation, taking place at some point of time, from a 
direction of fall which is uniform for all. The essential difference, however, is 
that with Democritus this primitive fact is something timeless, while with 
Epicurus it is a single voluntary act occurring in time., an act which is expressly 
compared with the causeless self-determination of the human will (cf. 16). 

3 Plut. in Kuseb. Dox. 1). 581, 19 ; Us. Fr. 266. 

186 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Ethical Period. [PART II. 

istic, and it was just in opposition to Plato and Aristotle that 
they expressly emphasised this position of theirs. Both maintain 
that the real (TO. OVTU), because it manifests itself in action and 
passion (TTOUIV Kat Treio-^etv), can be only corporeal; the Epicureans 
declared only empty space to be incorporeal. On the contrary, 
they combated the (Platonic) view that the properties of bodies 
are something incorporeal per se (KaO euvro), 1 and the Stoics even 
went so far as to declare that even the qualities, forces, and rela 
tions of things, which present themselves in changing modes in 
connection with things and yet as actual or real, are " bodies," 2 
and with a mode of thought which reminds us of the coming and 
going of the homoiomeriae with Anaxagoras, 3 they regarded the 
presence and change of properties in things as a kind of inter 
mixture of these bodies with others, a view from which resulted 
the theory of the universal mingling and reciprocal interpenetration 
of all bodies (K/oSo-is Si oAwv). 

In carrying out the materialistic theory the Epicureans produced 
scarcely anything new; on the contrary, the Stoic doctrine of Nature 
shows a number of new views, which are interesting not only in 
themselves, but also as having marked out the essential lines for 
the idea of the world held during the following centuries. 

First of all, in the Stoic system the two antitheses, which were 
to be removed or identified in the conception of Nature as one, again 
part company. The divine primitive essence divides into the active 
and the passive, into force and matter. As force, the deity is fire 
or warm, vital breath, pneuma / as matter, it changes itself out of 
moist vapour (air) partly into water, partly into earth. Thus fire is 
the soul, and the "moist" is the body, of the World-god; and yet 
the two form a single being, identical within itself. While the 
Stoics thus attach themselves, in their doctrine of the transmuta 
tion and re-transmutation of substances, to Heraclitus, and in their 
characterisation of the four elements principally to Aristotle, and 
follow Aristotle also in the main in their exposition of the world- 
structure and of the purposive system of its movements, the most 
important thing in their physics is doubtless the doctrine of the 
pneuma. 

God as creative reason (Xoyos o-Trep/AariKo;) is this warm vital 
breath, the formative fire-mind which penetrates all things and is 

1 Diog. Laert. X. 67. 

a Plut. C. Not. 50, 1085. 

8 A similar materialising of the Platonic doctrine of Ideas (Plat. Phcedo, 102), 
which reminds us of Anaxagoras, was apparently worked out by Eudoxos, who 
belonged to the Academy (p. 1&lt;&gt;:5). Arist. Met. I. 9, 991 a 17, and also Alex. 
Aphr. Schol. iu Arist. 573 a 12. 

CHAP. 1, 15.] Mechanism and Teleology : Epicureans, Stoics. 187 

dominant in them as their active principle ; he is the universe 
regarded as an animate being, spontaneously in motion within 
itself, and purposefully and regularly developed. All this is 
comprehended by the Stoics in the conception of the Trvev/xa, 1 an 
extraordinarily condensed conception, full of relations, an idea 
in which suggestions from Heraclitus (Aoyos), Anaxagoras (vovs), 
Diogenes of Apollonia (ar/p), Democritus (tire-atoms), and not least 
the Peripatetic natural philosophy and physiology, became intri 
cately combined. 2 

6. The most effective element in this combination proved to be 
the analogy between macrocosm and microcosm, universe and man, 
which the Stoics adopted from Aristotle. The individual soul, also, 
the vital force of the body, which holds together and rules the flesh, 
is fiery breath, pneuma; but all the individual forces which are 
active in the members and control their purposive functions, are 
also such vital minds or spirits (spiritus animates). In the human 
and the animal organism the activity of the pneuma appears con 
nected with the blood and its circulation ; nevertheless, the pneuma 
itself just because it is also a body, said Chrysippus 3 is sep 
arable in detail from the lower elements which it animates, and this 
separation takes place in death. 

At the same time, however, the individual soul, as it is only a 
part of the universal World-soul, is completely determined in its 
nature and its activity by this World-soul ; it is consubstantial with 
the divine Pneuma and dependent upon it. Just for this reason the 
World-reason, the Xdyos, is for the soul the highest law (cf. above, 
14, 3). The soul s independence is therefore only one that is 
limited by time, and in any case it is its ultimate destiny to be 
taken back into the divine All-mind at the universal conflagration 
of the world. With regard to the continuance of this independence, 
i.e. as to the extent of individual immortality, various views were 
current in the school; some recognised the duration of all souls 
until the time of the universal conflagration, others reserved this 
for the wise only. 

As now the one Pneuma of the universe (whose seat was located 
by the Stoics sometimes in heaven, sometimes in the sun, sometimes 
in the midst of the world) pours itself forth into all things as 
animating force, so the ruling part of the individual soul (TO rjytfj.o- 
VIKOV or Aoyicr/Aos) in which dwell ideas, judgments, and impulses, and 

1 Stob. Eel. I. 374. Dox. D. 463, 16 : elrai rt&gt; ov irvtS/M KIVOVV iavrb rpbt 
iavrb Kal e avrov, 17 Trvevfia, eavrb KIVOVV irpbffd) Ka.1 6irlffu&gt; KT\. 

2 Cf. H. Siebeck Zeitsch. f. Volkerpsychologie, 1881, pp. 364 ff. 
8 Nemesius, De Nat. Horn. p. 34. 

188 Hellenistic-Roman Thought: Ethical Period. [PART II. 

as whose seat the heart was assumed, was regarded as extending its 
particular ramifications throughout the whole body, like the " arms 
of a polyp." Of such particular " pneumata " the Stoa assumed 
seven, the five senses, the faculty of speech, and the reproductive 
power. As the unity of the divine Primitive Being dwells in the 
uiii verse, so the individual personality lives in the body. 

It is characteristic that the Epicureans could entirely adopt 
this external apparatus of psychological views. For them, too, the 
soul which according to Democritus consists of the finest atoms 
is a fiery, atmospheric breath (they apply likewise the term 
"pneuma"); but they see in this breath something that is intro 
duced into the body from without, something held fast by the body 
and mechanically connected with it, which in death is forthwith 
scattered. They also distinguish between the rational and the 
irrational part of the soul, without, however, being able to attribute 
to the former the metaphysical dignity which it acquired in the Stoic 
theory. Here, too, their doctrine is, on the whole, insufficient and 
dependent. 

7. In accordance with the pantheistic presupposition of the 
system, the metaphysics and physics of the Stoics form also a 
theology, a system of natural religion based on scientific demonstra 
tion, and this found also poetic presentations in the school, such as 
the hymn of Cleanthes. Epicureanism, on the contrary, is in its 
wholo nature anti-religious. It takes throughout the standpoint of 
" Enlightenment," that religion has been overcome by science, and 
that it is the task and triumph of wisdom to put aside the phantoms 
of superstition which have grown out of fear and ignorance. The 
poet of this school depicts in grotesque outlines the evils which 
religion brought on man, and sings the glory of their conquest by 
scientific knowledge. 1 It is all the more amusing that the Epicurean 
theory itself fell to depicting a mythology of its own which it re 
garded as harmless. It believed that a certain degree of truth must 
attach to the universal faith in gods, 2 but it found that this correct 
idea was disfigured by false assumptions. These it sought in the 
myths which feigned a participation of the gods in human life, and 
an interference on their part in the course of things ; even the 
Stoics belief in Providence appeared to them in this respect as but 
a refined illusion. Epicurus, therefore, following Democritus in 
his doctrine of the eidola, or images ( 10, 4), saw in the gods 
giant forms resembling men, who lead a blessed life of contemplation 
and spiritual intercourse in the intermediate spaces between the 

i Lucret. De Eer. Nat. I. 62 ff. a Diog. Laert. X. 123 f. ; Us. p. 59 f. 

CHAP. 1, !;&gt;.] Mechanism and Teleology : Epicureans, tftoics. 189 

worlds (intermundia) , undisturbed by the change of events, and 
unconcerned as to the destiny of lower beings ; and thus this doc 
trine, also, is fundamentally only the attempt of Epicureanism to 
put in mythological form its ideal of aesthetic self-enjoyment. 

8. It was in an entirely different way that the ideas of the 
popular religion were fitted into the Stoic metaphysics. Whereas, 
up to this time in the development of Greek thought philosoph 
ical theology had separated itself farther and farther from the 
indigenous mythology, we meet here, for the first time, the 
systematic attempt to bring natural and positive religion into 
harmony. Accordingly, when the Stoics, also, yielded to the need of 
recognising the warrant of ideas universally present throughout the 
human race (cf. 17, 4), their pneuma doctrine offered them not 
only a welcome instrument, but suggestions that were determinative. 
For consideration of the universe must teach them that the divine 
World-power has evidently taken on mightier forms and those of 
more vigorous life than individual human souls ; and so, beside the 
one deity without beginning and end, which for the most part they 
designated as Zeus, a great number of "gods that had come into exist 
ence," made their appearance. To these the Stoics, as Plato and 
Aristotle had already done, reckoned first of all the stars, which 
they too honoured as higher intelligences and especially pure for 
mations of the primitive fire, and further, the personifications of 
other natural forces in which the power of Providence, benevolent 
to man, reveals itself. From this point of view we can understand 
how an extensive interpretation of myths was the order of the day 
in the Stoic school, seeking to incorporate the popular figures in its 
metaphysical system by all kinds of allegories. In addition to this 
there was an equally welcome use of the Euemeristic theory, which 
not only explained and justified the deification of prominent men, 
but taught also to consider the demons sacred, as the guardian 
spirits of individual men. 

Thus the Stoic world became peopled with a whole host of higher 
and lower gods, but they all appeared as ultimately but emanations of 
the one highest World-power, as the subordinate powers or forces 
which, themselves determined by the universal Pneuma, were con 
ceived of as the ruling spirits of the world s life. They formed, 
therefore, for the faith of the Stoics, the mediating organs, which 
represent, each in its realm, the vital force and Providence of the 
World-reason, and to them the piety of the Stoics turned in the 
forms of worship of positive religion. The polytheism of the popular 
faith was thus philosophically re-established, and taken up as an 
integrant constituent into metaphysical pantheism. 

190 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Ethical Period. [PART II. 

In connection with this scientific reconstruction of positive re 
ligion stands the theoretical justification of divination in the Stoic 
system where it awakened great interest, except in the case of a few 
men like Panaetius, who thought more coolly. The interconnection 
and providentially governed unity of the world s processes was held to 
show itself as one form of manifestation in the possibility that 
different things and processes which stand in no direct causal rela 
tion to one another, may yet point to one another by delicate rela 
tions, and therefore be able to serve as signs for one another. The 
human soul is capable of understanding these by virtue of its rela 
tionship with the all-ruling Pneuma, but for the full interpretation 
of such ecstatic revelations the art and science of divination, resting 
upon experience, must be added. On this basis Stoicism regarded 
itself as strong enough to elaborate philosophically all the divination 
of the ancient world. This was especially true of its younger repre 
sentatives, and in particular, as it seems, of Posidonius. 

16. The Freedom of the Will and the Perfection of the World. 

The sharp definition of the contrasted mechanical and teleological 
views of the world, and especially the difference in the conceptional 
forms in which the thought, common to a certain extent, of Nature s 
universal conformity to law had been developed, led, in connection 
with the ethical postulates and presuppositions which controlled 
the thought of the time, to two new problems, which from the 
beginning had various complications. These were the problems of 
the freedom of the human will and of the goodness and perfection 
of the world. Both problems grew out of contradictions which 
made their appearance between moral needs and just those meta 
physical theories which had been formed to satisfy those needs. 

1. The proper home for the formation of these new problems 
was the Stoic system, and they may be understood as the necessary 
consequence of a deep and ultimately irreconcilable antagonism be 
tween the fundamental principles of the system. These principles are 
metaphysical monism and ethical dualism. The fundamental moral 
doctrine of the Stoics, according to which man should overcome the 
world in his own impulses by virtue, presupposes an anthropological 
duality, an opposition in human nature in accordance with which 
reason stands over against a sensuous nature contrary to reason. 
Without this antithesis the whole Stoic ethics is ready to fall. The 
metaphysical doctrine, however, by which the command of reason 
in man is to be explained, postulates such an unrestricted and all- 

CHAP. 1, 16.] Freedom of the Will: Socrates, Aristotle. 191 

controlling reality of the World-reason that the reality of what is 
contrary to reason, either in man or in the course of the world, 
cannot be united therewith. From this source grew the two ques 
tions which since then have never ceased to employ man s critical 
investigation, although all essential points of view that can come 
into consideration in the case were more or less clearly illumined at 
that time. 

2. The conceptions which form the presuppositions for the prob 
lem of freedom lie ready at hand in the ethical reflections on the 
voluntary nature of wrongdoing, which were begun by Socrates 
and brought to a preliminary conclusion by Aristotle in a brilliant 
investigation. 1 The motives of these thoughts are ethical through 
out, and the domain in which they move is exclusively psychologi 
cal. The question at issue is hence essentially that of freedom of 
choice, and while the reality of this is doubtless affirmed upon the 
basis of immediate feeling, and with reference to man s conscious 
ness of his responsibility, difficulty arises only in consequence of 
the intellectualistic conception of Socrates, who brought the will 
into complete dependence upon insight. This difficulty develops 
primarily in the double meaning of " freedom," or, as it is here still 
called, " voluntariness " (CKOUO-IOV), an ambiguity which has since 
been repeated again and again in the most variously shifted forms. 
According to Socrates, all ethically wrong action proceeds from a 
wrong view a view clouded by desires. He who thus acts does 
not "know," therefore, what he is doing, and in this sense he acts 
involuntarily. 2 That is, only the wise man is free ; the wicked is 
not free. 3 From this ethical conception of freedom, however, the 
psychological conception of freedom i.e. the conception of freedom 
of choice as the ability to decide between different motives must 
be carefully separated. Whether Socrates did this is a question ; 4 
at all events, it was done by Plato. The latter expressly affirmed 
man s freedom of choice, 5 appealing to his responsibility, a psycho 
logical decision on essentially ethical grounds, and, at the same 
time, he held fast to the Socratic doctrine that the wicked man acts 
involuntarily, i.e. is ethically not free. He even connects the two 
directly when he develops the thought 6 that man may sink into the 

1 Eth. Nic. III. 1-8. 

2 Xen. Mem. III. 9, 4 ; Cyrop. III. 1, 38. 
8 Cf. Arist. Eth. Nic. III. 7, 113 b 14. 

4 According to a remark in the Peripatetic Magna Moralia (I. 9, 1187 a 7) 
Socrates, indeed, had expressly said, " it is not in our power" to be good or bad. 
According to this, therefore, he had denied psychological freedom. 

6 Plat. Rep. X. 617 ff. 

6 Plat. I hcvd. 81 B. 

192 Hellenistic- Roman Thought : Ethical Period. [PART II. 

condition of ethical non-freedom by his own fault, and, therefore, 
with psychological freedom. 

With Aristotle, who separated himself farther from the Socratic 
intellectualism, the psychological conception of freedom comes out 
more clearly and independently. He proceeds from the position 
that ethical qualification in general is applicable only in the case of 
" voluntary " actions, and discusses in the first place the prejudices 
which this voluntariness sustains, partly from external force (/?ia) 
and psychical compulsion, and partly from ignorance of the matter. 
That action only is completely voluntary which has its origin in the 
personality itself, and of which the relations are fully known. 1 The 
whole investigation 2 is maintained from the standpoint of responsi 
bility, and the discovered conception of voluntariness is designed to 
lead to the conception of accountability. It contains within itself 
the characteristics of external freedom of action, and of a conception 
of the situation unclouded by any deception. But, on this account, 
it must be still further restricted, for among his voluntary acts a 
man can be held accountable for those only that proceed from a 
choice (Trpoeu pecris). 3 Freedom of choice, therefore, which proceeds 
by reflecting upon ends as well as upon means, is the condition of 
ethical accountability. 

Aristotle avoided a farther entrance upon the psychology of 
motivation and upon the determining causes of this choice ; he con 
tents himself with establishing the position that the personality 
itself is the sufficient reason for the actions 4 which are ascribed to 
it ; and to this maintenance of the freedom of choice his school, and 
especially Theophrastus, who composed a treatise of his own on 
freedom, held fast. 

3. On this same basis we find also the Stoics, in so far as purely 
ethical considerations are concerned. Precisely that lively feeling 
of responsibility which characterises their morals demanded of them 
the recognition of this free choice on the part of the individual, and 
they sought therefore to maintain this in every way. 

Their position became critical, however, by reason of the fact 
that their metaphysics, with its doctrine of fate and providence, 
drove them beyond this attitude. For since this theory of fate 
made man, like all other creatures, determined in all his external 
and internal formation and in all that he does and suffers, by the 

1 Eth. Nic. III. 3, 1111 a 73 : oC 17 aprf lv atr$ eidtri rd. *ca0 Ixao-ra &lt;?x oh TJ 
irpats. 

2 As the reference at the beginning to the right of punishment clearly shows 
(Eth. Nic. 1109 b 34). 

a Ib. 4, 1112 a 1. 

4 Ib. 5, 1112 b 31 : eoi/ce 5r? . . . &v6j&gt;wiros e~ivai ap^T] r&v irpdewi&gt;. 

CHAP. 1, 16.] Freedom of the Will: Stoics, Epicurus. 193 

all-animating World-power, personality ceased to be the true ground 
(apxn) of his actions, and these appeared to be, like all else that 
occurs, but the predetermined and unavoidably necessary operations 
of the God-Xature. In fact, the Stoa did not shrink from this 
extreme consequence of determinism; on the contrary, Chrysippus 
heaped up proof on proof for this doctrine. He based it upon the 
principle of sufficient reason (cf. above, 15, 2) ; he showed that 
only by presupposing this could the correctness of judgments con 
cerning the future be maintained, since a criterion for their truth or 
falsity is given only if the matter is already determined ; * he also 
gave to this argument the changed form, that since only the 
necessary can be known, and not that which is still undecided, the 
foreknowledge of the gods makes necessary the assumption of deter 
minism ; he even did not scorn to adduce the fulfilment of predic 
tions as a welcome argument. 

In this doctrine, which, from the standpoint of the Stoic doctrine 
of the logos, was completely consistent, the opponents of the system 
saw of course a decided denial of freedom of the will, and of the 
criticisms which the system experienced this was perhaps the 
most frequent and at the same time the most incisive. Among 
the numerous attacks the best known is the so-called ignaoa ratio, or 
"lazy reason" (d/&gt;yos Xoyos), which from the claim of the unavoid 
able necessity of future events draws the fatalistic conclusion that 
one should await them inactively, an attack which Chrysippus 
did not know how to avoid except by the aid of very forced distinc 
tions. 2 The Stoics, on the contrary, concerned themselves to show 
that in spite of this determinism, and rather exactly by virtue of it, 
man remains the cause of his actions in the sense that he is to be 
made responsible for them. On the basis of a distinction 3 between 
main and accessory causes (which, moreover, reminds us throughout 
of the Platonic CUTIOV and (fwamov) Chrysippus showed that every 
decision of the will does indeed necessarily follow from the co-opera 
tion of man with his environment, but that just here the outer 
circumstances are only the accessory causes, while the assent pro 
ceeding from the personality is the main cause, and to this account 
ability applies. While, however, this voluntarily acting ^ ye/ion/cov, 
or ruling faculty of man, is determined from the universal Pneuma, 
this Pneuma takes on in every separate being a self-subsistent 

1 Cic. De Fato, 10, 20. So far as concerns disjunctive propositions Epicurus 
also for this reason gave up the truth of disjunction : Cic. De Nat, Deor. I. 
25, 70. 

2 Cic. De Fato, 12, 28 ff. 
8 Cic. De Fato, 16, 36 ff. 

194 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Ethical Period. [PART II. 

nature, different from that of others, and this is to be regarded as a 
proper dpxn- 1 In particular, the Stoics make prominent the point 
that responsibility, as a judgment pronounced on the ethical quality 
of actions and characters, is quite independent of the question 
whether the persons or deeds might, in the course of events, have 
been other than they were, or not. 2 

4. The problem of the freedom of the will, which had been 
already complicated ethically and psychologically, experienced in 
this way still further a metaphysical and (in the Stoic sense) theo 
logical complication, and the consequence was that the indeterminists 
who were opponents of the Stoa gave a new turn to the conception 
of freedom which they regarded as threatened by the Stoic doctrine, 
and brought it into sharp definition. The assumption of the excep 
tionless causal nexus to which even the functions of the will were 
to be subordinated, seemed to exclude the capacity of free decision ; 
but this freedom of choice had, since Aristotle, been regarded in all 
schools as the indispensable presupposition of ethical accountability. 
On this account the opponents thought and this gave the contro 
versy its especial violence that they were defending an ethical 
good when they combated the Stoic doctrine of fate, and with that 
the Democritic principle of natural necessity. And if Chrysippus 
had appealed to the principle of sufficient reason to establish this, 
Carneades, to whom the freedom of the will was an incontestable 
fact, did not fear to draw in question the universal and invariable 
validity of this principle. 3 

Epicurus went still farther. He found the Stoic determinism so 
irreconcilable with the wise man s self-determination which formed 
the essential feature of his ethical ideal, that he would rather still 
assume the illusory ideas of religion than believe in such a slavery 
of the soul. 4 Therefore he, too, denied the universal validity of the 
causal law and subsumed freedom together with chance under the 
conception of uncaused occurrence. Thus in opposition to Stoic 
determinism, the metaphysical conception of freedom arose, by means 
of which Epicurus put the uncaused function of the will in man 
upon a parallel with the causeless deviation of the atoms from their 
line of fall (cf. 15, 4). The freedom of indeterminism means, 
accordingly, a choice between different possibilities that is deter 
mined by no causes, and Epicurus thought thereby to rescue moral 
responsibility. 

This metaphysical conception of freedom as causelessness is not at 

1 Alex. Aphr. De Fato, p. 112. 

2 Ib. p. 106. 

8 Cic. De Fato, 5, 9 ; 11, 23 ; 14, 31. 
* Diog. Laert. X. 133 f. ; Us. p. 65. 

CHAP. 1, 16.] Physico-Theoloyy : Epicurus, Stoics. 195 

all isolated in the scientific thought of antiquity. Only the Stoa 
held fast inviolably to the principle of causality. Even Aristotle 
had not followed into details the application of his general principles 
(cf. p. 143); he had contented himself with the eVt TO TroAu, " for the 
most part," and had based his renunciation of the attempt fully to 
comprehend the particular upon the assumption of the contingent 
in Nature, i.e. of the lawless and causeless. In this respect the 
Stoics alone are to be regarded as forerunners of the modern study 
of Nature. 

5. Stoicism encountered difficulties which were no less great, in 
carrying out its teleology. The pantheistic system which regarded 
the whole world as the living product of a divine Reason acting 
according to ends, and found in this its sole ground of explanation, 
must of course maintain also the purposiveness, goodness, and perfec 
tion of this universe ; and conversely the Stoics were accustomed to 
prove the existence of the gods and of Providence by pointing to 
the purposiveness, beauty, and perfection of the world ; that is, by 
the so-called physico-theoloyical method. 1 

The attacks which this line of thought experienced in antiquity 
were directed not so much against the correctness of the reasoning 
(though Carneades applied his criticism at this point also) as 
against the premises ; and conversely, the easy exhibition of the 
many defects and maladaptations, of the evils and the ethical harm 
in the world was employed as a counter-reason against the assump 
tion of a rational, purposeful World-cause and of a Providence. 
This was done first and with full energy, naturally, by Epicurus, 
who asked whether God would remove the evil in the world but 
could not, or could remove it but would not, or whether perhaps 
neither of these was true, 2 and who also pointed to the instances 
of injustice in which the course of life so often makes the good 
miserable and the wicked happy. 3 

These objections, intensified and carried out with especial care, 
were brought into the field by Carneades.* But to the reference to 
the evil and injustice of the course of events he added the objec 
tion to which the Stoics were most sensitive : 5 " Whence then in 
this world which has been created by Keason comes that which is 
void of reason and contrary to reason, whence in this world ani 
mated by the divine Spirit corne sin and folly, the greatest of all 

1 Cic. De Nat. Dear. II. 5, 13 ff. 

2 Lactant. DP Ira Dei, 13, 19 ; Us. Fr. 374. 
8 Id. Inst. Div. III. 17, 8 ; Us. Fr. 370. 

* Cic. Acad. II. 38, 120 ; De Nat. Deor. III. 32, 80 ff. 

* Cic. De. Nat. Deor. III. 25-31. 

196 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Ethical Period. [PART II. 

evils? " And if the Stoics, as perhaps occurred in spite of their 
determinism, 1 wished to make free will responsible for these things, 
the further question arose, why the almighty World-reason should 
have given man a freedom which was thus to be abused, and why 
it should permit this abuse. 

6. In the presence of such questions the Stoics with their monis 
tic metaphysics were in a much worse case than Plato and Aristotle, 
who had been able to trace the maladaptations and evil back to 
the resistance of the " Not-being," or of matter respectively. In 
spite of this the Stoics came forward boldly to master these diffi 
culties, and brought to light, not without acute thought, most of 
those arguments in which at later periods theodicy has moved again 
and again. 

The teleological doctrine of the perfection of the universe can be 
protected against such attacks either by denying the d/s-teleological 
facts, or by justifying them as the indispensable means or attend 
ant result in the purposefully connected whole. Both methods 
were pursued by the Stoa. 

Their psychological and ethical theories permitted the claim that 
what is called a physical evil is not such in itself, but becomes such 
by man s assent, that hence, if diseases and the like are brought 
about by the necessity of the natural course of events, it is only 
man s fault that makes an evil out of them ; just as it is frequently 
only the wrong use which the foolish man makes of things that 
makes these injurious, 2 while in themselves they are either indif 
ferent or even beneficial. So the objection based on the injustice 
of the course of the world is rebutted by the claim that in truth for 
the good man and the wise man physical evils are no evils at all, 
and that for the bad man, on the other hand, only a sensuous illu 
sory satisfaction is possible, which does not make him truly happy, 
but rather only aggi-avates and strengthens the moral disease which 
has laid hold of him. 3 

On the other hand, physical evils may also be defended on the 
ground that they are the inevitable consequences of arrangements 
of Nature which are in themselves adapted to their ends and do 
not fail of their purpose, as Chrysippus, for example, attempted to 
show in the case of diseases. 4 In particular, however, they have 
the moral significance of serving partly as reformatory punishments 
of Providence ; 5 partly, also, as a useful stimulus for the exercise 
of our moral powers. 6 

* Cleanth. Hymn. v. 17. 4 Gell. N. A. VII. 1, 7 ff. 

Seneca, Qu. Nat. V. 18, 4. 6 Plut. Stoic. Hep. 35, 1. 

8 Seneca, Ep. 87, 11 ff. Marc. Aurel. VIII. 35. 

CHAP. 1, 17.] Criteria of Truth: Peripatetics. 197 

While external evils were thus justified principally by pointing 
out their ethical purposiveness, it appeared for the Stoics an all the 
more urgent problem, though one which proved also the more diffi 
cult, to make moral evil or sin comprehensible. Here the negative 
way of escape was quite impossible, for the reality of baseness in 
the case of the great majority of men was the favourite subject of 
declamation in the Stoic discourses on morals. Here, then, was the 
centre of the whole theodicy, namely, to show how in this world 
which is the product of divine Reason, that which is contrary to 
reason in the impulses, dispositions, and actions of rationally 
endowed beings is possible. Here, therefore, the Stoics resorted to 
universal considerations. They showed how the perfection of the 
whole not only does not include that of all the individual parts, but 
even excludes it, 1 and in this way substantiated their claim that 
God must necessarily allow even the imperfection and baseness of 
man. In particular, they emphasised the point that it is only 
through opposition to evil that good as such is brought about ; for 
were there no sin and folly, there would be no virtue and wisdom. 2 
And while vice is thus deduced as the necessary foil for the good, 
the Stoics give as a final consideration, 3 that the eternal Providence 
ultimately turns even the evil to good, and has in it but an appar 
ently refractory means for the fulfilment of its own highest ends. 4 

17. The Criteria of Truth. 

The philosophical achievements of the post-Aristotelian ime 
were least important in the department of logic. Such a powerful 
creation as the Analytics of the Stagirite, which brought the prin 
ciples of Greek science in so masterly a fashion to the consciousness 
of all in a conclusive form, must naturally rule logical thought for 
a long time, and, in fact, did this until the close of the Middle 
Ages, and even beyond. The foundations of this system were so 
firmly laid that at first nothing there was shaken, and there re 
mained for the activity of the schools but to build up individual 
parts, an activity in connection with which, even at that time, 
much of the artificial adornment characteristic of a degenerate age 
displayed itself. 

1. The Peripatetics had already attempted to develop the Aristote 
lian Analytics systematically in this direction by a more detailed treat 
ment, by partially new proofs, by farther subdivision, and by more 

1 Plut. Stoic. Eep. 44, 6. 8 Ib. 35, 3. 

2 Ib. 36, 1. * Cleanth. Hymn. vv. 18 f. 

198 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Ethical Period. [PART II. 

methodical formulation. In particular, End emus and Theophrastus 
undertook investigations concerning the hypothetical and disjunc 
tive judgments, and the extension of the theory of the syllogism 
occasioned by the appearance of these judgments and premises. 
The Stoics continued these efforts ; they set these new forms of 
judgment (d^tw/xa) as composite over against the simple 1 categorical 
forms, developed into all their details the resulting forms of the 
syllogism, emphasised also especially the quality 2 of judgments, 
and deduced the laws of thought in altered forms. In general, 
however, they spun out the logical rules into a dry schematism and 
genuine scholastic formalism which thereby became farther and 
farther removed from the significant fundamental thoughts of the 
Aristotelian Analytics, and became a dead mass of formulae. The 
unfruitful subtlety of this process took special delight in the solu 
tion of sophistical catches, in which the real meaning was inextri 
cably involved in the contradiction of forms. 

It was in these elaborations by the schools that the science of 
logic created by Aristotle first took on the purely formal character 
that it retained up to the time of KANT. The more pedantic the 
form taken in the development of the particular features, the more 
the consciousness of the living thought, to which Aristotle had 
aspired, was replaced by a schoolmaster-like network of rules, 
essentially designed to catch thoughts and examine their formal 
legitimacy, but incapable of doing justice to the creative power of 
scientific activity. While, even with Aristotle, regard for proof 
and refutation had occupied the foreground, here it occupies the 
whole field. Antiquity did not attain a theory of investigation ; 
for the weak beginnings which we find toward this end in the inves 
tigations of a younger Epicurean, 3 Philodemus, 4 concerning conclu 
sions from induction and analogy, are relatively isolated, and have 
no result worthy of mention. 

2. In the doctrine of the Categories, of the elaboration of which the 
Stoics made much account, more that was real was to be expected. 
Here it was indeed quite correct, and yet not very fruitful, to call 
attention to the fact that the supreme category, of which the rest 

1 Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. VIII. 93. 

2 Diog. Laert. VII. 65. 

8 Epicurus himself, and his school also, as a whole, did not trouble themselves 
as to the principles of formal logic. One might regard this as an evidence of 
taste and intelligence, but it was in truth only indifference toward all that did 
not promise directly practical advantages. 

4 On his treatise irepl ffrjfifluv /cai ff-r)/j.fiufftuv, discovered in Herculaneum, cf. 
Th. Gompertz, He.rculanensische Studien, Heft 1 (Leips. 186"&gt;) ; Fr. Bahusch 
(Lyck, 1879); R. Philippson (Berlin, 1881). 

CHAP. 1, 17.] Criteria of Truth : Stoics. 199 

represent only special determinations, is that of Being (r6oi/) or 
Something (rt); and the co-ordination of the categories which, at 
least as regards the method of their enumeration, was Aristotle s 
plan, was replaced by an expressly systematic succession, according 
to which each category was to be more exactly determined by the 
following one. " What is," or Being, as abiding substrate of all 
possible relations, is substance (V-JTOKIL^VOV} ; this is the supporter 
(Trager) of fixed qualities (TTOIOI/), and only in this aspect is it 
involved in changing states (TO TTW? e^ov), and, in consequence of 
these latter, in relations to other substances (TO Trpos ri TTWS l^ov). 

Out of the doctrine of the categories grows thus an ontology, that 
is, a metaphysical theory as to the most general formal relations of 
reality, and this theory in the system of the Stoics, agreeably to 
their general tendency (cf. 15, 5), takes on a thoroughly materi 
alistic character. As substance, the existent is matter which is in 
itself destitute of properties (uA.r/), and the qualities and forces 
which are inherent in matter as a whole, as well as in a particular 
part (TrotoVr/Tcs Swa/xtis), are likewise kinds of matter (atmospheric 
currents) which are commingled with it (Kpcuns SY o-W). In this 
connection both substance and attributes are regarded, as well from 
the point of view of the general conception as from that of the indi 
vidual thing, and in the latter aspect it is emphasised that every 
individual thing is essentially and definitely distinguished from all 
others. 2 

Besides these categories of Being, we find making their appear 
ance among the Stoics those conceptional forms by which the rela 
tion of thought to Being is expressed, and in these the separation of 
the subjective from the objective, for which a preparation had been 
growing more and more complete in the development of Greek 
thought, now attains definite expression. For while the Stoics 
regarded all objects to which thought relates as corporeal, while 
they regarded the activity of thought itself, and no less its expres 
sion in language 3 as corporeal functions, they were still obliged to 
confess that the content of consciousness as such (TO A.CKTOV) is of in- 

1 That the Peripatetics also busied themselves with this category is proved 
by the definition preserved by Strato : rb 6 eari rb TTJS Sia/j.ovrjs atriov (Proclus 
in Tim. 242 E). 

2 In contrasting the first two with the last two categories, the language rela 
tion of noun and verb appears here also (in Stoic terminology TTTWCW and KOTTJ- 
yVj/xa). 

8 The Stoics laid great weight upon the discriminative comparison of thought 
and of speech, of the inner activity of reason (X6-yos evSiAOtros), and of its ex 
pression through the voice (\6yot 7rpo&lt;/&gt;opi(c6s) . Hence, too, the assumption (cf. 
15, 6) of the faculty of speech as a proper part of the soul ; hence their thor 
ough treatment of rhetoric and grammar side by side with logic. 

200 Hellenistic- Roman Thought : Ethical Period. [PART II. 

corporeal nature. But since the distinction was thus sharply 
drawn between Being and content of consciousness, the fundamental 
epistemological problem came forward, how the relations by which the 
ideational content refers to Being and agrees with it, are to be thought. 

3. This question was, moreover, also brought home by the vigor 
ous development which Scepticism had meanwhile undergone, and 
by the relatively strong position which it occupied as compared with 
the dogmatic systems. 

Whether by Pyrrho or Timon it matters not, it was at all events 
at about the same time at which the great school-systems became 
dogmatically developed and fortified, that all those arguments were 
systematised into a complete whole, by which the Sophistic period 
had shaken the naive trust in man s capacity for knowledge. Al 
though the ethical end of making man independent of fate by with 
holding judgment was ultimately decisive (cf. 14, 2), this 
Scepticism still forms a carefully carried out theoretical doctrine. 
It doubts the possibility of knowledge in both its forms, the form 
of perception as truly as that of judging thought, and after it has 
destructively analysed each of these two factors singly, it adds 
expressly that just on this account their union can have no certain 
result. 1 

As regards perception, the Sceptics availed themselves of the 
Protagorean relativism, and in the so-called ten Tropes 2 in which 
./Enesidemus 3 sets forth the sceptical theory with very defective 
arrangement, this tendency still occupies the broadest space. Per 
ceptions change not only with the different species of animate 
beings (1), not only with different men (2), according to their cus 
toms (9) and their whole development (10), but even in the case 
of the same individual at different times (3), in dependence upon 
bodily conditions (4), and upon the different relations in which the 
individual finds himself with regard to his object spatially (5). 
They alter, also, because of the difference in the states of the object 
(7), and have, therefore, no claim to the value of an immediate 
report of things, because their origination is conditioned by inter 
mediate states in media such as the air, the co-operating elements 
furnished by which we are not able to deduct (6). Man is, there- 

1 From two deceivers combined it is only right to expect no truth. Diog. 
Laert. IX. 114. 

2 Sext. Emp. Pyrrh. Hyp. I. 38 ff. 

8 It was said by the ancient writers that ^nesidemus was attached, not only 
to Scepticism, but also to the metaphysics of Heraclitus. The question whether 
this was actually so, or whether such a relation was only ascribed to him by mis 
take, has solely antiquarian significance. For had the former been the case, it 
would have been but another manifestation of a real relationship in thought, to 
which Plato had already directed attention, Thecet. 152 E ff. ; cf. p. 92, note 2. 

CHAP. 1, 17.] Criteria of Truth : Sceptics. 201 

fore, in all ways, not in a condition to know things purely (8), and 
in the face of the multiplicity of impressions so full of contradic 
tions he has no means of distinguishing a true from a false impres 
sion. One is no more (ov /xoAAov) valid than another. 

Equally relative with man s perceptions are also his opinions 
(8ocu). In this aspect the influences of the Eleatic dialectic 
assert themselves in Pyrrhonism. It is shown that to every opinion 
the opposite can be opposed with equally good reasons, and this 
equilibrium of reasons (roo-0cveta r&gt;v Aoywv) does not permit us, 
therefore, to distinguish true and false : in the case of such a con 
tradiction (dimAoyiu) the one holds no )nore than the other. All 
opinions accordingly stand according to the phrase of the 
Sophists, adopted by the Sceptics only by convention and cus 
tom (vo/x&lt;u T KOL $a), not by their essential right and title (&lt;ixrei). 

More energetically still did the later Scepticism attack the possi 
bility of scientific knowledge, by disclosing the difficulties of the 
syllogistic procedure, and of the methods which Aristotle had built 
up upon this. 1 In this Carneades seems to have led the way, show 
ing that every proof, since it presupposes other proofs for the valid 
ity of its premises, makes necessary a regressus in injinitum an 
argument that was completely in place for the Sceptic who did not, 
as did Aristotle, recognise anything as immediately certain (d/xeo-ov ; 
cf. 12, 4). The same argument was carried further by Agrippa, 
who formulated Scepticism in five Tropes 2 much more clearly and 
comprehensively than J^nesidernus. He called attention again to the 
relativity of perceptions (3) and of opinions (1); he showed how 
every proof pushes on into infinity (2 : 6 as airupov tK/JaAAwv), and how 
unjustifiable it is in the process of proof to proceed from premises 
that are only hypothetically to be assumed (4), and finally, how 
often it occurs, even in science, that that must be postulated as 
ground of the premises which is only to be proved by means of the 
syllogism in question (5: 6 SidXkrjXos) . In the latter aspect atten 
tion Avas also called to the fact that in the syllogistic deduction of 
a particular proposition from a general one, the general would yet 
from the outset be justified only on condition that the particular 
were valid. 3 

Since the essential nature of things is thus inaccessible to human 

1 Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. VIII. 316 ff. 

3 Sext. Emp. Pyrrh. Hyp. I. 164 ff . : (1) The conflict of opinions. (2) The 
endless regress in proving. (3) The relativity of all perceptions. (4) The im 
possibility of other than hypothetical premises. (5) The circle in the syllogism. 

8 Sext. Emp. Pyrrh. Hyp. II. 194 ff. Renewed in J. S. Mill, Logic, II. 3, 2; 
corrected in Chr. Sigwart, Logik, I. 55, 3. 

202 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Ethical Period. [PART II. 

knowledge, 1 the Sceptics demanded that man should suspend judg 
ment so far as possible (eVo^). We can say nothing concerning 
things (d&lt;a(n a) ; we can only assert that this and that appears so 
or so, and in so doing we report only our own momentary states (as 
the Cyrenaics had already taught, 8, 3). Even the sceptical main 
tenance of the impossibility of knowledge (in order to avoid the 
contradiction that here something of a negative character, at least, 
seems to be maintained and proved) 2 should be conceived of rather 
as a profession of belief than as knowledge, more as a withholding 
of opinion than as a positive assertion. 

Cf. V. Brochard, Les Sceptiques Grecs (Paris, 1877). 

4. The attack of Scepticism was most sharply concentrated in 
the principle 3 that, in the presence of the deceptions to which 
man is exposed in all his ideas of whatever origin, there is no uni- 
vocal, sure sign of knowledge, no criterion of truth. If, therefore, 
the dogmatic schools held fast to the reality of knowledge, even 
from the Socratic motive that virtue is impossible without knowl 
edge, 4 they found the task assigned them by this sceptical position 
of announcing such a criterion and of defending it against the 
sceptical objections. This was done also by the Epicureans and 
Stoics, although their materialistic metaphysics and the sensualistic 
psychology connected with it prepared for them serious, and, 
ultimately, insurmountable difficulties. 

In fact, it was the psycho-genetic doctrine of both these schools 
that the content of all ideas and knowledge arises solely from sen 
suous perception. The origin of sense-perception the Epicureans 
explained by the image theory of Democritus ( 10, 3). This 
theory gave even to the illusions of the senses, to dreams, etc., the 
character of perceptions corresponding to reality ; and even the con 
structions of the combining fancy or imagination could be explained 
on this theory by unions which had already taken place objectively 
between the images. But the Stoics also regarded perception as a 
bodily process, as an impression of outer things upon the soul 
(riJTroxns), the possibility of which seemed to them to be self- 
evident, in view of the universal commingling of all bodies. This 

1 The simplest formulation of Scepticism, finally, was that which brought 
Agrippa s five Tropes together into two ; there is nothing immediately certain, 
and just on this account nothing mediately certain; accordingly nothing what 
ever that is certain. Sext. Emp. Pyrrh. Hyp. I. 178 f. 

2 Cic. Acad. II. 9, 28 and 34, 109 ; Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. VIII. 463 ff. 

3 Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. VII. 159. 

4 Diog. LaerL X. 14(5 f. K. A ; Us. p. 76 f., on the other hand, Plut. Stoic. 
Rep. 47, 12. 

CHAP. 1, 17.] Criteria of Truth : Epicureans, Stoics. 203 

crassly sensuous conception they expressed by the since frequently 
repeated comparison, that the soul is originally like a blank tablet, 
on which the outer world imprints its signs in the course of time. 1 
More refined, but more indefinite, and yet absolutely mechanical 
still in its tone is the designation of Chrysippus, who called percep 
tion an alteration of qualities (erepotWis) in the soul ; for, at all 
events, the idea or mental presentation (^avrao-ta) remains for 
him, too, a corporeal effect or product of that which is presented 
( (JxivTacrTov) 

Both schools explained the presence of conceptions and of general 
ideas (-n-poXyifstis, and among the Stoics also KOIVOL ci/i/ouu) solely by 
the persistence of these impressions, or of parts of them, and by 
their combination. They combated, therefore, as the Cynics espe 
cially had already done, the Platonic-Aristotelian doctrine of Ideas 
and Forms, 2 especially the assumption of an independent activity 
or power of forming conceptions, and traced even the most general 
and abstract conceptions back to this mechanism of elementary 
perceptions (to which they scarcely gave any further analysis). 
To these general ideas of experience (i^-n-upia) , which arise natu 
rally and involuntarily (&lt;UO-IKU&gt;S), the Stoics indeed opposed the 
conceptions of science produced by the aid of a methodical con 
sciousness ; but even the content of these scientific conceptions was 
held to be exclusively derived from sensations. In this connection, 
both schools laid especial weight upon the co-operation of language 
in the origination of conceptions. 

But now, in so far as the total content of impressions, and like 
wise also the nature of thought, are the same among all men, it 
necessarily follows that under these circumstances the same general 
ideas will be formed, in both the theoretical and the practical domain, 
by means of the psychological mechanism. This consequence was 
drawn especially by the Stoics, whose attention was by their whole 
metaphysics directed vigorously to the common nature of the psy 
chical functions, which were all held to arise from the divine Pneuma. 
They taught, therefore, that the surest truth is to be sought in those 
ideas which develop uniformly among all men with natural neces 
sity, and they liked to take as their starting-point, even for scientific 
reasonings, these Koival Zwoai, or communes notiones. They have a 

1 Pint. Flac. IV. 11 ; Dox. D. 400 ; Plut. Comm. Xot. 47 ; cf. besides Plat. 
Thecet. 191 C. 

* Hence the Stoics regard Platonic " Ideas" (class-concepts) as merely struc 
tures of the human mind (fworifiara ij^repa ; cf. Plut. Pine. I. 10, Dox. D. 309), 
and thus cave the first suggestion for the later subjective meaning of the term 
"idea." Cf. 19. 

204 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Ethical Period. [PART II. 

predilection for appealing to the consensus gentium the consent of 
all men, an argument whose validity it was easy for the Sceptics 
to shake by pointing to the negative instances of experience. 1 

It was, therefore, not in the spirit of the Stoics that in the later 
Eclectic literature these common ideas were called innate (innatve), 
and that Cicero especially saw in them not only that which Nature 
teaches equally to all, but also that which Nature or the deity has 
originally implanted in every one at the same time with his reason. 
Cicero maintains this, not only for the fundamental conceptions of 
morality and right, but also for the belief in the deity and in the 
immortality of the soul : the knowledge of God especially is held 
to be only man s recollection of his true origin. 2 This doctrine 
formed the best bridge between the Platonic and the Stoic theories 
of knowledge, and under the Stoic name of Koival cwoai the ration 
alistic doctrine of knowledge was propagated on into the beginnings 
of modern philosophy. Just by this means it retained the accessory 
psychologistic meaning that rational knowledge consists in innate ideas. 

5. While now the Stoics as well as the Epicureans originally 
traced back all the contents of ideas to sense-impressions psycho- 
genetically, it was only the Epicureans who drew from this the 
consistent inference that the sign for the recognition of truth is 
solely the feeling of the necessity with which a perception forces 
itself upon consciousness, the irresistible clearness or vividness 
(evapyeta) conjoined with the taking up of reality in the function 
of the senses. Every perception is as such true and irrefutable ; it 
exists, so to speak, as a self-certain atom of the world of conscious 
ness, free from doubt, independent, and unmovable by any reasons 
whatever. 3 And if different and mutually contradictory perceptions 
of the same objects seem to exist, the error lies only in the opinion 
which refers them, and not in the perceptions which by the very 
fact of their difference prove that different outer causes correspond 
to them ; relativity is accordingly nothing in point against the cor 
rectness of all perceptions. 4 

Meanwhile, opinions (Sd&u) constantly and necessarily go beyond 
this immediate presence of sense-impressions : for the knowledge 
requisite for acting needs also knowledge of that which is not 
immediately perceptible : it needs to know, on the one hand, grounds 

1 Cic. De Nat. Deor. I. 23, 62 f. 

2 Id. De Leg. I. 8, 24 : ... tit is agnoscat deum, qui unde ortus sit quasi re- 
conletur ac noscat. 

8 The parallelism of this epistemological Atomism with the physical and 
ethical Atomism of the Epicureans is obvious. 
* Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. VII. 203 ff. 

CHAP. 1, 17.] Criteria of Truth: Epicureans. 205 

of phenomena (aS^Aov), and on the other hand the expectation as to 
the future that may be inferred from them (Tiyxxr/xcVov). But for all 
these farther functions of the psychical mechanism there is, accord 
ing to the Epicureans, no other guaranty than perception again. 
For if conceptions (TrpoA^cts) are only sense-impressions retained 
in the memory, they have their own certainty in the clearness or 
vividness of these impressions, a certainty susceptible neither of 
proof nor of attack; l and hypotheses (VTTOAT/I/KIS), both with regard 
to the imperceptible grounds of things and also with regard to future 
events, find their criterion solely in perception, in so far as they are 
verified by it, or at least not refuted ; the former holds for the pre 
diction of the future, the latter for explanatory theories. 2 There 
is therefore among the Epicureans nothing said of an independent 
faculty of conviction or belief ; whether our expectation of any event 
is correct we can know only when the event occurs. Thus they re- 
noimce on principle any attempt at an actual theory of investigation. 

6. It is evident from this that the Epicureans might regard their 
own Atomistic metaphysics as a hypothesis not refuted by facts, but 
that they were not permitted to regard it as a hypothesis that was 
proved. It was a hypothesis, indeed, of which the essential end, as 
they employed it, was to displace other hypotheses which seemed 
to them ethically objectionable. Their dogmatism is accordingly 
only problematical, and their doctrine of knowledge, in so far as it 
has to do with rational knowledge, is very strongly permeated with 
scepticism. In so far as they recognise only that which passes with 
sense-perception as a " fact," but regard such facts as completely cer 
tain, their standpoint is to be designated as that of Positivism. 

This positivism was developed in antiquity still more consistently, 
and in a form freed from the ethical and metaphysical tendencies of 
Epicurus, by the theories of the later schools of empirical physi 
cians. These schools went with the Sceptics as regards knowledge 
of all that is imperceptible by the senses and as regards all rational 
theories ; on the other hand, in their recognition of the sensuous 
evidence of perceptions, they went with the Epicureans. Observation 
(Trjprjo-Ls) is here portrayed as the basis of the physician s art, and ob 
servation retained in memory is regarded as the sole essence of his 
theory : aetiological explanations especially are rejected on principle. 

Connected with this is the circumstance that the later Sceptics 
treated the conception of causality in searching investigations and 

1 As the final criterion even for the intellectually good is, with Epicurus, sen 
suous pleasure, so the criterion of the truth of conceptions is only sensuous 
vividness (Evidenz). 

2 Sext. Erap. VII. 211. 

203 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Ethical Period. [PART II. 

discovered its difficulties. ^Enesidemus had already propounded a 
series of such aporiae, 1 and in Sextus Empiricus we find them devel 
oped more broadly and comprehensively. 2 With him not only such 
defects of setiological theories are designated as, that they reduce 
the known to the unknown which is just as inexplicable, that they 
maintain one possibility among many without a sufficient reason, 
that they do not examine experience carefully enough with a view 
to possible negative instances, and finally that they after all explain 
that which is inaccessible to perception by some sort of a scheme 
known from perception, which is especially simple and therefore 
apparently intelligible in itself ; besides these, he searches out, also, 
all the general difficulties which prevent us from gaining a clear 
(picturate) idea of the causal relation. The process of the action 
of one thing upon another, the passing over of motion from one 
thing to another, can be made intelligible neither on the assumption 
that that which acts (as force) is immaterial, nor on the opposite 
assumption ; nor does contact (a&lt;^) which is assumed as a conditio 
sine qua non of the causal process (as had been already done by 
Aristotle) make it any more explicable. So, too, the time relation 
of cause and effect is extremely difficult to determine. The most 
important thought in these discussions, however, is the pointing out 
of the relativity of the causal relation: nothing is in itself a cause or 
effect ; each of the two is such only with reference to the other ; 
ainov and irdo-xov are correlative terms which must not be absolutely 
postulated or asserted. The (Stoic) conception of an essentially 
efficient cause, the conception of a creative deity, is then thereby 
excluded. 

7. The Sceptics of the Academy sought in another direction a 
substitute for the certainty of rational knowledge which they also 
had given up. Since in practical life suspense cannot be carried 
out as a principle of conduct and action is indispensable, and since 
for action determining ideas are requisite, Arcesilaus brought out 
the view that ideas, even though one refuse them his complete 
assent, are yet able to move the will, 3 and that in practical life one 
must content himself with a certain kind of confidence or trust 
(TUCTTIS), according to which some ideas may in a greater degree than 
others be regarded as probable (evAoyov), adapted to the purpose of 
life, and reasonable. 4 

1 Sext. Emp. Pyrrh. Hyp. I. 180 ff. 

2 Adv. Math. IX. 195 ff. ; cf. K. Goring, Der Begriff der Ursache in der grie- 
chischen Philosophic. (Leips. 1874). 

8 Plut. Adv. Col. 26, 3. 

* Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. VII. 158. 

CHAP. 1, 17.] Criteria of Truth : Sceptics, Stoics. 207 

The theory of Probabilism was carried out farther by Carneades 1 
in an attempt to define more exactly, according to logical relations, 
the particular degrees of this "belief." The least degree of proba 
bility (n-LOavoTrj i) is that which (as an indistinct and imperfect form 
of sensuous clearness or vividness eVa/oya) belongs to the single 
idea that stands in no farther connections. A higher degree of 
probability belongs to that idea which can be united (ctTreptWao-Tos), 
without any contradictions, with other ideas in connection with 
which it belongs. Lastly, the highest stage of belief is reached 
where a whole system of such connected ideas is examined as to its 
complete harmony and verification in experience (irepKaSev^vi] ) . 
Empirical confidence rises, therefore, from the sensuously isolated 
to the logical systems of scientific research. But though in the 
latter form it may be completely sufficient for practical life (as 
Carneades assumed), it is yet not able to lead to a completely 
certain conviction. 

8. In contrast with this, the Stoics made the most strenuous 
efforts to gain an epistemological substructure for their metaphysics, 
to which they attributed so high a value from considerations of ethi 
cal interest, and in spite of psycho-genetic sensualism, to rescue the 
rational character of science. 2 On the principle that like is known 
by like, their doctrine of the World-reason demanded a knowledge 
of the external Logos by the internal logos of man, by his rea 
son; 3 and the ethical antagonism or dualism between virtue and 
the sensuous impulses required a parallel distinction between 
knowledge and sensuous ideas. Although, therefore, the whole 
material of knowledge was held to grow out of sensuous presenta 
tions, the Stoics pointed out, on the other hand, that in perception 
as such, no knowledge whatever is contained ; that it is not to 
be characterised as either true or false. Truth and falsity can be 
predicated only when judgments (O^IW/AUTU) have been formed in 
which something is asserted or denied as to the relation of ideas. 4 

Judgment, nevertheless, is conceived of by the Stoics and in 
this they take a new and important position, which, in antiquity, 
only the Sceptics approach in some degree by no means merely as 
the theoretical process of ideation and combination of ideas. They 
recognised, as the essential characteristic in judgment, the peculiar 
act of assent (&lt;yKaTa0ri&lt;;), of approval, and of being convinced, 
with which the mind makes the content of the idea its own, grasps 

1 Ib. 166 ff. 

2 Cf. M. Heinze, Zttr Erkenntnisslehre der Stoiker (Leips. 1880). 
8 Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. VII. 93. 

4 Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. VIII. 10. 

208 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Ethical Period. [PART II. 

it, and in a certain way takes possession of it (KaraAa/x/Jamv). This 
act of apprehension the Stoics regard as an independent function of 
consciousness (^ye/AovtKoV), in the same way as they regard the 
assent to the impulses, which makes its appearance in passion. The 
arising of ideas, like that of the excitations of feeling, is a process 
which is of natural necessity and completely independent of human 
will (axoixnov) ; but the assent by which we make the one class, 
judgments, and the other, passions, is a decision (K^IO-IS) of con 
sciousness, free (e/coJo-tov) from the outer world. 1 

But now in the case of the wise man, by virtue of the identity of 
the universal with the individual logos, this assent appears only in 
the case of those ideas which are true : the soul, therefore, in appre 
hending the content of these ideas, apprehends reality. Such an 
idea the Stoics called &lt;avTacrta KaraA^-i-iK?;, 2 and they were of the 
conviction that such an idea must call forth the reasonable man s 
assent with immediate evidence or clearness. Hence assent itself 
(o-vyKarafleo-is) is conceived of as an activity of the thinking soul, 
but individual perceptions appear as the objects of assent as truly 
as do the intellectual activities of conception, judgment, and reason 
ing, based upon the individual perceptions. 

If thus the Stoics understood by the favTao-ia KaTaXyirTiK-q that 
idea by which the mind lays hold of reality, and which, therefore, 
so illumines the mind that this, in its assent, makes reality its own, 
this was indeed the correct expression for the requirement which 
they set up for the true idea, 3 but the definition was not at all 
adapted to the end for which it was framed : that is, for a sign by 
which to recognise truth. For as the Sceptics 4 very justly objected, 
the subjective mark, assent, might be shown as a psychological fact 
in the case of a multitude of evidently false ideas. 

Thus the anthropological discord in the Stoic doctrine manifests 

1 Ib. VIII. 39, 7. 

2 In the interpretation of this term there is a wide divergence. According to 
the sources, it seems now as if the idea were intended which the mind lays hold 
of, now that which apprehends the real fact, now that by which the mind appre 
hends reality, and now again that which on its part so lays hold of the mind 
that the mind must assent to it. It has hence been supposed that the Stoics 
purposely constructed the expression in this ambiguous form, inasmuch as all 
these relations would harmonise in it, and perhaps E. Zeller (IV. 3 83) [Eng. tr., 
Stoics, etc., p. 89] intended to repeat this ambiguity by his translation, " concep- 
tional idea or perception" (be/jriffliche Vorstellung) , which, however, has an 
accessory logical sense that the Stoics certainly did not intend. 

8 It is worth while to point out the fact that in their designations for the 
relation of the knowing mind to the external reality, the Stoics employ, for the 
nust part, expressions from the field of the sense of touch (impression, appre 
hending, or grasping, etc.), while formerly optical analogies had been preferred. 
Cf. 11, 2. 

1 Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. VII. 402 ff. 

CHAP. 1, 17.] Criteria of Truth : Stoics. 209 

itself even in this central conception of their theory of knowledge. 
As it could not be explained in accordance with their metaphysics 
how the individual soul arising from the World-reason should fall 
under the mastery of sensuous impulses, so it is equally impossible 
to understand how theoretical assent should, under certain circum 
stances, be given even to false ideas. Both difficulties, however, 
have ultimately a common ground. The Stoics agreed with Hera- 
clitus in identifying in their metaphysics the normative and the 
actual ordering of things, although these conceptions had meanwhile 
become much more clearly separated. Reason was for them that 
which should be, as well as that which is ; it was at the same time 
vo/xos and &lt;v o-is. And this antithesis, the two sides of which came 
into strenuous opposition in their doctrine of freedom and their 
theodicy, was the problem of the future. 

CHAPTER II. 

THE RELIGIOUS PERIOD. 

J. Simon, Histoire de FEcole cf Alexandria. Paris, 1843 ff. 

E Matter, Essai sur F Ecole d Alexandrie. Paris, 1840 ff. 

E. Vacherot, Histoire Critique de VEcole d -Aleot.andrie. Paris, 1846 ft". 

[J. Drummond, Philo Judaius, or the Jewish Alexandrian Philosophy in its 

Development and Completion. 2 vols., Lond. 1888.] 
Barthelemy St. llilaire, Sur le Concours ouvert par V Academic, etc., sur V Ecole 

d Alexandrie. Paris, 1845. 

K. Vogt, Neuplatonismus und Christenthum. Berlin, 18.&gt;6. 
Georgii, Ueber die Gegensdtze in der Anffassung der alexandrinischen Religions- 

philosophie (Zeitschr. f. hist. Theol. 1839). 

E. Deutinger, Geist der christlichen Ueberlieferung. Regensburg, 1850-51. 
A. Ritschl, Die Entstehung der altkatholischen Kirche. 2d ed., Bonn, 1857. 
Chr. Baur, Das Christenthum der drei ersten Jahrhunderte. Tubingen, 1860. 
J. Alzog, Grundnss der Patmlogie. 3d ed., Freiburg i. B. 1876. 
[A. V. G. Allen, The Continuity of Christian Thought. Boston, 1884.] 
Alb. Stockl, Geschichte der Philosophic der patristischen Zeit. Wiirzburg, 1859. 
J. Huber, Die Philosophic der Kirchenvdter. Munich, 1859. 
Fr. Overbeck, Ueber die Anfdnge der patristischen Litteratur (Hist. Zeitschr. 

1882). 

A. Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte. 3 vols. Freiburg i. B. 1886-90. 
[J. Donaldson, Critical History of Christian Literature and Doctrine. ] 

THE gradual transition of the Hellenistic-Roman philosophy from 
the ethical to the religious standpoint had its inner causes in this 
philosophy itself, and its external occasion in the imperious de 
mands made by the felt need of the time. For the farther the 
contact between the systems extended, the more it became evident 
how little able philosophy was to fulfil the task which it had set 
itself : namely, that of educating man by a sure insight to a state 
of virtue and happiness, to inner independence of the world. While 
the sceptical mode of thought, which was extending more and more, 
already taught that virtue consists rather in the renunciation of the 
attempt to know, than in knowledge itself, the view forced its way 
more and more, even among the Stoics, that their ideal of the wise 
man, so sharply and rigidly drawn, was not entirely realised in a,ny 

210 

CHAP. 2.] The Religious Period. 211 

human being, and thus it was felt in every direction that man in 
his own strength can become neither knowing, nor virtuous and 
happy. 

If, then, a disposition to welcome a higher help for ethical ends 
was necessarily evoked in philosophy itself, it was also true that 
the theoretical doctrines of the time contained a great number of 
religious elements. The Epicureans, to be sure, purposely excluded 
such, but the Stoics, on the contrary, granted them an entrance that 
was all the freer. With the Stoics, not only did metaphysics lead 
to seeking the principle of morals in a divine command, but in their 
pneuma doctrine, the possibility presented itself of giving to the 
creations of myth a philosophical meaning, which might be shared 
also by all forms of worship. Finally, the spiritual monotheism in 
Aristotle s teaching, and that ideal tendency with which Plato 
sought the abiding essence of things in a higher world of the super- 
sensuous, were not forgotten. 

Just this dualism, which opposed the earthly world of the perish 
able to a supersensuous world of the divine, ultimately proved to be 
the right expression for that inner discord which ran through the 
entire life of the aging Greek and Roman world. The old craving 
for sensuous pleasure might still celebrate its orgies in full power 
and to the intoxication of the senses ; but in the midst of it all, out 
of surfeit and loathing grew a new craving for a purer, higher joy : 
and in the presence of the tremendous contrasts which the social 
condition of the Roman Empire brought with it, the look of all the 
millions that saw themselves excluded from the good things of this 
earth turned longingly toward a better world. Thus in all ways a 
deep, passionate need for true salvation of the soul (o-om/pia) came 
to be increasingly felt, a hunger for something beyond the earthly, 
a religious urgency without an equal. 

This religious movement proved its vigour first of all in the eager 
reception which foreign forms of worship found in the Graeco- 
Roman world, in the mingling and fusing of Oriental and Occidental 
religions. But with the adjustment which their oppositions found 
here and there, their strife for the mastery over men s spirits be 
came still more energetic, and thus the soil of the ancient world of 
civilisation, after bearing the fruits of art and science, became the 
battleground of religions. Man s essential interest became thereby 
transferred for long centuries from the earthly to the heavenly 
sphere ; he began to seek his salvation beyond the world of sense. 

But the forms in which this contest of the religions was waged 
prove in spite of all what a spiritual and intellectual power Greek 
science had grown to be. For so strongly was the ancient world 

212 Hellenistic-Roman Thought. [PART II. 

"sicklied o er with the pale cast of thought," so deeply had it be 
come permeated by the feeling of a need for knowledge, that each of 
the religions desired to satisfy not only the feelings but also the 
intellect, and was therefore anxious to transform its life into a doc 
trine. This is true even of Christianity, and indeed precisely true of 
it. The true, victorious power of the religion of Jesus lay, to be 
sure, in the fact that it entered this decrepit, blase world with the 
youthful force of a pure, high, religious feeling, and a conviction 
that was courageous to the death ; but it was able to conquer the 
ancient civilised world only by taking it up into itself and working 
it over ; and as in its external conflict with the old world it shaped 
its own constitution l and thereby ultimately became so strong as to 
be able to take possession of the Roman state, so also in its defence 
against the ancient philosophy it made the world of that philoso 
phy s ideas its own, in order thereby to build up its own dogmatic 
system. 

Thus the needs of science and of life met. The former sought the 
solution of the problems at which it had been labouring in vain, in 
religion, and the latter desired a scientific formulation arid basis for 
its religious longing or conviction. Hence from this time on, for 
many centuries, the history of philosophy is grown together with 
that of dogmatic theology, 2 and the period of religious metaphysics 
begins. The thought of antiquity described a peculiar curve, sepa 
rating itself farther and farther from religion from which it pro 
ceeded, reaching its extreme separation in Epicureanism, and then 
again steadily drawing near to religion, to return at last entirely 
within it. 

Under these conditions it is possible to understand how that 
Weltanschauung which separated the supersensuous and the sensu 
ous, looking upon them, from the point of view of value, as divine 
perfection and earthly baseness, respectively, constituted the 
common ground of the whole religious-philosophical movement. 
This view had already, indeed, been introduced by the Pythagoreans 
(cf. 5, 7), and had been maintained even by Aristotle, but it had, 
without doubt, found its most forcible formulation in the Platonic 
metaphysics. It was, therefore, this latter system which formed the 
controlling centre for the religious closing development of ancient 
thought. A religious development of Platonism is the fundamental 
character of this period. 

1 Cf. K. J. Neumann, Der romische Staat und die allgemeine Kirche bis auf 
Diocletian (Vol. I. Leips. 1890). 

* It will be understood as a matter of course that the following exposition 
has left at one side all specifically dogmatic elements, except where they are 
quite inseparably interwoven with philosophical principles. 

CHAP. 2.] The Religious Period. 213 

The geographical centre of the movement, however, is found in 
that city which, by its history, as well as by its population, repre 
sented most distinctly the mingling of peoples and of religions, 
Alexandria. Here, where in the active work of the museum all 
treasures of Grecian culture were garnered, all religions and forms 
of worship crowded together in the great throngs of the commercial 
metropolis to seek a scientific clarification of the feelings that 
surged and stormed within them. 

The first line of the Alexandrian philosophy is the so-called Neo- 
Pythagoreanism, a mode of thought which, proceeding from the 
religious practice of the Pythagorean mysteries, makes only an 
external use of the number-mysticism of the old Pythagoreans after 
whom it calls itself and its writings, while it finds the theoretical 
setting for its world-renouncing, religious-ascetic ethics in a trans 
formation of the Platonic metaphysics, which became of the pro- 
foundest value for the conception of the spiritual nature in the 
following period. Apollonius of Tyana, the founder of a religion, 
is to be regarded as typical representative of this school. 

Not without influence from this school, the Stoa, also, in the time 
,of the Empire, brought out more energetically the religious elements 
in its theory of the world, so that not only did the anthropological 
dualism of the system become sharpened, but a more theistic mode 
of thought gradually became substituted for the original pantheism 
of the school. In men like Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, 
the Stoic doctrine became completely a philosophy of deliverance or 
redemption. 

Even Cynicism revived again about this time in a religious garb, 
as a rude, popular preaching of renunciation, and Demonax passes 
for its best-known representative. 

Scarcely to be separated from the Neo-Pythagoreans are the 
Eclectic Platonists of the first centuries of our era, such as Plutarch of 
Chseronea and Apuleius of Madaura. Later appear Numenius of 
Apamea and Nicomachus of Gerasa, who, besides, already stand 
under Jewish and Christian influences as witnesses of a complete 
fusion of the two tendencies. 

But while, in all these forms, the Hellenic element ever maintains 
the ascendency over the Oriental, the latter makes its appearance in 
very much stronger force in the Jewish philosophy of religion. As 
the sect of the Essenes l probably proceeded from a contact of Neo- 
Pythagoreanism with the Hebrew religious life, so the various 
attempts of learned Jews to draw nearer to Greek science in the 

1 Cf. E. Zeller V. 8 277 ff. 

214 Hellenistic-Roman Thought. [PART II. 

presentation of their dogmas, led ultimately to the doctrine of Philo 
of Alexandria, whose original elaboration of these fermenting bodies 
of thought influenced their further formation and movement in the 
most important points. 

The philosophy of Christianity, which for these first centuries is 
usually designated by the name Patristics, unfolded in an analogous 
manner upon a larger scale. This philosophical secularisation of the 
gospel begins with the Apologists, who sought to present its re 
ligious belief as the only true philosophy, with the purpose of pro 
tecting Christianity in the eyes of the cultured world from contempt 
and persecution, and therefore began to adapt this content of re 
ligious faith to the conceptional forms of Greek science : the most 
important of them are Justin and Minacius Felix. 

But the need of changing faith (TUOTIS) into knowledge or wisdom 
(yvwcns) asserted itself vigorously in the Christian communities, 
even without this polemical tendency. The first attempts, how 
ever, which the Gnostics made to create an adequate view of the 
world for the new religion, proceeded from the excited phantasies 
of a Syrian mingling of religions, and, in spite of the employment of 
Hellenistic philosophemes, led to such grotesque constructions, that 
the Church as it grew stronger and more definitive was obliged to 
reject them. Saturninus, Basileides, and Valentinus are to be named 
as the best known of this class. 

In reaction against such over-hasty attempts of religious fantasti- 
calness, a violent aversion toward all philosophical interpretation 
and adjustment of Christian faith set in, for a time, in Christian 
literature in the writings of men like Tatian, Tertullian, and Arno- 
bius. An express anti-rationalism thus came forward which never 
theless found it necessary on its part also to return to the related 
doctrines of Greek philosophy. Without this one-sidedness and 
with a closer approximation to the older Hellenising Apologists, 
Gnosticism was combated by Irenceus and his disciple Hippolytus. 

It was not until the beginning of the third century, and after all 
these preceding attempts, that a positive Christian theology, a sys 
tem of dogmatics in a complete conceptional form, was established. 
This came about in the School for Catechists at Alexandria, through 
the leaders of the school, Clement and Origen. The latter especially 
is to be regarded as philosophically the most important representa 
tive of Christianity in this period. 

By his side, however, there went out from the Alexandrian phil 
osophic school the man who undertook to bring the religion-forming 
tendency of philosophy to an issue solely upon the Hellenistic basis, 
Plotinus, the greatest thinker of this period. His attempt to 

CHAP. 2.] The Religious Period. 215 

systematise all the main doctrines of Greek and Hellenistic phil 
osophy under the religious principle is designated as Neo- Platonism. 
His doctrine is the most definitive and thoroughly constructed sys 
tem of science that antiquity produced. His disciple Porphyry, 
however, showed himself already inclined to make a religion out of 
this religious teaching, and Jamblichu,*, who is termed the leader of 
Syrian Neo-Platonism, transformed it into a dogmatic theology of poly 
theism, with which the learned and political opponents of Christianity, 
such as the Emperor Julian, hoped to revive the forms of worship 
of the heathen religions, then in a state of dissolution. After this 
attempt had miscarried, the Athenian school of Neo-Platonism, as 
the heads of which Plutarch of Athens, Proclus, and Damascius 
appear, returned finally to a methodical, scholastic development of 
the system of Plotinus. 

Thus the Hellenistic efforts to attain to a new religion by means 
of science remained without result in this form : the scholars dis 
covered no church. On the other hand, the need felt by positive 
religion to complete and strengthen itself in a scientific doctrine did 
attain its goal : the Church created its dogma. And the great course 
of history in this movement was, that the defeated Hellenism in its 
powerful death-struggle still created the conceptions by means of 
which the new religion shaped itself into a dogma. 

While the Pythagorean mysteries had maintained their existence through all 
antiquity, scientific Pythagoreanism vanished as a proper school after its 
incorporation into the Academy (cf. p. :!). It is not until during the first 
century B.C. that specifically Pythagorean doctrines become noticeable again : 
they appear in the Pythagorean writings, of which Diogenes Laertius (VIII. 
24 ff.), following Alexander Polyhistor, gives an account that leads us to infer 
an essentially Stoic influence. They are renewed expressly by Cicero s learned 
friend, P. Nigidius Figulus (died 45 n.&lt;:.), and find approval also with other 
men in Koine. Cf. M. Herz, De P. Nig. Fig. Studiis atque Operibus (Berlin, 1845). 

Hut Neo-Pythagoreanism proper was first presented in literary form by 
the great number of writings which became public in Alexandria at about the 
beginning of our era, under the names of Pythagoras, or Philolaus, or Archytas, 
or other older Pythagoreans, the fragments of which give rise to so great diffi 
culties in forming a conception of genuine Pythagoreanism. Cf. the lit. p. 31. 

Of the personalities of the new school, on the contrary, very little is known. 
The only distinct figure is Apollonius of Tyana, of whose life and nature the 
rhetorician Philostratus (ed. by C. L. Kayser, Leips. 1870) gave a romantic 
representation at the beginning of the third century, in order to portray in it 
the ideal of the Pythagorean life. Of the works of Apollonius himself, who 
lived in the first century A.D., fragments of a biography of Pythagoras and of 
a treatise on Sacrifice are extant. Cf. Chr. Baur, Apollonius und Christus in 
Drei Abhandl. zur Gesch. d. alt. Philos. (Leips. 1876). [Tredwell, Life of 
Apollonius of Tyana, contains a good bibliography, N.Y. 1880.] His con 
temporary, Moderatus of Gades, might perhaps also be mentioned. 

Neo-Pythagorean and Stoic doctrines appear mingled in the Eclectic Sotion 
of Alexandria, who was affiliated with the Sextians (cf. p. 163). His disciple, 
L. Annaeus Seneca of Cordova (4-65 A.D.), was the leader of the Stoics in 
the time of the Empire. He was instructor of Nero, was well known because of 
his tragic fate, and also as tragic poet unfolded the rigid conceptions of life held 

216 Hellenistic-Roman Thought. [PART II. 

by his school. Of his writings a considerable number of mainly ethical trea 
tises are preserved besides his Epistolce (ed. by Haase, 3 vols., Leips. 1852-3) 
[Eng. tr. (or rather paraphrase) by T. Lodge, Lond. 1014, Selections from th.s 
and from L Estrange s Seneca" 1 s Morals by Way of Abstract, Lond. 1888, Game- 
lot series]. Cf. Chr. Baur, S. und Panlux in the Drci Abhandl. ; see above. 

Besides him we mentio.i L. Anmeus Cornutus (Phurnutus), a chief repre 
sentative of the Stoic interpretation of myths (Ile/H TTJS rQ/v 6fCjv &lt;pv&lt;reus, ed. 
by Osann, Gottingen, 1844), the satiric poet Persius, the moralist C. Musonius 
Rufus, and especially Epictetus. who lived at the time of Domitian, and whose 
doctrines were published by Arrian in two works, Aiarpipal and ^yx eL P^ lol&gt; ( e( i. 
together with the commentary of Simplicius by J. Schweighauscr, Leips. 1799 f.) 
[tr. by G. Long, Bohn s library ; also by T. W. Higginson, Boston, 1865]. Cf. 
A. Bonhoffer E. und die Stna (Stuttgart, 1890). 

With the noble Marcus Aurelius Antoninus the Stoa mounted the lloman 
imperial throne (161-180). His reflections TO. eis avr6v (ed. by J. Stich, Leips. 
1882) are the characteristic monument of this eclectic-religious Stoicism. 
[Eng. tr. by G. Long. The Thoughts of the Emperor, M. Aurelius Antoninus, 
Lond. Bohn s lib. ; W. Pater, Marius the Epicurean, Lond. and N.Y. 1888 ; M. 
Arnold in Essays.] 

In the ancient Grecian period, an original figure, that of the monkish wan 
dering preacher Teles, had gone out from the Cynic school (cf. v. Wilamovitz- 
Mollendorf, Philol. Untcrs, IV. 292 ff.). In the time of the Empire this quaint 
creature was frequently copied and exaggerated even to the most ridiculous 
extent. Demetrius, Oinomaos of Gadara, Demonax (cf. Fritsche, Leips. 186(5), 
and Peregrinus Proteus, known through Lucian, belong to these figures. Cf. 
J. Bernays, Lukian und die Kyniker (Berlin, 1879). 

Of the representatives of religious Platonism who kept at a distance from 
the number theory, may be mentioned the eclectic commentators Eudorus and 
Arius Didymus, Thrasyllus, the editor of the works of Plato and Democritus, 
and especially Plutarch of Chseronea (about 100 A.U.), from whom, in addition 
to his famous biographies, a great number of other writings are preserved, 
especially philosophical treatises of dogmatic and polemical content (Moralia, 
ed. Diibner ; Paris, Didot, Vols. III. and IV. 1855) (cf. H, Volkmann, Leben, 
Schriften und Philosophic des P., Berlin, 1872). [Plutarch s Morals, trans, ed. 
by Goodwin, 5 vols., Boston, 1870 ; also tr. by Shilleto and by C. W. King, both 
in Bohn s lib., Lond. 1888 and 1882 resp.] We mention further Maximus of 
Tyre of the time of the Antonines ; his contemporary, Apuleius of Madaura, 
who belongs in this series not only on account of his philosophical writings (ed. 
by A. Goldbacher, Vienna, 1876), but also on account of his allegorico-satirical 
romance, "The Golden Ass" (cf. Hildebrand in the introduction to his col 
lected works, Leips. 1842) [The Works of Apuleius, Bohn s lib.]; the oppo 
nent of Christianity, Celsus, whose treatise 0X77077$ \6yos (about 180) is known 
only from the counter-treati.se of Origen, Kara K.t\&lt;rov (cf. Th. Keim, C. " wahres 
Wort," Zurich, 1873); and lastly the physician Claudius Galen, who died about 
200, and might, to be sure, with his broad eclecticism be likewise classed as a Peri 
patetic and also as a Stoic (cf. K. Sprengel, Beitrage zur Gesch. d. Medicin, I. 
117 ff.). From the same circle of ideas arose also the writings circulated under 
the name of Hermes Trisrnegistus, which belong to the third century (French 
tr. by L. Me nard, Paris, I860 ; partially published by G. Parthey, Berlin, 1854). 

Among the Platonists of the second century Nicomachus of Gerasa in Ara 
bia, of whose writings arithmetical text-books and (through Photius) an extract 
from a work Apie^riKa. 6fo\oyov&gt;j.fva are extant, and Numeiiius of Apamea, 
concerning whom we owe our instruction mainly to Eusebius, are strongly Neo- 
Pythagorean. Cf. F. Thedinga (Bonn, 1875). 

The entrance of Greek philosophy into Jewish theology may be traced back 
to the middle of the second century B.C., where it can be recognised in the 
Biblical explanation of Aristobulus ; it appears then in a particularly marked 
manner, and in a form that is already much nearer the Alexandrian sphere of 
thought, in the pseudo-Solomonic Book of Wisdom. Yet these are but weak 
forerunners of the important creation of Philo of Alexandria, of whose life 
little more is known than that in the year 39, when already in advanced age, he 
was a member of an embassy from his native community to the Emperor Calig- 

CHAP. 2.] The Religious Period. 217 

ula. His numerous writings, among which there is also much that is not 
genuine, were edited by Th. Mangey (Lond. 1742), Leips. stereotype ed., 8 vols., 
1851-53 ; [Eng. tr. by C. 1). Yonge, 4 vols., Lond., Bohn s lib.]. 

F. Dahne, Die jiidisch-alexandrinische Re.ligionsphilosophie (Halle, 18.34). 

A.Gfrorer, Philon und die alexandrinisc.he Theosophie (Stuttgart, 1835); M. 
Wolff, Die philonische Philosophic (Gothenburg, 1858); Ewald, Gesch. des 
Volkes Israel, VI. 231 ft 

Among the Christian Apologists whose writings are collected in the Corpus 
Apoloyetarum Chrintianorum secundi souculi, ed. by Otto (Jena, 1842 ft .), the 
most prominent is Flavins Justin Martyr of Sichem, who lived in the middle of 
the second century. Two defensive writings and a dialogue with Trypho the 
Jew are preserved [Kng. tr. iu Ante-Nicene Ch. lib., ed. by Roberts and Donald 
son, Edinburg, T. & T. Clark, 1807]. K. Semisch (2 vols., Breslau, 1840-42), 
and B. Aub6 (Paris, 18(51) treat of him. Further Apologists from the Hellenic 
circle of culture are Aristides (whose discourses, discovered in the Armenian 
language, were printed with a Latin translation, Venice, 1878), Athenagoras 
of Athens (wpeff^fia irtpl Xpiffriavtiv addressed to Marcus Aurelius about 170), 
Theophilus of Antioch (a treatise addressed to Autolycus about 180), Melito 
of Sardis, Apollinaris of Hierapolis, and others. Latin literature presents 
especially Minucius Felix, whose dialogue Octavius was written about 200 
(ed. in the Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum, by C. Halm, Vienna, 
1867). The rhetorician, Firmianus Lactantius (about 300), is to be placed in 
the same series. His main treatise is the Institutions Divinw [tr. of the above 
authors in Ante-Nicene lib., see above]. 

Of the Gnostics our information comes essentially through their opponents, 
Iremeus (140-200 ; his treatise "EXe7x os * a * AwrpoirT) TT?S \f/fv5uvv/j.ov -yvtiffcus, ed. 
by A. Stieren, Leips. 1853), Hippolytus (Kara iraa-uv aipfoeuv \e7xos, ed. by 
Duncker and Schneidewin, Gottingen, 1859), Tertullian (Adveiwis Valenti- 
nianos), etc. [Eng. tr. of the above writings in Ante-Nicene lib., above]. Of 
Gnostic treatises only one, and that by an unknown author, is extant, Harris 
ffo&lt;f&gt;ta (ed. by Petermann, Berlin, 1851). Of the main representatives of this 
doctrine there were active in the first half of the second century Saturninus of 
Antioch, Basilides, a Syrian, and Carpocrates in Alexandria ; toward the 
middle of the century Valentinus, the most important of them (died about 
160); and toward the end of the century Bardesanes of Mesopotamia. Expo 
sitions of the Gnostic Systems by A. W. Neander (Berlin, 1818) [Eng. tr. by 
Torrey, Boston, 1865], E. Matter (Paris, 1843), Chr. Baur (Tubingen, 1835), 
A. Hilgenfeld (Jena, 1884), same author, BanJpsanes, der letzte Gnostiker 
(Leips. 1864). A. Harnack, Zur Quellenkritik der Geschichte des Gnosticismus 
(Leips. 1873); [H. L. Mansel, Gnostic Heresies, Lond. 1876]. 

The most radical opponent of Greek science was Tatian, an Assyrian, 
whose treatise n/&gt;6s"E\\77i&gt;as arose about 170, but who later became himself an 
adherent of the Valentinian Gnosticism. The passionate Apologist Qu. Sep- 
timius Florens Tertullian (105-220, for a time Presbyter in Carthage) ended 
likewise in opposition to the Catholic Church, in the sect of the Montanists. 
His works have been edited by Fr. Oehler (3 vols., Leips. 1853 f.), recently by 
A. Reifferscheid and Wissowa (Vol. I. Vienna, 1890, in Corp. script, cccl. lat.) 
[Eng. tr. in Ante-Nicene lib.]. Cf. A. W. Neander, Anti gnostic us, Geist des 
Tertullian, etc. (2d ed. Berlin, 1849) [Eng. tr. Bohn s lib. , 1851]; A. Hauck, 
TVs Leben und Schriften, Erlangen, 1877). In the same series, but from 
a later time, is the African rhetorician Amobius. whose seven books, Adversus 
Gentes, were composed about 300 (ed. by A. Reifferscheid in Corp. script, eccl. 
lat., Vienna, 1875). 

Of the writings of Clement of Alexandria (died about 217) three treatises 
are preserved, A6&gt;os irporpewTiKb* irpds "E\\iji&gt;as IIat5a"xa&gt;76j SrpajyaaTetj (ed. 
by J. Potter, Oxford, 1715) [tr. in Ante-Nicene lib.]. From his school (cf. on 
the Alex. Catechetical school, Guericke, Halle, 1824 f., and Hasselbach, Stettin, 
1826) went forth the founder of Christian theology, Origen. surnamed the Ada 
mantine. Born 185 A.D. in Alexandria, equipped with the full education of the 
time, he came forward early as a teacher, fell into conflicts on account of his 
doctrines with the Synod, was by it removed from his office, and later lived in 
Ctesarea and Tyre, dying in the latter place 254. Of his writings, aside from 
the above-mentioned treatise against Celsus, his work \\tpi apx&v is of chief 
importance ; it is extant almost only in the Latin version of Rutinus (ed. by 

218 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Religious Period. [PART II. 

Redepenning, Leips. 1836) [tr. in Ante-Nicene lib.]. Cf. J. Reinkens, De. 
Clemente Presbytero Al. (Breslau, 1851); Redepenning, O., Darstellung seines 
Lebens und seiner Lehre (Bonn, 1841-46) [cf. Bigg, The Christian Platonists 
of Alexandria, Oxford, 1887 ; A. Harnack, Art. Origen in Enc. rit.]. 

A collection of the sources for all the Church writers of this period has been 
issued by J. P. Migne, Patrologice Cursus Completus (Paris, 1840 ff.). 

A certain Ammonius Saccus appears in old traditions as the founder of 
Neo-Platonism, but nothing is known to justify this tradition. To his pupils 
belonged Plotinus, Origen, the rhetorician Longinus (213-273), to whom the 
book Ilepi v j/ovs was ascribed, and another Origen. 

The true founder of the school was Plotinus (204-269). Born in Lycopolia 
in Egypt, and educated in Alexandria, he bicame a member of an expedition 
against the Persians in order to promote his religious studies, made a highly 
successful appearance as teacher in Rome about 244, and died on a country 
estate in Campania. His works, written late in life, were published by his 
disciple Porphyry, arranged in six enneads. Ed. by H. Miiller (Leips. 1878-80), 
with a German translation [Eng. tr. in part by Th. Taylor, Lend. 1787, 1794, 
1817, French tr. by Bouillut, Paris, 1857-60]. Cf. H. Kirchntr, Die Philns. des 
PL (Halle, 1851). A. Riehter, Neuplatonische Studien (Halle, 1864 ff.). 
H. v. Kleist, Neupl it. Studien (Heidelberg, 1883). [A. Harnack, Art. Xeo- 
Platonism in Enc. Brit.] 

To the Alexandrian Xeo-Platonism are reckoned further Gentilianus Ame- 
lius of Ameria, and the Tyrian Porphyry (about 230-300). Among the ex 
tant writings, aside from the biographies of Plotinus and Pythagoras, are to be 
mentioned A.&lt;pof&gt;/j.ai Trpos TO. vorjrd, an aphoristic abridgment of the system of 
Plotinus (printed in Creuzer s ed. of the works of Plotinus, Paris, 1855), the 
treatise On Abstemiousness (irepi OTTOX^J rdiv e /A^xw, important on account of 
its use of the Trepi ei)cre/3eas of Theophrastus ; cf. J. Bernays, Berlin, 1866), and 
of the commentaries the Elvayuyr) ei s rds KaTyyoplas (ed. by Busse, Berlin, 1877 ; 
and also in the Berlin ed. of Aristotle, Vol. IV.). 

Syrian Neo-Platonism was founded by Jamblichus of Chalcis in Ccele- 
Syria (died about 330), a hearer of Porphyry. His writings were principally 
commentaries upon Hellenistic and Oriental theology. The following are par 
tially preserved : Ilepi rov llvdayopiKov piov (ed. by Westermann, Paris, 1850), 
A6yos irpoTpeirTtKbs et j (pi\offo&lt;plav (ed. by Kiessling, Leips. 1813), Ilepl rrjs KOLVJJS 
jua077^aTiK77s tiri&lt;rTri/j.Tjs (ed. by Villoison, Venice, 1781) [Eng. tr. Life of Pyth. 
by Taylor, Loud. 1818, Egyptian Mysteries, by same, Chiswick, 1821]. 

Of the disciples of the school, Dexippus commented on the Aristotelian 
Categories (ed. by L. Spengel, Munich, 1859), Sallustius wrote a compendium 
of metaphysics (ed. by Orelli, Zurich, 1821), and Themistius (about 317-387) 
made himself known as a paraphrast and commentator upon Aristotelian works. 
From the same circle comes the treatise De Mystenis ^Eyyptiorum (ed. by G. 
Parthey, Berlin, 1857 ; cf. Harless, Munich, 1858). 

This movement had a transient political success by the accession of the 
Emperor Julian, who hoped by its help to renew the old religion and displace 
Christianity. His writings against the Christians have been edited with a 
German translation by K. J. Neumann (Leips. 1880). Cf. A. W. Neander, 
Ueber den Kaiser J. und sein Zeitalter (Berlin, 1812). 1). Fr. Strauss, .7. der 
Abtrunnige, der Romantiker auf dem Throne, der Cdsaren (Mannheim, 1847). 
A. Miicke, ./. nach den Quell fn (Gotha, 1866-68). 

The founder of Athenian Neo-Platonism was Plutarch of Athens (died 
after 430), with his pupils Syrianus and Hierocles. All these, as well as the 
following, composed commentaries upon Platonic and Aristotelian or Pythago 
rean writings, which are in part preserved. More important was Proclus 
(411-485), among whose works the most important is Ilepi TT?S /card nXdrwro 
Oeo\oyias (ed. of his works by V. Cousin, Paris, 1820-25) [Eng. tr. by Th. 
Taylor]. Cf. H. Kirchner, De Prod. Metaphysica (Berlin, 1846). K. Stein- 
hart s Art. in Ersch und Griiber s Enc. 

The last head of the Platonic Academy was Damascius, of whose writings 
the beginning of a treatise irepi r&v irpwruv dpxwv, and the conclusion of a com 
mentary upon the Parmenides are extant (ed. by J. Kopp, Frankfort a. M. 
182 J ; cf. E. Heitz in Strass. Abhdl. fur Philos., 1884), and also a biography of 

CHAP. 2, 18.] Authority and Revelation. 219 

his teacher Isidorus. Among the commentators of this time Simplicius is 
prominent (on the Physics, ed. pr. Venice, 1526, the first four books, Diels, 
Berlin, 1882; on the De Cvelo, Karsten, Utrecht, 1865; on the De Anima, 
llayduck, Berlin, 1882). 

The two latter wandered with their immediate associates for a time toward 
Persia, when in the year 529 the Emperor Justinian closed the Academy, con 
fiscated its property, and by forbidding lectures on heathen philosophy gave 
the external confirmation to its close. 

18. Authority and Revelation. 

The imperturbable self-certainty and self-mastery which the post- 
Aristotelian philosophy had sought and in part claimed for the wise 
man, had been so deeply shaken with the progress of time that it 
had given place to a feeling of the need of help, both in the ethical 
and in the theoretical spheres. The philosophising individual no 
longer had confidence that he could attain to right insight or to his 
soul s salvation by his own strength, and sought his help accord 
ingly, partly amid the great monuments of the past, partly in 
a divine revelation. Both tendencies, however, are ultimately upon 
the same basis, for the confidence which was placed in the men and 
writings of a previous time rested only upon the fact that they 
were regarded as especially favoured vessels of higher revelation. 
Authority, therefore, acquired its value as the mediate, historically 
accredited revelation, while the divine illumination of the individ 
ual as immediate revelation came to its assistance. Differently as 
the relation between these two forms was conceived of, it is yet the 
common mark of all Alexandrian philosophy that it regards divine 
revelation as the highest source of knowledge. Already in this inno 
vation in the theory of knowledge, we find expressed the heightened 
value which this period put upon personality, and on personality as 
evincing itself in the feelings. The longing of this time desired 
that the truth might be found by experience, as an inner commun 
ion of man with the Supreme Being. 

1. The appeal to authority often makes its appearance in Greek 
and Hellenistic philosophy in the sense of a confirmation and 
strengthening of an author s own views, but not as a decisive and 
conclusive argument. The jurare in verba magistri might be usual 
enough among the subordinate members of the schools, 1 but the 
heads of schools, and in general the men who engaged in indepen 
dent research, maintained an attitude toward the teachings of the 
former time that was much more one of criticism than of uncondi 
tional subjection ; 2 and though in the schools, chiefly the Academic 

1 Though even the well-known oi)r6s &lt;/&gt;o [ipse dixit] of the Pythagoreans is 
attested only through later writers (Cicero). 

2 Kven th&gt; admiration of Socrates, in which all the following schools were at 
one, did not in itself lead to his being regarded as the valid authority for defi 
nite philosophical doctriuus. 

220 Hellenistic- Roman Thought : Religious Period. [PART II 

and Peripatetic, the inclination to preserve and maintain the 
teaching of the founder as an unassailable treasure was fostered by 
the custom of commenting upon his works, yet in all the conflict 
as to the criteria of truth the principle had never been brought 
forward that something must be believed because this or that great 
man had said it. 

How strongly the need for authority had come to be felt in the 
later time, we may recognise even from the countless interpolations 
which were the order of the day in the whole Alexandrian litera 
ture. Their authors, who, perhaps, for the most part acted in good 
faith, since they themselves regarded their thoughts as only devel 
opments and continuations of the old doctrines, evidently believed 
that they could get a hearing for their works in no better way than 
by assigning to them the name of one of the heroes of wisdom, of 
an Aristotle, a Plato, or a Pythagoras. This phenomenon appeared 
most extensively among the Neo-Pythagoreans, whose chief con 
cern it was to invest their new doctrine with the halo of ancient 
wisdom. But the more the convictions that were to be established 
in this manner bore a religious character, the more lively became 
the need to conceive of these authorities themselves as the bearers 
of a religious revelation, and therefore all the traits that might 
stamp them as such were sought for within them or even read into 
them. Not contented, however, with this, the later Greeks believed 
that they could give a higher sanction to their philosophy, as well 
as to their entire civilisation, by deriving it from the Oriental 
religions : thus Numenius l did not hesitate to maintain that 
Pythagoras and Plato had presented only the old wisdom of the 
Brahmans, Magi, Egyptians, and Jews. As a result of this, the 
extent of literary authorities increased extraordinarily ; the later 
Neo-Platonists, a Jamblichus and Proclus, commented not only on 
Greek philosophers, but also upon the entire Hellenic and barbarian 
theology, 2 and credulously adopted myths and miraculous tales 
from these sources. 

In quite a similar manner Oriental literature testified also to its 
esteem for Hellenism. Among the predecessors of Philo, Aristo- 
bulus especially appealed to verses which were interpolated in 
Orpheus and Linus, in Homer and Hesiod ; and with Philo himself, 
the great Jewish theologian, the great men of Greek philosophy 
appear side by side with the Old Testament, as bearers of wisdom. 

The felt need of authority naturally asserts itself most strongly 
in the unconditional faith in religious records. Here the Old Testa- 

i In Eus. Prop. Ev. IX. 7. * Marinus, Prod. Vit. 22. 

CHAP. 2, 18.] Authority and Revelation : Philo. 221 

ment was from the beginning the firm foundation for the science 
and philosophy of Judaism and also for that of (orthodox) Christian 
ity. But in the Christian Church the need of establishing a collec 
tion of writings in which the system of faith should be defined with 
certainty, first developed with Marcion, and then was gradually 
satisfied in the completion and conclusion of the New Testament : 
with Irenaeus and Tertullian both Testaments already appear with 
the full value and validity of churchly authority. 

2. If now in this way even scientific thought, which in conse 
quence of sceptical disintegration no longer gave itself credit for 
the power of truth, subjected itself voluntarily to the authorities of 
antiquity and to religious institution, it was yet in nowise bound 
thereby to the extent that we might suppose. This relation rather 
took the form, along all lines, of extracting from the authoritative 
sources, and also of reading into them, the scientific doctrines which 
arose from the new religious movements. 1 

Where in so doing they did not resort expressly to those inter 
polations which are found more or less in the entire literature of 
the period as well as in Neo-Pythagoreanism, they employed as 
their instrument the method of allegorical interpretation. 

This meets us first in Jewish theology. It had its prototype 
indeed in the allegorical interpretation of myths, which made its 
appearance early in Grecian literature, was employed by the Sophists, 
and extensively prosecuted by the Stoics. It was applied to relig 
ious documents by Aristobulus, but it was Philo 2 who carried it 
through methodically, proceeding from the conviction that a dis 
tinction must be made in Scripture between the literal and the 
spiritual meaning, between its body and its soul. In order to teach 
his commands to the great mass of men, who in their sensuous 
nature are unable to apprehend the divine purely, God gave to 
revelation the anthropomorphic form, behind which only the spirit 
ually mature man penetrates to the true sense. This sense is to be 
sought in the philosophical conceptions which lie hidden in the 
historical husks. Accordingly, since Philo the task of theology 
has been directed toward interpreting religious documents into a sys 
tem of scientific doctrines; and if he uses Greek philosophy for this 
purpose, and finds in it the higher meaning of the Scripture, he 

1 Rven a man like Plutarch of Chaeronea, who follows the writings of Plato 
as he would the revelations of a religious document, does not scruple to intro 
duce into the teaching of his master Aristotelian and Stoic doctrines as well as 
his own religious view. 

2 Cf. Siegfried, Philon v. Alexandria als Aualeger des alten Testaments 
(Jena, 1875). 

222 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Religious Period. [PART II. 

explains this relation on the ground that the thinkers of Greece 
have drawn from Mosaic documents. 1 

Following his example, the Gnostics then attempted to transform 
Oriental myths into Greek conceptions by allegorical interpretation, 
and thought thus to develop a secret doctrine of the Apostolic 
tradition, the Apologists maintained the harmony of Christian 
doctrine with the dogmas of Greek philosophy, even men like 
Irenaeus and Tertullian worked upon the New Testament, and 
finally Orfgen knew how to bring the philosophy of Christianity 
into accord with its documents. The great Alexandrian theologian, 
like the Gnostics who first attempted to create a Christian theology, 
distinguished between the carnal (somatic), psychical, and spiritual 
(pneumatic) conceptions of the religious records, corresponding 
to the metaphysico-anthropological ideas of the time (cf. 19 f.). 
For him the literal historical tradition yields only a " Christianity 
according to the flesh " (x(oi0T&lt;.avio-/u,os o-w/AariKo?), and it is the task of 
theology to lead out of this, through the moral significance at which 
the " psychical " readers stop, to the ideal content of the Scripture, 
which must then illumine the reader as self-evident truth. Only he 
who grasps this last belongs to the pneumatic or spiritual readers, 
to whom the eternal gospel thus disclosed reveals itself. 

This extraction of philosophical meaning from religious tradition 
is found in fullest extent among the Neo-Platonists. Jamblichus 
practises it, in accordance with the Stoic model, on all forms of 
Oriental and Occidental mythology, and Proclus, too, declares ex 
pressly that myths veil the truth from sensuous men who are not 
worthy of it. 2 

3. But in all such doctrines, the interest of science (in the Chris 
tian teachings, yi/okris) ultimately predominates over that of faith; 
they are accommodations of philosophy to the need of religious 
authority, felt at this time. The essential identity of authority and 
of rational knowledge obtains, therefore, as the fundamental presuppo 
sition ; it obtains in such a degree, that just where it seems threat 
ened, all artifices of allegorical interpretation are attempted in order 
to rescue it. This confidence, nevertheless, with which science pro 
ceeded to develop its own content as that of the religious documents, 
rested ultimately upon the conviction that both historical authority 
and scientific doctrine are but different revelations of the same divine 
Power. 

We have seen that the belief in authority in this period grew out 
of the felt need of salvation and help. Another psychological root of 

i Phil. Vit. Mos. 657 a. (137 m.). 2 Procl. In Kemp. 369. 

CHAP. 2, 18.] Authority and Revelation : Origen, Justin. 223 

this belief was the enhanced importance of personality. This shows 
itself in the lively expression of admiration for the great men of the 
past, as we find it in Philo and in all lines of Platonism, and not 
less in the unconditional trust of the disciples in their masters, 
which, especially in later Neo-Platonism, degenerated to exaggerated 
veneration of the heads of schools. 1 This same motive appears in 
grandest form as a power in the world s history, in the stupendous, 
overpowering impression of the personality of Jesus. Faith in him 
was the uniting bond which held together victoriously the various and 
manifold tendencies of early Christianity. 

But this psychological motive justified itself to theory by the 
consideration that the admired personality was regarded, in teach 
ing and life, as a revelation of the divine World-reason. The meta 
physical and epistemological bases for this were given in Platonism 
and especially in Stoicism. Attachment to the Platonic doctrine 
that knowledge is recollection, with the turn already expressed in 
Cicero that right knowledge is implanted by God in the soul, is innate 
within it, the carrying out of the Stoic logos doctrine, and of the 
idea contained in it that the rational part of the soul is a consub- 
stantial emanation from the divine World-reason, all this led to 
regarding every form of right knowledge as a kind of divine revela 
tion in man. 2 All knowledge is, as Xumenius said, 3 the kindling of 
the small light from the great light which illumines the world. 

It was from this point of view that Justin, especially, conceived 
of the relationship maintained by him between the old philosophy 
and Christianity, and at the same time conceived the superiority of 
the latter. God has indeed revealed himself internally through the 
rational nature 4 (oW/D/Aa Aoyou e/x&lt;uroi/) of man who is created in 
his image, as he has revealed himself externally through the perfec 
tion of his creation ; but the development of this universal, more 
potential than actual revelation, is retarded by evil demons and 
man s sensuous impulses. God has, therefore, for man s help, em 
ployed the special revelation, which has appeared not only in Moses 
and the prophets, but also in the men of Greek science. 5 Justin 
calls the revelation which is extended to the entire human race, the 

1 From the point of view of the history of civilisation we may notice the 
parallel in the boundless deification of the Koinan Emperors. 

2 So also by the Stoics of the time of the Kmpire, philosophy, which among 
them likewise aimed to be a cure for sick souls (Epictetus, Dissert. III. 23, 30), 
is set forth as a sermon of the deity himself, through the mouth of the wise 
man (ib. I. 36). 

s In Kuseb. Frcep. Ev. XI. 18, 8. 

4 Apol. 11.8; cf. Min. Fol. Oct. 16, 5. 

5 On the other hand, to be sure, Justin as well as Philo derives the Greek 
philosophy from the Jewish religion, as a borrowing. 

224 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Religious Period. [PART II. 

Xoyos &lt;nrepfjM.TiKos. But that which has appeared in former time, so 
dispersed and often obscured, is not the full truth : the entire, pure 
logos has been revealed in Christ, Son of God, and second God. 

In this teaching there prevails, on the one hand, with the Apolo 
gists, the effort to set forth Christianity as the true and highest phil 
osophy, and to show that it unites in itself all teachings * of abiding 
worth that can be discovered in the earlier philosophy. Christ is 
called the teacher (StSao-xaAos), and this teacher is Reason itself. 
While Christianity was by this means brought as near as possible to 
rational philosophy, and philosophy s principle of knowledge made 
essentially equivalent to that of religion, this had yet at the same 
time the consequence, that the conception of the religious content 
itself became strongly rationalistic with Justin and similar Apolo 
gists, such as Minucius Felix : the specifically religious elements 
appear more repressed, and Christianity takes on the character of a 
moralising deism, in which it acquires the greatest similarity to 
religious Stoicism. 2 

On the other hand, in this relation the self-consciousness of 
Christianity speaks out, for with its perfect revelation it regarded 
all other kinds of revelation, universal as well as particular, as super 
fluous ; and at this point the Apologetic doctrine became of itself 
polemic, as is shown especially in Atfienagoras. Revelation here, 
too, is still regarded as the truly reasonable, but just on this account 
the reasonable is not to be demonstrated, but only believed. Phil 
osophers have not found the full truth, because they have not been 
willing or able to learn God from God himself. 

4. Thus, although in the Apologetic doctrine the rational is re 
garded as supernaturally revealed, there is gradually preparing an 
opposition between revelation and knowledge by the reason. The more 
the Gnostics, in developing their theological metaphysics, separated 
themselves from the simple content of Christian faith, the more 
Irenceus 3 warned against the speculations of worldly wisdom, and 
the more violently Tatian, with Oriental contempt of the Greeks, 
rejected every delusion of the Hellenic philosophy which was 
always at variance with itself, and of whose teachers each would 
exalt only his own opinions to the rank of law, while the Christians 
uniformly subjected themselves to the divine revelation. 

This opposition becomes still sharper with Tertullian and Arno- 
bius. The former, as Tatian had already done in part, adopted tho 

1 Apol. II. 13, foa iraptiL iraffi KaXws etprirai TJ/JLUV XpiffTiavuv ttrriv. 

2 Cf. Min. Fel. Oct. 31 ft., where the Christian fellowship of love appears pre 
cisely as the Stoic world-state of philosophers. 

Bef. II. 25 ff. 

CHAP. 2, 18.] Authority and Revelation : Tertullian, Plutarch. 225 

Stoic materialism in its metaphysical aspect, but drew from it only 
the logical consequence of a purely sensualistic theory of knowledge. 
This was carried out in an interesting way by Arnobius, when, to 
combat the Platonic and Platonising theory of knowledge, he showed 
that a man left in complete isolation from his birth on would re 
main mentally empty, and not gain higher knowledge. 1 Since the 
human soul is by nature limited solely to the impressions of the 
senses, it is therefore of its own power absolutely incapable of 
acquiring knowledge of the deity, or of any vocation or destiny of 
its own that transcends this life. Just for this reason it needs rev 
elation, and finds its salvation only in faith in this. So sensualism 
here shows itself for the first time as basis for orthodoxy. The lower 
the natural knowing faculty of man, and the more it is limited to 
the senses, the more necessary does revelation appear. 

Accordingly, with Tertullian, the content of revelation is not only 
above reason, but also in a certain sense contrary to reason, in so 
far as by reason man s natural knowing activity is to be understood. 
The gospel is not only incomprehensible, but is also in necessary 
contradiction with worldly discernment : credibile est quia iitep- 
tum est ; certum est, quia impossibile est credo quia absurdum. Hence 
Christianity, according to his view, has nothing to do with philoso 
phy, Jerusalem nothing to do with Athens. 2 Philosophy as natural 
knowledge is unbelief ; there is therefore no Christian philosophy. 

5. But rationalistic theory also found occasions enough for such 
a defining of boundaries between revelation and natural knowledge. 
For by their identification the criterion of truth threatened to 
become lost. The quantity of that which presented itself as reve 
lation, in this time of such agitation in religion, made it indispen 
sable to decide on the right revelation, and the criterion for this 
could not be sought in turn in the individual s rational knowledge, 
because the principle of revelation would be thereby injured. This 
difficulty made itself very noticeable, especially in the Hellenistic 
line of thought. Plutarch, for example, who regards all knowledge 
as revelation, follows the Stoic division of theology into three kinds, 
viz. of the poets, of the law-givers, and of philosophers, and 
would concede to science or philosophy the supreme decision as to 
religious truth, 3 declaring himself vigorously against superstition 4 

1 Am. Adv. Gent. II. 20 ff. 

2 Tertull. De Carne Chr. 5; De Prcescr. 7. In the latter passage he directs 
his polemic also expressly against those who present a Stoic or Platonic Chris 
tianity. He is the extreme opponent of the Hellenising of dogma ; he knows 
no compromise, and with his hot-blooded nature demands unconditional surren 
der to revelation. In a still more popular manner Arnobius sets forth the help 
lessness of natural knowledge (Adv. Gent. II. 74 ff.). 

8 De laid. G8. * De Superst. 14. 

226 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Religious Period. [PART II. 

; but he shows himself to be ultimately as naive and 
credulous as his time, since he takes up into his writings all kinds 
of tales of prophecies and miracles ; and the incredible absence of 
criticism with which the later Neo-Platonists, a Jamblichus and 
Proclus proceeded in this respect, shows itself as the consistent 
result of the renunciation of the thinker s own discernment, a 
renunciation which the need of revelation brought with it from the 
beginning. 

Here the development of the Church, which was then in process 
of organisation, set in with its principle of tradition and historically 
accredited authority. It regards the religious documents of the Old 
arid New Testaments as entirely, and also as alone, inspired. It 
assumes that the authors, in recording this highest truth, were 
always in a state of pure receptivity in their relation to the divine 
spirit, 1 and finds the verification of this divine origin, not in the 
agreement of this truth with the knowledge derived from human 
reason, but essentially in the fulfilment of the prophecies which are 
therein contained, and in the purposeful connection of their succession 
in time. 

The proof from prophecy, which became so extraordinarily impor 
tant for the further development of theology, arose accordingly from 
the need of finding a criterion for distinguishing true and false 
revelation. Since man is denied knowledge of the future through 
natural processes of cognition, the fulfilled predictions of the proph 
ets serve as marks of the inspiration, by means of which they have 
propounded their doctrines. 

To this argument a second is now added. According to the doc 
trine of the Church, which on this point was supported chiefly by 
Irenaeus, 2 Old and New Testaments stand in the following connec 
tion : the same one God has revealed himself in the course of time 
to man in a constantly higher and purer manner, corresponding to 
the degree of man s receptive capacity : to the entire race he 
reveals himself in the rational nature, which, to be sure, may be mis 
used ; to the people of Israel, in the strict law of Moses ; to entire 
humanity again, in the law of love and freedom which Jesus an 
nounced. 3 In this connected succession of prophets there is thus 
developed the divine plan of education, according to which the reve 
lations of the Old Testament are to be regarded as preparations for 

1 Just. Apol. I. 31. 

2 Bef. III. 12 ; IV. 11 ff. 

8 The Alexandrian theology added, as fourth phase of revelation, the "eter 
nal gospel," which is to be sought in the pneumatic interpretation of the New 
Testament. Cf. the carrying out of these thoughts in Lessing s Education of 
the Human Race. 

CHAP. 2, 18.] Authority and Revelation : Neo-Platonism, Philo. 227 

the New, which in turn confirms them. Here, too, in patristic 
literature, the fulfilment of prophecies is regarded as the connect 
ing link between the different phases of revelation. 

These are the forms of thought in which the divine revelation 
became fixed for the Christian Church as historical authority. But 
the fundamental psychological power which was active in this pro 
cess remained, nevertheless, devotion in faith to the person of 
Jesus, who, as the sum total of divine revelation, formed the centre 
of Christian life. 

6. The development of the doctrine of revelation in the Hellenistic 
philosophy took an entirely different direction. Here the scientific 
movement lacked the living connection with the Church community, 
and therefore the support of a historical authority; here, therefore, 
revelation, which was demanded as a supplement for the natural 
faculties of knowledge, must be sought in an immediate illumination 
of the individual by the deity. On this account revelation is here 
held to be a supra-rational apprehension of divine truth, an appre 
hension which the individual man comes to possess in immediate con 
tact (d^&gt;7/) with the deity itself: and though it must be admitted 
that there are but few who attain to this, and that even these attain 
only in rare moments, a definite, historically authenticated, special 
revelation, authoritative for all, is nevertheless here put aside. 
This conception of revelation was later called the mystic conception, 
and to this extent Neo-Platonism is the source of all later mysticism. 

The origins of this conception again are to be sought with Philo. 
For he had already taught that all man s virtue can arise and con 
tinue only through the working of the divine Logos within us, and 
that the knowledge of God consists only in the renunciation of self, 
in giving up individuality, and in becoming merged in the divine 
Primordial Being. 1 Knowledge of the Supreme Being is unity of 
life with him, immediate contact. The mind that wishes to behold 
God must itself become God. 2 In this state the soul s relation is 
entirely passive and receptive ; 3 it has to renounce all self-activity, 
all its own thought, and all reflection upon itself. Even the vovs, 
the reason, must be silent in order that the blessedness of the per 
ception of God may come upon man. In this st.ite of ecstasy 
(tKo-Tcuns) the divine spirit, according to Philo, dwells in man. 
Hence, in this state, he is a prophet of divine wisdom, a foreteller 
and miracle-worker. As the Stoa had already traced mantic arts 

* Phil. Leg. AH. 48 e. ; 55 d.; 57 b. (53-62 M.). 

* KiroOeudr)va.L is found also in the Hermetic writings; Poemand. 10. 6 ff. 
The 8to\&gt;ff6a.L (dfifiratio) is later a general term of Mysticism. 
3 Cf. Hut. DePyth. Orac. 21 ff. (404 ff.). 

228 Hellenistic- Roman Thought : Religious Period. [PART II. 

to the consubstantiality of human and divine spirits (Trveu/xara), so 
too the Alexandrians conceive of this "deification" of man from 
the standpoint of his oneness in essence with the ground of the 
world. All thought, Plotinus teaches, is inferior to this state of 
ecstasy; for thought is motion, a desiring to know. Ecstasy, 
however, is certainty of God, blessed rest in him ; l man has share 
in the divine Otwpia, or contemplation (Aristotle) only when he has 
raised himself entirely to the deity. 

Ecstasy is then a state which transcends the self-consciousness of 
the individual, as its object transcends all particular determinate- 
ness (cf. 20, 2). It is a sinking into the divine essence with an 
entire loss of self-consciousness : it is a possession of the deity, a 
unity of life with him, which mocks at all description, all percep 
tion, and all that abstract thought can frame. 2 

How is this state to be attained ? It is, in all cases, a gift of the 
deity, a boon of the Infinite, which takes up the finite into itself. 
But man, with his free will, has to make himself worthy of this 
deification. He is to put off all his sensuous nature and all will 
of his own ; he is to turn back from the multitude of individual 
relations to his pure, simple, essential nature (airAaxn?) ; 3 the ways 
to this are, according to Proclus, love, truth, and faith ; but it is 
only in the last, which transcends all reason, that the soul finds its 
complete unification with God, and the peace of blessed rapture. 4 As 
the most effective aid in the preparation for this operation of divine 
grace, prayer 5 and all acts 6 of religious worship are commended. 
And if these do not always lead to the highest revelations of the 
deity, they yet secure at least, as Apuleius 7 had before this sup 
posed, the comforting and helpful revelations of lower gods and 
demons, of saints and guardian spirits. So, also, in later Neo- 
Platonism, the raptures of prophecy which the Stoics had taught 
appear as lower and preparatory forms for the supreme ecstasy of 
deification. For, ultimately, all forms of worship are to the Neo- 
Platonist but exercises symbolic of that immediate union of the 
individual with God. 

Thus the theory of inspiration diverged, in Christianity and Neo- 
Platonism, into two wholly different forms. In the former, divine 

i Plot. Ennead. VI. 7. 
2 Ib. V. 3. 

8 An expression which is found even with Marcus Aurelius (IIp6i iavr. IV. 
1), and which Plotinus also employs (Enn. VI. 7, 35). 
4 Procl. Theol. Plat. I. 24 f. 
6 Jambl. in Procl. Tim. 64 C. 

6 De Myst. ^Eg. II. 11 (96). 

7 Apul. De Socr. 6 ff. 

CHAP. 2, 19.J Spirit and Matter: Stoics, Neo- Pythagoreans. 229 

revelation is fixed as historical authority ; in the latter, it is the 
process in which the individual man, freed from all eternal relation, 
sinks into the divine original Ground. The former is for the M*iddle 
Ages the source of Scholasticism; the latter, that of Mysticism. 

19. Spirit and Matter. 

Among the arguments in which the felt need of revelation devel 
ops in the Alexandrian philosophy, none is so incisive as that which 
proceeds from the premise that man, ensnared in the world of sense, 
can attain to knowledge of the higher spiritual world only by super 
natural help: in this is shown the religious dualism which forms 
the fundamental mode of view of the period. Its roots are partly 
anthropological, partly metaphysical : the Stoic antithesis of reason 
and what is contrary to reason is united with the Platonic distinction 
between the supersensuous world, which remains ever the same, 
and the sensuous world which is always changing. 

The identification of the spiritual and the immaterial, which was in 
nowise made complete with Plato although he prepared the way 
for it, had been limited by Aristotle to the divine self-consciousness. 
All the spiritual and mental activities of man, on the contrary, were 
regarded, even by Plato, as belonging to the world of phenomena 
(ye veo-is), and remained thus excluded from the world of incorporeal 
Being (ouo-ta), however much the rational might be opposed to the 
sensuous in the interest of ethics and of the theory of knowledge ; 
and while, in the antagonistic motives which crossed in the Aristo 
telian doctrine of the i/ous, the attempt had been made to regard 
Reason as an immaterial principle, entering the animal soul from 
without, the development of the Peripatetic School (cf. 15, 1) at 
once set this thought aside again. It was, however, in the doctrines 
of Epicurus and the Stoa that the conscious materialising of the 
psychical nature and activities attained its strongest expression. 

On the other hand, the ethical dualism, which marked off as 
strongly as possible, man s inner nature, withdrawn into itself, as 
over against the sensuous outer world, became more and more 
sharply accentuated, and the more it took on religious form, the 
more it pressed, also, toward a theory of the world that made this 
opposition its metaphysical principle. 

1 [The German " Geist," corresponding to both "mind" and "spirit," as 
used in this period leans sometimes to one, sometimes to the other meaning. 
In view of the prevailingly religious character of the ideas of the period I have 
usually rendered it in this section by "spirit," sometimes by the alternative 
"mind or spirit."] 

230 Hellenistic- Roman Thought : Religious Period. [PART II. 

1. This relation appears in clearest form, perhaps, in the expres 
sions of the later Stoics, who emphasise anthropological dualism so 
strongly that it comes into palpable contradiction with the meta 
physics of the school. The idea of the oneness of man s nature, 
which the Stoics had taught hitherto, had indeed been already 
questioned by Posidonius, when he expressed the Platonising 
opinion, that the passions could not arise from the lyye/xovtKov, but 
must come from other irrational parts of the soul. 1 Now, however, 
we find in Seneca 2 a bald opposition between soul and "flesh " ; the 
body is only a husk, it is a fetter, a prison for the mind. So, too, 
Epictetus calls reason and body the two constituent elements of 
man, 3 and though Marcus Aurelius makes a distinction in man s 
sensuous nature between the coarse material and the psychical 
breath or piieuma which animates it, it is yet his intention to sep 
arate all the more sharply from the latter the soul proper, the 
rational spirit or intelligence (voC? and Stavoiu), as an incorporeal 
being. 4 In correspondence with this, we find in all these men an idea 
of the deity, that retains only the intellectual marks from the Stoic 
conception, and looks upon matter as a principle opposed to the deity, 
hostile to reason. 5 

These changes in the Stoa are due, perhaps, to the rising influence 
of Neo-Pythagoreanism, which at first made the Platonic dualism, 
with its motives of ethical and religious values, the centre of its 
system. By the adherents of this doctrine the essential difference 
of soul and body is emphasised in the strongest manner, 6 and with 
this are most intimately connected, 7 on the one hand, the doctrine 
which will have God worshipped only spiritually, as a purely 
spiritual being, 8 by prayer and virtuous intention, not by outward 
acts, and on the other hand, the completely ascetic morals which 
aims to free the soul from its ensnarement in matter, and lead it 
back to its spiritual prime source by washings and purifications, by 
avoiding certain foods, especially flesh, by sexual continence, and 
by mortifying all sensuous impulses. Over against the deity, which 
is the principle of good, matter (vA^) is regarded as the ground of 
all evil, propensity toward it as the peculiar sin of man. 

1 Cf. Galen, De Hipp, et Plat. IV. 3 ff. 

2 Senec. Epist. (55, 22 ; 92, 13 ; Ad Marc. 24, 6. 

3 Epict. Dissert. I. 3, 3. 

* Marc. Aur. Med. II. 2 ; XII. 3. 

5 Senec. Ep. 65. 24 ; Epict. Diss. II. 8, 2 ; Marc. Aur. Med. XII. 2. 

Claud. Mam. DC Stratu Anim. II. 7. 

7 In so far as hero, too, man is regarded as a microcosm. Ps.-Pythag. in 
Phot. Cod. 249, p. 440 a. 

8 Apollonius of Tyana (ircpl 6v&lt;riC&gt;v) in Eus. Prcep. Ev. IV. 13. 

CHAP. 2, 19.] Spirit and Matter : Philo, Plutarch. 231 

We meet this same conception ethically, among the Essenes, and 
theoretically, everywhere in the teaching of Philo. He, too, dis 
tinguishes between the soul, which as vital force of the bodily 
organism has its seat in the blood, and the pneuma, which as ema 
nation of the purely spiritual deity, constitutes the true essential 
nature of man. 1 He, too, finds that this latter is imprisoned in the 
body, and retarded in its unfolding by the body s sensuous nature 
(a*&lt;rde&lt;rt?), so that since man s universal sinfulness 2 is rooted in this, 
salvation from this sinfulness must be sought only in the extirpa 
tion of all sensuous desires ; for him, too, matter is therefore the 
corporeal substratum, which has indeed been arranged by the deity 
so as to form the purposive, good world, but which, at the same 
time, has remained the ground of evil and of imperfection. 

2. The Christian Apologists idea is related to this and yet differ 
ent. With them the Aristotelian conception of God as pure intel 
lect or spirit (vovs TtAetos) is united with the doctrine that God has 
created the world out of shapeless matter : yet here matter is not 
regarded immediately as an independent principle, but the ground 
of evil is sought rather in the perverted use of freedom on the part 
of man and of the demons who seduce him. Here the ethical and 
religious character of the dualism of the time appears in its com 
plete purity : matter itself is regarded as something of an indiffer 
ent nature, which becomes good or evil only through its use by 
spiritual powers. In the same manner Hellenistic Platonists like 
Plutarch, proceeding from the conception of matter as formless Not- 
being, sought the principle of evil not in it, but rather in a force or 
power, standing in opposition to the good deity, 3 a force which, 
to a certain degree, contends with the deity about the formation of 
matter. Plutarch found this thought in the myths of different 
religions, but he might also have referred to a passage where Plato 
had spoken of the evil world-soul in opposition to the good. 4 

Meanwhile, the tendency to identify the antithesis of good and 
evil with that of mind (or spirit) and matter asserts itself here too, 
in the fact that the essence of evil is sought again in a propensity 

1 In this connection Philo calls irvev^a that which among the Stoics, Aristo 
telians, and Platonists of the time is called roOs ; cf. Zeller V. 3 3!)5, 3. Yet there 
occur with him again other expressions in which, quite in the Stoic fashion, the 
pneuma appears as air, in the sense of a most refined physical reality. Cf. H. 
Siebeck, Gescli. d. toych. I. b 302 ff. 

2 It is also characteristic that the sinfulness of all men, a doctrine which 
is completely at variance with the old Stoic faith in the realisation of the ideal 
of the wise man, is generally acknowledged by the Stoics of the time of the 
Empire, and regarded as motive for the necessity of supernatural help. Cf. 
Seneca, Benef. I. 10 ; VII. 27 ; Epict. Dissert. II. 11, 1. 

a Plut. De Isid. 46 ff. 
* Plat. Laws, 896 E. 

232 Hellenistic- Roman Thought : Religious Period. [PART II. 

toward the sensuous and fleshly, toward matter ; while the good, 
on the contrary, is sought in love to the purely spiritual deity. 
This is not only a fundamental feature of the early Christian morals, 
but it is found also, in the same form, among the Platonists above 
mentioned. For Plutarch, too, liberation from the body is the 
necessary preparation for that reception of the working of divine 
grace which forms the goal of human life, and when Numenius 
carried out his theory further, by teaching that, as in the universe, 
so also in man, two souls, one good and one evil, contend with each 
other, 1 he yet also seeks the seat of the evil soul in the body and 
its desires. 

In these doctrines, also, we find everywhere emphasised, not only 
the pure spirituality and incorporeality of God, but likewise the 
incorpo reality of the individual spirit or mind. With Plutarch this 
is shown once more in the form that he would separate the vous, the 
rational spirit, from the ^v^v, which possesses the sensuous nature 
and the passions together with the power to move the body. So, too, 
Iremeus 2 distinguishes the psychical breath of life (irvorj t,^} 
which is of a temporal nature and bound to the body, from the ani 
mating spirit (irvcvfjia. ^woTroiovv), which is in its nature eternal. 

These views of course appear everywhere in connection with the 
doctrines of immortality or of the pre-existence and transmigration 
of souls, of the Fall through which or as a punishment for which 
man has been placed in matter, and of the purification through which 
he is to free himself from it again ; and just in this, too, the synthe 
sis in question is completed more and more effectively, inasmuch as 
the immutable Eternal which remains ever the same (the Platonic 
ouo-t a) is recognised in spirit; the perishable and changeable in matter. 

3. In these connections we find developing gradually a separa 
tion of the two characteristics which had been originally united 
in the conception of the soul, the physiological and the psycholog 
ical, the characteristic of vital force and that of the activity of con 
sciousness. As in the scheme that had already been employed by 
Aristotle, so now, side by side with the " soul " which moves the body, 
appears the " spirit " as self-subsisting and independent principle, 
and in this spirit is found no longer merely a general rational activ 
ity, but the proper essence of the individual (as also of the divine) 
personality. The triple division of man into body, soul, and spirit 
is introduced in all lines, in the most various modes of expression, 3 

1 .Iambi, in Stob. Eel. I. 894. 

2 Iren. Adv. Hcer. V. 12, 2. 

3 Of the various terminology (^vxt, awia, jri/eG^a, spiritus, animus, etc.), in 
which these doctrines appear, examples have already been given above, and 

CHAP. 2, 19.] Spirit and Matter: Plotinus. 233 

and it is easily understood that in this case, the boundaries, on the 
one hand between soul and body, and on the other to a still greater 
degree between soul and spirit, were very fluctuating ; for the soul 
plays here the part of a mean between the two extremes, matter and 
spirit. 

An immediate consequence of this was that a new and deeper idea 
could be gained of the activities of consciousness, which now as 
"mental" or "spiritual" were separated from the physiological 
functions of the soul. For, when once removed in essence from the 
corporeal world, the spirit could not be thought as dependent upon 
sensuous influences, either in its activity or in the object of its 
activity ; and while, in all Greek philosophy, cognition had been 
regarded as the perception and taking up of something given, and 
the attitude of thought as essentially receptive, now the idea of 
mind or spirit as an independent, productive principle forces its 
way through. 

4. The beginnings for this lie already in the Neo- Pythagorean 
doctrine, in so far as in it the spirituality of the immaterial world 
was first maintained. The immaterial substances of Platonic meta 
physics, the Ideas, appear no longer as self-subsistent essences, but 
as elements constituting the content of intellectual or spiritual activity; 
and while they still remain for human cognition something given 
and determining, they become original thoughts of God. 1 Thus the 
bodiless archetypes of the world of experience are taken up into 
the inward nature of mind ; reason is no longer merely something 
which belongs to the ova-la or which is only akin to it, it is the 
entire oucna itself; the immaterial world is recognised as the world of 
mind or spirit. 2 

In correspondence with this, the rational spirit or intellect (you?) 
is defined by Plotinus 5 as the unity which has plurality within 
itself, i.e. in metaphysical language, as duality determined by unity 
but in itself indeterminate (cf. 20), and in anthropological Ian- 
might very easily be multiplied. This doctrine was developed in an especially 
interesting way by Origen (De Princ. III. 1-5), where the "soul" is treated 
partly as motive power, partly as faculty of ideation and desire, while the spirit, 
on the contrary, is presented as the principle of judging, on the one hand 
between good and evil, on the other hand between true and false ; in this alone, 
teaches Origen, consists man s freedom. The like triple division appears then 
with Plotinus in connection with his whole metaphysical construction. Enn. 
II. 9, 2. Cf. 20. 

1 Of. Nicnmachus, Arithm. Intr. I. 6. 

2 With this change the Platonic doctrine of Ideas passed over to the future, 
because I lotinus, and with him all Neo-Platonism, accepted it. Yet this did not 
take place without opposition. Longinus at least protested against it, and Por 
phyry as his disciple wrote a treatise of his own &TL ew rov vov v&lt;f&gt;^ffrrjKt TO. vorjrd. 
Porph. Vit. Plot. 18 ff. 

8 Plot. Enn. V. 9, 6 ; 3, 15 ; 4, 2. 

234 Hellenistic-Roman Thought: Religious Period. [PART II. 

guage, as the synthetic function which produces plurality out of its 
higher unity. From this general point of view the Neo-Platonists 
carried out the psychology of cognition under the principle of the 
activity of consciousness. For according to this, the higher soul can 
no longer be looked upon as passive, but must be regarded as essen 
tially active in all its functions. 1 All its intelligence (o-weo-ts) rests 
upon the synthesis (o-vv&o-is) of various elements; 2 even where the 
cognition refers to what is given by the senses, it is only the body 
which is passive, while the soul in becoming conscious (o-waurfleo-is 
and TrapaKoXou^o-is) is active; 3 and the same is true of the sensuous 
feelings and passions. Thus in the field of sensation a distinction 
is made between the state of excitation and the conscious perception 
of this; the former is a passive or receptive state of the body (or 
also of the lower soul); the latter even already in conscious per 
ception (dvTi A^is) is an act of the higher soul, which Plotinus 
describes as a kind of bending back of thought reflection. 4 

While consciousness was thus conceived as the active noting of the 
mind s own states, functions, and contents, a theory, which, ac 
cording to Philoponus, was carried out especially by the Nee-Pla 
tonic Plutarch also, there resulted from this with Plotinus the 
conception of self-consciousness (TrapaKoXovOciv catn-w). 5 His conception 
of this was that the intellect, as thought active and in motion 
(vorjo-is), has for its object itself as a resting, objective thought 
(vorjrov) : intellect as knowledge, and intellect as Being, are in this 
case identical. 

But the conception of self-consciousness takes on also an ethico- 
religious colouring in accordance with the thought of the time. The 
erwecns is at the same time o-wet Sj/o-is conscience, i.e. man s knowl 
edge, not only of his own states and acts, but also of their ethical 
worth, and of the commandment by the fulfilment of which the 
estimate of this worth is governed ; and for this reason the doctrine 
of self-consciousness is developed in the doctrine of the Church 
Fathers, not only as man s knowledge of his sins, but also as repent 
ance (/xeravota) in actively combating them. 

5. The conception of mine? or spirit as self-active, creative principle 
did not stop with its significance for psychology, ethics, and theory 

1 Porph. Sentent. 10, 19 et al. 

2 Plot. Enn. IV. 3, 26. 

8 Ib. IV. 4, 18 f. The term awaLffB^ffa whose meaning reminds us besides 
of the Koivbv ala6r]T-f)pi.ov in Aristotle, and thus ultimately of Plato, Theast. 184 f. 
is found in similar use already in Alexander Aphrodisias, Qucest. III. 7, 
p. 177, and so, too, Galen employs the expression Sidyvwffis to designate the 
becoming conscious of the change in the bodily organ as contrasted with that 
change itself. 

* Plot. Enn. I. 4, 10. 5 Ib. III. 9. 

CHAP. 2, 20.] God and the World. 235 

of knowledge, but as the ancient world passed out, this conception 
rose to be the dominant thought of religious metaphysics. For by 
making the attempt to derive matter also from this creative spirit, 
this conception offered the possibility of finally overcoming that 
dualism which formed the presupposition of the whole movement of 
the religious thought of the time. 

Hence it became the last and highest problem of ancient philoso 
phy to understand the world as a product of spirit, to comprehend 
even the corporeal world with all of its phenomena as essentially 
intellectual or spiritual in its origin and content. The spiritualisa- 
tion of the universe is the final result of ancient philosophy. 

Christianity and jSTeo-Platonism, Origen and Plotinus, alike 
worked at this problem. The dualism of spirit and matter remains, 
indeed, persisting in full force for both so far as they have to do 
with the conception of the phenomenal world, and especially when 
they treat ethical questions. The sensuous is still regarded as that 
which is evil and alien to God, from which the soul must free itself 
in order to return to unity with pure spirit. But even this dark 
spot is to be illumined from the eternal light, matter is to be recog 
nised as a creation of spirit. The last standpoint of ancient philos 
ophy is thus spiritual monism. 

But in the solution of this common problem the philosophy of 
Christianity and that of Neo-Platonism diverge widely; for this de 
velopment of the divine spirit into the world of phenomena, even 
down to its material forms, must evidently be determined by the 
ideas which obtained of the nature of God and of his relation to the 
world, and just in this Hellenism found itself working under pre 
suppositions that were completely different from those of the doctrine 
of the new religion. 

20. God and the World. 

The peculiar suspense between metaphysical monism and ethico- 
religious dualism, which defines the character of the entire Alex 
andrian philosophy, forces together all the thoughts of the time, 
and condenses them into the most difficult of problems, that of the 
relation of God and the World. 

1. This problem had already been suggested from the purely 
theoretical side, by the opposition between the Aristotelian and 
the Stoic philosophy. The former maintained the transcendence 
of God, i.e. his complete separation from the world, as strongly as 
the latter maintained the immanence of God, i.e. the doctrine that 
God is completely merged in the world. The problem, and the 
fundamental tendency adopted in its solution, may, therefore, be 

236 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Religious Period. [PART II 

recognised already in the eclectic mingling of Peripatetic and Stoic 
cosmology, as type of which the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, Con 
cerning the World is regarded. 2 With the Aristotelian doctrine 
that the essence of God must be set far above Nature (as the sum- 
total of all particular things which are moved), and especially above 
the mutation of earthly existence, is connected here the Stoic en 
deavour to follow the working of the divine power through the entire 
universe, even into every detail. While, accordingly, the world was 
regarded among the Stoics as God himself, while Aristotle saw in 
it a living being, purposefully moved, whose outermost spheres 
were set in revolution only by longing for the eternally unmoved, 
pure Form, a revolution communicating itself with ever-lessening 
perfection to the lower spheres, here the macrocosm appears as 
the system of individual things existing in relations of mutual 
sympathy, in which the power of the supra-mundane God is domi 
nant under the most varied forms as the principle of life. The 
mediation between theism and pantheism is gained, partly by the 
distinction between the essence and the power of God, partly by 
the graded scale of the divine workings, which descends from the 
heaven of the fixed stars to the earth. The pneuma doctrine is 
united with the Aristotelian conception of God, by conceiving of 
the forces of Nature s life as the workings of pure Spirit. 3 

This turn, however, but increased the difficulty already inherent 
in the Aristotelian doctrine of the action of the deity upon the 
world. For this action was regarded as consisting in the motion of 
matter, and it was hard to reconcile this materialisation of the 
divine action with the pure spirituality which was to constitute the 
essence of the deity. Even Aristotle had not become clear as to the 
relation of the unmoved mover to that which was moved (cf. 13. ). 4 

2. The problem became more severe as the religious dualism 
became more pronounced, a dualism which, not satisfied with con 
trasting God as spirit with matter, the supersensuous sphere with 
the sensuous, rather followed the tendency to raise the divine being 

1 Stratonism as a transformation of the Aristotelian doctrine in the direction 
of pantheistic immanence, a transformation allied to the doctrine of the Stoa, 
has been treated above, 15, 1. 

2 This book (printed among the writings of Aristotle, 301 ff.) may perhaps 
have arisen in the first century A.D. Apuleius worked it over into Latin. 

3 Cf. principally Ch. 6, 397 b 9. 

4 These difficulties in Aristotle s case became condensed in the concept of the 
o0i). For since the " contact " of the mover with the moved was regarded as the 
condition of motion, it was necessary to speak also of a " contact " between God 
and the heaven of the fixed stars. This, however, was liable to objection on 
account of the purely spiritual essence of the deity, and the a 0^ in this case 
received a restricted and intellectually transformed meaning ("immediate 
relation "). Cf. Arist. De Gen. et Corr. I. 6, 323 a 20. 

CHAP. 2, 20.] God and the World : Neo-Platonivm. 237 

above all that can be experienced and above every definite content, 
and thus to make the God who is above the world also a God above, 
mind or spirit. This is found already with the Neo- Pythagoreans, 
among whom a wavering between various stadia of dualism lurks 
behind their mode of expression in the symbolism of numbers. 
When the " One " and the " indefinite duality " are maintained to be 
principles, the latter indeed always means matter as the impure, as 
the ground of the imperfect and the evil; the One, however, is 
treated now as pure Form, as spirit, now also as the "cause of 
causes" which lies above all reason, as the primordial being 
which has caused to proceed forth from itself the opposition of the 
derivative One and duality, of spirit and matter. In this case the 
second One, the first-born One (irptaroyovov /) appears as the perfect 
image of the highest One. 1 

Inasmuch as mind or spirit was thus made a product of the deity, 
though the first and most perfect product, this effort led to raising 
the conception of the deity even to complete absence of all qualities. 
This had been already shown in Philo, who emphasised so sharply 
the contrast between God and everything finite that he designated 
God expressly as devoid of qualities (aTroios 2 ) : for since God is 
exalted above all, it can be said of him only that he has none of the 
finite predicates known to human intelligence ; no name names him. 
This type of thought, later called " negative theology," we find also 
among those Christian Apologists that were influenced in their con 
ceptions by Philo, especially with Justin, 3 and likewise in part 
among the Gnostics. 

The same meets us also in Neo-Platonism in a still more intensi 
fied form, if possible. As in the Hermetic writings 4 God had been 
considered as infinite and incomprehensible, as nameless, exalted 
above all Being, as the ground of Being and Reason, neither of 
which exists until created by him, so for Plotinus, the deity is the 
absolutely transcendent primordial being, exalted as a perfect unity 
above mind, which, as the principle that contains plurality already 
in its unity ( 19, 4), must have proceeded forth from God (and 
not have been eternal). This One, TO 2v, precedes all thought and 
Being; it is infinite, formless, and "beyond" (ITTIKUVO.) the intel 
lectual as well as the sensuous world, and therefore without con 
sciousness and without activity. 5 

1 Nicomachus, Theol. Arithm. p. 44. 

2 Phil. Leg. Alleg. 47 a ; Qu. D. S. Immut. 301 a. 

8 Just. Apol. 1. 61 ff. * Poemand. 4 f. 

5 It is easy to understand how a state of ecstasy devoid of will and conscious 
ness and raised above reason, appeared requisite for man s relation to this supra- 
rational God-Being, exalted above all action, will, and thought. Cf. above, 18, 6. 

238 Hellenistic- Roman Thought : Religious Period. [PAKT II. 

Finally, while Plotinus still designates this inexpressible First 
(TO TrpoJTov) as the One, which is the cause of all thought and of all 
Being, and as the Good, as the absolute end of all that comes to 
pass, even this did not satisfy the later members of the school. 
Jamblichus set above the o&gt; of Plotinus a still higher, completely 
ineffable One (iravr^ apprjros apx*} )&gt; an( ^ Proclus followed him in this. 

3. In opposition to such dialectical subtilisations, the development 
of Christian thought in the Church preserved its impressive energy 
by holding fast to the conception of God as spiritual personality. It 
did this, not as the result of philosophical reflection and reasoning, 
but by virtue of its immediate attachment to the living belief of the 
Church community, and just in this consisted its psychological 
strength, its power in the world s history. This faith is breathed in 
the New Testament; this is defended by all the supporters of 
patristic theology, and just by this are the limits of the Christian 
doctrine everywhere defined, as against the Hellenistic solutions of 
the chief problem in the philosophy of religion. 

Hellenism sees in personality, in however purely spiritual a man 
ner it may be conceived, a restriction and a characteristic of the 
finite, which it would keep at a distance from the Supreme Being, 
and admit only for the particular gods. Christianity, as a living 
religion, demands a personal relation of man to the ground of the 
world conceived of as supreme personality, and it expresses this 
demand in the thought of the divine sonship of man. 

If, therefore, the conception of personality as intrinsic spiritual 
ity (geistiger Innerlichkeit) expresses the essentially new result, to 
yield which, theoretical and ethical motives intertwined in Greek 
and Hellenistic thought, then it was Christianity which entered 
upon this inheritance of ancient thought, while Neo-Platonism 
turned back to the old idea that saw in personality only a transi 
tory product of a life which as a tvhole is impersonal. It is the 
essential feature of the Christian conception of the world that it 
regards the person and the relations of persons to one another as 
the essence of reality. 

4. In spite of this important difference, all lines of the Alexan 
drian philosophy were confronted by the same problem, that of plac 
ing the deity, thus taken from the sensible world, in those relations 
which religious need demanded. For the more deeply the opposi 
tion between God and the world was felt, the more ardent became 
the longing to overcome it to overcome it by a knowledge that 
should understand the world also through God, and by a life that 
should return out of the world to God. 

1 Damasc. De Princ. 43. 

CHAP. 2, 20.] God and the World : Christianity, Gnostics. 239 

Hence the dualism of God and the world, as well as that of spirit 
and matter, is but the starting-point taken in the feelings and 
the presupposition of the Alexandrian philosophy: its goal is 
everywhere, theoretically as well as practically, to vanquish this 
dualism. Just in this consists the peculiarity of this period, that 
it is anxious to close, in knowledge and will, the cleft which it finds 
in its feelings. 

This period, to be sure, produced also theories of the world in 
which dualism asserted itself so predominantly as to become fixed 
as their immovable basis. Here belong primarily Platonists like 
Plutarch, who not only treated matter as an original principle side 
by side with the deity, because the deity could in nowise be the 
ground of the evil, but also assumed beside God, the "evil world- 
soul " as a third principle in the formation of this indifferent matter 
into a world. A part of the Gnostic systems present themselves 
here, however, for especial consideration. 

This first fantastic attempt at a Christian theology was ruled 
throughout by the thoughts of sin and redemption, and the funda 
mental character of Gnosticism consists in this, that from the point 
of view of these ruling thoughts the conceptions of Greek philos 
ophy were put in relation with the myths of Oriental religions. 
Thus with Valentinus, side by side with the deity (irpoira.Tu&gt;p) poured 
out into the Pleroma or fulness (TO ir^p^/jua) of spiritual forms, 
appears the Void (TO KeVw/xa), likewise original and from eternity; 
beside Form appears matter, beside the good appears the evil, and 
though from the self-unfolding of the deity (of. 6, below) an entire 
spiritual world has been formed in the " fulness " above men 
tioned, the corporeal world is yet regarded as the work of a fallen 
JEon (cf. 21) who builds his inner nature into matter. So, too, 
Saturninus set matter, as the domain of Satan, over against God s 
realm of light, and regarded the earthly world as a contested bound 
ary province for whose possession the good and evil spirits strive 
by their action upon man ; and in a similar manner the mythology 
of Bardesanes was arranged, which placed beside the " Father of 
Life " a female deity as the receptive power in the formation of the 
world. 

But dualism reached its culmination in a mixed religion which 
arose in the third century under the influence of the Gnostic systems 
combined with a return to the old Persian mythology, Mani- 
chwittm. 1 The two realms of good and evil, of light and darkness, 

1 The founder, Mani (probably 240-280 A.D.), regarded his doctrine as the 
consummation of Christianity and as a revelation of the Paraclete. He fell 
a victim to the persecution of the Persian priests, but his religion soon became 

240 Hellenistic- Roman Thought : Religious Period. [PART II. 

of peace and strife, stand here opposed as eternally as their princes, 
God and Satan. Here, too, the formation of the world is conceived of 
as a mixture of good and evil elements, brought about by a viola 
tion of the boundaries ; in man the conflict of a good soul belonging 
to the realm of light, and of an evil soul arising from darkness, is 
assumed, and a redemption is expected that shall completely sepa 
rate both realms again. 

Thus at the close of the period it is shown in the clearest manner 
that the dualism of the time rested essentially upon ethico-religious 
motives. By adopting as their point of view for theoretical explana 
tion the judgment of worth, in accordance with which men, things, 
and relations are characterised as good or bad, these thinkers came 
to trace the origin of the thus divided universe back to two different 
causes. In the proper sense of the judgment, only one of these 
causes, that of the good, should be regarded as positive and have 
the name of deity, but in a theoretical aspect the other also fully 
maintains its claim to metaphysical originality and eternity (ov&lt;na). 
But even from this relation it may be seen that as soon as the meta 
physical relation was completely adapted to the ethical, this must in 
itself lead to a removal of the dualism. 

5. In fact, dualism, from motives that were most peculiarly its 
own, produced a series of ideas through which it prepared its own 
overcoming. For the sharper the antithesis between the spiritual 
God and the material world, and the greater the distance between 
man and the object of his religious longing, the more the need 
asserted itself of bringing about again, by intermediate links, a union 
of what was thus separated. The theoretical significance of this 
was to render comprehensible and free from objections the action 
of the deity upon matter alien to him and unworthy of him ; prac 
tically these links had the significance of serving as mediators 
between man and God, having the power to lead man out of his sen 
suous vileness to the Supreme Being. Both interests were alike 
suggestive of the methods by which the Stoics had known how to 
utilise, in their religion of Nature, the popular faith in the lower 
deities. 

This mediation theory was first attempted on a large and thorough 
plan by Philo, who gave it its definite direction by bringing it into 
close relations, on the one hand, with the Neo-Pythagorean doctrine 
of Ideas, on the other hand with the doctrine of angels in his 

greatly extended, and maintained itself in vigour far on into the Middle Ages. 
We are best instructed with regard to it through Augustine, who was himself 
for a time an adherent of it. Cf. F. C. Baur, Das manichdische Religions- 
system (Tubingen, 1836); 0. Flugel, Mani und seine Lehre (Leips. 1862). 

CHAP. L&gt;, 20.] G-od and the World : Philo. 241 

religion. The mediating powers, in considering which Philo had in 
mind more the theoretical significance and the explanation of the 
influence of God upon the world, he designates according to the 
changing point of view of his investigation, now as Ideas, now as 
acting forces, or again as the angels of God ; but with this is always 
connected the thought that these intermediate members have part 
in God as in the world, that they belong to God and yet are different 
from him. So the Ideas are regarded, on the one hand, in Neo- 
Pythagorean fashion as thoughts of God and content of his wis 
dom, but again, after the old Platonic thought, as an intelligible 
world of archetypes, created by God : and if these archetypes are 
held to be at the same time the active forces which shape the unor 
dered matter according to their purposeful meaning, the forces 
appear in this case sometimes as powers so independent that by 
assigning them the formation and preservation of the world, all 
immediate relation between God and the world is avoided, and some 
times again as something attached to the divine essence and repre 
senting it. Finally, as angels they are indeed real mythical forms, 
and are designated as the servants, the ambassadors, the messengers, 
of God, but on the other hand they represent the different sides and 
qualities of the divine essence, which, it is true, is as a whole un 
knowable and inexpressible in its depth, but which reveals itself 
just in them. This double nature, conditioned by the fundamental 
thought of the system itself, brings with it the consequence that 
these ideal forces have the significance of the contents of general 
conceptions, and yet are at the same time furnished with all the 
marks of personality ; and just this peculiar amalgamation of scien 
tific and mythical modes of thought, this indefinite twilight in which 
the entire doctrine remains, is the essential and important therein. 

The same is true of the last inference, with which Philo con 
cluded this line of thought. The fulness of Ideas, forces, and 
angels was itself in turn an entire world, in which plurality and 
motion ruled : between it and the one unmoved, changeless deity 
there was need of still a higher intermediate link. As the Idea is 
related to the individual phenomena, so the highest of the Ideas 
(TO ywKumiTov), the "Idea of the Ideas," must be related to the 
Ideas themselves, as force is related to its activities in the world 
of sense, so the rational World-force in general must be related to 
the forces : the world of angels must find its unitary conclusion in 
an archangel. This s\im-total of the divine activity in the world, 
Philo designates by the Stoic conception of the Logos. This also 
appears with him, on this account, in wavering, changing light. 
The Logos is, on the one hand, the divine wisdom, resting within 

242 Hellenistic- Roman Thought: Religious Period. [PART II. 

itself (o-o^ta Aoyos cVStaforos ; cf. p. 200, note 1), and the producing 
rational power of the Supreme Being ; it is, on the other hand, 
Reason as coining forth from the deity (Xoyo? Trpcx^opi/cos, " uttered 
Reason "), the self-subsistent image, the first-born son, who is not, 
as is God, without origin, nor yet has he arisen, as have we men; 
he is the second God. 1 Through him God formed the world, and he 
is in turn also the high priest, who, through his intercession, creates 
and preserves relations between man and the deity. He is know- 
able, while God himself, as exalted above all determination, remains 
unknowable : he is God in so far as God forms the life-principle 
of the world. 

Thus the transcendence and immanence of God divide as separate 
potencies, to remain united, nevertheless ; the Logos, as the God 
within the world, is the "dwelling-place" of the God without the 
world. The more difficult the form which this relation assumes 
for abstract thought, the richer the imagery in which it is set forth 
by Philo. 2 

6. With this Logos doctrine the first step was taken toward 
filling the cleft between God and the sensible world by a definite 
graded succession of forms, descending, with gradual transitions, 
from unity to plurality, from unchangeableness to changeableness, 
from the immaterial to the material, from the spiritual to the sen 
suous, from the perfect to the imperfect, from the good to the bad; 
and when this series, thus arranged by rank, was conceived of at 
the same time as a system of causes and effects which again were 
themselves causes, there resulted from this a new exposition of the 
cosmogonic process, in which the world of sense was derived from 
the divine essence by means of all these intermediate members. 
At the same time, the other thought was not far distant, that the 
stages of this process should be regarded also in their reverse order, 
as the stages by which man, ensnared in the world of sense, becomes 
reunited with God. And so, both theoretically and practically, the 
path is broken on which dualism is to be overcome. 

A problem was thus taken up again which Plato in his latest 
Pythagoreanising period had had in mind, and the oldest Academi 
cians as well, when they sought, with the aid of the number theory, 

1 Philo in Eus. Prcep. Ev. VII. 13, 1. With a somewhat stronger emphasis 
upon personality, these same conceptions are found in Justin, Apol. I. 32 ; Dial, 
c. Tryph. 56 f. 

2 Connected with all these doctrines is the fact, that with Philo the spiritual 
in the world of experience occupies a doubtful position between the immaterial 
and the material : the voOs of man, the faculty of thought and will, is a part of 
the divine Logos (even the demons are designated after the Stoic analogy as 
X6-x&lt;u), and yet it is again characterised as finest pneuma. 

CHAP. 2, 20.] God and the World : Gnostics. 243 

to comprehend how Ideas and things proceeded forth from the 
divine unity. But it had been shown at that time that this scheme 
of the development of plurality out of the One, as regards its 
relation to the predicates of worth, admitted two opposite interpre 
tations : viz. the Platonic mode of view, defended by Xenocrates, 
that the One is the good and the perfect, and that that which is 
derived from this is the imperfect and, ultimately, the bad, and the 
opposing theory, held by Speusippus, that the good is only the final 
product, not the starting-point of the development, and that this 
starting-point is to be sought, on the contrary, in the indefinite, the 
incomplete. 1 It is customary to distinguish the above-described 
doctrines as the system of emanation and the system of evolution. 
The former term arises from the fact that in this system, which was 
decidedly prevalent in the religious philosophy of Alexandrianism, 
the separate formations of the world-producing Logos were often 
designated by the Stoic term, as "emanations" (airoppoiai) of the 
divine essence. 

Yet the Alexandrian philosophy is not lacking in attempts at 
evolutionary systems. In particular, these were especially avail 
able for Gnosticism; for, in consequence of the degree to which it 
had strained the dualism of spirit and matter, this system was 
necessarily inclined to seek the monistic way of escape rather in an 
indifferent, original ground, which divided itself into the opposites. 
Hence where the Gnostics sought to transcend dualism, and this 
was the case with the most important of them, they projected 
not only a cosmogonic but a theogonic process, by which the deity 
unfolded himself from the darkness of his primeval essence, 
through opposition, to complete revelation. Thus, with Basileides, 
the nameless, original ground is called the not (yet) existing God 
(?&gt; oi&lt;K &lt;fiv 0eos). This being, we hear, produced the world-seed 
(irufa-n-fp/jiLa), in which the spiritual forces (VIOTT/TCS) lay unordered 
side by side with the material forces (d/u,op&lt;ia). The forming and 
ordering of this chaos of forces is completed by their longing for the 
deity. In connection with this process the various "sonships," the 
spiritual world (vtrcpicMrpta), separate themselves from the material 
world (KCXT/XOS), and in the course of the process of generation all the 
spheres of the thus developed deity ultimately become separate; 
each attains its allotted place, the unrest of striving ceases, and the 
peace of glorification rests over the All. 

Motives from both systems, that of evolution and that of emana 
tion, appear peculiarly mingled in the doctrine of Valentinus. For 

1 Cf. Arist. Met. XIV. 4, 1091 b 16 ; XII. 7, 1072 b 31. 

244 Hellenistic- Roman Thought : Religious Period. [PART li 

here the spiritual world (irXrjpufJia) or system of the "^Eons," the 
eternal essences, is developed first as an unfolding of the dark and 
mysterious primitive Depth ((BvOos) to self-revelation, and in the 
second place as a descending production of more imperfect forms. 
The mythical schema in this is the Oriental pairing of male and 
female deities. In the highest pair or " syzygy " there appears side 
by side with the original Ground " Silence " (&lt;nyrj ) , which is also called 
"Thought " (ei/voia). From this union of the Original Being with 
the capacity of becoming conscious there proceeds as the firstborn the 
Spirit (here called vows) which in the second syzygy has as its object 
" Truth," i.e. the intelligible world, the realm of Ideas. Thus, having 
itself come to full revelation, the deity in the third syzygy takes the 
form of "Reason" (Aoyos) and "Life" (0)17), and in the fourth 
syzygy becomes the principle of external revelation as " Ideal Man " 
(av0/ow7ros) and "Community" (cKKAi/ata, church). While the de 
scending process has thus already begun, it is continued still farther 
by the fact that from the third and fourth syzygies still other /Eons 
proceed, which, together with the sacred Eight, form the entire 
Pleroma, but which stand farther and farther removed from the 
original Ground. It is the last of these ^Eons, " Wisdom "(ao&lt;ia), 
that, by sinful longing after the original Ground, gives occasion for 
the separation of this Longing and of its being cast into the mate 
rial Void, the KWU/JM, there to lead to the formation of the earthly 
world. 

If we look at the philosophical thoughts which lie back of these 
highly ambiguous myth-constructions, it is easy to understand that 
the school of the Valentinians diverged into various theories. For 
in no other system of that time are dualistic and monistic motives 
of both kinds, from the system of evolution as well as from that of 
emanation, so intricately mingled. 

7. Clarified conceptionally, and freed from mythical apparatus, 
the like motives appear in the doctrine of Plotinus, yet in such a 
manner that in the system as completed the principle of emanation 
almost entirely crowds out the other two. 

The synthesis of transcendence and immanence is sought by 
Plotinus also in the direction of preserving the essence of God as 
the absolutely one and unchangeable, while plurality and changea 
bility belong only to his workings. 1 Of the " First," which is ex 
alted above all finite determinations and oppositions, nothing what 
ever can be predicated in the strict sense (cf. above, 2). It is 

1 In so far we find here, coined into theological form, the problem of the 
Eleatics and Heraclitus, with which Greek metaphysics began, a problem 
which also determined the nature of Platonism. 

CHAP. 2, 20.] God and the World : Plotinus. 245 

only in an improper sense, in its relation to the world, that it can 
be designated as the infinite One, as the Good, and as the highest 
Power or Force (-rrp^r-q StW/xis), and the workings of this Power 
which constitute the universe are to be regarded, not as ramifica 
tions and parts into which the substance of the First divides, and so 
not as " emanations " in the proper sense, but rather as overflowing 
by-products which in nowise change the substance itself, even 
though they proceed from the necessity of its essence. 

To express this relation in figurative form Plotinus employs the 
analogy of light, an analogy which, in turn, has also an influence 
in determining his conception. Light, without suffering at all in its 
own essence or itself entering into motion, shines into the darkness 
and produces about itself an atmosphere of brightness that decreases 
in intensity more and more from the point which is its source, and 
finally of itself loses itself in darkness. So likewise the workings 
of the One and Good, as they become more and more separate from 
their source, proceeding through the individual spheres, become 
more and more imperfect and at last change suddenly into the dark, 
evil opposite matter. 

The first sphere of this divine activity is, according to Plotinus, 
mind or rational spirit (vovs), in which the sublime unity differen 
tiates itself into the duality of thought and Being, i.e. into that of 
consciousness and its objects. In mind the essence of the deity is 
preserved as the unity of the thought-function (vcfycns) ; for this 
thought which is identical with Being is not regarded as an activity 
that begins or ceases, changing as it were with its objects, but as the 
eternal, pure perception, ever the same, of its own content, which is 
of like essence with itself. But this content, the world of Ideas, 
the eternal Being (ouai a in the Platonic sense) as contrasted with 
phenomena, is, as intelligible world (KOO-/AOS 1/077765), at the same time 
the principle of plurality. For the Ideas are not merely thoughts 
and archetypes, but are at the same time the moving forces (i/ol 
Swa/xtis) of lower reality. Because, therefore, unity and variety 
are united in this intelligible world as the principles of persistence 
and of occurrence and change, and are yet again separated, the fun 
damental conceptions (categories) of this world are these five, 1 viz. 
Being or Existing (TO 6V), Rest (orcuris), Motion or Change (KIV^O-IS), 
Identity (TUVTOTI/S), and Difference (crepoTijs). Mind, then, as a 
function which has determinate contents, and carries plurality 
within itself, is the form through which the deity causes all empiri- 

1 Well known from the dialogue, the Sophist, of the Corpus Platonicum. Cf. 
254 B. ff. 

246 Hellenistic- Roman Thought : Religious Period. [FAKT II. 

cal reality to proceed forth from itself : God as productive principle, 
as ground of the world, is mind or rational spirit. 

But spirit needs to shine out in a similar manner in order to pro 
duce the world from itself ; its most immediate product is the soul, 
and this in turn evinces its activity by shaping matter into cor 
poreality. The peculiar position of the " soul " therefore consists 
in this, that it, perceiving or beholding, receives the content of 
spirit, the world of Ideas, and after this archetype (eiKwv) forms 
the world of sense. Contrasted with the creative spirit, it is the 
receptive, contrasted with matter, the active principle. And this 
duality of the relations toward the higher and the lower is here so 
strongly emphasised that just as " spirit " divided into thought and 
Being, so the soul, for Plotinus, is out and out doubled : as sunk 
into the blissful contemplation of the Ideas it is the higher soul, 
the soul proper, the ^vyy in the narrower sense of the word ; as 
formative power, it is the lower soul, the &lt;ixns (equivalent to the 
Aoyos CTTrep/AaTiKos of the Stoics). 

All these determinations apply on the one hand to the universal 
soul (world-soul Plato), and on the other to the individual souls 
which have proceeded from it as the particular forms which it has 
taken on, especially therefore to human souls. The &lt;u&lt;ns, the for 
mative power of Nature, is distinguished from the pure, ideal world- 
soul : from the latter emanate the gods, from the former the demons. 
Beneath man s knowing soul, which turns back to the spirit, its 
home, stands the vital force which forms the body. Thus the sepa 
ration in the characteristics of the concept of the soul a separation 
which developed materially from dualism (cf. 19, 3) is here de 
manded formally by the connected whole of the metaphysical system. 

In this connection, this working of the soul upon matter is of 
course conceived of as purposive, that is, as appropriate or adapted 
for ends, because it ultimately goes back to spirit and reason 
(Aoyos) ; but since it is a work of the lower soul, it is regarded as 
undesigned, unconscious direction, which proceeds according to 
natural necessity. As the outer portions of the rays of light pene 
trate into the darkness, so it belongs to the nature of the soul to 
illumine matter with its glory which arises from spirit and from 
the One. 

This matter, however, and this is one of the most essential 
points in the metaphysics of Plotinus, must not be looked upon 
as a corporeal mass subsisting in itself beside the One ; it is, rather, 
itself without body, immaterial. 1 Bodies are indeed formed out of 

: Ennead. III. 6, 7. 

CHAI&gt;. a, 20.] God and the World : Plotinus. 247 

it, but it is itself no body ; and since it is thus neither spiritual nor 
corporeal in its nature, it cannot be determined by any qualities 
(UTTOIOS). But for Plotinus, this epistemological indeterminateness 
has, at the same time, the force of metaphysical indeterminateness. 
Matter is for him absolute negativity, pure privation (or 6/3770-15), 
complete absence of Being, absolute Non-being : it is related to the 
One as darkness to light, as the empty to the full. This v\rj of 
the Neo-Platonists is not the Aristotelian or the Stoic, but is once 
more the Platonic ; it is empty, dark space. 1 So far in ancient 
thought does the working of the Eleatic identification of empty 
space with Non-being, and of the farther extension of this doctrine 
by Democritus and Plato, extend: in Neo-Platonism, also, space 
serves as the presupposition for the multiplication which the Ideas 
find in the phenomenal world of sense. For this reason, with 
Plotinus, also, the lower soul, or &lt;/&gt;wns, whose office it is to shine 
out upon matter, is the principle of divisibility, 2 while the higher 
soul possesses the indivisibility which is akin to the rational spirit. 

In this pure negativity lies a ground for the possibility of deter 
mining by a predicate of worth this matter thus devoid of quali 
ties ; it is the evil. As absolute want (-n-tvia iravrtX^} , as the 
negation of the One and of Being, it is also the negation of 
the Good, eb-ovo-ia ayaOov. But by introducing the conception 
of evil in this manner, it receives a special form : evil is not itself 
something positively existent ; it is want, or deficiency ; it is lack 
of the Good, Non-being. This conception thus formed gave Plotinus 
a welcome argument for theodicy ; if the evil is not, it need not be 
justified, and so it follows from the sheer conceptions as so deter 
mined that all that is, is good. 

For Plotinus, therefore, the world of the senses is not in itself 
evil any more than it is in itself good ; but because in it light 
passes over into darkness, because it thus presents a mixture of 
Being and Non-being (the Platonic conception of yeVetns here comes 
into force anew), it is good so far as it has part in God or the 
Good; i.e. so far as it is; and on the other hand, it is evil in so far 
as it has part in matter or the Evil ; i.e. in so far as it is not [has 
no real, positive existence]. Evil proper, the true evil (trpuTov 
/caKov), is matter, negation; the corporeal world can be called evil 
only because it is formed out of matter : it is secondary evil (Sevrepov 
w); and the predicate " evil " belongs to souls only if they give 

1 Ennead. III. 6, 18. Universal empty space forms the possibility (viroKeinevov) 
for the existence of bodies, while, on the other hand, the particular spatial deter- 
minateness is conditioned by the nature of the bodies, II. 4, 12. 

2 Ib. III. 9, 1. 

248 Hellenistic- Roman Thought : Religious Period. [PART II. 

themselves over to matter. To be sure, this entrance into matter 
belongs to the essential characteristics of the soul itself ; the soul 
forms just that sphere in which the shining forth of the deity 
passes over into matter, and this participation in evil is, therefore, 
for the soul, a natural necessity which is to be conceived of as 
a continuation of its own proceeding forth from the rational 
spirit. 1 

By this distinction of the world of sense from matter, Plotinus 
was able to do justice, also, to the positive element in phenomena. 2 
For since the original power works through spirit and soul upon 
matter, all that in the world of sense really exists or is, is evidently 
itself soul and spirit. In this is rooted the spiritualisation of the 
corporeal world, the idealising of the universe, which forms the 
characteristic element in the conception of Nature held by Plotinus. 
The material is but the outer husk, behind which, as the truly 
active reality, are souls and spirits. A body or corporeal substance 
is the copy or shadow of the Idea which in it has shaped itself to 
matter; its true essence is this spiritual or intellectual element 
which appears as a phenomenon in the image seen by sense. 

It is in such shining of the ideal essence through its sensuous 
phenomenon that beauty consists. By virtue of this streaming of 
the spiritual light into matter the entire world of the senses is 
beautiful, and likewise the individual thing, formed after its arche 
type. Here in the treatise of Plotinus on beauty (Ennead. I. 6) 
this conception meets us for the first time among the fundamental 
conceptions of a theory of the world; it is the first attempt at 
a metaphysical aesthetics. Hitherto the beautiful had always 
appeared only in homonomy with the good and the perfect, and the 
mild attempts to separate the conception and make it independent, 
which were contained in Plato s /Symposium, were now taken up again 
for the first time by Plotinus ; for even the theory of art, to which 
aesthetic science had restricted itself as it appeared most clearly in 
the fragment of the Aristotelian Poetic, considered the beautiful 
essentially according to its ethical effects (cf. 13, 14). Ancient 
life must run its entire course, and that turning toward the inner 
life, that internalising, as it were, which this life experienced in the 
religious period, must be completed, to bring about the scientific 

1 Therefore, though Plotinus in his ethics emphasised strongly freedom in 
the sense of responsibility, the great tendency of his metaphysical thought is 
shown just in this, that he did not make this freedom of "power to the con 
trary " his explaining principle, but sought to understand the transition of the 
world into evil as a metaphysical necessity. 

2 Very characteristic in this respect is the treatise (Ennead. II. 9) which he 
wrote against the barbarian contempt of Nature shown by the Gnostics. 

CHAP. 2, 20.] God and the World : Plotinus. 249 

consciousness of this finest and highest content of the Grecian 
world ; and the conception in which this takes place is on this 
account characteristic for the development from which it comes 
forth; the beauty which the Greeks had created and enjoyed is 
now recognised as the victorious power of spirit in externalising its 
sensuous phenomena. This conception also is a triumph of the 
spirit, which in unfolding its activities has at last apprehended its 
own essential nature, and has conceived it as a world-principle. 

As regards the phenomenal world, Plotinus takes a point of view 
which must be designated as the interpretation of Nature in terms oj 
psychical life, and so it turns out that with reference to this antithe 
sis ancient thought described its course from one extreme to the 
other. The oldest science knew the soul only as one of Nature s 
products side by side with many others, for Neo-Platonism the 
whole of Nature is regarded as real only in so far as it is soul. 

But by employing this idealistic principle for explaining individ 
ual things and processes in the world of sense, all sobriety and 
clearness in natural research is at an end. In place of regular, 
causal connections appears the mysterious, dreamily unconscious 
weaving of the world-soul, the rule of gods and demons, the spirit 
ual sympathy of all things expressing itself in strange relations 
among them. All forms of divination, astrology, faith in miracles, 
naturally stream into this mode of regarding Nature, and man 
seems to be surrounded by nothing but higher and mysterious 
forces : this world created by spirit, full of souls, embraces him like 
a magic circle. 

The whole process in which the world proceeds forth from the 
deity appears, accordingly, as a timeless, eternal necessity, and 
though Plotinus speaks also of a periodical return of the same 
particular formations, the world-process itself is yet for him without 
beginning or end. As it belongs to the nature of light to shine 
forever into the darkness, so God does not exist without the stream 
ing forth with which he creates the world out of matter. 

In this universal life of spirit the individual personality vanishes, 
as a subordinate, particular phenomenon. Released from the all- 
soul as one of countless forms in which that unfolds, it is cast into 
the sensuous body out of the purer pre-existent state, on account 
of its guilty inclination toward what is void and vain, and it is 
its task to estrange itself from the body and from material essence 
in general, and to "purify" itself again from the body. Only when 
it has succeeded in this can it hope to traverse backward the stages 
by which it has proceeded forth from the deity, and so to return to 
the deity. The first positive step to this exaltation is civic and 

250 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Religious Period. [PART II. 

political virtue, by which man asserts himself as a rationally forma 
tive force in the phenomenal world ; but since this virtue evinces 
itself only in reference to objects of the senses, the dianoetic virtue 
of knowledge stands far above it (of. Aristotle), the virtue by which 
the soul sinks into its own spiritual intrinsic life. As a help 
stimulating to this virtue, Flotinus praises the contemplation of the 
beautiful, which finds a presentiment of the Idea in the thing of 
sense, and, in overcoming the inclination toward matter, rises from 
the sensuously beautiful to the spiritually beautiful. And even 
this dianoetic virtue, this aesthetic 6m&gt;pia and self-beholding of the 
spirit, is only the preliminary stage for that ecstatic rapture with 
which the individual, losing all consciousness, enters into unity with 
the ground of the world ( 18, 6). The salvation and the blessed 
ness of the individual is his sinking into the All-One. 

The later Neo-Platonists, Porphyry first, and, still more, Jamblichus and 
Proclus, in the case of this exaltation emphasise, far more than Plotinus, the 
help which the individual finds for it in positive religion and its acts of worship. 
For these men largely increased the number of different stages through which 
the world proceeds forth from the " One," and identified them with the forms 
of the deities in the different ethnic religions by all kinds of more or less arbi 
trary allegories. It was therefore natural, in connection with the return of the 
soul to God, since it must traverse the same stages up to the state of ecstatic 
deification, to claim the support of these lower gods : and thus as the metaphys 
ics of the Neo-Platonists degenerated into mythology, their ethics degenerated 
into theurgic arts. 

8. On the whole, therefore, the derivation of the world from God as 
set forth by Plotinus, in spite of all its idealising and spiritualising 
of Nature, follows the physical schema of natural processes. This 
streaming forth of things from the original Power is an eternal 
necessity, founded in the essence of this Power; creation is a pur 
posive working, but unconscious and without design. 

But at the same time, a logical motive comes into play here, which 
has its origin in the old Platonic character of Ideas as class-concepts. 
For just as the Idea is related to individual things of sense, so in 
turn the deity is related to Ideas, as the universal to the particular. 
God is the absolute universal, and according to a law of formal 
logic, in accordance with which concepts become poorer in contents 
or intension in proportion as their extension increases so that the 
content must correspond to the extension co, the absolutely uni 
versal is also the concept of the " First," void of all content. But 
if from this First proceed first the intelligible, then the psychical, 
and finally the sensuous world, this metaphysical relation corre 
sponds to the logical process of determination or partition. This 
point of view, according to which the more general is throughout 
regarded as the higher, metaphysically more primitive reality, while 

CHAP. 2, 20. J God and the World: Proclus, Christianity. 251 

the particular is held to be, in its metaphysical reality also, a deriv 
ative product from the more general, a view which resulted from 
hypostatising the syllogistic methods of Aristotle (cf. 12, 3), 
was expressed among the older Neo-Flatonists principally by 
Porphyry, in his exegesis of Aristotle s categories. 

Meanwhile Proclus undertook to carry out methodically this 
logical schema of emanation, and out of regard for this principle 
subordinated a number of simple and likewise unknowable "henads" 
beneath the highest, completely characterless /. In so doing he 
found himself under the necessity of demanding a proper dialectical 
principle for this logical procession of the particular from the uni 
versal. Such a schematism the systematiser of Hellenism found in 
the logico-metaphysical relation which Plotinus had laid at the basis 
of the development of the world from the deity. The procession of 
the Many forth from the One involves, in the first place, that the 
particular remains like the universal, and thus that the effect abides 
or persists within the cause; in the second place, that this product 
is a new self-subsisting entity in contrast with that which has pro 
duced it, and that it proceeds forth from the same ; and finally, that 
by virtue of just this antithetic relation the individual strives to 
return again to its ground. Persistence, procession, and return (/U.OVT;, 
TrpooSos, iri(TTpo&lt;f&gt;r)), or identity, difference and union of that which 
has been distinguished, are accordingly the three momenta of the 
dialectical process; and into this formula of emanistic development, 
by virtue of which every concept should be thought of as in itself 
out of itself returning into itself, Proclus pressed his entire 
combined metaphysical and mythological construction, a construc 
tion in which he assigned to the systems of deities of the different 
religions their place in the mystical and magical universe, arranging 
them in the series divided again and again by threes, according to 
his law of the determination of concepts. 1 

9. In contrast with this, the peculiarity of Christian philosophy 
consists essentially in this, that in its apprehension of the relation 
of God to the world, it sought to employ throughout the ethical 
point of view of free, creative action. Since from the standpoint of 
its religious conviction it held fast to the conception of the person 
ality of the Original Being, it conceived of the procedure of the 
world forth from God, not as a physical or logical necessity of the 

1 Personally, Proclus is characterised by the mingling of a superabundant 
credulous piety with a logical formalism carried even to pedantry, a combina 
tion which is highly interesting psychologically. Just for this reason he. is, 
perhaps, the most pronounced type of this period which is concerned in putting 
its ardent religiosity into a scientific system. 

252 Hellenistic- Roman Thought : Religious Period. [PART II 

unfolding of his essence, but as an act of will, and in consequence of 
this the creation of the world was regarded not as an eternal process, 
but as a fact in time that had occurred once for all. The conception, 
however, in which these motives of thought became concentrated, 
was that of the freedom of the will. 

This conception had had at first the meaning (with Aristotle) 
of conceding to the finite personality acting ethically the capacity of 
a decision between different given possibilities, independently of 
external influence and compulsion. The conception had then taken 
on, with Epicurus, the metaphysical meaning of a causeless activity 
of individual beings. Applied to the absolute, and regarded as a 
quality of God, it is developed in the .Christian philosophy into the 
thought of " creation out of nothing," into the doctrine of an un 
caused production of the world from the will of God. Every attempt 
at an explanation of the world is thereby put aside ; the world is 
because God has willed it, and it is such as it is because God has 
willed it so to be. At no point is the contrast between Neo-Pla- 
tonism and orthodox Christianity sharper than at this. 

Meanwhile, this same principle of the freedom of the will is 
employed to overcome the very difficulties which resulted from it. 
For the unlimited creative activity of the omnipotent God forces 
the problem of " theodicy " forward still more urgently than in the 
other theories of the universe, the problem how the reality of 
evil in the world can be united with God s perfect goodness. The 
optimism involved in the doctrine of creation, and the pessimism in 
volved in the felt need of redemption, the theoretical and the practical, 
the metaphysical and the ethical momenta of religious faith strike 
.hard against each other. But faith, supported by the feeling of 
responsibility, finds its way of escape out of these difficulties in the 
assumption that God provided the spirits and human souls which 
he created, with a freedom analogous to his own, and that through 
their guilt evil came into the good world. 1 

This guilt, the thinkers of the Church find not to consist properly 
in the inclination toward matter or the sensuous; for matter as 
created by God cannot in itself be evil. 2 The sin of free spirits 
consists rather in their rebellion against the will of God, in their 

1 This is expressed abstractly by Clement of Alexandria (Strom. IV. 13, 605) 
in the form, that evil is only an action, not a substance (ov&lt;ria), and that it there 
fore cannot be regarded as the work of God. 

2 Just for this reason the metaphysical dualism of the Gnostics must be in its 
principle heterodox, and that, too, no matter whether it bore the stamp rather 
of Oriental mythology or of Hellenistic abstract thought even though in the 
ethical consequences which it drew it coincided in great part with the doctrine 
of the Church. 

CHAP. 2, 20. ] God and the World : Origen. 253 

longing after an unlimited power of self-determination, and only 
secondarily in the fact that they have turned their love toward God s 
creations, toward the world instead of toward God himself. Here 
too, therefore, there prevails in the content of the conception of 
evil the negative element of departure and falling away from God; 
but the whole earnestness of the religious consciousness asserts 
itself in this, that this falling away is conceived of not merely as 
absence of the good, but as a positive, perverted act of will. 

In accordance with this the dualism of God and the world, and 
that of spirit and matter, become indeed deeply involved in the 
Christian theory of the world. God and the eternal life of the 
spirit, the world and the transitory life of the flesh, these are 
here, too, sharply enough contrasted. In contradiction with the 
divine pneuma the world of sense is filled with "hylic" spirits, 1 
evil demons, who ensnare man in their pursuits which are animated 
by hostility to God, stifle in him the voice of universal natural reve 
lation, and thereby make special revelation necessary ; and without 
departure from them and from the sensuous nature there is for the 
early Christian ethics, also, no rescue of the soul possible. 

But still this dualism is not regarded as being in its intrinsic 
nature either necessary or original. It is not the opposition be 
tween God and matter, but that between God and fallen spirits ; it 
is the purely inner antagonism of the infinite and the finite will. In 
this direction Christian philosophy completed through Origen the 
metaphysical spiritualising and internalising or idealising of the 
world of the senses. In it the corporeal world appears as completely 
permeated and maintained by spiritual functions, yes, even as much 
reduced to spiritual functions, as is the case with Plotinus ; but 
here the essential element in these functions is relations of will. 
As the passing over of God into the world is not physical necessity, 
but ethical freedom, so the material world is not a last streaming 
forth of spirit and soul, but a creation of God for the punishment 
and for the overcoming of sin. 

To be sure, Origen, in developing these thoughts, took up a motive 
which was allied to Neo-Platonism, a motive which brought him 
into conflict with the current mode of thought in the Church. For 
strongly as he held fast to the conception of the divine personality 
and to that of creation as a free act of divine goodness, the scientific 
thought which desires to see action grounded in essence was yet 
too strong in him to allow him to regard this creation as a causeless 

1 In this sense even Origen could call the evil rb OVK 6v (in Joh. II. 7, 65). 

2 Tatian, Orat. ad Grcec. 4. 

254 Hellenistic- Roman Thought : Religious Period. [PART II. 

act taking place once for all in time. The eternal, unchangeable 
essence of God demands rather the thought that he is creator from 
eternity even to all eternity, that he never can be without creating, 
that he creates timelessly. 1 

But this creation of the eternal will is, therefore, only one that 
relates to eternal Being, to the spiritual world (ova-La). In this 
eternal manner, so Origen teaches, God begets the eternal Son, the 
Logos, as the sum-total of his world-thoughts (t3x iSeuiv), and 
through him the realm of free spirits, which, limited within itself, 
surrounds the deity as an ever-living garment. Those of the spirits 
that continue in the knowledge and love of the Creator remain in 
unchanged blessedness with him ; but those that become weary and 
negligent, and turn from him in pride and vainglory, are, for pun 
ishment, cast into matter created for this purpose. So arises the 
world of sense, which is, therefore, nothing self-subsistent, but 
a symbolic eternalvsation of spiritual functions. For what may be 
regarded as Real in it is not the individual bodies, but rather the 
spiritual Ideas which are present, connected and changing within 
them. 2 

So, with Origen, Platonism becomes united with the theory of 
the creative will. The eternal world of spirits is the eternal prod 
uct of the changeless divine will. The principle of the temporal 
and the sensuous (yeVecns) is the changing will of the spirits. 
Corporeality arises on account of their sin, and will vanish again 
with their improvement and purification. Thus will, and the rela- 

* Orig. De Princ. I. 2, 10 ; III. 4, 3. 

2 This idealising of the world of sense was treated in great detail, quite ac 
cording to the Platonic model, by the most important of the Oriental Church 
fathers, Gregory of Nyssa (331-394). His main treatise is the \6yos Karrjx n- 
rt/c6s. Edition of his works by Morellus (Paris, 1675) [Eng. tr. in Vol. V., 2d 
series, Lib. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Schaff and Wace, Oxford, 
Lond., and N.Y. 1890]. Cf. J. Rupp, G. des Bischofs von N. Loben und 
Meinnngen, Leips. 1834. This transformation of Nature into psychical terms 
found an extremely poetic exposition among the Gnostics, particularly with the 
most ingenious among them, Valentinus. The origin of the world of sense 
is portrayed as follows in his theogonic-cosmogonic poetic invention : When 
the lowest of the ^Eons, Wisdom (o-o0a), in over-hasty longing, would fain 
have plunged into the original Ground and had been brought back again to her 
place by the Spirit of Measure (Spos), the Supreme God separated from her her 
passionate longing (irddos) as a lower Wisdom (KCITW &lt;ro0ta), called Achamoth, 
and banished it into the "void" (cf. 20, 4). This lower &lt;ro&lt;t&gt;la, nevertheless, 
impregnated by Spos for her redemption, bore the Demiurge and the world of 
sense. On this account that ardent longing of ffoQla. expresses itself in all 
forms and shapes of this world ; it is her feelings that constitute the essence of 
phenomena ; her pressure and complaint thrills through all the life of Nature. 
From her tears have come fountains, streams, and seas ; from her benumbing 
before the divine word, the rocks and mountains ; from her hope of redemption, 
light and ether, which in reconciliation stretch above the earth. This poetic 
invention is farther carried out with the lamentations and penitential songs of 
aofyla. in the Gnostic treatise, Ilfo-m &lt;ro&lt;pia. 

CHAP. 2, 21.] Philosophy of History. 255 

tion of personalities to one another, in particular that of the finite to 
the infinite personality, are recognised as the ultimate and deepest 
meaning of all reality. 

21. The Problem of Universal History. 

With this triumph of religious ethics over cosmological meta 
physics, thus sealed by Christianity, is connected the emergence of 
a farther problem, to solve which a number of important attempts 
were made the problem of the philosophy of history. 

1. Here something which is in its principle new comes forward, 
as over against the Greek view of the world. For Greek science 
had from the beginning directed its questions with reference to the 
&lt;u&lt;ris, the abiding essence (cf. p. 73), and this mode of stating 
the question, which proceeded from the need of apprehending 
Nature, had influenced the progress of forming conceptions so 
strongly that the chronological course of events had always been 
treated as something of secondary importance, having no meta- 
phvsical interest of its own. In this connection Greek science 
regarded not only the individual man, but also the whole human 
race, with all its fortunes, deeds, and experiences, as ultimately but 
an episode, a special formation of the world-process which repeats 
itself forever according to like laws. 

This is expressed with plain grandeur in the cosmological begin 
nings of Greek thought; and even after the anthropological tendency 
had obtained the mastery in philosophy the thought remained in 
force as theoretical background for every projected plan of the art 
of living, that human life, as it has sprung forth from the unchang 
ing process of Nature, must flow again into the same (Stoa). Plato 
had indeed asked for an iiltimate end of earthly life, and Aristotle 
had investigated the regular succession of the forms assumed by 
political life ; but the inquiry for a meaning in human history taken 
as a whole, for a connected plan of historical development, had 
never once been put forward, and still less had it occurred to any 
of the old thinkers to see in this the intrinsic, essential nature of 
the world. 

The most characteristic procedure in just this respect is that 
of Neo-Platonism. Its metaphysics, also, follows the religious 
motive as its guide ; but it gives this motive a genuine Hellenic 
turn when it regards the procession of the imperfect forth from 
the perfect as an eternal process of a necessary nature, in which 
the human individual also finds his place and sees it as his destiny 
to seek salvation alone by himself by return to the infinite. 

256 Hellenistic- Roman Thought : Religious Period. [PART II. 

2. Christianity, however, found from the beginning the essence 
of the whole world-movement in the experiences of personalities: 
for it external nature was but a theatre for the development of 
the relation of person to person, and especially of the relation of the 
h nite spirit to the deity. And to this were added, as a further 
determining power, the principle of love, the consciousness of the 
solidarity of the human race, the deep conviction of the universal 
sinfulness, and the faith in a common redemption. All this led to 
regarding the history of the fall and of redemption as the true 
metaphysical import of the world s reality, and so instead of an 
eternal process of Nature, the drama of universal history as an on 
ward flow of events that were activities of free will, became the con 
tent of Christian metaphysics. 

There is perhaps no better proof of the power of the impression 
which the personality of Jesus of Nazareth had left, than the fact 
that all doctrines of Christianity, however widely they may other 
wise diverge philosophically or mythically, are yet at one in seeking 
in him and his appearance the centre of the world s history. By him 
the conflict between good and evil, between light and darkness, is 
decided. 

But this consciousness of victory with which Christianity believed 
in its Saviour had still another side : to the evil which had been 
overcome by him belonged also the other religions, as by no means 
its least important element. For the Christian mode of thought of 
those days was far from denying the reality of the heathen gods ; it 
regarded them rather as evil demons, fallen spirits who had seduced 
man and persuaded him to worship them, in order to prevent his 
returning to the true God. 1 

By this thought the conflict of religions, which took place in the 
Alexandrian period, acquires in the eyes of Christian thinkers a 
metaphysical significance : the powers whose struggling forms the 
world s history are the gods of the various religions, and the history 
of this conflict is the inner significance of all reality. And since 
every individual man with his ethical life-work is implicated in 
this great complex process, the importance of individuality becomes 
raised far above the life of sense, into the sphere of metaphysical 
reality. 

3. With almost all Christian thinkers, accordingly, the world s 
history appears as a course of inner events which draw after them 
the origin and fortunes of the world of sense, a course which 
takes place once for all. It is essentially only Origen who holds fast 

i So even Origen ; cf . Cont. Gels. III. 28. 

CHAP. 2, 21.] Philosophy of History : Christianity. 257 

to the fundamental character of Greek science (cf. p. 27, ch. 1). 
so far as to teach the eternity of the world-process. Between the 
two motives, the Christian and the Greek, he found a way of escape 
by making a succession of temporal worlds proceed forth from the 
eternal spiritual world, which he regarded as the immediate creation 
of God, and by holding that these temporal worlds take their origin 
with the declension and fall of a number of free spirits, and are to 
find their end with the redemption and restitution of the same 

The fundamental tendency of Christian thought, on the contrary, 
was to portray the historical drama of fall and redemption as a 
connected series of events taking place once for all, which begins 
with a free decision of lower spirits to sin, and has its turning- 
point in the redemptive revelation, the resolve of divine freedom. 
In contrast with the naturalistic conceptions of Greek thought, 
history is conceived of as the realm of free acts of personalities, taking 
place but once, and the character of these acts, agreeably to the entire 
consciousness of the time, is of essentially religious significance. 

4. It is highly interesting now to see how in the mythico- 
metaphysical inventions of the Gnostics, the peculiar relation of 
Christianity to Judaism is brought to expression in cosmogonic 
garb. In the Gnostic circles the so-called Gentile Christian ten 
dency is predominant, the tendency which desires to define the new 
religion as sharply as possible, as over against Judaism, and this 
tendency just through the Hellenistic philosophy grows to the most 
open hostility against Judaism. 

The mythological form for this is, that the God of the Old Testa 
ment, who gave the Mosaic law, is regarded as the fashioner of the 
world of sense, for the most part under the Platonic name of the 
Demiurge, and is assigned that place in the hierarchy of cosmic 
forms or ^Eons, as well as in the history of the universe, which 
belongs to him in accordance with this function. 

At the beginning this relation is not yet that of pronounced oppo 
sition. A certain Cerinthus (about 115 A.D.) had already distin 
guished the God of the Jews as Demiurge, from the Supreme God 
who was not defiled by any contact with matter, and had taught 
that in contrast with the " law " given by the God of the Jews, 
Jesus had brought the revelation of the Supreme God. 2 So, too, 

1 Orig. De Princ. III. 1, 3. These worlds, on account of the freedom from 
which they proceed, are not at all like one another, but are of the most mani 
fold variety; Ib. II. 3, .", f. 

2 A distinction which Numenius also adopted, evidently under Gnostic influ 
ences. Cf. Euseb. Prcep. Ev. XI. 18. 

258 Hellenistic- Roman Thought : Religious Period. [PART II. 

with Saturninus, the God of the Jews appears as the head of the 
seven planetary spirits, who, as lowest emanation of the spiritual 
realm, in their desire to rule tore away a portion of matter to form 
from it the world of sense, and set man as guardian over it. But a 
conflict arises, since Satan, to conquer back this part of his kingdom, 
sends against man his demons and the lower "hylic" race of men. 
In this conflict the prophets of the Demiurge prove powerless until 
the Supreme God sends the JSon i/oDs as Saviour, in order that he 
may free pneumatic men and likewise the Demiurge and his spirits 
from the power of Satan. This same redemption of the Jewish God 
also is taught by Basilides, who introduces him under the name of 
the "great Archon " as an efflux of the divine world-seed, as head 
of the world of sense, and represents him as made to tremble by the 
Supreme God s message of salvation in Jesus, and as brought to 
repentance for his undue exaltation. 

In a similar manner, the God of the Old Testament, with Carpo- 
crates, belongs to the fallen angels, who, commissioned to form the 
world, completed it according to their own caprice, and founded sep 
arate realms in which they got themselves reverenced by subordinate 
spirits and by men. But while these particular religions are, like 
their Gods, in a state of mutual conflict, the Supreme Deity reveals 
in Jesus the one true universal religion which has Jesus as its 
object, even as he had already before made revelation in the great 
educators of humanity, a Pythagoras and a Plato. 

In more decided polemic against Judaism Cerdo the Syrian 
further distinguished the God of the Old Testament from that of 
the New. The God announced by Moses and the prophets, as the 
purposeful World-fashioner and as the God of justice is accessible 
even to natural knowledge the Stoic conception ; the God re 
vealed through Jesus is the unknowable, the good God the 
Philonic conception. The same determinations more sharply denned 
are employed by Marcion 1 (about 150), who conceives of the Chris 
tian life in a strongly ascetic manner, and regards it as a warfare 
against the Demiurge and for the Supreme God revealed through 
Jesus, 2 and Marcion s disciple Apelles even treated the Jewish God 

1 Cf. Volkmar, Pliilosophnumena und Marcion ( Theol. Jahrb. Tubingen, 
1854). Same author. Das Evangdium Marcion s (Leips. 1852). 

2 An extremely piquant mythological modification of this thought is found 
in the sect of the 0/&gt;hites, who gave to the Hebraic narrative of the fall the 
interpretation, that the serpent which taught man to eat of the tree of knowl 
edge in Paradise made a beginning of bringing the revelation of the true God 
to man who had fallen under the dominion of the Demiurge, and that after 
man had on this account experienced the wrath of the Demiurge, the revela 
tion had appeared victorious in Jesus. For this knowledge which the serpent 
desired to teach is the true salvation of man. 

CHAP. 2, 21.] Philosophy of History : Gnostics, Patristics. 259 

as Lucifer, who brought carnal sin into the world of sense which 
had been formed by the good " Demiurge," the highest angel, so that, 
at the petition of the Demiurge, the Supreme God sent the Re 
deemer against him. 

5. In contrast with this view we find the doctrine firmly held, 
not only by the Recognitions^ ascribed to Clement of Rome (which 
arose about 150 A.D.), but in the entire orthodox development of 
Christian doctrine, that the Supreme God and the creator of the 
world, the God of the New and the God of the Old Testaments, are 
the same. But a well-planned educative development of the divine 
revelation is assumed, and in this the history of salvation, i.e. the 
inner history of the world, is sought. Proceeding in accordance 
with the suggestions of the Pauline epistles, 2 Justin, and especially 
Irenaeus, took this standpoint. The theory of revelation did not 
become complete until it found this elaboration in the philosophy 
of history (cf. 18). 

For the anticipations of Christian revelation, that emerge on the 
one hand in Jewish prophecy, on the other in Hellenic philosophy, 
are regarded from this point of view as pedagogic preparations for 
Christianity. And since the redemption of sinful man constitutes, 
according to the Christian view, the sole significance and value of 
the world s history, and so of all that is real aside from God, the 
well-ordered succession of God s acts of revelation appears as the 
essential thing in the entire course of the world s events. 

In the main, corresponding to the doctrine of revelation, three 
stages of this divine, saving activity are distinguished. 3 As divided 
theoretically there are, first, the universal-human revelation, given 
objectively by the purposiveness of Nature, subjectively through 
the rational endowment of the mind ; second, the special revelation 
imparted to the Hebrew people through the Mosaic law and the 
promises of the prophets ; and third, the complete revelation through 
Jesus. Divided according to time, the periods extended from Adam 
to Moses, from Moses to Christ, from Christ to the end of the world. 4 
This triple division was the more natural for ancient Christianity, 
the stronger its faith that the closing period of the world s redemp- 

1 Edited by Gersdorf (Leips. 1838). Cf. A. Hilgerifeld, Die clementinischen 
Recognitionen und Homilien (Jena, 1848); G. Uhlhorn, Die Homilien und 
Recognitionen des Cl. R. (Gottingen, 1854). 

2 Which treat the " law " as the " schoolmaster" unto Christ (irauSayuybs et s 
XPKTTO ./); Gal. iii. 24. 

8 This had been done in part already by the Gnostics, by Basilides at least, 
according to Hippolytus. 

4 The later (heretical) development of eschatology added to these three 
periods yet a fourth, by the appearance of the " Paraclete." Cf., e.g., Ter- 
tullian, De Virg. Vel. 1, p. 884 O. 

260 Hellenistic-Roman Thought : Religious Period. [PART II. 

tion, which had begun with the appearance of the Saviour, would be 
ended in a very short time. The eschatological hopes are an essential 
constituent of the early Christian metaphysics ; for the philosophy 
of history which made Jesus the turning-point of the world s history 
had, as by no means its slighest support, the expectation that the 
Crucified would return again to judge the world, and to complete 
the victory of light over darkness. However varied these ideas 
become with time and with the disappointment of the first hopes, 
however strongly the tendencies of dualism and monism assert 
themselves here also, by conceiving of the last Judgment either as 
a definite separation of good and evil, or as a complete overcoming 
of the latter by the former (aTro/carao-Tao-is TTO.VTWV with Origen), and 
however much a more material and a more spiritual view of blessed 
ness and unhappiness, of heaven and hell, interplay here also, in 
every case the last Judgment forms the conclusion of the work of 
redemption, and so the consummation of the divine plan of salva 
tion. 

6. The points of view from which the world s history is regarded 
by Christian thinkers are thus indeed exclusively religious ; but the 
more general principle of a historical teleology gains recognition 
within them. While Greek philosophy had reflected upon the pur- 
posiveiiess of Nature with a depth and an energy which religious 
thought could not surpass, the completely new thought rises here 
that the course of events in human life also has a purposeful mean 
ing as a whole. The teleology of history becomes raised above 
that of Nature, and the former appears as the higher in worth, in 
whose service the latter is employed. 1 

Such a conception was possible only for a time that from a ripe 
result looked back upon the vivid memory of a great development 
in the world s history. The universal civilisation of the Roman 
Empire found dawning in the self-consciousness of its own inner 
life the presentiment of a purpose in that working together of 
national destinies through which it had itself come into existence, 
and the idea of this mighty process was yielded especially by the 
continued tradition of Greek literature embracing a thousand years. 
The religious theory of the world, which had developed from this 
ancient civilisation, gave to that thought the form that the meaning 
of the historical movement was to be sought in the preparations of 
God for the salvation of man ; and since the peoples of the ancient 
civilisation themselves felt that the time of their efficient working 
was complete, it is comprehensible that they believed they saw the 

i Cf. Irenseus, Ref. IV. 38, 4, p. 702 f. St. 

CHAP, 2, 21.] Philosophy of History : Patristics. 261 

end of history immediately before them, where the sun of their day 
was sinking. 

But hand in hand with this idea of a systematically planned unity 
in human history goes the thought of a unity of the human race, 
exalted above space and time. The consciousness of common civil 
isation, breaking through national boundaries, becomes complete in 
the belief in a common revelation and redemption of all men. Inas 
much as the salvation of the whole race is made the import of the 
divine plan for the world, it appears that among the provisions of 
this plan, the most important is that fellowship (cK/cA^aia) to which 
all members of the race are called, by sharing in faith the same work 
of redemption. The conception of the Church, shaped out from the 
life of the Christian community, stands in this connection with the 
religious philosophy of history, and accordingly, among its constitu 
tive marks or notes, universality or catholicity is one of the most 
important. 

7. In this way, man and his destiny becomes the centre of the 
universe. This anthropocentric character distinguishes the Christian 
view of the world essentially from the Neo-Platonic. The latter, 
indeed, assigned a high metaphysical position to the human individ 
ual, whose psychico-spiritual nature it even held to be capable of 
deification ; it regarded the purposeful connected whole of Nature 
also from the (Stoic) point of view of its usefulness for man, but 
never would Neo-Platonism have consented to declare man, who 
for it was a part of the phenomena in which divine efficiency 
appears, to be the end of the whole. 

Just this, however, is the case in the philosophy of the Fathers. 
According to Irenceus, man is the end and aim of creation : it is to 
him as a knowing being that God would reveal himself, and for his 
sake the rest, the whole of Nature, has been created ; he it is, also, 
who by abuse of the freedom granted him, made farther revelation 
and redemption necessary ; it is he, therefore, for whose sake all 
history also exists. Man as the highest unfolding of psychical life 
is, as Gregory of Nyssa teaches, the crown of creation, its master 
and king : it is creation s destiny to be contemplated by him, and 
taken back into its original spirituality. But with Origen, too, men 
are just those fallen spirits, who, for punishment and improvement, 
have been clothed with the world of sense: Nature exists only on 
account of their sin, and it will cease again when the historical 
process has attained its end through the return of all spirits to the 
Good. 

Thus the anthropological movement, which at first forced its way 
into Greek science only as a shifting of the interest, as a change in 

262 Hellenistic -Roman Thought : Religious Period. [PART II. 

the statement of the problem, developed during the Hellenistic- 
Roman period to be more and more the real principle from which 
the world was considered, and at last in league with the religious 
need it took possession of metaphysics. The human race has gained 
the consciousness of the unity of its historical connection and re 
gards the history of its salvation as the measure of all finite things. 
What arises and passes away in space and time has its true signifi 
cance only in so far as it is taken up into the relation of man to his 
God. 

Being and Becoming were the problems of ancient philosophy 
at its beginning : the conceptions with which it closes are God and 
the human race. 

PART III. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 

Rousselot, tftudes sur la Philosophic du Moyen Age. Paris, 1840-42. 
B. Haurfiau, De la Philosophic Scholastique. Paris, 1850. 
B. llaurfiau, Histoire de la Philosophic Scholastique. Paris, 1872-80. 
A. Stockl, Geschichte der Philosophic des Mitte.lalters. Mainz, 1864-66. 

WHEN the migration of the peoples broke in devastation over the 
Roman Empire, and the latter lacked the political strength to 
defend itself against the northern barbarians, scientific civilisation, 
also, was in danger of becoming completely crushed out; for the 
tribes to whom the sceptre now passed brought still less mind and 
understanding for the finely elaborated structures of philosophy 
than for the light forms of Grecian art. And, withal, ancient civ 
ilisation was in itself so disintegrated, its vital force was so broken, 
that it seemed incapable of taking the rude victors into its school. 

Thus the conquests of the Greek spirit would have been given 
over to destruction beyond hope of rescue, if in the midst of the 
breaking down of the old world, a new spiritual power had not 
grown strong, to which the sons of the North bowed, and which, 
with firm hand, knew how to rescue for the future the goods of 
civilisation, and preserve them during the centuries of subversion. 
This power was the Christian Church. What the State could not 
do, what art and science could not achieve, religion accomplished. 
Inaccessible still for the fine workings of aesthetic imagination and 
abstract thought, the Germans were laid hold of in their deepest 
feelings by the preaching of the gospel, which worked upon them 
with all the power of its grand simplicity. 

Only from this point of religious excitation, therefore, could the 
process of the appropriation of ancient science by the peoples of 
the Europe of to-day begin ; only at the hand of the Church could 
the new world enter the school of the old. The natural conse 
quence, however, of this relation was, that at first only that portion 
of the intellectual content of ancient civilisation remained alive 

264 Mediaeval Philosophy. [PART III. 

which had been taken up into the doctrine of the Christian Church, 
and that the teaching authority rigidly excluded all else, and espe 
cially that which was opposed to her. By this means, to be sure, 
confusion in the youthful mind of these nations, which would not 
have been able to comprehend and elaborate much and many kinds 
of material, was wisely guarded against ; but thereby whole worlds 
of the intellectual life sank to the depth from which they could 
only be drawn forth again long after, by toil and conflict. 

The Church had grown to its great task of becoming the educator 
of the European nations, first of all, because from the invisible 
beginnings of a religious society it had developed with steadily 
growing power to a unified organisation, which amid the dissolution 
of political life presented itself as the only power that was firm and 
sure of itself. And since this organisation was supported by the 
thought that the Church was called to become the means of bring 
ing the salvation of redemption to all humanity, the religious edu 
cation of the barbarians was a task prescribed by its own nature. 
But the Church was all the more able to take this in hand, since in 
her inner life she had proceeded with the same certainty amid 
numerous deviating paths, and had attained the goal of a unified 
and completed system of doctrine. To this was further added the 
especially favourable circumstance, that at the threshold of the new 
epoch she was presented with the sum-total of her convictions, 
worked out into the form of a thorough scientific system by a mind 
of the first order, Augustine. 

Augustine was the true teacher of the Middle Ages. Not only 
do the threads of Christian and Neo-Platonic thought, the ideas of 
Origen and of Plotinus, unite in his philosophy, but he also concen 
trated the entire thought of his time with creative energy about the 
need of salvation and the fulfilment of this need by the church 
community. His doctrine is the philosophy of the Christian Church. 
Herewith was given, in pregnant unity, the system which became 
the basis of the scientific training of the European peoples, and in 
this form the Romanic and Germanic peoples entered upon the 
inheritance of the Greeks. 

But for this reason the Middle Ages retraced in the reverse direc 
tion the path which the Greeks had gone over in their relations to 
science. In antiquity science had arisen from the pure aesthetic joy 
in knowledge itself, and had only gradually entered into the service 
of practical need, of ethical tasks, and of religious longings. The 
Middle Ages begins with the conscious subordination of knowledge 
to the great ends of faith ; it sees in science at the beginning only 
the task of the intellect to make clear to itself and express in 

Mediaeval Philosophy. 265 

abstract thought that which it possesses surely and unassailably 
in feeling and conviction. But in the midst of this work the joy 
in knowledge itself w;ikes anew, at first timorously and uncertainly, 
then with ever-increasing force and self-certainty ; it unfolds itself 
at first sdiolastically, in fields which seem to lie far distant from 
faith s unassailable sphere of ideas, and at the end breaks through 
victoriously when science begins to define her limits as against 
faith, philosophy hers as against theology, and to assume a con 
scious independent position. 

The education of the European peoples, which the history of the 
philosophy of the Middle Ages sets forth, has then for its starting- 
point the Church doctrine, and for its goal the development of 
the scientific spirit. The intellectual civilisation of antiquity is 
brought to modern peoples in the religious form which it assumed 
at its close, and develops in them gradually the maturity for prop 
erly scientific work. 

Under such conditions it is easy to understand that the history 
of this education awakens psychological interest and an interest 
connected with the history of civilisation, rather than presents new 
and independent fruits of philosophical insight. In the appropria 
tion of the presented material the peculiar personality of the 
disciple may assert itself here and there ; the problems and con 
ceptions of ancient philosophy may, therefore, find many fine trans 
formations when thus taken up into the spirit of the new peoples, 
and in forging out the new Latin terminology in the Middle Ages 
acuteness and depth often contend emulously with pedantry and 
insipidity ; but in its fundamental philosophical thoughts, mediaeval 
philosophy remains enclosed within the system of conceptions of 
the Greek and the Hellenistic-Roman philosophy, not only as 
regards its problems, but also as regards their solutions. Highly 
as we must estimate the worth of its labours for the intellectual 
education of European peoples, its highest achievements remain in 
the last instance just brilliant productions of scholars or disciples, 
not of masters, productions in which only the eye of the most 
refined detailed investigation can discover the gently germinating 
beginnings of a new thought, but which show themselves to be, on 
the whole, an appropriation of the world of thought of the depart 
ing antiquity. Mediaeval philosophy is, in its entire spirit, solely 
the continuation of the Hellenistic-Roman, and the essential dis 
tinction between the two is that what in the first centuries of cm- 
era had been coming into existence amid struggles was, for the 
Middle Ages, given and regarded as something in the main complete 
and definitive. 

266 Mediaeval Philosophy. [PART III. 

This period, in which the humanity of to-day was at school, 
lasted a full thousand years, and as if in systematically planned 
pedagogic steps its education proceeds toward science by the suc 
cessive addition of ancient material of culture. Out of the antith 
eses which appear in this material grow the problems of philosophy, 
and the ancient conceptions taken up and amplified give the form 
to the scientific theories of the world prevalent in the Middle 

An original discord exists in this tradition between Neo-Platonism 
and the Church doctrine defended by Augustine, a discord which 
indeed was not equally strong at all points, since Augustine in very 
essential points had remained under the control of Neo-Platonism, 
and yet a discord which amounted to an opposition with reference 
to the fundamental character of the relation of philosophy to faith. 
The system of Augustine is concentrated about the conception of 
the Church ; for it philosophy has as its main task to present the 
Church doctrine as a scientific system, to establish and develop it : 
in so far as it prosecutes this task mediaeval philosophy is the 
science of the schools, Scholasticism. The Neo-Platonic tendency, 
on the contrary, takes the direction of guiding the individual, 
through knowledge, to blessed oneness of life with the deity : in so 
far as the science of the Middle Ages sets itself this end it is Mysti 
cism. 

Scholasticism and Mysticism accordingly supplement each other 
without being reciprocally exclusive. As the intuition of the Mystics 
may become a part of the Scholastic system, so the proclamation of 
the Mystics may presuppose the system of the Scholastics as its 
background. Throughout the Middle Ages, therefore, Mysticism is 
more in danger than Scholasticism of becoming heterodox ; but it 
would be erroneous to see in this an essential mark for distinguish 
ing between the two. Scholasticism is, no doubt, in the main 
entirely orthodox ; but not only do the theories of the Scholastics 
diverge widely in the treatment of dogmas which are still in 
the process of formulation, but many of the Scholastics, even in 
the scientific investigation of the doctrines which were given, pro 
ceeded to completely heterodox theories, the expression of which 
brought them into more or less severe conflicts without and within. 
As regards Mysticism, the Neo-Platonic tradition often forms the 
theoretical background of the secret or open opposition offered to 
the monopolising of the religious life on the part of the Church ; * 

i Cf. H. Reuter, Geschichte der religiosen Aufklarung im Mittelalter, 2 vols. 
(Berlin, 1875-77). Cf. also H. v. Eicken, Geschichte der mittelalterlichen Welt 
anschauung (Stuttgart, 1888). 

Mediaeval Philosophy. 267 

but we meet on the other hand enthusiastic Mystics who feel them 
selves called to take the true faith into their protection against the 
excesses of Scholastic science. 

It appears thus to be inappropriate to give to the philosophy of 
the Middle Ages the general name of "Scholasticism." It might 
rather prove, as the result of a more exact estimate, that in the 
maintenance of scientific tradition as well as in the slow adaptation 
and transformation of those philosophical doctrines which were 
effective for the after time, a part belongs to Mysticism which is 
at least as great as the part played by Scholasticism, and that on the 
other hand a sharp separation of the two currents is not practicable 
in the case of a great number of the most prominent philosophic 
thinkers of the Middle Ages. 

Finally, it must be added that even when we put together Scholas 
ticism and Mysticism, we have in nowise exhausted the character 
istics of mediaeval philosophy. While the nature of both these 
tendencies is fixed by their relation to the religious presuppositions 
of thought, in the one case the established doctrine of the Church, 
in the other personal piety, there runs along side by side with 
these, especially in the later centuries of the Middle Ages though 
noticeable still earlier, a secular side-current which brings in an in 
creasing degree the rich results of Greek and Roman experience of 
the world, to science building itself anew. Here, too, at the outset 
the effort prevails to introduce organically into the Scholastic 
system this extensive material and the forms of thought which are 
dominant in it ; but the more this part of the sphere of thought 
develops into an independent significance, the more the entire lines 
of the scientific consideration of the world become shifted, and 
while the reflective interpretation and rationalisation of the relig 
ious feeling becomes insulated within itself, philosophical knowl 
edge begins to mark off anew for itself the province of purely 
theoretical investigation. 

From this multiplicity of variously interwoven threads of tradi 
tion with which ancient science weaves its fabric on into the Middle 
Ages, we can understand the wealth of colour in which the philosophy 
of this thousand years spreads out before historical research. In 
the frequent exchange of friendly and hostile contact, these elements 
of a tradition changing in compass and content from century to 
century play back and forth to form ever new pictures ; a surprising 
fineness in the transitions and shadings becomes developed as these 
elements are woven together, and thus there is developed also a 
wealth of life in the work of thought, which manifests itself in a 
considerable number of interesting personalities, in an astonishing 

268 Mediaeval Philosophy. [PART III 

amount of literary production, and in a passionate agitation of scien 
tific controversies. 

Such living variety in form has as yet by no means everywhere 
received full justice at the hands of literary-historical research, 1 but 
the main lines of this development lie before us clearly and dis 
tinctly enough for the history of philosophic principles, which 
nevertheless finds but a meagre field in this period for the reasons 
already adduced. We must, indeed, be on our guard against aiming to 
reduce the complex movement of this process to formulas that are 
all too simple, and against overlooking the multitude of positive 
and negative relations that have come and gone in shifting forms 
between the elements of ancient tradition which found their en 
trance in the course of centuries by irregular intervals into mediaeval 
thought. 

In general, the course of science among the European peoples of 
the Middle Ages proceeded along the following lines. 

The profound doctrine of Augustine had its first efficiency, not in 
the direction of its philosophical significance, but as an authoritative 
presentation of the doctrine of the Church. Side by side with this 
a Neo-Platonic Mysticism maintained itself, and scientific schooling 
was limited to unimportant compendiums, and to fragments of the 
Aristotelian logic. Nevertheless, a logico-metaphysical problem of 
great importance developed from the elaboration of the logic, 
and about this problem arose a highly vigorous movement of 
thought, which, however, threatened to degenerate into barren for 
malism in consequence of the lack in knowledge to form the content 
of thought. In contrast with this the Augustinian psychology 
began gradually to assert its mighty force ; and at the same time the 
first effects of contact with Arabian science disclosed themselves, a 
science to which the West owed, primarily at least, a certain stimulus 
toward employment with realities, and further a complete widening 

1 The grounds for this lie, certainly in part, in the but gradually vanishing 
prejudices which long stood in the way of a just appreciation of the Middle 
Ages ; but in no less a degree they lie also in this literature itself. The circum 
stantial and yet for the most part sterile prolixity of the investigations, the 
schematic uniformity of the methods, the constant repetition and turning of 
the arguments, the lavish expenditure of acuteness upon artificial and sometimes 
absolutely silly questions, the uninteresting witticisms of the schools, all these 
are features which perhaps belong inevitably to the process of learning, appro 
priating, and practising, which mediaeval philosophy sets forth, but they bring 
with them the consequence that in the study of this part of the history of phi 
losophy the mass of the material, and the toil involved in its elaboration, stand 
in an unfavourable relation to the real results. So it has come about that just 
those investigators who have gone deeply, with industry and perseverance, into 
mediaeval philosophy have often not refrained from a harsh expression of ill- 
humour as to the object of their research. 

Mediaeval Philosophy. 269 

and transformation of its horizon. This development was in the 
main attached to the acquaintance gained by such by-ways with the 
entire system of Aristotle, and the immediate consequence of this 
acquaintance was that the structure of Church doctrine was pro 
jected in the grandest style and carefully wrought out in all its 
parts with the help of his fundamental metaphysical conceptions. 
Meanwhile Aristotelianism had been accepted from the Arabians 
(and Jews) not only in their Latin translation, but also with their 
commentaries, and in their interpretation which was under strong 
Neo-Platonic influence ; and while by this means the Neo-Platonic 
elements in previous tradition, even in the Augustinian form, found 
vigorous confirmation in various directions, the specific elements of 
the Augustinian metaphysics were forced into sharper and more 
energetic expression, in violent reaction against the Neo-Platonic 
tendency. Thus while both sides lean upon Aristotelianism, a cleft 
in scientific thought is produced, which finds its expression in the 
separation of theology and philosophy. This cleft became widened 
by a new and not less complicated movement. Empirical research 
in medicine and natural science had also made its way from the 
East, hand in hand with Aristotelianism ; it began now to rise also 
among the European peoples ; it conquered the domain of psychology 
not without assistance from the Augustinian current, and favoured 
the development of the Aristotelian logic in a direction which led 
far from the churchly Aristotelian metaphysics. And while thus 
the interwoven threads of tradition were separating on all sides, the 
fine filaments of new beginnings were already finding their way into 
this loosening web. 

With such various relations of mutual support or retardation, 
and with such numerous changes of front, the thoughts of ancient 
philosophy move through the Middle Ages ; but the most important 
and decisive turn was doubtless the reception of Aristotelianism, which 
became complete about the year 1200. This divides the whole 
field naturally into two sections which in their philosophical import 
are so related that the interests and the problems, the antitheses 
and the movements, of the first period are repeated in broader, and 
at the same time deeper, form in the second. The relation of these 
two divisions, therefore, cannot be generally designated in this case 
by differences in the subject matter. 

CHAPTER I. FIRST PERIOD. 

(UNTIL ABOUT 1200.) 
W. Kaulich, Geschichte der scholastichen Philosophie, I. Theil. Prague, 1863. 

THE line of thought in which mediaeval philosophy essentially 
moved, and in which it continued the principles of the philosophy 
of antiquity, was prescribed for it by the doctrine of Augustine. 
He had moved the principle of internality (Innerlichkeit) , which 
had been preparing in the whole closing development of ancient 
science, for the first time into the controlling central position of 
philosophic thought, and the position to which he is entitled in 
the history of philosophy is that of the beginner of a new line of 
development. For the bringing together of all lines of the Patristic 
as well as the Hellenistic philosophy of his time, which he com 
pletely accomplished, was possible only as these were consciously 
united in that new thought which was itself to become the germ of 
the philosophy of the future. But only of a more distant future : 
his philosophical originality passed over his contemporaries and the 
immediately following centuries without effect. Within the circuit 
of the old civilisation the creative power of thought had become 
extinguished, and the new peoples could only gradually grow into 
scientific work. 

In the cloister and court schools which formed the seats of this 
newly beginning civilisation, permission for instruction in dialectic 
by the side of the arts most necessary for the training of the clergy 
had to be conquered step by step. For this elementary logical 
instruction they possessed in the first centuries of the Middle Ages 
only the two least important treatises of the Aristotelian Organon, 
De Categoriis and De Interpretatione, in a Latin translation with 
the introduction of Porphyry, and a number of commentaries of 
the Neo-Platonic time, in particular those of Boethius. For the 
material of knowledge (of the Quadrivium) they used the com- 
pendiums of departing antiquity, which had been prepared by 
Marcianus Capella, Cassiodorus, and Isidorus of Sevilla. Of the 

CHAP. 1.] First Period. 271 

great original works of ancient philosophy, only the Platonic 
TimcBus in the translation of Chalcidius was known. 

Under these circumstances, scientific activity in the schools was 
mainly directed toward learning and practising the schematism of 
formal logic, and the treatment even of the material parts of knowl 
edge, in particular of religious dogma which was indeed regarded 
as something essentially complete and in its contents unassailable, 
took the direction of elaborating and setting forth what was given 
and handed down by tradition, in the forms and according to the 
rules of the Aristotelian-Stoic logic. In this process the main em 
phasis must necessarily fall upon formal arrangement, upon the 
formation and division of class-concepts, upon correct syllogistic 
conclusions. Already in the Orient the ancient school logic had 
been put into the service of a rigidly articulated development of 
Church doctrine by John Damascenus, and now this took place in 
the schools of the West also. 

Meanwhile this pursuit, which had its basis in the conditions of 
the tradition, had not only the didactic value of a mental exercise 
in the appropriation of material, but also the consequence that the 
beginnings of independent reflection necessarily took the direction 
of an inquiry as to the significance of logical relations, and so we 
find emerging early in the Western literature, investigations as to 
the relation of the conception on the one hand to the word, and on 
the other to the thing. 

The problem thus formed became strengthened by a peculiar com 
plication. By the side of the Church doctrine there persisted, half 
tolerated and half condemned, a mystical transmission of Chris 
tianity in Neo-Platonic form. It went back to writings which had 
arisen in the fifth century, but which were ascribed to Dionysius 
the Areopagite, and it gained wider extension when these writings 
were translated in the ninth century by John Scotus Erigena, and 
made the basis of his own doctrine. In this doctrine, however, 
a main point was that identification of the different grades of ab 
straction with the stages of metaphysical reality, which had been 
already propounded in the older Platonism and in Neo-Platonism 
(cf.20, 8). 

In consequence of these incitements the question as to the meta 
physical significance of logical genera became, during the next centuries, 
the centre of philosophic thought. About this were grouped the 
other logical and metaphysical problems, and the answer given to 
this question decided the party position of individual thinkers. 
Amid the great variety of decisions given in this controversy over 
universals, three tendencies are prominent: Realism, which main- 

272 Mediaeval Philosophy. [PART III. 

tains the independent existence of genera and species, is the doctrine 
of Anselm of Canterbury, of William of Champeaux, and of the 
Platonists proper, among whom Bernard of Chartres is prominent ; 
Nominalism, which sees in universals only designations or terms 
which apply commonly, is defended in this period principally by 
Koscellinus; finally a mediating theory, which has been called 
Conceptualism or Sermonism, is attached principally to the name of 
Abelard. 

These conflicts came to an issue principally in the endless dispu 
tations at the Paris University, which for this period and on into 
the following period formed the centre of scientific life in Europe; 
and these battles, conducted with all the arts of dialectical dexterity, 
exercised upon this age a fascinating power like that which the 
disputes of the Sophists and Socratic circles had once exercised 
upon the Greeks. Here as there the unreflective life of the popular 
consciousness was awakened to thought, and here as there wider 
circles were seized by a feverish thirst for knowledge, and by a pas 
sionate desire to take part in such hitherto unwonted intellectual 
games. Far beyond the narrow circles of the clergy, who had pre 
viously been the transmitters of scientific tradition, the impulse 
toward knowledge, thus awakened, forced its way to the surface. 

But this excessive vigour in dialectical development found at the 
same time manifold opposition. In fact, it hid within itself a seri 
ous danger. This brilliant performance, in which abstract thought 
proved its power, lacked all basis of real knowledge. With its dis 
tinctions and conclusions it was carrying on to a certain extent a 
juggler s game in the open air, which indeed set the formal mental 
powers into beneficial motion, but which, in spite of all its turns and 
windings, could lead to no material knowledge. Hence, from intelli 
gent men like Gerbert, who had received information from the empir 
ical studies of the Arabians, went out the admonition to abandon 
the formalism of the schools and turn to the careful examination 
of Nature and to the tasks of practical civilisation. 

But while such a call still echoed mainly unheard, dialectic met a 
more forcible resistance in the piety of faith and in the power of the 
Church. The result was inevitable that the logical working over of 
the metaphysics of the Church s faith, and the consequences which 
were developed in the strife about universals, at first without any 
reference to their religious bearing, should come into contradiction 
with the dogma of the Church ; and the more this was repeated, the 
more dialectic appeared not only superfluous for the simply pious 
mind, but also dangerous to the interests of the Church. In this 
spirit it was attacked, sometimes with extreme violence, by the 

CHAP. 1.] First Period. 273 

orthodox Mystics, among whom the most combative was Bernard of 
Clairvaux, while the Victorines turned back from the excesses of 
dialectical arrogance to the study of Augustine, and sought to bring 
out the rich treasure of inner experience which his writings con 
tained, by transferring the fundamental thoughts of his psychology 
from the metaphysical to the empirical sphere. 

Aurelius Augustinua (354-430), born at Thagaste in Numidia, and educated 
for a jurist there and also in Madaura in Carthage, passed through in his youth 
almost all phases of the scientific and religious movement of his time. He 
sought at first in Manichseism religious relief for his burning doubts, then fell 
into the Academic Scepticism which he had early absorbed from Cicero, passed 
over from this gradually to the Neo-Platonic doctrine, and was at last won by 
Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, for Christianity, whose philosopher he was to become. 

As priest, and later as bishop at Hippo Regius, he was unwearied in practical 
and literary activity for the unity of the Christian Church and doctrine; his 
doctrinal system was developed especially in the Donatist and Pelagian contro 
versies. Among his works (in Migne s collection, 16 vols., Paris, 1835 ft [tr. 
ed. by Dods, 15 vols., Edin. 1871-77 ; also in Schaff s lib., IS icene and Post- 
Nicene Fathers, Vols. 1-8, Buffalo, 1886-88] ) those of chief importance for 
philosophy are his autobiographical Confessions, and further Contra Academi- 
cos, De Beata Vita, De Ordie, De Qttantitate Animce, De Libero Arbitrio, De 
Trinitate, Soliloquia, Dr Immortalitate Animce, De Civitate Dei. Ct.C. Binde- 
mann, Der. hlg. A. (3 Bde. 1844-1869). Fr. Bohringer, Kirchengeschichte in 
Biographien, XI. Bd. in 2 Till. (Stuttgart, 1877-78). A. Dorner, A. (Berlin, 
1873). W. Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, I. (Leips. 1883), 
pp. 322 ff. J. Store, Die Philos. des hlg. A. (Freiburg, 1892). 

The EUayuyl] e/s rds KaTyyopla.* of Porphyry (ed. by Busse, Berlin, 1887), in 
its translation by Boethius, gave the external occasion for the controversy over 
universals. Boethius (470-525), aside from this, exercised an influence upon 
the early Middle Ages by his translations and commentaries upon the two 
Aristotelian treatises, and upon a number of Cicero s writings. In addition to 
his books there were still others which circulated under the name of Augustine. 
Cf. Prantl, Gesch. d. Log. im Abendl., II., and A. Jourdain, Recherches critiques 
sur Page et Vorigine des traductions latines d Aristotle (Paris, 2 ed., 1843). 

Among the scientific encyclopedias of departing antiquity, Marcianus Capella 
(from Carthage, the middle of the fifth century), in his Satyricon (ed. by 
Eyssenhardt, Leips. 1866), after his whimsical introduction De Nuptiis Mercurii 
et Philologice, treats the seven liberal arts, of which, as is well known, in the 
activity of the schools grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic formed the Trivium, 
arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, including poetics, the Quadrivium. 
A valuable commentary on Capella was written later by Scotus Erigena (ed. by 
B. Haurgau, Paris, 1861). The Institutions Divinarum et Scecularium Lec- 
tionum and De Artibus ac Disciplinis Litternrum Liberalium of the Senator Cas- 
siodorus (480-570, Works, Paris, 1588), and the Originum sice Etymologiarum, 
LibriXX. (in Migne) of Isidorus Hispalensis (died 636) are already completely 
upon theological ground. John Damascenus (about 700) in his Ilrj-y?; yvuffcws 
(Works, Venice, 1748) gave the classical example for the employment of the 
ancient school logic in the service of systematising the Church doctrines. 

While the storms of the national migrations were blustering upon the conti 
nent, scientific study had fled to the British Isles, in particular to Ireland, and 
later flourished to a certain extent in the school at York under the Venerable 
Bede. From here learned education was won back to the continent through 
Alcuin, upon the inducement of Charles the Great ; beside the episcopal and the 
cloister schools arose the palatinal school, whose seat was fixed by Charles the 
Bald at Paris. The most important cloister schools were those of Fulda and 
Tours. At the former worked Rabanus (lihaban) Maurus (of Mainz, 776-856 ; 
De Universo, Libri XXII.}, and Eric (Heiricus) of Auxerre; from it went out, 
at the end of the ninth century, Remigius of Auxerre and the probable author 

274 Mediaeval Philosophy. [PART IIL 

of the commentary Super Porphyrium (printed in Cousin s Ouvrages Inedits 
d 1 Abelard, Paris, 183(5). In Tours Alcuin was followed by the Abbot Frede- 
gisus, whose letter, De, Nihilo et Tenebris, is preserved (in Migne, Vol. 105). 
Later the cloister at St. Gall (Notker Labeo, died 1022) formed a principal seat 
of scientific tradition. 

Cf. also for the literary relations, the Histoire Litteraire de la France. 

The writings ascribed to the Areopagite (cf. Acts of the Apostles, 17 : 34), 
among which those of chief importance are irepi nvffTucijs 6eo\oyias and wepl rrjs 
tepapx/as ovpavtov (in Migne ; German by Engelhardt, Sulzbach, 1823), show the 
same mixture of Christian and Neo-Platonic philosophy which appeared fre 
quently in the Orient (the result of Origen s influence) and in an especially 
characteristic form in the Bishop Synesius (about 400 ; cf. R. Volkmann, S. von 
Gyrene, Berlin, 18(59). The above-named writings of the Pseudo-Dionysius, 
which probably arose in the fifth century, are first mentioned, 532, and their 
genuineness is there contested; nevertheless, this was defended by Maximus 
Confessor (580-662 ; DC Yarns Difficilioribus Locis Patrum Dionysii et Gregorii, 
ed. Oehler, Halle, 1857). 

In connection witli this Mysticism develops the first important scientific 

Personality of the Middle Ages, John Scotus Erigena (sometimes Jerugena, 
mm Ireland, about 810-880), of whose life it is certainly known that he was 
called by Charles the Bald to the court school at Paris, and was for a time 
active there. He translated the writings of the Areopagite. wrote against 
Gottschalk the treatise De Praidestinatione, and put his own theories into his 
main work, De Divisione Naturce (German by Noack, Leips. 1870-76). The 
works form Vol. 122 in Migne s collection. Cf. J. Huber, J. S. E. (Munich, 1861). 

Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) came from Aosta, was active for a long 
time in the Norman cloister at Bee, and was called to become Archbishop of 
Canterbury in 1093. Of his works (Migne, Vol. 155) the most important for 
philosophy besides the treatise Cur Dens Homo? are the Monologium and the 
Proslogium. The two latter are edited by C. Haas (Tubingen, 18G3), together 
with the refutation of a monk, Gaunilo (in the cloister Marmoutier near Tours), 
Liber pro Insipiente, and the reply 01 Anselm. Cf. Ch. Remusat, A. de C., 
tableau de la vie monastique et de la Intte du pouvoir spirituel avec le pouvoir 
temporel au 11"" siecle (2d ed., Paris, 1868). 

William of Champeaux (died 1121 as Bishop of Chalons-sur-Marne) was a 
teacher who was much heard at the cathedral school in Paris, and established 
studies there in the Augustinian cloister at St. Victor. We are chiefly informed 
as to his philosophical views by his opponent Abelard ; his logical treatise is lost. 
Cf. E. Michaud, G. de Ch. et les ecoles de Paris au 12 siecle (Paris, 1868). 

The Platonism of the earlier Middle Ages attached itself essentially to the 
Timwiis, and under the influence of the Neo-Platonic interpretation gave to the 
doctrine of Ideas a form which did not completely correspond to the original 
sense. The most important figure in this line is Bernard of Chartres (in the 
first half of the twelfth century). His work De Mundi Universitate sive Mega- 
coxmus et Microcosmus has been edited by C. S. Barach (Innsbruck,. 1876). 
William of Conches (Magna de Natnris Philosophia ; Dragmaticon Philnso- 
phice) and Walter of Montagne are regarded as his disciples. Adelard of 
Bath also wrote in the same spirit (De Eodem et Diver.to ; Questiones Naturales). 

Roscellinus of Armorica in Brittany came forward as teacher at various 
places, especially at Locmenach where Abelard was his hearer, and was 
obliged to retract his opinions at the Council at Soissons. Of his own writings 
only a letter to Abelard is extant (printed in the Abhandl. der bair. Akad., 1851) ; 
the sources for his doctrine are Anselm, Abelard, John of Salisbury. 

Abelard (Abeillard), the most impressive and energetic personality among 
the thinkers of this period, was born 1079 at Pallet, in the county of Nantes, 
and was a pupil of William of Champeaux and of Roscellinus. His own activity 
as a teacher was developed at Melun and Corbeil, and most successfully in 
Paris at the cathedral school, and at the logical school St. Genevieve. The 
misfortune into which his well-known relationship to Heloise plunged him, and 
the conflicts into which his teaching brought him with the Church authority, 
chiefly at the instigation of his unwearied prosecutor, Bernard of Clairvaux 

CHAP. 1.] First Period. 275 

(Synods at Soissons 1121, and Sens 1141), did not allow the restless man to 
attain complete clearness in his mind, and impelled him to seek resting-places 
in various cloisters : he died 1142 in St. Marcel, near Chalons-sur-Saone. Cf. his 
Historia Calamitatum Mearum, and his correspondence with Heloise (M. Car- 
riere, A. u. H., 2d ed., Giessen, 1853). His works have been edited by V. Cousin 
in two volumes (Paris, 1849-59). Among these the most important are his 
Dialectic, Introductio in Theologium, Theologia Christiana, Dialoyus inter 
Philosophum, Christianum e,t Judceum, the treatise Sic et Non, and the ethical 
treatise Scito Te Ipsum. Cf. Ch. d. Remusat, Abelard (2 vols., Paris, 1845). 

A number of anonymous treatises (published by V. Cousin) occupy a position 
allied to that of Abelard. Of this description are a commentary on De Interpre- 
tatioue, De Intellectibus, and De Generibus et Speciebus (the latter is possibly 
from Joscellinus, a Bishop of Soissons who died 1151). Related to Abelard is 
also the philosophico-theological position of Gilbert de la Porrfie (Gilbertus 
Porretanus, died 1154 as Bishop of Poitiers), who taught in Chartres and Paris, 
and was drawn into the prosecution of Abelard by Bernard of Clairvaux. 
Besides a commentary on the De Trinitatc and De Dnabus Naturis in Christo 
of Pseudo-Boethius, he wrote the De sex Principiis, which was much com 
mented upon later. 

The consequences of the "dialectic" that were objectionable for the Church 
showed themselves at an early date especially with Berengar of Tours (999- 
108s), whose doctrine of the Sacrament was combated by Lanfranc (1005- 
1089, Anselm s predecessor at Bee and Canterbury). The latter is probably 
the author of the treatise formerly ascribed to Anselm and printed among his 
works, Elucidarium sive Dialoyus Summam Totius Theologiae Complectens. 
In this compendium the effort first appears to give the whole compass of what 
had been established by the Church, in the form of a logically arranged text 
book, putting aside dialectical innovations. From this proceeded later the 
works of the Summists [so called from their writings which took the form of 
a "Sum" of theology], among whom the most important is Peter Lombard 
(died 1104 as Bishop of Paris). His Libri IV. Sententiartim form Vol. 192 in 
Migne. Among the earlier we may perhaps mention Robert Pulleyn (Robertus 
Pullus, died 1150) ; among the later, Peter of Poitiers (died 1205) and Alanus 
Ryssel ("aft insulin" , died 1203). Cf. on him Baumgartner (Minister, 1890). 

Gerbert (died 1003 as Pope Sylvester II.) has the merit of having pointed 
out energetically the necessity of the study of mathematics and natural science. 
He became acquainted with the work of the Arabians while in Spain and Italy, 
and acquired an amount of knowledge that made him an object of amazement 
and suspicion to his contemporaries. Cf. K. Werner, G. von Aurillac, die. 
Kirche und Wissenschaft seiner Zeit (2d ed., Vienna, 1881). Like him his 
disciple, Fulbert (died 1029 as Bishop of Chartres), called men back from 
dialectic to simple piety, and in the same spirit Hildebert of Lavardin was 
active (1057-1133, Bishop of Tours). 

The same thing was done upon a large scale by the orthodox Mysticism of 
the twelfth century. As its most zealous supporter we are met by Bernard of 
Clairvaux (1091-1 153). Among his writings those prominent are DC Cuntemptu 
Mundi, and De Gradibus fhimilifatis (ed. by Mabillon, last ed., Paris, 1839 f.). 
Cf. Neander, Der hciliije B. und seine Zeit (3d ed., 18(55) ; Morison, Life and 
Times of St. B. (Lond. 1808) ; [R. S. Storrs, B. of C. (N.Y. 1892)]. 

Mysticism became scientifically fruitful among the Victorines, the conduc 
tors of the cloister school of St. Victor, in Paris. The most important was Hugo 
of St. Victor (born 1096 as Count of Blankenburg in the Harz, died 1141). 
Annum liis works (in Migne, Vols. 175-177) the most important is De Sacra- 
mentis Fidei Christiana; for the psychology of Mysticism the most important 
works are the Soliloquium de Arrha Animce, De Area Noe and De Vanitate 
Mundi, and besides these the encyclopedic work Eruditio Didascalica. Cf. A. 
Liebner, H. v. St. V. und die tkeologiteken liichtungen seiner Zeit (Leips. 183(i). 

His pupil, Richard of St. Victor (a Scot, died 1173), wrote De Statu, De 
Kruilitinni H. mnnis Interioris, De Preparntione Animi ad Contemplationem, 
and De Gratia Contemplation in. His works form Vol. 194 in Migne. Cf. 
\V. A. Kiiulich, Die Lehren des H. und R. von St. V. (in the Abhandl. der 
Bohrn. Ges. der Wiss., 18(i3 f.). His successor. Walter of St. Victor, distin- 

276 Mediaeval Philosophy : First Period. [PART III. 

guished himself in a less scientific polemic against the heretical dialectic (7n 
Quattuor Labyrinthos Francice}. 

At the close of this period appear the beginnings of a Humanist reaction 
against the one-sidedness of the work of the schools, in John of Salisbury 
(Johannes Saresberiensis, died 1180 as Bishop of Chartres), whose writings Poli- 
craticus and Metalogicus (Migne, Vol. 199) form a valuable source for the 
scientific life of the time. Cf. C. Schaarschmidt, J. 8. nach Leben und Studien, 
Schriften und Philosophic (Leips. 1862). 

22. The Metaphysics of Inner Experience. 

The philosophy of the great Church teacher Augustine is not 
presented in any of his works as a complete system; rather, it 
develops incidentally in all his literary activity in connection with 
the treatment of various subjects, for the most part theological. 
But from this work as a whole we receive the peculiar impression 
that these rich masses of thought are in motion in two different 
directions, and are held together only by the powerful personality 
of the man. As theologian Augustine throughout all his investi 
gations keeps the conception of the Church in mind, as criterion ; as 
philosopher he makes all his ideas centre about the principle of the 
absolute and immediate certainty (Selbstgewissheit) of consciousness. 
By their double relation to these two fixed postulates, all questions 
come into active flux. Augustine s world of thought is like an 
elliptic system which is constructed by motion about two centres, 
and this, its inner duality, is frequently that of contradiction. 1 

It becomes the task of the history of philosophy to separate from 
this complicated system those ideas by which Augustine far tran 
scended his time and likewise the immediately following centuries, 
and became one of the founders of modern thought. All these ideas, 
however, have their ultimate ground and inner union in the prin 
ciple of the immediate certainty of inner experience (selbstgewissen 
Innerlichkeit) , which Augustine first expressed with complete clear 
ness, and formulated and used as the starting-point of philosophy. 
Under the influence of the ethical and religious interest, metaphys 
ical interest had become gradually and almost imperceptibly shifted 
from the sphere of the outer to that of the inner life. Psychical 
conceptions had taken the place of physical, as the fundamental 
factors in the conception of the world. It was reserved for Augus 
tine to bring into full and conscious use, this, which had already 
become an accomplished fact in Origen and Plotinus. 2 

1 It is unmistakable that Augustine himself in the course of his development 
transferred the emphasis of his personality more and more from the philosophi 
cal to the Church centre. This comes forward with especial distinctness in his 
backward look over his own literary activity, the lietractationes. 

2 Aug. De Ver. Eel. 39, 72. Noli foras ire ; in te ipsum redi : IN INTERIORS 
HOMINK habitat veritas. 

CHAP. 1, 22.] Metaphysics of Inner Experience : Augustine. 277 

This tendency toward inner experience even constitutes his pecu 
liar literary quality. Augustine is a virtuoso in self-observation 
and self-analysis ; he has a mastery in the portrayal of psychical 
states, which is as admirable as is his ability to analyse these in 
reflection and lay bare the deepest elements of feeling and impulse. 
Just for this reason it is from this source almost exclusively that 
he draws the views with which his metaphysics seeks to compre 
hend the universe. So there begins, as over against the Greek 
philosophy, a new course of development, which indeed, during 
the Middle Ages, made but little progress beyond what was achieved 
by Augustine in his first cast, and the full development of which is 
not to be found until the modern period. 

1. This makes its appearance clearly already in Augustine s 
doctrine of the starting-point of philosophical knowledge. In cor 
respondence with the course of his personal development he seeks 
the way to certainty through doubt, and in this process, sceptical 
theories themselves must break the path. At first, to be sure, with 
the indomitable thirst of his ardent nature for happiness, he 
strikes down doubt by the Socratic postulate that the possession of 
truth (without the presupposition of which there is also no proba 
bility) is requisite for happiness, and therefore is to be regarded as 
attainable : but with greater emphasis he shows that even the 
sceptic who denies the external reality of the content of perception, 
or at least leaves it undecided, can yet not involve in doubt the 
internal existence of the sensation as such. But instead of con 
tenting himself with the relativistic or positivistic interpretations 
of this fact, Augustine presses forward just from this basis to victo 
rious certainty. He points out that together with the sensation 
there is given not only its content, which is liable to doubt in one 
direction or another, but also the reality of the perceiving subject, 
and this certainty which consciousness has in itself follows first of 
all from the very act of doubt. In that I doubt, or since I doubt, 
he says, I know that I, the doubter, am : and thus, just this doubt 
contains within itself the valuable truth of the reality of the con 
scious being. Even if I should err in all else, I cannot err in this ; 
for in order to err I must exist. 1 

This fundamental certainty extends equally to all states of con- 

1 Augustine attributed fundamental importance to this line of argument, 
which he frequently worked out (De Be,ata Vita, 7; Solil. II. 1 ff. ; De Ver. 
Eel. 72 f. ; De Trin. X. 14, etc.). That it, however, was not completely 
unknown to Greek literature also is proved by the passage (III. 6 f.) of the 
compilation current under the name of "Metaphysics of Herennios." The 
source of this passage has not as yet been discovered, but is probably late Stoic. 
Cf. on this E. Heitz in Sitz.-Ber. der Berl. Ak. d. W., 1889, pp. 1167 ff. 

278 Mediceval Philosophy : First Period, [PART III. 

sciousness (cogitare), and Augustine sought to show that all the 
various kinds of these states are already included in the act of 
doubt. He who doubts knows not only that he lives, but also that 
he remembers, that he knows, and that he wills : for the grounds 
of his doubt rest upon his former ideas ; in estimating the momenta 
of the doubt are developed thought, knowledge, and judgment; and 
the motive of his doubt is only this, that he is striving after truth. 
Without particularly reflecting upon this, or drawing farther con 
clusions from it, Augustine proves in this example his deep insight 
into the psychical life, since he does not regard the different kinds 
of psychical activity as separate spheres, but as the aspects of one 
and the same act, inseparably united with one another. The soul 
is for him and by this he rises far above Aristotle, and also above 
the Neo-Platonists the living whole of personality, whose life is 
a unity, and which, by its self-consciousness, is certain of its own 
reality as the surest truth. 

2. But from this first certainty Augustine s doctrine at once 
leads farther, and it is not only his religious conviction, but also 
a deep epistemological reflection, that makes him regard the idea 
of God as immediately involved in the certainty which the indi 
vidual consciousness has of itself. Here, too, the fundamental 
fact of doubt is of authoritative importance ; in this case, also, it 
already contains implicitly the full truth. How should we come 
to question and doubt the perceptions of the external world which 
force themselves upon us with such elementary power, asks Augus 
tine, if we did not possess, besides these, and from other sources, 
criteria and standards of truths by which to measure and examine 
these perceptions ? He who doubts must know the truth, for only 
for its sake does he doubt. 1 In reality, continues the philosopher, 
man possesses, besides sensation (sensus), the higher capacity of 
reason (intellectus, ratio), i.e. of the immediate perception of incor 
poreal truths ; 2 under the latter Augustine understands, not only 
the logical laws, but also the norms of the good and the beautiful ; 
in general, all those truths not to be attained by sensation, which 
are requisite to elaborate and judge what is given, the principles 
of judging. 3 

1 De Ver. Eel. 39, 72 f. 

2 Aspectus animi, quo per se ipsum non per corpus verum intuetur : De Trin. 
XII. 2, 2. Cf. Contra Acad. III. 13, 29. 

3 The apprehension of these intelligible truths by human consciousness was 
at the first designated by Augustine quite Platonically dva/avT/crts. It was ortho 
dox scruples against the assumption of the pre-existence of the soul that led 
him to regard the reason as the intuitive faculty for the incorporeal world. Cf. 
also J. Stortz, Die Philosophic des hi. Auyustinus (Freiburg i. B. 1882). 

CHAP. 1, 22.] Metaphysics of Inner Experience : Augustine. 279 

Such norms of reason assert themselves as standards of judg 
ment in doubt as in all activities of consciousness ; but they 
transcend, as something higher, the individual consciousness into 
which they enter in the course of time : they are the same for all 
who think rationally, and experience no alteration in this their 
worth. Thus the individual consciousness sees itself attached in its 
own function to something universally valid and far reaching. 1 

But it belongs to the essence of truth that it is or exists. Augus 
tine also proceeds from this fundamental conception of the ancient, 
as of every nai ve theory of knowledge. But the Being or existence 
of those universal truths, since they are absolutely incorporeal in 
their nature, can be thought only as that of the Ideas in God 
after the Neo-Platonic mode ; they are the changeless Forms and 
norms of all reality (principales formce vel rationes rerum stabiles 
atque incommutabiles, qu&lt;x, in divino intellect u continentur) , and the 
determinations of the content of the divine mind. In him they 
are all contained in highest union ; he is the absolute unity, the all- 
embracing truth ; he is the highest Being, the highest Good, perfect 
Beauty (unum, verum, bonum). All rational knowledge is ulti 
mately knowledge of God. Complete knowledge of God, indeed, 
even according to Augustine s admission, is denied to human insight 
in the earthly life. Perhaps only the negative element in our idea 
of him is completely certain ; and, in particular, we have no ade 
quate idea of the way in which the different elements of divine 
truth which the reason beholds are united in him to form the 
highest real unity. For his incorporeal and changeless essence 
(essentia) far transcends all forms of relation and association that 
belong to human thought ; even the category of substance applies 
to him as little as do the rest. 2 

3. Directly consistent as these thoughts are with Neo-Platonism, 3 
their Christian character is yet preserved in Augustine s presenta 
tion by the fact that the religious idea of the deity as absolute 
personality is inseparably fused with the philosophical conception 
of the deity as the sum and essence of all truth. But just for this 
reason the whole Augustinian metaphysics is built up upon the 

1 Df Lib. Arb. II. 7 ff. 

2 The essential thing in this is the insight, that the categories acquired in 
knowing Nature are inadequate for the peculiar nature of spiritual synthesis 
(according to which the divine essence should be thqught). The new categories 
of internality are, however, with Augustine only in the process of coming into 
existence ; cf. the following. 

8 In fact, Augustine seeks throughout to identify the voOs of Plotinus with the 
X Vyos of Origen ; but by dropping from the Neo-Platonic doctrine the emanistic 
derivation of the voOj and its acquirement of independent existence, he abrogates 
the physical schema of the world potencies in favour of the psychical. 

280 MedicBval Philosophy : First Period. [PART IIL 

self-knowledge of the finite personality ; that is, upon the fact of 
inner experience. For so far as a comprehension of the divine 
essence is at all possible for man, it can be gained only after the 
analogy of human self-knowledge. This, however, shows the fol 
lowing fundamental composition of the inner life : the permanent 
existence of spiritual Being is given in the sum-total of its content 
of consciousness, or reproducible ideas ; its movement and living 
activity consists in the processes of uniting and separating these 
elements in judgments ; and the impelling force in this motion is 
the will, directed toward the attainment of highest blessedness. 
Thus the three aspects of psychical reality are idea ( Vorstellung), 
judgment, and will : memoria, intellectus, voluntas, 1 and Augustine is 
expressly on his guard against conceiving of these modes of func 
tioning which are peculiar to personality, as the properties of 
bodies are conceived. Just as little do they mean different strata 
or spheres of its existence ; they form in their indissoluble unity 
the substance of the soul itself. In accordance with these relations 
thus recognised in man s mental life, Augustine then not only seeks 
to gain an analogical idea of the mystery of the Trinity, but recog- 
. nises, also, in the esse, nosse, and velle the fundamental determina 
tions of all reality. Being, knowing, and willing comprise all 
reality, and in omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness, the 
deity encompasses the universe. 

The outspoken opinion of the inadequacy of the physical (Aristotelian) 
categories reminds us only seemingly of Neo-Platonism, whose intelligible cate 
gories (cf. p. 245), as well as its entire metaphysical schema, are throughout 
physical. It is Augustine who is first in earnest in the attempt to raise the 
peculiar forms of relation characteristic of the inner nature, to metaphysical 
principles. Aside from this, his cosmology runs on in the track laid by Xeo- 
Platonism without peculiarities worthy of mention. The doctrine of the two 
worlds, with its anthropological correlates, forms here the presupposition. 
The world of sense is known through perceptions, the intelligible world through 
the reason, and these two given constituents of knowledge are brought into 
relation with each other by intellectual thought (ratiocinatio) . For apprehend 
ing Nature, the teleology conditioned by the doctrine of Ideas presents itself. 
The corporeal world also is created out of nothing by divine power, wisdom, and 
goodness, and bears in its beauty and perfection the sign of its origin. Evil 
(including moral evil, yet cf. below) is here, too, nothing properly real ; it is 
not a thing, but an act; it has no causa efficiens, but only a causa deficiens; 
its origin is to be sought not in the positive Being (God), but in the lack of 
Being of finite natures ; for these latter, as having been created, possess only 
a weakened and therefore a defective reality. Augustine s theodicy stands thus 
essentially upon the ground of that of Origen and Plotinus. 

4. A farther and essential consequence of placing philosophy 
upon a consciously anthropological basis is, in Augustine s case, the 
central position which he assigned in his theory of the universe to 

1 The same triple division of the psychical activities is found among the 
Stoics. Cf. p. 187. 

CHAP. 1, 22.] Metaphysics of Inner Experience: Augustine. 281 

the will. The leading motive in this is doubtless the man s own 
experience; himself a nature ardent and strong in will, as he exam 
ined and scrutinised his own personality he came upon the will as 
its inmost core. On this account the will is for him the essential 
element in all : omnes nihil aliud quam voluntates sunt. 

In his psychology and theory of knowledge this is shown especially 
in the fact that he seeks to set forth on all sides the controlling 
position of the will in the entire process of ideation and knowledge. 1 
While with reference to sense perception the Neo-Platonists had 
distinguished between the state of corporeal stimulation and the 
becoming conscious of the same, Augustine demonstrates by an 
exact analysis of the act of seeing, that this becoming conscious is 
essentially an act of will (intentio animi). And as physical atten 
tion is accordingly a matter of the will, so too the activity of the 
inner sense (sensus interior) shows a quite analogous dependence 
upon the will. Whether we bring our own states and actions as 
such to our consciousness or not, depends as truly upon voluntary 
reflection as does the intentional consideration of something which 
belongs to our memory, and as does the activity of the combining 
fantasy when directed toward a definite goal. Finally, the thinking 
of the intellect (ratiocinatio), with its judging and reasoning, is 
formed completely under the direction of the purposes of the will ; 
for the will must determine the direction and the end according to 
which the data of outer or inner experience are to be brought under 
the general truths of rational insight. 

In the case of these cognitions of rational insight the relation 
assumes a somewhat more involved form, for in its relation to this 
higher divine truth the activity of the human mind cannot be given 
the same play as in the case of its intellectual relation to the outer 
world and to its own inner world. This is true even on philosophi 
cal grounds, for according to the fundamental metaphysical scheme 
the active part in the causal connection must belong to the more 
universal as the higher and more efficient Being (Sein). The rela 
tion of the human mind to this truth, which is metaphysically its 
superior, can in the main be only a passive one. The knowledge of 
the intelligible world is for Augustine also, essentially illumination, 
revelation. Here, where the mind stands in the presence of its crea 
tor, it lacks not only the creative, but even the receptive initiative. 
Augustine is far from regarding the intuitive knowledge of the 
intelligible truths as possibly an independent production of the 

1 Cf. principally the eleventh book of the treatise De Trinitate, and besides, 
especially W. Kahl, Die Lehre vom Primat des Willens bei Augustinus, Duns 
Scotus und Descartes (Strassburg, 1880). 

282 Mediceval Philosophy : First Period. [PART III. 

mind out of its own nature; indeed, he cannot even ascribe to it the 
same spontaneity of attention or of directing its consciousness 
(intentio) that he ascribes to the empirical cognitions of outer and 
inner perception : he must, on the contrary, regard the illumination 
of the individual consciousness by the divine truth as essentially an 
act of grace (cf. below), in the case of which the individual con 
sciousness occupies an expectant and purely receptive attitude. 
These metaphysical considerations, which might also have been 
possible upon the basis of Neo-Platonism, experience in Augustine s 
case a powerful reinforcement by the emphasis which he laid in his 
theology upon the divine grace. Knowledge of the truths of reason 
is an element in blessedness, and blessedness man owes not to his 
own will, but to that of God. 

Nevertheless Augustine here, too, sought to save a certain co 
operation for the will of the individual, at least at first. He not 
only emphasises that God bestows the revelation of his truths upon 
him only, who through good endeavour and good morals, i.e. through 
the qualities of his will, shows himself a worthy subject for this 
revelation ; he teaches also that the appropriation of divine truth is 
effected not so much by insight, as through faith or belief. Faith 
or belief, however, as ideation plus assent, though without the act 
of conception, presupposes indeed the idea of its object, but contains 
in the factor of assent, which is determined by no intellectual com 
pulsion, an original volitional act of the affirming judgment. The 
importance of this fact extends so far, in Augustine s opinion, that 
not only in divine and eternal things, but also in the human and 
earthly and temporal things, this conviction produced immediately 
by the will yields the original elements of thought. The insight 
which conceives and comprehends grows out of these elements by 
means of the combining reflective procedure of the understanding. 
Thus even in the most important things, i.e. in questions of salva 
tion, faith in the divine revelation and in its appearance in the tradi 
tion of the Church faith dictated by the good will must precede 
the knowledge which appropriates and comprehends it intellectually. 
Full rational insight is indeed first in dignity, but faith in revelation 
is the first in time. 

5. In all these considerations of Augustine, the central point 
is the conception of the freedom of the will, as a decision, choice, or 
assent of the will, independent of the functions of the understand 
ing, not conditioned by motives of cognition, but rather determining 
these motives without grounds in consciousness for its acts, and 
Augustine faithfully exerted himself to maintain this conception 
against various objections. In addition to the consciousness of 

CHAP. 1, 22.] Metaphysics of Inner Experience: Augustine. 283 

ethical and religious responsibility, it is principally the cause of 
the divine justice that he here aims to defend : and, on the other 
hand, most of his difficulties arise from the attempt to unite un 
caused action whose opposite is alike possible and objectively think 
able, with the divine prescience. He helps himself here by appealing 
to the distinction between eternity (timelessness) and time. In an 
extremely acute investigation l he maintains that time has real sig 
nificance only for the functions of inner experience as they measure 
and compare : its significance for outer experience also arises only 
in consequence of this. The so-called foreknowledge of the deity, 
which is in itself timeless, has as little causally determining power 
for future events as memory has for those of the past. In these 
connections, Aristotle is justly regarded as one of the most zealous 
and forcible defenders of the freedom of the will. 

But in opposition to this view, championed essentially with the 
weapons of former philosophy, there now appears in Augustine s 
system another line of thought, increasing in force from work to 
work, which has its germ in the conception of the Church and in 
the doctrine of its redeeming power. Here the principle of histor 
ical universality encounters victoriously the principle of the abso 
lute certainty of the individual mind. The idea of the Christian 
Church, of which Augustine was the most powerful champion, is 
rooted in the thought that the whole human race is in need of re 
demption. This latter idea, however, excludes the completely unde 
termined freedom of the will in the individual man ; for it requires 
the postulate that every individual is necessarily sinful, and therefore 
in need of redemption. Under the overpowering pressure of this 
thought, Augustine set another theory by the side of his theory of 
freedom of the will which was so widely carried out in his philo 
sophical writings ; and this second theory runs counter to the first 
throughout. 

Augustine desires to solve the question as to the origin of evil, 
which is so important for him personally, and to solve it in 
opposition to Manichaeism by the conception of the freedom of 
the will, in order to maintain in this, human responsibility and 
divine justice; but in his theological system it seems to him to be 
sufficient to restrict this freedom of will to Adam, the first man. 
The idea of the substantial oneness of the human race an idea 
which was a co-operating element in the faith in the redemption of 
all by the one Saviour permitted likewise the doctrine that in 

1 In the eleventh book of the Confessions. Cf. C. Fortlage, A. De Tempore, 
Doctrina (Heidelberg, 1836). 

284 Mediceval Philosophy : First Period. [PART III. 

the one man Adam all humanity had sinned. By the abuse of this 
freedom of the will on the part of the first man, the whole human 
nature has been so corrupted that it cannot do otherwise than sin 
(non posse non peccare) . This loss of freedom applies without ex 
ception, to the whole race arising from Adam. Every man brings 
with him into the world this corrupted nature which is no longer 
capable of good in its own strength or freedom, and this inherited 
sin is the punishment for original sin. Just from this it follows 
that all men, without exception, are in need of redemption and of 
the Church s means of grace. One as little as another deserves to 
receive this grace : therefore, thinks Augustine, no injustice can 
be seen in the fact that God bestows this grace, to which no one 
has any claim, not upon all, but only upon some ; and it is never 
known upon whom. But, on the other hand, the divine justice 
demands that, at least in the case of some men, the punishment for 
Adam s fall should be permanently maintained, that these men, 
therefore, should remain excluded from the working of grace and 
from redemption. Since, finally, in consequence of their corrupted 
nature, all are alike sinful and incapable of any improvement of 
themselves, it follows that the choice of the favoured ones takes 
place not according to their worthiness (for there are none worthy 
before the working of grace), but according to an unsearchable 
decree of God. Upon him whom he will redeem he bestows his 
revelation with its irresistible power : he whom he does not choose, 
he can in nowise be redeemed. Man in his own strength cannot 
make even a beginning toward the good : all good comes from God 
and only from him. 

In the doctrine of predestination, accordingly (and this is its philo 
sophical element), the absolute causality of God suppresses the free 
will of the individual. The latter is refused both metaphysical 
independence and also all spontaneity of action ; the individual is 
determined either by his nature to sin or by grace to the good. So 
in Augustine s system two powerful streams of thought come into 
violent opposition. It will always remain an astonishing fact that 
the same man who founded his philosophy upon the absolute and 
independent certainty of the individual conscious mind, who threw 
the plummet of the most acute examination into the depths of inner 
experience and discovered in the will the vital ground of spiritual 
personality, found himself forced by the interests of a theological 
controversy to a theory of the doctrine of salvation which regards 
the acts of the individual will as unalterably determined conse 
quences, either of a general corruption or of the divine grace. 
Individualism and universalism in the conception of psychical reality 

CHAP. 1, 22.] Metaphysics of Inner Experience : Augustine. 285 

stand here in bald opposition, and their clashing contradiction is 
scarcely concealed by the ambiguity of the word " freedom," which, 
in the one line, is defended according to its psychological meaning, 
in the other, according to its ethico-religious meaning. The oppo 
sition, however, of the two motives of thought which here lie side by 
side so irreconcilable, had influence in the succeeding development 
of philosophy until long past the Middle Ages. 

6. In the light of the doctrine of predestination the grand picture 
of the historical development of humanity, which Augustine drew 
in the manner and spirit of the old patristic philosophy, takes on 
dark colours and peculiarly stiff, inflexible forms. For if not only 
the course of the history of salvation taken as a whole, but also, 
as in Augustine s system, the position which every individual is to 
occupy within it, has been previously fixed by divine decree, one 
cannot rid one s self of the gloomy impression that all man s voli 
tional life in history, with all its thirst for salvation, sinks to a 
play of shadows and puppets, whose result is infallibly fixed from 
the beginning. 

The spiritual world throughout the whole course of history falls 
apart, for Augustine, into two spheres, the realm of God and the 
realm of the devil. . To the former belong the angels that have not 
fallen, and the men whom God has chosen for his grace ; the other 
embraces, together with the evil demons, all those men who are not 
predestined to redemption, but are left by God in the state of sin and 
guilt : the one is the kingdom of heaven, the other that of the world. 
The two occupy in the course of history a relation like that of two 
different races which are mingled only in outer action, while in 
ternally they are strictly separate. The community of the elect has 
no home on earth ; it lives in the higher unity of divine grace. The 
community of the condemned, however, is divided within itself by 
discord; it fights in earthly kingdoms for the illusory worth of 
power and rule. Christian thought at this stage of development 
is so little able to master the reality presented by the world, that 
Augustine sees in the historical states only the provinces of a com 
munity of sinners in hostility to God, condemned to quarrel with 
one another. For him, in fact, the kingdom of God is still not of 
this world ; and the Church is for him the saving institution of the 
divine kingdom, which enters the temporal life. 

The course of the world s history under these presuppositions 
is so conceived that we find a division entering between the two 
realms, which becomes sharper and sharper in the course of history, 
and ultimately results in the complete and definitive separation of 
the same. In six periods, which correspond to the creative days of 

286 Mediaeval Philosophy : First Period. [PART III. 

the Mosaic cosmogony and are attached to dates of Israelitic his 
tory, Augustine constructs his history of the world. In this process, 
he combines a depreciatory estimate of the Roman world with slight 
understanding of the essential nature of the Grecian. The decisive 
point in this development is for him, also, the appearance of the 
Saviour, by which not only the redemption of those chosen by grace 
is brought to completion, but also their separation from the children 
of the world. With this begins the last world-period, whose end will 
be the Judgment : then after the stress of conflict shall enter the Sab 
bath, the peace of the Lord but peace only for the elect ; for those 
not predestined to salvation will then be completely separated from 
the saints, and entirely given over to the pain of their unhappiness. 

However spiritually sublime (though never without attendant 
physical imagery) the conception of happiness and pain here pre 
sented, and this sublimity is especially noteworthy in the thought 
of unhappiness as a weakening of Being, due to the lack of divine 
causality, the dualism of the Good and the Evil is yet unmistak 
ably, for Augustine, the final issue of the world s history. The man 
assailed by so many powerful motives of thought has not overcome 
the Manichwism of his youthful belief; he has taken it up into 
Christian doctrine. Among the Manichasans the antithesis of 
good and evil is held to be original and indelible : with Augustine 
this antithesis is regarded as one that has come into being, and yet 
as one that is ineradicable. The omnipotent, omniscient, supremely 
benevolent God has created a world which is divided forever into 
his own realm and that of Satan. 

7. Among the complicated problems and ideas of universal his 
torical importance which Augustinianism contains, there is still one 
to be brought forward. It lies in the conception of blessedness itself 
in which all motives of his thought cross. For, strongly as Augus 
tine recognised in the will the inmost motive energy of human 
nature, deeply as he penetrated the striving after happiness as the 
impelling motive of all psychical functions, he yet remained firmly 
convinced that the satisfaction of all this stress and urging is to be 
found only in beholding divine truth. The highest good is God ; but 
God is the truth, and one enjoys truth by beholding it and resting in 
its contemplation. All urging of the will is but the path to this 
peace in which it ceases. The last task of the will is to be silent in 
the gracious working of divine revelation, to remain quiet when 
the vision of truth, produced from above, comes over it. 

Here are united in common opposition to individualism of will, 
the Christian idea of the absolute causality of God, and the contem 
plative mysticism of the Neo-Platonists. From both sides, the same 

CHAP. 1, 23.] Controversy over Universal^. 287 

tendency is at work to bring about the conception of man s sanctifi- 
cation as a working of God in him, as a becoming filled and illumined 
by the highest truth, as a will-less contemplation of the one, infinite 
Being. Augustine, indeed, worked out forcibly the practical conse 
quences which the working of grace should have in the earthly life, 
purification of the disposition and strictness in the conduct of life, 
and just in this is shown the comprehensive breadth of his personal 
nature and his spiritual vision. He develops the vigorous energy of 
his own combative nature into an ethical doctrine, which, far re 
moved from the asceticism of Neo-Platonism with its weariness of 
life, sets man in the midst of the world-battle between Good and 
Evil as a brave fighter for the heavenly kingdom. But the highest 
reward which beckons this fighter for God is yet, for Augustine, not 
the restless activity of the will, but the rest of contemplation. For 
the temporal life, Augustine demands the full and never-resting 
exertion of the struggling and acting soul ; for eternity he offers the 
prospect of the peace of becoming absorbed in divine truth. He 
indeed designates the state of the blessed as the highest of the 
virtues, as love 1 (charitas), but in the eternal blessedness where the 
resistance of the world and of the sinful will is no longer to be over 
come, where love has no longer any want that must be satisfied, 
there this love is no longer anything other than a God-intoxicated 
contemplation. 

In this duality, also, of the Augustinian ethics, old and new lie 
close together. With the tense energy of will which is demanded 
for the earthly life, and with the transfer of the ethical judgment 
so as to make it apply to the inner disposition, the modern man 
appears ; but in the conception of the highest goal of life the ancient 
ideal of intellectual contemplation retains the victory. 

Here lies in Augustine s doctrine itself a contradiction with the 
individualism of the will, here at a decisive point an Aristotelian, 
Neo-Platonic element maintains itself, and this internal opposition 
unfolds itself in the formation of the problems of the Middle Ages. 

23. The Controversy over Universals. 

Johannes Saresberiensis, Metalogicus, II. cap. 17 f. 

J. H. Lowe, Der Kampf zwischen Nnminalismus und Realismus im Mittel- 
alter, sein Ursprung und sein Verlauf (Prague, 1876). 

The schooling in formal logic which the peoples that entered 
upon the scientific movement at the beginning of the Middle Ages 

1 In his system the three Christian virtues, faith, hope, and love, are placed 
above the practical and dianoetic virtues of Greek ethics. 

288 Mediaival Philosophy : First Period. [TAUT III. 

were obliged to undergo, developed in connection with the question 
as to the logical and metaphysical significance of genera and species 
(universalia) . But it would be a grave mistake to suppose that this 
question had only the didactic value of serving as a subject for 
mental drill, in connection with which the rules of conceptional 
thought, division, judgment, and inference, were impressed for cen 
turies upon ever new and increasing throngs of scholars. On the 
contrary, the tenacity with which the science of the Middle Ages 
and it is significant that this occurred independently in the Orient 
as well as in the Occident held fast to the elaboration of this 
problem in endless discussions, is rather in itself a proof that in this 
question a very real and very difficult problem lies before us. 

In fact, when Scholasticism, in its timorous beginnings, made the 
passage in Porphyry s Introduction 1 to the Categories of Aristotle 
which formulated this problem, the starting-point of its own first 
attempts at thought, it hit with instinctive sagacity upon precisely 
the same problem which had formed the centre of interest during 
the great period of Greek philosophy. After Socrates had assigned 
to science the task of thinking the world in conceptions, the ques 
tion how the class-concepts, or generic conceptions, are related to 
reality, became, for the first time, a chief motive of philosophy. It 
produced the Platonic doctrine of Ideas and the Aristotelian logic ; 
and if the latter had as its essential content (cf. 12) the doctrine 
of the forms in which the particular is dependent upon the uni 
versal, it is easy to understand that even from so scanty remains 
and fragments of this doctrine as were at the service of the earliest 
Middle Ages, the same problem must arise with all its power for the 
new race also. And it is likewise easy to understand that the old 
enigmatic question worked upon the nai ve minds of the Middle 
Ages, untrained in thought, in a manner similar to that in which it 
worked upon the Greeks. In fact, the delight in logical dispute, as 
this developed after the eleventh century at the schools of Paris, 
finds its counterpart as a social phenomenon only in the debates of 
the philosophers at Athens, and in these latter, too, as numerous 
anecdotes prove, the question as to the reality of universals, which 
was connected with the doctrine of Ideas, played a leading part. 

Nevertheless the problem was renewed under conditions that 
were essentially less favourable. When this question emerged for 
the Greeks, they possessed a wealth of proper scientific experience 

1 The formulation of the problem in the translation of Bogthius is as follows : 
" . . . de (/eneribus et speciebus sive sitbsistant sire in nolis nitdis intellectibus 
posita sint, sive. subsistentin corporalia an incur/iornlia, et utrum separata a 
sensibilibus an in sensibilibus posita et circa hcnc consistentia. . . ." 

CHAP. 1, 23.] Controversy over Universal* : Scotus Erigena. 289 

and a store of real information and knowledge, which, if not always, 
yet for the most part and on the whole, prevented them from mak 
ing their discussion solely a game with the abstractions of formal 
logic. But mediaeval science, especially in its beginnings, lacked 
just this counterpoise, and on this account was obliged to move so 
long in a circle with the attempt to construct its metaphysics out 
of purely logical considerations. 

That the Middle Ages, in their turn, engaged and persisted so 
pertinaciously in this controversy which had previously been waged 
principally between Plato and the Cynics, and afterward between 
the Academy, the Lyceum, and the Stoa, was not due solely to the 
fact that in consequence of the defective character of their tradi 
tions the thinkers of the Middle Ages knew as good as nothing of 
those earlier debates ; it had yet a deeper ground. The feeling of 
the peculiar, intrinsic worth of personality, which had gained so 
powerful expression in Christianity and especially in the Augustin- 
ian doctrine, found the liveliest echo and the strongest sympathy 
among precisely those tribes which were called to become the new 
bearers of civilisation ; and in the hearts of these same peoples 
surged also the youthful delight in richly coloured reality, in the 
living, particular appearance. But with the Church doctrine they 
received a philosophy which, with the measured calm of Greek 
thought, conceived the essential nature of things to lie in universal 
connections, a metaphysics which identified the stages of logical 
universality with intensities of Being of varying worths. In this 
lay an inconsistency which covertly asserted itself, even in Augus- 
tinianism, and became a constant stimulus for philosophical reflec 
tion. 

1. The question as to the individual s ground of Being or exis 
tence, from which mediaeval thought never became free, was the 
more natural for it just at its beginning in proportion as the Neo- 
Platonic metaphysics still maintained itself under the veil of a 
Christian mysticism. Nothing could be more adapted to call out 
the contradiction of a natural individualism than the high degree 
of consistency with which Scotus Erigena carried through the funda 
mental thoughts of the Neo-Platonic Realism. Perhaps no philoso 
pher has expressed more clearly and frankly than he the final 
consequences of the metaphysics which, from the standpoint of the 
Socratic-Platonic principle that the truth, and therefore also Being, 
is to be sought in the universal, identifies the stages of universality 
with those of the intensity and priority of Being. The universal 
(the class-concept or logical genus) appears here as the essential and 
original reality, which produces from itself and contains within itself 

290 MedicKval Philosophy : First Period. [PART III. 

the particular (the species and ultimately the individual). The 
universals are, therefore, not only substances (res; hence the name 
" Realism"), but, as contrasted with the corporeal individual things, 
they are the more primitive, the producing and determining sub 
stances ; they are the more Real substances, and they are the more 
Real in proportion as they are the more universal. In this conception, 
therefore, the logical relations of concepts immediately become 
metaphysical relations ; formal arrangement contains real signifi 
cance. Logical subordination becomes changed into a production 
and inclusion of the particular by the general ; logical partition and 
determination become transformed into a causal process by means 
of which the universal takes on form and unfolds itself in the 
particular. 

The pyramid of concepts, thus raised to a metaphysical signifi 
cance, culminates in the concept of the deity as the most universal. 
But the last product of abstraction, the absolutely universal, is that 
which has no determinations (of. p. 250). Hence this doctrine 
becomes identical with the old "negative theology," according to 
which we can predicate of God only what he is not ; 1 and yet here, 
too, this highest Being is designated, quite in accord with the 
thought of Plotinus, as the "uncreated, but self-creating Nature." 
For this most universal Being produces out of itself all things; 
these, therefore, contain nothing else than its manifestations, and 
are related to it as particular specimens or instances are to the 
class ; they are in it and exist only as its modes of appearance. 
The result of these presuppositions is thus a logical pantheism : all 
things of the world are " theophanies " ; the world is God developed 
into the particular, proceeding out of himself to take on a definite 
form (deus explicitas). God and the world are one. The same 
"Nature" (&lt;wris) is, as creative unity, God, and as created plurality, 
the world. 

The process of unfolding (egressus) proceeds in the graded scale 
of logical universality. Out of God comes at first the intelligible 
world as "the Nature which is created and itself creates," the realm 
of universals, of Ideas which (as vdi in the sense of Plotinus) form 
the working forces in the sensuous world of phenomena. The 
Ideas are built up as a heavenly hierarchy according to their various 
grades of universality, and therefore also of intensity of Being, and 
in connection with this thought Christian Mysticism constructs a 

1 In carrying out this Philonic thought (cf. p. 237) the Church Fathers had 
already employed a course of thought which proceeds by successive abstraction 
to the concept of God as the undetermined. Cf., e.g., Clement Alex. Strum. 
V. 11 (689). 

CHAP. 1, 23.] Controversy over Universals : Scotus Eriyena. 291 

doctrine of angels after a Neo-Platonic pattern. But in every case 
beneath the mythical covering the important thought is really 
active, that real dependence consists in logical dependence ; the 
logical consequence, by which the particular follows from the 
general, is spuriously substituted for the causal relation. 

Hence, then, even in the world of the senses, it is only the uni 
versal that is properly active and efficient : corporeal things, as a 
whole, form the " Nature which is created and does not itself 
create." 1 In this world the individual thing is not as such active; 
it is rather active according to the proportion of universal attri 
butes which attain manifestation in it. The individual thing of 
sense, accordingly, possesses the least force of Being, the weakest 
and completely dependent species of reality : the . Neo-Platonic 
Idealism is maintained by Scotus Erigeria in full. 

To the stages of unfolding corresponds in a reverse order the 
return of all things into God (regressus), the resolution of the 
world of individual forms into the eternal primitive Being, the dei 
fication of the world. So thought, as the final goal of all genera 
tion and change, as the extinction of all that is particular, God is 
designated as " the Nature which neither is created nor creates " : 
it is the ideal of motionless unity, of absolute rest at the end of the 
world-process. All theophanies are destined to return into the 
unity of the divine All-Being, that unity which knows no dis 
tinctions. Thus, even in the final destiny of things, the superior 
reality of the universal, which swallows up all that is particular, 
preserves itself. 

2. As in antiquity (cf. 11, 5), so here, in consequence of the 
effort to assure truth and reality to universals, the peculiar thought 
of a graded scale of Being appears. Some things (universals), is 
the doctrine, are more than others (particulars). " Being" is looked 
upon as, like other qualities, capable of comparison, of increase and 
diminution ; it belongs to some things more than to others. So it 
became the custom to think that the concept of Being (esse, existere) 
has a relation to that which is (essentia), and a relation of different 
degrees of intensity, just as other marks and qualities are related 
to the objects in which they are formed. As a thing possesses more 
or less extension, force, permanence, so it has also more or less 
"Being"; and as it can receive or lose other qualities, so it can 
receive or lose that of Being. This line of thought, peculiar to 
Realism, must be kept in mind to understand a great number of the 

1 It need only be briefly mentioned that this "division of Nature" obviously 
recalls the Aristotelian distinction of the unmoved mover, the moved mover, 
and that which neither moves nor is moved. Cf. 13, 5. 

292 Mediceval Philosophy : First Period. [PART III. 

metaphysical theories of the Middle Ages. It explains, in the first 
place, the most important doctrine which Realism produced, the 
ontological argument for the existence of God which Anselm of Can 
terbury brought forward. 

The more universality, the more Keality. From this it follows 
that if God is the most universal being, he is also the most Real ; 
if he is the absolutely universal being, he is also the absolutely Real 
being, ens realissimum. He has, therefore, according to the concep 
tion of him, not only the comparatively greatest Reality, but also 
absolute Reality ; that is, a Reality than which a greater and higher 
cannot be thought. 

But through the whole development which this line of thought 
had already taken in antiquity, we find that the worth-predicate of 
perfection was inseparably fused with the conception of Being. 
The degrees of Being are those of perfection ; the more anything 
is, the more perfect it is, and, vice versa, the more perfect anything 
is, the more it is. 1 The conception of the highest Being is, there 
fore, also that of an absolute perfection ; that is, of a perfection such 
that it cannot be thought higher and greater : ens perfectissimum. 

In accordance with these presuppositions, Anselm is perfectly 
correct in his conclusion that, from the mere conception of God as 
most perfect and most real Being, it must be possible to infer his 
existence. But to do this he attempts various modes of proof. In 
his Monologium he follows the old cosmological argument that 
because there is Being at all, a highest and absolute Being must 
be assumed from which all else that exists has its Being, and which 
itself exists only from itself, according to its own essential nature 
(aseitas). Whereas every individual existent entity can be also 
thought as non-existent, and therefore owes the reality of its essence 
not to itself, but to another (the Absolute), the most perfect Being 
can be thought only as being or existent, and exists accordingly 
only by virtue of the necessity of its own nature. God s essence 
(and only God s) involves his existence. The nerve of this argu 
ment is thus ultimately the Eleatic basal thought, eortv etvcu, Being 
is, and cannot be thought otherwise than as being or existing. 

Anselm, however, involved this same thought in a peculiar com 
plication, while he intended to simplify it and render it independent 
in itself. In the Proslogium he entered upon the ontological argu 
ment, properly so called, which maintains that without any reference 
to the Being of other things, the mere conception of the most per- 

1 A principle which lies at the basis of Augustine s theodicy, in so far as with 
both the existent is held to be eo ipso good, and the evil, on the contrary, as not truly existent. 

CHAP. 1, 23.] Controversy over Univermh : Anselm. 293 

feet Being involves its Reality. Inasmuch as this conception is 
thought, it possesses psychical reality : the most perfect being is as 
a content in consciousness (esse in intellectu). But if it existed 
only as a content in consciousness, and not also in metaphysical 
reality (esse etiam in re), a still more perfect being could evidently 
be thought, which should possess not only psychical, but also meta 
physical reality ; and thus the former would not be the most perfect 
being possible. It belongs, accordingly, to the conception of the 
most perfect being (quo majus cogitari non potest) that it possesses 
not only reality in thought, but also absolute reality. 

It is obvious that Anselm in this formulation was not fortunate 
in his shift, and that what hovered before him attained in this 
proof but a very awkward expression. For it takes little acuteness 
to see that Anselm proved only that if God is thought (as most 
perfect being), he must be thought also necessarily as being or 
existent, and cannot be thought as non-existent. But the ontologi- 
cal argument of the Proslogium did not show even in the remotest 
degree that God, i.e. that a most perfect being, must be thought. 
The necessity for this stood fast for Anselm personally, not only 
because of the conviction of his faith, but also by the cosmological 
argumentation of the Monologium. When he believed that he 
could dispense with this presupposition and with the help of the 
mere conception of God arrive at the proof of his existence, he 
exemplified in typical manner the fundamental idea of Realism, 
which ascribed to conceptions without any regard to their genesis 
and basis in the human mind, the character of truth, i.e. of 
Reality. It was on this ground alone that he could attempt to 
reason from the psychical to the metaphysical reality of the concep 
tion of God. 

The polemic of Gaunilo, therefore, in a certain respect hit the 
vulnerable point. He argued that according to the methods of 
Anselm, in quite the same manner the reality of any idea whatever, 
e.g. that of an island, if the mark of perfection were only included 
within it, might be proved. For the most perfect island, if it were 
not really in existence, would evidently be surpassed in perfection 
by the real island, which should possess the same other marks; the 
former would be inferior to the latter in the attribute of Being. 
But instead of showing in his rejoinder, as might have been ex 
pected, that the conception of a perfect island is a completely unnec 
essary arbitrary fiction, or that this conception contains an inner 
contradiction, while the conception of the most real being is neces 
sary and not contradictory, Anselm expatiates further upon his 
argument, that if the most perfect being is in the intellect, it must 
be also in re. 

294 Mediaeval Philosophy : First Period. [PART III. 

However slight the cogency of this attempted proof remains for 
him who does not, as Anselm does without acknowledging it, regard 
the conception of an absolute Being as a necessity of thought, the 
ontological argument is yet valuable as the characteristic feature of 
mediseval Realism, of which it forms the most consistent expression. 
For the thought that the highest being owes its reality only to its 
own essential nature, and that therefore this reality must be capable 
of being proved from its conception alone, is the natural conclusion 
of a doctrine which traces the Being of things of perception back to 
a participation in conceptions, and again within the conceptions 
themselves sets up a graded scale of reality, employing the degree 
of universality as the standard. 

3. When now the question arose as to the kind of reality which 
belongs to universals, and as to their relation to the individual 
things known to the senses, mediaeval Realism found itself involved 
in difficulties quite similar to those which had faced the Platonic 
Realism. The thought of a second, higher, immaterial world, which 
at that former period had to be born, was now indeed received as a 
complete and almost self-evident doctrine, and the religiously dis 
posed thinking could be only sympathetic in its attitude toward the 
Nee-Platonic conception of the Ideas as contents of the divine mind. 
Following the pattern of the Platonic Timseus, whose mythical mode 
of presentation was favourable to this conception, Bernard of 
Chartres sketched an imaginative cosmogonic work of fantastic 
grotesqueness, and we find with his brother Theodoric, attempts, sug 
gested by the same source, to construct a symbolism of numbers, 
which undertook not only, as was done in other instances, to develop 
the dogma of the Trinity, but also to develop further fundamental 
metaphysical conceptions out of the elements of unity, likeness, and 
unlikeness. 1 

In addition to this question concerning the archetypal reality of 
the Ideas in the mind of God, the question is also, what significance 
is to be conceded to them in the created world. Extreme Realism, 
as it had been maintained at the outset by William of Champeaux, 
taught the full substantiality of the class-concept in this world also ; 
the universal is present in all its individuals as the undivided 
essence, everywhere identical with itself. The class accordingly 
appears as the unitary substance, and the specific marks of the indi 
viduals belonging to it appear as the accidents of this substance. 
It was Abelard s objection that according to this theory mutually 
contradictory accidents would have to be ascribed to the same sub- 

1 Cf. the extracts in Haureau, Hist. d. I. ph. sc., I. 396 ff. 

CHAP. 1, 23.] Controversy over Universals : Realism. 295 

stance, which first forced the defender of Realism to give up this 
extreme position and restrict himself to the defence of the proposi 
tion, that the class exists in the individuals, individualiter; 1 i.e. 
that its universal, identical essence clothes itself in each particular 
example in a particular substantial Form. This view was in touch 
with the conception of the Neo-Platonists, which had been main 
tained by Boethius and Augustine and also occasionally mentioned 
in the literature of the intervening period, and its exposition moves 
readily in the Aristotelian terminology, according to which the 
universal appears as the more indeterminate possibility which 
realises itself in individuals by means of their peculiar Forms. 
The conception is then no longer substance in the proper sense, but 
the common substratum which takes on different forms in individ 
ual instances. 

Walter of Mortagne sought to remove the difficulty in another 
way, by designating the individualising of the classes or genera to 
species, and of the species to individual things, as the entering of 
the substratum into different states (status), and yet regarding 
these states as realiter specialising determinations of the universal. 

In both these lines of thought, however, Realism was only with 
difficulty held back from a final consequence which at the first lay 
in nowise within the purpose of its orthodox supporters. The re 
lation of the universal to the particular might be regarded as the 
self-realising of the substratum into individual Forms, or as its 
specialisation into individual states, in either case one came ulti 
mately in the ascending line of abstract conceptions to the idea of 
the ens generalissimtim, whose self-realisations, or whose modified 
states, formed in descending line the genera, species, and individuals, 
i.e. to the doctrine that in all phenomena of the world only the one 
divine substance is to be seen. Pantheism inhered in the blood of 
Realism by reason of its Neo-Platonic descent and was always 
making its appearance here and there; and opponents like Abelard 
did not fail to cast this consequence in the face of Realism. 

Meanwhile realistic pantheism did not come to be expressly 
maintained in this period; on the other hand, Realism in its theory , 
of universals found an instrument for establishing some of the | 
fundamental dogmas, and therefore rejoiced in the approbation of 
the Church. The assumption of a substantial reality of the logi 
cal genera not only seemed to make possible a rational exposi 
tion of the doctrine of the Trinity, but also, as was shown by 
Anselm and Odo (Odardus) of Cambrey, proved to be a fit phil- 

1 For the reading " indifferenter," cf. Lowe, op. cit., 49 ff., and Cl. Bauuikcr, 
Arch. f. Gesch. d. Ph., X. 257. 

296 Mediceval Philosophy : First Period. [PART III. 

osophical basis for the doctrines of inherited sin and vicarious 
satisfaction. 

4. On the same grounds, we find at first the reverse lot befalling 
Nominalism, which during this period remained more repressed and 
stifled. Its beginnings l were harmless enough. It grew out of the 
fragments of Aristotelian logic, in particular out of the treatise De 
Categoriis. In this the individual things of experience were desig 
nated as the true "first" substances, and here the logico-grammatical 
rule was propounded that "substance" could not be predicate in 
a judgment: res non predicatur. Since now the logical significance 
of universals is essentially that of affording the predicates in the 
judgment, (and in the syllogism), it seemed to follow this the 
commentary Super Porphyrium had already taught that univer 
sals could not be substances. 

What are they, then ? It could be read in Marcianus Capella that 
a universal was the comprehension of many particularities by one 
name (nomen), by the same word (vox); but a word, Boethius had 
defined as a "motion of the air produced by the tongue." With 
this all elements of the thesis of extreme Nominalism were given : 
universals are nothing but collective names, common designations 
for different things, sounds (flatus vocis), which serve as signs for a 
multiplicity of substances or their accidents. 

In what degree the thus formulated Nominalism, which in this 
extreme form must have ignored even the real occasions for such 
collective names, was actually propounded and defended during that 
period 2 can no longer be determined. 3 But the metaphysics of indi 
vidualism which corresponds to such a theory of knowledge meets us 
clearly and firmly with the claim that only individual things are to 
be regarded as substances, as truly real. This was doubtless most 
sharply expressed by Roscellinus, when he presented it in a two 
fold aspect : as the comprehension of many individuals under the 
same name is only a human designation, so, too, the distinguishing 
of parts in individual substances is only an analysis for human 
thought and communication ; 4 the truly real is the individual thing, 
and that alone. 

1 Cf. C. S. Barach, Zur Geschichte de.s Nominalismus vor Roscellin (Vienna, 
1866). 

2 It is certain that this did not as yet occur in the beginnings of Nominalism 
(with Eric of Auxerre, with the author of the commentary Super Porphyrium, 
etc.), for with these writers we find at the same time the expression of Boethius 
that genus is substantialis similitude* ex diversis speciebus in cogitation? collecta. 

3 John of Salisbury says (Policr. VII. 12 ; cf. Metal. II. 17) that this opinion 
vanished again with its author lloscellinus. 

4 The example of the house and its wall, which, according to Abelard (Ouvr. 
Ined. 471), he employed in this connection, was certainly the most unfortunate 
that could be thought of. How inferior such considerations are to the begin 
nings of Greek thought! 

CHAP. 1, 23.] Controversy over Universal* : Nominalism. 297 

The individual, however, is that which is given in the world of 
sensible reality ; hence for this metaphysics, knowledge consists 
only in the experience of the senses. That this sensualism appeared 
in the train of Nominalism, that there were men who allowed their 
thinking to go on entirely in corporeal images, we are assured, not 
only by Anselm, but also by Abelard : but who these men were 
and how they carried out their theory we do not learn. 

This doctrine became momentous through its application to theo 
logical questions by Berengar of Tours and Roscellinus. The one 
contested, in the doctrine of the Sacrament, the possibility of the 
transmutation of the substance while the former accidents were 
retained ; the second reached the consequence that the three persons 
of the divine Trinity were to be looked upon as three different 
substances, agreeing only in certain qualities and workings (tri- 
theism). 

5. In the literary development of these antitheses Realism passed 
current as Platonic, Nominalism as Aristotelian. The latter desig 
nation was evidently much more distorted than the former, but 
when we consider the defective nature of the transmitted material, 
we can understand that the mediating tendencies which thrust 
themselves in between Realism and Nominalism introduced them 
selves with the endeavour to harmonise the two great thinkers of 
antiquity. Of such attempts, two are chiefly worthy of mention : 
from the party of Realism the so-called Indifferentism, from that of 
Nominalism the doctrine of Abelard. 

As soon as Realism abandoned the doctrine of the separate 
existence of the concepts (the Platonic ^o&gt;ptcr/xos) and supported 
only the " universalia in re," the tendency asserted itself to con 
ceive of the different stages of universality as the real states of one 
and the same substratum. One and the same absolute reality is, in 
its different " status," animate being, man, Greek, Socrates. As the 
substratum of these states the moderate Realists regarded the uni 
versal, and ultimately the ens realissimum; it was therefore a 
significant concession to Nominalism when others made the indi 
vidual the supporter of these states. The truly existent, these 
latter thinkers conceded, is the individual thing, but the individual 
thing supports within itself as essential determinations of its own 
nature certain qualities and groups of qualities which it has in 
common with others. This real similarity (consimilitudo) is the 
indifferent ("not different ") element in all these individuals, and 
thus the genus is present in its species, the species in its indi 
vidual examples, in diffe renter. Adelard of Bath appears as the 
chief supporter of this line of thought, yet it must have had a 

298 Mediceval Philosophy : First Period. [PART in. 

wider extension, perhaps with a somewhat stronger nominalistic 
accent. 1 

6. But it was Abelard 2 with his all-sided activity who formed 
the vigorous centre in the controversy over universals. The pupil 
and at the same time the opponent both of Roscellinus and of 
William of Champeaux, he fought Nominalism and Realism each 
by means of the other, and since he takes the weapons of his 
polemic now from the one side now from the other, it could not fail 
to result that his position should be interpreted and judged oppo 
sitely. 3 And yet the outlines of this position are clear and dis 
tinct before us. In his polemic against all kinds of Realism, the 
thought that the logical consequence of Realism is pantheism 
returns so frequently and energetically that we must see in it, not 
merely a convenient weapon for use in the ecclesiastical conditions 
then prevailing, but rather the expression of an individualistic con 
viction easy to understand in the case of a personality so energetic, 
self-conscious, and proudly self-reliant. But this individuality had 
at the same time its inmost essence in clear, sharp, intellectual 
activity, in genuine French rationality. Hence its no less powerful 
opposition against the sensualistic tendencies of Nominalism. 

Universals, Abelard teaches, cannot be things, but just as little 
can they be mere words. The word (vox) as a complex of sounds, 
is indeed something singular ; it can acquire universal meaning only 
mediately, by becoming a predicate (serrao). Such an employment 
of a word for a predicate is possible only through conceptional 
thought (conceptus), which, by comparing the contents of percep 
tion, gains that which is by its nature adapted to become a predicate 
(quod de pluribus natum est prcedicari) . 4 The universal is then the 
conceptual predicate (Sermonism) , or the concept itself (Conceptual- 
ism). 5 But if the universal as such gains its existence first in 
thought and judgment, and in the predicate which is possible only 
by this means, and exists only there, it is not therefore entirely 
without relations to absolute reality. Universals could not be the 
indispensable forms of all knowledge, as they in fact actually are, 
if there "vyere not something in the nature of things which we 

1 According to the statements in the treatise De Generibus et Speciebus and 
the communications of Abelard in his gloss on Isagoge. It seems, too, that Wil 
liam of Champeaux inclined toward Indifferentism at the last. 

2 Cf. S. M. Deutsch, Peter Abaelard, ein kritischer Theolog. des zwolften 
Jahrhnnderts (Leips. 1883). 

8 Thus Hitter makes him a Realist ; Haureau, a Nominalist. 

* Cf. Arist. De Interpr. 7, 17 a 39. 

5 It seems that Abelard at different times emphasised sometimes the one 
alternative, sometimes the other, and perhaps his school also developed differ 
ently in accordance with these two lines of thought. 

CHAP. 1, 23.] Controversy over Universals : Abelard. 299 

apprehend and predicate in these universals. This something is the 
likeness or similarity (conformitas) of the essential characteristics 
of individual substances. 1 Not as numerical or substantial identity, 
but as a multiplicity with like qualities, does the universal 
exist in Nature, and it becomes a unitary concept which makes 
predication possible, only when it has been apprehended and con 
ceived by human thought. Even Abelard, however, explains this 
likeness of character in a multiplicity of individuals upon the 
hypothesis that God created the world according to archetypes which 
he carried in his mind (noys). Thus, according to his view, the 
universals exist firstly, before the things, as conceptus mentis in God ; 
secondly, in the things, us likeness of the essential characteristics of 
individuals; thirdly, after things, in the human understanding as its 
concepts and predicates acquired by comparative thought. 

Thus, in Abelard the different lines of thought of the time 
become united. But he had developed the individual elements of 
this theory incidentally, partly in connection with his polemic, and 
perhaps, also, at different times with varying emphasis on this or 
that element : a systematic solution of the whole problem he never 
gave. As regards the real question at issue he had advanced so far 
that it was essentially his theory that became the ruling doctrine in 
the formula accepted by the Arabian philosophers (Avicenna), "uni- 
versalia ante multiplicitatem, in multiplicitate et post multiplidtatem ; " 
to universals belongs equally a significance ante rem as regards the 
divine mind, in re as regards Nature, and post rem as regards human 
knowledge. And since Thomas and Duns Scotus in the main agreed 
in this view, the problem of universals, which, to be sure, has not 
yet been solved, 2 came to a preliminary rest, to come again into the 
foreground when Nominalism was revived (cf. 27). 

1 Others, who in the main had the same thought, e.g. Gilbert de la Porree, 
aided themselves with the Aristotelian distinction between first and second 
substances, or between substance and subsistence ; yet Gilbert uses the latter 
terms in a changed meaning as compared with their use by Abelard. 

2 Kven if the problem as to the universals be restricted, according to the 
mode of Scholasticism, to the reality of the class-concepts, the problem has 
gone through essentially new phases in its further development, and cannot be 
regarded as finally solved by the position taken by science to-day. Behind this, 
however, rises the more general and more difficult question, what metaphysical 
significance belongs to those universal determinations, in a knowledge of which 
all explanatory science practically consists. Cf. H. Lotze, Logik (Leips. 1874), 
313-321. [Kng. tr. ed. by B. Bosanquet, Oxford and N.Y. 1888.] 

To the investigators of to-day, therefore, who would throw the controversy 
over universals to the lumber pile of past theories, or treat it as a long-outgrown 
children s disease, so long as they do not know how to state with complete 
certainty and clearness in what consists the metaphysical reality and efficiency 
of that which we call a law of Nature, we must still cry, " mutato nomine de te 
fnltiln narrata." Cf., also, (). Leibmann, Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit (2d 
ed., Strassburg, 1880), 313 ff., 471 ff., and Gedanken und Thatsachen (1 Heft, 
Strassburg, 1882), 89 ff. 

300 Mediaeval Philosophy : First Period. [PART ILL 

7. But Abelard has a still greater significance than that due to 
this central position in the controversy over universals, for he mani 
fested in his own person, and expressed in typical form, the attitude 
which the dialectic, unfolding in connection with that controversy, 
occupied in the mental and spiritual life of that time. He is, so 
far as it was possible within the limits of the ideas of his time, the 
spokesman of free science, the prophet of the newly awakened im 
pulse toward real and independent knowledge. Abelard (and with 
him Gilbert) is first of all a rationalist ; thought is for him the norm 
of truth. Dialectic has the task of distinguishing between true 
and false. He may, indeed, subject himself to revelation preserved 
in tradition, but, he says, we believe divine revelation only because it 
is reasonable. Hence dialectic has, in his case, no longer really the 
task which Anselm, following Augustine, prescribed it, of making 
the content of faith comprehensible for the intellect ; he demands 
for it also the critical right of deciding in doubtful cases according 
to its own rules. Thus, in the treatise "Sic et Non" he set the 
views of the Church Fathers over against each other to their recip 
rocal disintegration dialectically, in order to find at last what is 
worthy of belief only in what is capable of proof. So, too, in his 
Dialogus, the cognising reason appears as judge over the various 
religions, and while Abelard regards Christianity as the ideal con 
summation of the history of religions, there are expressions in his 
works x in which he reduces the content of Christianity to the origi 
nal moral law, which was re-established by Jesus in its purity. 
From this standpoint, too, Abelard was the first to win once more 
a free, unbiassed view for the interpretation of antiquity. Little 
as he knew of them, he was an admirer of the Greeks ; he sees in 
their philosophers Christs before Christianity, and regarding men 
like Socrates and Plato as inspired, he asks (reversing the thought 
of the Church Fathers, cf. p. 223, note 5) whether religious tradi 
tion may not perhaps have been partly created by these philoso 
phers. Christianity is regarded by him as the philosophy of the 
Greeks made democratic. 

Abelard, like almost all the " Enlighteners " of the Middle Ages, 2 
was an obedient son of the Church. But if this fact were to put us 
in error as to the significance of his personality in the line just 
mentioned, a significance rather for the history of religion and 
civilisation than as producing something philosophically new, it 
would be sufficient to take into account the attacks which he met. 

1 Cf. the evidence for what follows in Reuter, Gesch. der Aufklarung im 
f.-A., I. 183 ff. 
2 A. Harnack, Dogmengeschichte, III. 322. 

CHAP. 1, 24.] Dualism of Body and Soul. 301 

In fact, his controversy with Bernard of Clairvaux is the conflict of 
knowledge with faith, of reason with authority, of science with the 
Church. And if Abelard lacked ultimately the weight and staying 
power of personality to prevail in such a contest, 1 it will be remem 
bered, on the other hand, that a science such as the twelfth century 
could offer even aside from the external power to which the 
Church at that time had attained must have been inferior to the 
mighty inward strength of faith, even if it had not been supported 
by so great and high a personality. For that bold postulate, so full 
of the future, that only unprejudiced scientific insight should deter 
mine faith, what means did it then possess for its fulfilment ? 
Its only means were the hollow rules of dialectic ; and the content 
which this science had to exhibit, it owed just to that tradition 
against which it rebelled with its intellectualistic criticism. This 
science lacked the material strength to carry out the part to which 
she felt herself called ; but she set herself a problem which, while 
she herself was not able to solve it, has never again vanished from 
the memory of European peoples. 

We hear, indeed, of the disturbing practices of those who would 
have everything treated only " scientifically " ; 2 complaints multiply 
after the time of Anselm over the growing rationalism of the Zeitgeist, 
over the evil men who will believe only what they can comprehend 
and prove, over the Sophists who, with impudent dexterity, know 
how to dispute pro et contra, over the " deniers," who from ration 
alists are said to have become materialists and nihilists ; but not 
even the names of the men who answer to this description have 
been preserved, to say nothing of their doctrines. And just this 
lack in proper material of its own was the reason that the dialectic 
movement, whose prince was Abelard, in spite of all its zeal and all 
its acuteness, ran out and became exhausted without direct and 
immediate results. 

24. The Dualism of Body and Soul. 

On these grounds it is explicable that in the twelfth and, in part, 
even in the eleventh century, we find the feeling of the unfruitful- 
ness of dialectic as widely extended as the feverish impulse to 
attain through it to true knowledge. A tendency that indicates 
disillusion is manifested in this period by the side of the ardent 
desire for knowledge. Discontented with the subtilties of dialectic, 
which, even in men like Anselm, had laid itself under obligation to 

1 Cf. Th. Ziegler, AbaelarcTs Ethica, in Strassburg. Abh. z. Philos. (Freiburg, 
1884), p. 221. 

2 " Puri philosophi." 

302 Mediaeval Philosophy : First Period. [PART III. 

place the ultimate mysteries of faith upon a rational basis, some 
plunged from unfruitful theory into practical life, " in das Rauschen 
der Zeit, ins Rollen der Begebenheit," into the rush of time, the 
rolling of events, others plunged into a revelry in supra-rational 
Mysticism ; others, finally, into diligent work in empirical research. 
All the opposites, into which an intellectual activity that is predom 
inantly logical can pass over, develop by the side of dialectic, and 
take their position against it in a more or less firmly concluded 
league, Practice, Mysticism, and Empiricism. 

There resulted from this at first a peculiarly distorted relation to 
scientific tradition. Aristotle was known only as the father of 
formal logic and master of dialectic, and in consequence of this igno 
rance was regarded as the hero of the purely intellectual mode of 
considering the world. Plato, on the contrary, was known partly 
as the creator of the doctrine of Ideas (unwittingly falsified in 
accordance with Neo-Platonic processes), partly, by virtue of the 
preservation of the Timceus, as the founder of a philosophy of 
Nature whose fundamental teleological character found the live 
liest assent in religious thought. Hence when Gerbert, as a counter 
poise against the pride of dialectic in which he himself had at first 
made some not very successful attempts, commended the study of 
Nature, to which he had been stimulated by the example of the 
Arabians, and which corresponded to his own vigorous practical 
bent toward active life, he could count on approval for this en 
deavour only among men who, like him, were working toward an 
extension of material information, and who, in aid of this, were 
appropriating the results of ancient researches. Thus the return to 
antiquity makes here its first appearance as the source of material 
knowledge in opposition to the Aristotelian dialectic, a first weak 
Renaissance which, half humanistic, half naturalistic, aims to gain 
a living content of knowledge. 1 Gerbert s disciple, Fulbert (died 
1029), opened the school of Chartres, which, in the following period, 
became the seat of the Platonism that was intimately associated 
with the study of Nature. Here worked the brothers Theodoric 
and Bernard of Chartres ; from this school William of Conches 
received his tendency. In their writings the powerful stimulus of 
classical antiquity unites with the interest of an active and vigorous 

1 The cloister Monte Cassino in Italy formed one of the main seats of this 
movement. Here (about 1050) the monk Constantinus Africanus worked, who, 
as is known to have been the case also with the I latonist Adelard of Bath, 
gathered his learning on his journeys in the Orient, and was especially active 
in the translation of medical treatises by Hippocrates and Galen. The effects 
of the activity in this cloister are shown not only in literature, but also in the 
founding of the famous school of Salerno in the middle of the twelfth century. 

CHAP, l, 24.] Body and Soul : School of Chartres. 303 

knowledge of Nature. We see here one of the most peculiar shift- 
ings that have occurred in the history of literature. Plato and 
Aristotle have exchanged their roles : the latter appears as the ideal 
of an abstract science of conceptions, the former as the starting- 
point for a concrete knowledge of Nature. The knowledge of ex 
ternal reality that meets us in this period of mediaeval science is 
attached to the name of Plato. So far as there is a natural science 
in this age, it is that of the Platonists, of a Bernard of Chartres, 
of a William of Conches, and their associates. 1 

But this disposition toward concrete reality, which makes the 
Platonists of the Middle Ages conspicuous as contrasted with the 
high-soaring metaphysics of the dialecticians, assumed still another 
form, which was much more valuable. Incapable as yet of gaining 
from outer experience better results than those already at its hand 
in the transmitted Greek science, the empirical impulse of the 
Middle Ages directed its activity to the investigation of the mental 
life, and unfolded the full energy of real observation and acute 
analysis in the domain of inner experience in psychology. This is 
the field of scientific work in which the Middle Ages attained the 
most valuable results. 2 In this, the experience of practical life as 
well as that of the sublimest piety was filled with a substantial con 
tent, and as such set itself in opposition to the dialectical play of 
conceptions. 

1. The natural leader in this field was Augustine, whose psychologi 
cal views exercised a mastery that was the stronger in proportion as 
his views were interwoven with the current religious conviction, and 
in proportion, also, to the slight extent to which the Aristotelian 
psychology was known. But Augustine had maintained in his 
system the complete dualism which regarded the soul as an imma 
terial substance, and man as a union of two substances, body and 
soul. Just for this reason he could riot expect to gain a knowledge 
of the soul from .its relations to the body, and took with full con 
sciousness of his procedure the standpoint of inner experience. 

The new principle of method which had thus arisen from meta 
physical presuppositions could unfold itself undisturbed so long as 
the monistic metaphysical psychology of the Peripatetic school re- 

1 This humanistic natural science of the early Middle Ages was not at all 
discriminating in its adoption of ancient tradition ; so, for example, if we may 
trust the account of Walter of St. Victor (in the extracts made by Bulaeus, 
Miyne, Vol. 190, p. 1170), William of Conches regarded an atomistic conception 
of Nature as capable of union with his Platonism. (Migne, Vol. 90, pp. 1132 ff.). 

* Cf. for this and for what follows (as also for 27, later) the articles by 
II. Siebeck in Vols. I.-III. of the Archiv fur Geschichtc der Philosophic, and 
also in Vols. U3, 94, Zeitschrift fur Philos. u. philos. Krit. (1888-90). 

304 Mediaeval Philosophy : First Period. [PART TIL 

mained unknown. And this unfolding was furthered emphatically 
by those needs which brought the Middle Ages to psychology. 
Faith sought knowledge of the soul for the purpose of the soul s 
salvation, and this salvation was found just in those transcendent 
activities through which the soul, estranged from the body, strives 
toward a higher world. It was, therefore, principally the Mystics 
who sought to spy out the secrets of the inner life, and thus became 
psychologists. 

Weightier and philosophically more significant than the individual 
doctrines propounded in this line, which were often very fantastic 
and hazy, is the fact that by means of these and connected theories, 
the dualism of the sensuous and super-sensuous worlds was maintained 
in its full strength, and thus formed a strong counterpoise to the 
Neo-Platonic monism. But it was not destined to exercise this 
metaphysical influence till later: at first, in the more limited form 
of the anthropological dualism of body and soul, it became the 
starting-point for psychology as the science of inner experienced 

It is, therefore, a very noteworthy phenomenon that the sup 
porters of this psychology as " natural science of the inner sense," 
as it was later called, are precisely the same men who are faithfully 
exerting themselves to gain a knowledge of the outer world from all 
available material. Having turned away from dialectic, they seek a 
knowledge of what is real in experience, a philosophy of Nature ; 
but they divide this into two completely separated fields, physica 
corporis and physica animce. Among the Platonists the preference 
for the study of external Nature is predominant, among the Mystics 
that for the study of the internal Nature. 2 

2. But we must regard as the characteristic, the essentially new 
and beneficial mark of this empirical psychology, the endeavour, 
not only to classify the psychical activities and states, but to appre 
hend them in the living stream of mental life, and to comprehend 
their development. These men in their pious feelings, in their 
struggles for the enjoyment of divine grace, were conscious of an 
inner experience, of a history of the soul, and were impelled to write 
this history ; and while in so doing they used Platonic, Augustinian, 

1 Cf. also K. Werner, Kosmologie und Naturlehre des scholastischen Mit- 
telalters, mit specielle.r Be.ziehnng auf Wilhelm von Conches ; and Der Entwick- 
lungsgang der mittelalterlichen Psychologie von Alcuin bis Albertus Magnus 
(off-prints from the SitzungsberirMen (Vol. 75), and Denkschriften (Vol. 25) 
respectively of the Vienna Acad., 1876). 

* Nevertheless it must be mentioned that Hugo of St. Victor not only shows 
an encyclopaedic knowledge in his Eruditio DtdcucaliGO, but also shows that he 
is acquainted, even to the most exact detail, with the teachings of ancient medi 
cine, particularly with the theories of physiological psychology (explanation of 
perceptions, temperaments, etc.). 

CHAP. 1, 24.] Body and Soul : Victorines. 305 

and Neo-Platonic conceptions in motley mixture to designate in 
dividual facts, the essential and decisive point is that they under 
took to exhibit the development of the inner life. 

These Mystics, who were not seeking a metaphysics but already 
possessed one in their faith, were not much troubled by the ques 
tion which later became so important, of how this duality of body 
and soul should be understood. Hugo of St. Victor is indeed con 
scious that though the soul is lowest in the immaterial world, and 
the human body highest in the material world, the two are yet so 
opposite in constitution that their union (unio) remains an incom 
prehensible enigma ; but he thinks that in this very fact God has 
shown, and desired to show, that for him nothing is impossible. 
Instead of racking their brains dialetically upon this point, the 
Mystics rather assume this dualism as a presupposition, in order to 
isolate the soul for their scientific consideration, and to observe its 
inner life. 

This life, however, is, for Mysticism, a development of the soul to 
God, and so this first form of the psychology of the inner sense is the his 
tory of salvation in the individual soul. The Mystics regarded the soul 
essentially as Gemiith ["heart," the seat of sentiment and feeling, 
rather than intellect]. They show the development of its vital pro 
cess out of the feelings, and prove their literary virtuosoship in their 
depicting of the states and movements of feeling. They are also 
the genuine successors of Augustine in examining, in their analysis 
of this process, the motive forces of the will, in investigating the 
decisions of the will, by virtue of which faith conditions the course 
of knowledge, and finally in the fact that they ultimately regard as 
the highest stage in the soul s development the mystical contempla 
tion of God, which, to be sure, is here held to be the same with love. 
Such, at least, was the activity of the two Victorines, Hugo and 
Richard, who were completely sustained by the spirit of science, 
while in the case of Bernard of Clairvaux, the practical factor of the 
will is much more strongly emphasised. Bernard is unwearied in 
denouncing as heathenish that pure impulse after knowledge for its 
own sake which comports with all the virtues and vices, and yet, 
even for him, the last of the twelve stages of humility is that 
ecstasy of deification with which the individual disappears in the 
eternal essence, " as the drop of water in a cask of wine." 

The psychology of knowledge, also, is built up with the Victorines 
\ipon Augustinian lines. Three eyes are given to man, the eye of 
flesh to know the corporeal world, the eye of reason to know himself 
in his inner nature, the eye of contemplation to know the spiritual 
world and the deity. While, then, according to Hugo, cogitatio, 

306 Mediaeval Philosophy : First Period. [PART III. 

meditatio, and contemplatio are the three stages of intellectual activ 
ity, the degree to which he emphasises the co-operation of the imag 
ination (imaginatio) in all kinds of knowledge is interesting and 
characteristic of his personality. Even contemplation is a visio 
intelledualis, a mental beholding which alone grasps the highest 
truth undistorted, while thought is not capable of this. 

Old and new are thus variously mingled in the writings of the 
Victorines. Fantasies of mystic rapture force their way amid the 
most acute observations and the most delicate portrayals of the psy 
chical functions. The method of self-observation doubtless falls here, 
too, into the danger of leading to Schwarmerei, 1 or ecstatic enthusi 
asm ; but, on the other hand, it wins much fruit of its own, it 
breaks up the soil for the research of the future, and, above all, it 
marks off the field on which modern psychology is to grow. 

3. This new science received support and enrichment likewise 
from quite another direction : a side-result of the controversy over 
universals and that, too, not the worst result came to its aid. 
When Nominalism and Conceptualism combated the doctrine that 
universals exist in themselves, and declared the species and genera 
to be subjective creations in the knowing mind, the duty fell on 
them of making intelligible the process by which these universal 
ideas arise in the human mind. They found themselves thus sent 
directly to the empirical study of the development of ideas, and sup 
plemented the sublime poesy of the Mystics with results which were 
indeed sober and dry, but all the more valuable on that account. 
For, just because the matter in hand required an exhibition of the 
origin of purely subjective contents of thought, which were to be 
explained as the products of man s development in time, this inves 
tigation could become only a contribution to the psychology of inner 
experience. 

The very thesis of extreme Nominalism afforded its opponents 
occasion to treat the relation of word to thought, and in the case of 
Abelard led to a searching investigation of the co-operating activity 
that belongs to language in connection with the development of 
thought. The question as to the meaning of signs and designations 
in the movement of ideas was by this means raised anew. A still 
deeper entrance into the heart of theoretical psychology was made 
by the investigation which is conducted as to the necessary connec 
tion between intellect and perception in the treatise De Intellectibus. 
It is here shown how sensation, as confused idea (confusa conceptio), 
enters into the perception (imaginatio) which grasps and holds it 

1 Cf. Kant, Anthropologie, 4. 

CHAP. 1, 24.] Body and Soul : John of Salisbury. 307 

together with others, and remains preserved reproducible in this 
imagination; how, then, the understanding by successively running 
through this manifold material (discursive activity) elaborates it to 
concepts and judgments ; and how, after all these conditions have 
been fulfilled, opinion, faith, arid knowledge arise, in which ulti 
mately the intellect knows its object in a single collective perception 
or intuition (intuitive activity). 

In a similar way John of Salisbury set forth the process of 
psychical development : but in his case the tendency peculiar to the 
Augustinian conception of the soul asserts itself most strongly, the 
tendency to regard the different forms of activity not as strata 
lying above one another or beside one another, but as ways of 
functioning in which the same living unity manifests itself. He 
sees already in the sensation, and in a higher degree in perception 
or imagination, an act of judgment; and as union of the newly 
entering sensations with those which are reproduced, imagination 
contains at the same time the emotional states (passiones) of fear 
and hope. Thus out of imagination as fundamental psychical state 
develops a twofold series of states of consciousness ; in the 
theoretical series appear first, opinion, and by comparison of 
opinions, knowledge and rational conviction (ratio), both in con 
nection with prudence (prudentia), which is an operation of the 
will; finally, by virtue of the striving after calm wisdom (sapientia), 
we have the contemplative knowledge of the intellect; in the 
practical series are given the feelings of pleasure and pain with all 
their diversifications in the changing states of life. 

Thus with John we have indicated the whole programme of the 
later associational psychology in which his countrymen were to 
become leaders. And he may be regarded as their prototype not 
only in his problems, but also in the mode of their treatment. He 
keeps at a distance from the speculations of dialectic that were so 
alien to the active world ; he has the practical ends of knowledge 
in his mind, he desires to find his way in the world in which man 
is to live, and above all in man s actual inner life, and brings with 
him into philosophy a fineness and freedom of mind character 
istic of the man of the world, such as aside from him we do not find 
at that time. He owes this in no small degree to the education of 
the taste and of sound cosmopolitan thought which classical studies 
afford ; and in this, too, his countrymen have followed him, not to 
their injury. He is the precursor of the English Enlightenment as 
Abelard is of the French. 1 

1 Renter, op. cit.. II. 80, sets thus Roger Bacon and Abelard over against each 
other ; yet precisely the decisive tendency of empirical psychology is present 
more strongly in the case of John. 

308 Mediaeval Philosophy : First Period. [PART III. 

4. We notice finally Abelard s ethics as a peculiar side-phenomenon 
in this process of making more rigid the contrast of outer and inner,, 
and of transferring the scientific first principle to the inner nature. 1 
Its very title, Scito Te Ipsum, announces it as a science based on 
inner experience, and its importance consists just in the fact that 
here for the first time ethics is again treated as a proper philo 
sophical discipline, and freed from dogmatic metaphysical efforts. 2 
This is true of this ethics although it, too, proceeds from the 
Christian consciousness of sin as its fundamental fact. But here 
it strives to go at once to the heart of the matter. Good and evil, 
it says, consist not in the outward act, but in the action s inner 
cause. Nor yet do they consist in the thoughts (suggestio), feelings, 
and desires (delectatio) which precede the decision of the will, but 
solely in this resolve or consent to the deed (consensus). For the 
inclination (voluntas), founded in the whole natural disposition and 
in part in the bodily constitution, which may lead toward good or 
evil, is not itself in the proper sense good or evil. Fault or error 
(vitium) to this Abelard reduces inherited sin becomes sin 
(jpeccatum) only through the consensus. But if this is present, the 
sin is fully and completely there with it, and the bodily executed 
action with its external consequences adds nothing ethically. 

The essence of the moral is thus placed by Abelard solely in the 
resolve of the will (animi intentio). But what now is the norm 
according to which this resolve of the will is to be characterised as 
good or evil ? Here, too, Abelard rejects with contempt all external 
and objective determination by a law ; he finds the norm of judg 
ment solely within the deciding individual, and it consists in the 
agreement or non-agreement with the conscience (conscientia) . That 
action is good which is in accord with the agent s own conviction ; 
that only is bad which contradicts this. 

And what is conscience ? Where Abelard teaches as a philoso 
pher, as the rationalistic dialectician that he was, there conscience 
is for him (in accordance with ancient example, Cicero) the natural 
moral law, which, though known in varying degree, is common to 
all men, and which, as Abelard was convinced, was wakened 
to new clearness in the Christian religion, after it had become ob 
scured through human sin and weakness (cf. above, 23, 7). But 

1 Cf. on this Th. Ziegler in the Strassburgcr Abhdl. z. Phil. (Freiburg, 
1884). 

2 It throws a surprising light upon the clearness of Abelard s thought when 
he incidentally separates the metaphysical conception of the good (perfection = 
reality) carefully from the moral conception of the good, with which alone ethics 
has to do. He shows in this that he had penetrated this complication of prob 
lems, one of the most intricate in history. 

CHAP. 1, 24.] Body and Soul: Abelard. 309 

for the theologian this lex naturalis is identical with the will of God. 1 
To follow the conscience means, therefore, to obey God; to act against 
the conscience is to despise God. But where the import of the 
natural moral law is in any wise doubtful, the only resort for the 
individual is to decide according to his conscience, that is, according 
to his knowledge of the divine command. 

The ethics of intention 2 which was presented by the head of the 
dialecticians and Peripatetics proves itself to be an enhancement of 
the Augustinian principles of internalisation and of the individual 
ism of the will, which forces its way out of the system of the great 
Church teacher and beyond its bounds, to fruitful operation in the 
future. 

. 1 In his theological metaphysics Abelard seems occasionally to have gone so 
far as to reduce the content of the moral law to the arbitrary choice of the 
divine will (Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, II. 241). 

2 The important contrast here presented in various directions to Church 
theory and practice cannot be brought out here. 

CHAPTER II. SECOND PERIOD. 

(AFTER ABOUT 1200.) 

Karl Werner, Der hl. Thomas von Aquino. % vols., Regensburg, 1858 ff. 
Karl Werner, Die Scholastik des spiiteren Mittelalters. 3 vols., Vienna, 1881 S. 

THK felt need for real knowledge, which mastered Western science 
after the first enthusiasm for dialectic was past, was very soon to 
find a satisfaction of unsuspected extent. Contact with the Oriental 
civilisation which at first maintained itself victoriously against the 
shock of the Crusades, disclosed to the peoples of Europe ne\v worlds 
of intellectual life. Arabian, and in its train Jewish, science made 
their entry into Paris. They had preserved the tradition of Greek 
thought and knowledge more immediately and more completely than 
had the cloisters of the West. A stronger and richer stream of 
scientific material poured over Bagdad and Cordova than over Rome 
and York. But the former brought not much more that was new 
with it than did the latter. Rather, as regards thoughts which dis 
cover or establish principles, the Oriental philosophy of the Middle 
Ages is still poorer than the European. Only, in the breadth and 
quantity of tradition, in the compass of learned material and in 
the extent of information in matters of science, the East was far 
superior, and these treasures now passed over into the possession of 
the Christian peoples. 

From the point of view of philosophy, however, the matter of 
chief importance was that Parisian science became acquainted not 

1 The author believes that he may and ought to decline to give a full exposi 
tion of the Arabian and Jewish philosophy of the Middle Ages ought to, in so 
far as he is here in great part excluded from penetrating to the original sources, 
and would therefore find himself forced to reproduce others expositions at 
second hand, may, however, because that which passed over with fructifying 
influence into European science from this large literature and it is only this 
element that could be treated in this presentation of the development of philos 
ophy as a whole is found to be, with very small exceptions, the spiritual 
possession of antiquity, of the Greek or the Hellenistic philosophy. On this 
account there will be given only a brief survey of the Arabian and Jewish phi 
losophy in the Middle Ages, which will be found at the close of the introductory 
material of this chapter, pp. 31(5-318. 

310 

CHAP. 2.] Second Period. 311 

only with the entire logic of Aristotle, but also with all parts of his 
philosophy that furnished material knowledge. By this "new 
logic " fresh blood was infused into the already dying dialectic, and 
while the task of rationally expounding the view of the world held 
by faith was attacked anew and with a matured technique of thought, 
there was presented at the same time an almost immeasurable mate 
rial for arrangement in the metaphysico-religious system. 

Mediaeval thought showed itself abundantly ready for the problem 
thus enhanced, and solved it under the after-working of the impres 
sion of that most brilliant period in the development of the papacy 
which Innocent III. had brought about. The Neo-Platonic- Arabian 
Aristotelianism, which at the first, with its naturalistic consequences, 
seemed only to strengthen the rationalistic courage of dialectic to 
victorious pride, was mastered with admirable swiftness and bent to 
the service of the system of the Church. This, indeed, was possible 
only in a form in which the intellectualistic elements of Augustinian 
thought and those allied to Neo-Platonism gained a decided pre 
ponderance in this now completely systematic development of a 
philosophy conformed to the doctrine of faith. In this way was 
completed an adjustment and arrangement of world-moving thoughts 
upon the largest and most imposing scale that history has seen, 
and that, too, without the creative activity of any properly new 
philosophical principle as its impulse toward the formation of a 
system. The intellectual founder of this system was Albert of Boll- 
stddt. It owes its organic completion in all directions, its literary 
codification, and thus its historical designation, to Thomas Aquinas, 
and finds its poetical exposition in Dante s Divine Comedy. 

But while Hellenistic science and Christian faith seemed to be 
brought into complete harmony in Thomism, the opposition between 
them broke forth at once all the more violently. Under the influ 
ence of Arabian doctrines, the pantheism involved in the logical 
consequence of Realism from being potential became actual in ex 
tended circles, and immediately after Thomas, his fellow-Domin 
ican, Master Eckhart, developed scholastic intellectualism to the 
heterodoxy of an ideoMstic Mysticism. 

Hence it is comprehensible that Thomism also encountered the 
resistance of a Platonic- Augustinian tendency, which indeed gladly 
adopted the increase in the knowledge of Nature (as had been the 
case before) and the perfection of the logical apparatus, but put 
aside the intellectualistic metaphysics and developed all the more 
energetically the opposite elements of Augustinianism. 

This tendency reached its full strength in the acutest and deepest 
thinker of the Christian Middle Ages, Duns Scotus, who brought the 

312 Mediceval Philosophy. [PART III. 

germs of the philosophy of the will, contained in Augustine s 
system, to their first important development, and so from the meta. 
physical side gave the impulse for a complete change in the direc 
tion of philosophical thought. With him religious and scientific 
interests, whose fusion had begun in the Hellenistic philosophy, 
begin to separate. 

The renewal of Nominalism, in which the intellectual movement 
of the last century of the Middle Ages culminated in an extremely 
interesting combination, led to the same result with still more last 
ing force. Dialectic, which had anew obtained the mastery and 
was flaunting itself in various disputations, developed in its text 
books on logic the Aristotelian schematism. This was worked out 
especially on the grammatical side, and there developed to a theory 
which attached the doctrine of judgment and the syllogism to the 
view that regarded the concepts (termini) as subjective signs for 
really existing individual things. This Terminism became united 
in William of Occam with the naturalistic tendencies of the Arabian- 
Aristotelian theory of knowledge, and these combined combated 
Kealism, which had been maintained alike in Thomism and Scotism. 
But Terminism also became united with the Augustinian doctrine 
of the will into a powerful individualism, with the beginnings of 
the empirical psychology which studied the history of develop 
ment, to a kind of idealism of the inner experience, and with the 
natural investigation which was conquering wider and wider territory, 
to an empiricism that was to be fruitful in the future. Thus under 
the scholastic covering were sprouting the germs of new thought. 

Here and there in this extremely diversified movement men still 
vainly appear with the confidence that they can create a rational 
system of religious metaphysics, and finally a man of the signifi 
cance of Nicolaus Cusanus sought vainly to force all these elements 
of a new secular science back under the power of a half scholastic, 
half mystic intellectualism : it was just from his system that those 
elements exercised an influence upon the future, that was all the 
stronger because of his work. 

The reception of Aristotle falls in the century 1150-1250 (for this topic see 
principally the work of A. Jourdain, cited p. 273). It began with the more val 
uable parts of the Oryanon, hitherto unknown (vetus nova logica), and pro 
ceeded to the metaphysical, physical, and ethical books, always accompanied 
by the introduction of the Arabian explanatory writings. The Church slowly 
admitted the new logic, although dialectic was again set in fluctuation thereby ; 
for it soon became convinced that the new method which was introduced with 
the aid of the doctrine of the syllogism, was advantageous for presenting its 
own teachings. 

This scholastic method in the proper sense is as follows : a text used as 
the basis for discussion is broken up by division and explanation into a number 
of propositions ; questions are attached and the possible answers brought to- 

CHAP. 2.] Second Period. 313 

gether ; finally the arguments to be adduced for establishing or refuting these 
answers are presented in the form of a chain of syllogistic reasoning, leading 
ultimately to a decision upon the subject. 

This scheme was first employed by Alexander of Hales (died 1245) in his 
Summa Universes Theologies, with a mastery which was far superior to the 
mode of treatment of the earlier Summists in wealth of contents, clearness of 
development, and definiteness of results, and was scarcely surpassed even later. 

An analogous change in method was worked out with regard to the material 
in the encyclopaedias of natural science by Vincent of Beauvais (Vincentius 
Bellovacensis, died about 1205), by his Speculum Quadruplex, and Johannes 
Fidanza, called Bonaventura (1221-1274), did the same work for the doctrines 
of Mysticism, especially those of the Victorines. Among Bonaventura s works 
the lieductio Artium ad Theologiam is especially characteristic. Cf. K. Werner, 
Die Psychologic, und Erkenntnisslehre des B. (Vienna, 1876). 

The Church proceeded in a much more hesitating manner in regard to Aris 
totle s Metaphysics and Physics, because these made their entrance in intimate 
connection with Averroism, and because this latter theory had developed to 
open pantheism the Neo-Platonic Mysticism which had never been entirely 
forgotten since Scotus Erigena. As the defenders of such a system appear 
Amalrich of Bena near Chartres, and David of Dinant, about 1200, concern 
ing whose doctrines we are informed only by later writers, especially Albert 
and Thomas. With the widely extended sect of the Amalricans, which, after 
the Lateran council of 1215, was persecuted with fire and sword, the "Eternal 
Gospel" of Joachim Floris was also connected. Cf. on this J. N. Schneider 
(Dillingen, 1873). 

The judgment of condemnation passed upon the Averroistic Pan-psychism 
(cf. 27) applied at first to Aristotle also. It is the service of the two men 
dicant orders, the Dominicans and Franciscans, to have broken this connec 
tion, and to have brought over the power of the Church to the recognition of 
the Peripatetic system. By a long conflict, which frequently wavered this way 
and that, they succeeded in founding two chairs of the Aristotelian philosophy 
at the University of Paris, and finally in having them taken into the faculty 
(cf. Kaufmann, Gesch. d. Univ., I. 275 ff.). After this victory in 1254, respect 
for Aristotle rose fast, until he became the highest philosophical authority. He 
was praised as the forerunner of Christ in matters of Nature as was John 
the Baptist in matters of grace, and from this time on Christian science (like 
Averroes) held him to be in such a sense the incarnation of scientific truth, that 
in the following literature he is often cited only as " Philosophus." 

The doctrine of the Dominicans, which has remained until the present time 
the official doctrine of the Catholic Church, was created by Albert and Thomas. 

Albert of Bollstadt (Albertus Magnus) was born 1193 at Lauingen in 
Swabia, studied in Padua and Bologna, taught in Cologne and Paris, became 
Bishop of Regensburg, and died in Cologne in 1280. His writings consist for 
the most part of paraphrases and commentaries upon Aristotle ; aside from the 
Summa his Botany is particularly of independent value (De Vegetabilibus, 
Libri VII. ; ed. by Meyer and Jessen, Berlin, 1867). Cf. J. Sighart, Al. Mag. 
st in Leben und seine \Visse.nschaft (Kegensburg, 1857) ; v. Hertling, Al. Mag. 
und die Wissenschaft seiner Zeit (in Hist.-pol. Bliitter, 1874) ; J. Bach, Al. 
Mag. (Vienna. 1888). 

Thomas of Aquino, born 1225 or 27 in Roccasicca, Lower Italy, was edu 
cated at first in the cloister Monte Cassino, famous of old for study in natural 
science, then in Naples, Cologne, and Paris. After this he taught alternately 
at these universities and also at Rome and Bologna, and died, 1274, in a cloister 
near Terracina. Besides minor treatises, his works contain commentaries on 
Aristotle, on the Liber de Causis and the Sentences of Peter Lombard, and 
in addition to these, principally the Summa Thrologite and the treatise De 
veritate fidei Catholics contra gentiles (Snmma contra gentiles}. The treatise 
De Jiegimine Principum belongs to him only in part. From the very copious 
literature concerning him, the following may be named : Ch. Jourdain, La 
PkilotOfMe de St. Th. (Paris, 1858); Z. Gonzalez, Studien iiber die Philos. 
des. hi. Th. v. A., translated from the Spanish by Nolle (Regensburg, 1885); 
R. Kucken, Die Philos. d. Th. v. A. und die Cultus der Neuzeit (Halle, 1880); 
A. Frohschammer, Die Philosophic des Th. v. A. (Leips. 1889). 

314 Mediceval Philosophy. [PART III. 

The philosophical importance of Dante Alighieri has been best recognised 
among his editors by Philalethes in the commentary on his translation of the 
Divina Commedia. Besides his great world-poem, the treatise De Monarchia 
should not be forgotten in a philosophical consideration. Cf. A. F. Ozanam, 
D. et la Philosophic Catholigue au 23"" Siecle (Paris, 1845); G. Baur, Boethius 
und Dante (Leips. 1873). 

Interest in other Thomists, whose number is great, is only literary -historical. 

To the Dominican Order belonged also the father of German Mysticism, 
Master Eckhart, a younger contemporary of Thomas. Born in the middle of 
the thirteenth century, probably in Saxony, at about 1300 he was Professor of 
Philosophy in Paris, became then Provincial of his Order for Saxony, lived for 
a time in Cologne and Strassburg, and died during the painful discussions con 
cerning the orthodoxy of his doctrine in 1329. The extant writings (collected 
by F. Ffeiffer, II. Leips. 1857) are principally sermons, tracts, and aphorisms. 
Cf. C. Ullman, Refnrmatoren vor der Reformation, Vol. II. (Hamburg, 1842); 
W. Preger, Gesch. d. deutschen Mystik im Mittelalter (Leips. 1875, 1881) ; also 
the different editions and articles by S. Denifle. On Eckhart in particular, 
J. Bach, M. E. der Vater der deutschen Speculation (Vienna, 1864); A. Lasson, 
M. E. d&lt;:r Mystiker (Berlin, 1868). 

In its farther development German Mysticism branched into the heresies of 
the Beghards and of the " Friends of God " of Basle ; in the case of the former it 
led to the most radical connection with the Averroistic pantheism. It took the 
form of popular preaching with John Tauler at Strassburg (1300-1361), and 
of poetic song with Heinrich Suso of Constance (1300-1365). Its theoretical 
doctrines maintained themselves, while the heterodoxy was diminished, in the 
" Gn-man Theology 1 (first edited by Luther, 1516). 

The Augustinian Platonic opposition against the suspected Aristotelianism 
of the Arabians has as its main supporters : 

"William of Auvergne, from Aurillac, teacher and Bishop in Paris, where he 
died in 1249, author of a work De Universo. He is treated by K. Werner, Die 
Philosophic des W. v. A. (Vienna, 1873). 

Henry of Ghent (Henricus Gandavensis, Heinrich Crethals of Muda near 
Ghent, 1217-1293), the valiant defender of the prim;icy of the will against 
Tliomism. Besides a theological compendium, he wrote a Summa Qucestionum 
Ordinarium, and principally Quodlibeta Theologica. Cf . K. Werner, H. v. ft. als 
lieprasentant dex chrixtlichen Platonismus im 13 Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1878). 

Richard of Middletown (R. de Mediavia, died 1300) and William de la 
Marre, the author of a violent Corrpctorium Fratris Thomce, may also be 
named here. In the following centuries an Augustinian theology proper main 
tained itself by the side of Thomism and Scotism. ^Egydius of Colonna is 
regarded as its leader (JRg. Romanus, 1247-1316). Cf. K. Werner, Schol. d. 
spat. M.-A., III. 

The sharpest opposition to Thomism grew out of the Franciscan order. 
Roger Bacon s was a mind fruitfully stimulating in all directions, but not 
appearing in a fixed and definite form in any one of them. He was born in 
1214, near Ilchester, educated in Oxford and Paris, several times persecuted on 
account of his occupations and theories, which were directed in the line of 
natural research, protected only for a time by Pope Clement IV., and died soon 
after 1292. His doctrines are embodied in the Opus Mains (ed. by Bridges, 
Oxford, 1897), and in the form of extracts in his Opus Minus (ed. by Brewer, 
Lond. 1859). Cf. E. Charles, li. B., sa vie, ses ouvrages, ses doctrines (Paris, 
1861), and K. Werner, in two articles on his psychology, theory of knowledge, 
and physics (Vienna, 1879). 

The most important thinker of the Christian Middle Ages was Johannes 
Duns Scotus. His home (Ireland or Northumberland) and the year of his 
birth, which was about 1270, are not certainly known. At first a scholar and 
teacher in Oxford, he then won high reputation at Paris, where he was active 
after 1304, and in 1308 moved to Cologne, where he died soon after his arrival 
all too early. The edition of his works prepared by his Order (12 vols., 
Lyons, 1639) contains, besides the genuine writings, much that is not genuine 
or that has been worked over, and especially transcripts of his disputations and 

Second Period. 315 

lectures. To the latter belongs the so-called Opus Parisie.nse, which forms a com 
mentary upon the Sp.ntPnc.ps of the Loin bard. The (juestiones Qundlibetales have 
a similar origin. The Opus Oxoniense, the original commentary upon the Lom 
bard, is his own writing. Besides this there are his commentaries upon Aristo 
telian writings and some smaller treatises. His doctrine is expounded in Werner 
and Stockl. No exhaustive monograph, corresponding to his importance, exists. 

Among his numerous adherents, Francis of Mayro, who died 1325, is the best 
known. The controversy between Thomists and Scotists was a very active one 
at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and brought many intermediate 
theories into the field ; but soon both parties had to make common cause in 
defence against Terminism. 

Among the logical school books of the later Scholasticism, the most influen 
tial was that of Petrus Hispanus, who died 1277 as Pope John XXI. His 
Summulce Logicales were a translation of a Byzantine-Greek text-book, the 
Syw^ts eis ryv Apt&lt;rTOT&lt;?\oi/s \oytKriv iiriffTJwv by Michael Psellos (in the eleventh 
century). Imitating the processes in this latter treatise (ypdnnara typtvj/f ypa- 
(j&gt;i8i Tex"iK6s), the well-known barbarous mnemonic designations for the modes 
of the syllogism were introduced in the Latin version (Barbara, celarent, etc.). 
Terminism, developed in the nominalistic direction from this rhetorical and 
grammatical logic, contrasted itself as logica moderna with the logica antiqua 
of the Realists, including both Scotists and Thomists under this latter title. 

In the renewal of Nominalism we find William Durandus of St. Pour- 
9ain, who died 1332 as Bishop of Meaux, and Petrus Aureolus, who died at 
Paris, 1321, the former coming from Thomism, the latter from Scotism. Much 
more important is William of Occam, the Abelard of the second period. With 
a broad and keen vision for reality, and with a bold, unresting eagerness for 
innovation, he unites in himself all the elements with the help of which the 
new science forced its way out of Scholasticism. Born in a village in the 
County of Surrey, trained under Duns Scotus, he became Professor at Paris, 
then took an active part in the conflicts of his time between Church and State 
by joining with Philip the Fair and Lewis of Bavaria in combating the papacy, 
(Diaputatio inter clericum et militem super potentate ecclesiastica prailatis atque 
principibus terrarum commissa, and the Defensorium against Pope John XXII.), 
and died 1347 at Munich. There is no complete edition of his works, but the 
most important are : Summa Totius Logices, Expositio Aurea super Artem 
Ve.tere.m, Quodlibeta Septem, Centilogium Theologicum, and a commentary on 
Peter Lombard. Cf. W. A. Schreiber, Die politischen und religiosen Doctrinen 
unter Ludwig dem Baier (Landshut, 1858). C. Prantl, Der Universalie.nstre.it 
im dreizehnten und vierzehnten Jahrhundert (Sitz.-Ber. der Miinchener Akad., 
1874). Occam, too, still waits his philosophically competent biographer. 

Of the supporters of terministic Nominalism in the fourteenth century, 
Johannes Buridan, Hector of the University at Paris, and co-founder of that at 
Vienna, and Marsilius of Inghen, one of the first teachers at Heidelberg, are 
usually named. A union of mystical doctrines with the nominalistic rejection 
of metaphysics is found in Pierre d Ailly (Petrus de Alliaco, 1350-1425), and in 
Johannes Gerson (Charlier, 1363-142!)). 

The attempt at a purely rational exposition of Church doctrine in the interest 
of apologetics and propagation was made by Raymundus Lullus of Catalonia 
(1235-1315), who is principally known by his curious discovery of the "Great 
Art," that is, a mechanical device which by combining the fundamental concepts 
was intended to present the system of all possible cognitions. An extract from 
this may be found in J. E. Erdmann, History of Phil., I. 206 [Eng. tr. ed. by 
HoughJ. His efforts were repeated in the fifteenth century by Raymund of 
Sabunde, a Spanish physician, who taught in Toulouse and gained respect by his 
Theologia Naturalis (sive, Liber Creaturarum) . On him cf. D. Matzke (Breslau, 
1846); M. Huttler (Augsburg, 1851). 

The, philosophy of Nicolaus Cusanus (Nicolaus Chrypffs, born in Kues (Cusa) 
near Trier, 1401, died as Cardinal and Bishop of Brixen, 1464), offers an inter 
esting comprehensive view of the intellectual condition of the departing Middle 
Ages. The main treatise bears the title De Docta lynorantia (ed. in German 
together with his other most important writings by F. A. Scharpff, Freiburg i. B. 
1862). Cf. U. Falckenberg, Grundzuge der Philos. des N. v. C. (Breslau, 1880). 

316 Mediceval Philosophy : Second Period. [PAKT III. 

Brief Survey of the Arabian and Jewish Philosophy of the Middle 
Ages. 

This period is certainly more interesting from a literary and historical point 
of view than from that of philosophy, and as yet no competent presentation of 
the period as a whole has been made. Nor has complete clearness been attained 
as yet by investigation, but from the literature concerning it the following are 
to be emphasised : 

Mohammed al Schahrestani, History of Religious and Philosophical Sects 
among the Arabs (German by Haarbrucker, Halle, 1850 f.); A Schmolders, 
Documenta Philosophic Arabum (Bonn, 1886), and Essai sur les Ecoles Phi- 
losophiques chez les Ar. (Paris, 1812); Fr. Dieterici, Die Philosophic der Ar. im 
zehnten Jahrhunrlert (8 Hefte, Leips. 1865-76). Cf. also Hammer-Purgstall, 
Gesch. der arabischen Litteratur. 

S. Mimk, Melanges de philosophic juive et arabe (Paris, 1859), and the same 
author s articles on the individual philosophers in the Dictionnaire des Sciences 
Philosophiques. [W. Wallace, Art. Arabian Phil, in Enc. Brit., Ueberweg, 
Erdmann. ] 

M. Eisler, Vorlesungen uber die jiidischen Philosophen des J\ffttelalters (3 
vols., Vienna, 1870-84); M.Joel, Beitrdge zur Geschichte der Philosophic (Bres- 
lau, 1876). Cf. also Fiirst s Bibliotheca Judaica, and histories of Judaism by 
Graetz and Geiger. 

Close as the relations may be which the philosophy of the two civilised Semitic 
peoples sustained to their religious interests, Arabian science especially owes 
its peculiar character to the circumstance that its founders and supporters 
were, for the most part, not members of the clergy, as in the West, but physi 
cians (cf. F. Wiistenfeld, Gesch. der arab. Aerzte und Naturforscher, Gottingen, 
1840). Thus from the beginning the study of ancient medicine and natural 
science went on hand in hand with that of philosophy. Hippocrates and Galen 
were as much translated (in part through the medium of the Syrian) and read 
as were 1 lato, Aristotle, and the Neo-Platonists. Hence in Arabian metaphysics 
dialectic is always balanced by natural philosophy. But well as this was adapted 
to afford scientific thought a broader basis of knowledge of facts, we must not, 
on the other hand, overestimate the independent achievements of the Arabs in 
medicine and natural science. Here, too, mediaeval science is essentially learned 
tradition. The knowledge which the Arabs were later able to deliver to the 
West had its origin, in the main, in the books of the Greeks. Nor did even 
experimental knowledge experience an essential extension through the Arabs 
own work ; only in some fields, as, for example, chemistry and mineralogy and 
in some parts of medicine, e.g. physiology, do they appear more independent. 
In their method, however, in their principles by which they apprehend the uni 
verse, and in their entire system of philosophical conceptions, they stand, so far 
as our information on the subject reaches, entirely under the combined influence 
of Aristotelianism and Neo-Platonism ; and the same is true of the Jews. Nor 
can it be maintained that a national peculiarity becomes disclosed in their appro 
priation of this material. It is rather the case that this whole scientific culture 
was artificially grafted upon the Arabian civilisation, it can strike no true roots 
into it, and after a short period of bloom it withers away without vital force. 
In the history of science as a whole, its mission is only to give back in part to 
the development of the Western mind the continuity which the latter had itself 
temporarily lost. 

From the nature of the case, the appropriation of ancient science in this case 
also was completed gradually and by working backward. Beginning with the 
Neo-Platonism which was still current in Syrian tradition, and which was 
received with sympathy on account of its religious colouring, the Arabian 
thinkers proceeded to ascend to the better sources ; but the consequence 
remained that they saw Aristotle and Plato through the spectacles of Plotinus 
and Proclus. During the rule of the Abassidse an active scientific life prevailed 
in Bagdad, stimulated especially by the Caliph Almamun at the beginning of 
the ninth century. The Neo-Platonists, the better commentators, almost the 
( ntire didactic writings of Aristotle, and the Republic, Laws, and Timteus of 
1 lato, were known in translations. 

CHAP. 2.] Arabian and Jewish Philosophy. 317 

The first distinctly emerging personalities, Alkendi, who died about 870, and 
Alfarabi, who died 950, are scarcely to be distinguished in their teachings from 
the Neo-Platonic elucidators of Aristotle. A greater importance belongs to 
Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980-1037), whose "Canon" became the fundamental 
book of mediaeval medicine in the West, as well as in the East, and who also 
exercised a powerful influence by his extremely numerous philosophical writ 
ings, especially his Metaphysics and Logic. His doctrine comes nearer again to 
pure Aristotelianism, and perhaps the nearest among all the Arabians. 

But the extension of these philosophical views was regarded with jealous eyes 
by Mohammedan orthodoxy, and the scientific movement experienced, so vio 
lent persecutions in the tenth century that it took refuge in the secret league of 
the "Pure Brothers." Avicenna himself was also persecuted. The above- 
named league embodied the extremely excellent compass of the knowledge of 
the time in a number of treatises (on this see above, Dieterici), which neverthe 
less, in contrast with Avioenna, seem to show a stronger leaning toward Neo- 
Plstoniam. 

Of the scientific achievements of their opponents we know on the one hand 
the strange metaphysics of the orthodox Motekallemin, who, as against the 
Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic view of Nature as a living whole, developed an 
extreme exaggeration of the sole causality of God, and resorted to a distorted 
Atomism in the greatest metaphysical embarrassment ; on the other hand, in 
the writings of Algazel (1059-1111, Destructio Philosophorum) there appears 
a sceptical and mystical analysis of philosophy. 

These latter tendencies won the victory in the Orient the more readily, as the 
spiritual exaltation of Mohammedanism quickly declined in that quarter. The 
continuance of Arabian science is to be sought in Andalusia, where Mohamme 
dan civilisation found its short after-bloom. Here, under freer conditions, 
philosophy developed to vigorous naturalism, which in turn bore a strongly 
Neo-Platonic stamp. 

A characteristic exposition of the doctrine of knowledge in this philosophy is 
found in the Conduct of the Solitary by Avempace, who died 1138, and similar 
thoughts culminate with Abubacer (Ibn Tophail, died 1185) in an interesting 
comparison of natural with positive religion. The latter author s philosophi 
cal romance The Living One, the Son of the Waking One, which sets forth the 
intellectual development of a man upon a lonely island, excluded from all his 
torical and social relations, was published in a Latin translation by Pocock as 
Philosophus Autodidactus (Oxford, 1G71 and 1700, not twenty years before the 
appearance of Defoe s Robinson Crusoe ! ) and in a German translation as 
Der Naturmensch by Eichhorn (Berlin, 1783). 

But the most important and independent among Arabian thinkers was 
Averroes, who was born 1120 in Cordova, was for a time judge, and then 
physician in ordinary to the Caliph, was driven afterward by religious perse 
cution to Morocco, and died in 1198. He treated in paraphrases and longer or 
shorter commentaries, which were printed in the older editions of Aristotle, 
almost all the didactic writings of Aristotle, who was esteemed by him as the 
highest teacher of truth. Of his own works (Venice, 1553 ; some exist now 
only in the Hebrew version) the refutation of Algazel, Destructio Destructions, 
is most important. Two of his treatises on the relation of philosophy and the 
ology have been published in German translation by M. J. Miiller (Munich, 
1875). Cf. E. Kenan, Averroes et VAverroisme (3d ed., Paris, 18(59). 

With the expulsion of the Arabians from Spain traces of their philosophical 
activity are lost. 

Jewish philosophy of the Middle Ages is, in the main, an accompaniment 
of the Arabian, and dependent upon it. The only exception to this is the Cab 
bala, that fantastic secret doctrine whose fundamental outlines, which, to be 
sure, were later much elaborated, show the same peculiar amalgamation of 
Oriental mythology with ideas of Hellenistic science as does Christian Gnosti 
cism, and go back to the same period and to the same agitated condition of 
thought attendant upon the mingling of religions. Cf. A. Franck, Systeme de 
la Kabbah (Paris, 1842; German by Jellinek, Leips. 1844); H. Joel, Die 
ii-liijionxphilnsnphie des Sohar (Leips. 1849). On the other hand, the main 
works of Jewish philosophy were originally written in Arabic, and not trans 
lated into Hebrew until a relatively late time. 

318 Mediaeval Philosophy : Second Period. [PART in. 

The book of Saadjah Fajjumi (died 942), Concerning Religions and Philoso 
phies, which aims to furnish an apology for Jewish doctrine, is related to the 
earliest Arabian Aristotelianism, and still more closely to the free-thinking 
Mohammedan theologians, the so-called Mutazilin. In the Neo-Platonic line 
we meet Avicebron (Ibn Gebirol, a Spanish Jew of the eleventh century), of 
whose Fons Vitaz, Hebrew and Latin versions are extant. Moses Maimonides 
(1135-1204) is regarded as the most important Jewish philosopher of the Middle 
Ages. In his culture and doctrine he belongs to the phase of Arabian doctrine 
which has Averroes as its centre. Mis main treatise, Guide to the Perplexed 
(Doctor Perplexorum) , has been published in Arabic and French with a com 
mentary by Munk (3 vols., Paris, 18o6-&lt;56) [Eng. tr. by Friedlander, Trubner, 
Lend.]. The attachment to Averroes is still closer in the case of Gersonides 
(Levi ben Gerson, 1288-1344). 

The Jews, by means of their widely extended mercantile relations, were the 
chief contributors to the extension of Oriental philosophy in the West, by sale 
and translation ; in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries especially their 
schools in Southern France formed the medium for this wide-reaching activity. 

To the Arabian and Jewish literature, which was taken up by Christian 
science about 1200, belongs finally a number of pseudonymous and anonymous 
writings, which arose in the latest periods of Neo-Platonism, and in part per 
haps were of still later date. Among these the principal are the Theology of Aris 
totle (Arabic and German by Dieterici, Leips. 1882-83), and the Liber de Caitsis 
(De essentia pur(R boniUitis), an extract from the ffToix ^ lj}(ri ^ 6fo\oyiK^i ascribed 
to Proclus, published in Arabic, Latin, and German by O. Bardenhewer (Frei 
burg i. li. 1882). 

25. The Realm of Nature and the Realm of Grace. 

Among all the philosphers of the Middle Ages we find existing, 
with greater or less clearness, a lively feeling of the twofold tradi 
tion which forms the presupposition of their thought. In the 
earlier period all knowledge and thought had arranged itself, as it 
were, of its own accord within the system of religious metaphysics ; 
and now there appeared by the side of this a powerful, finely articu 
lated, coherent body of thought which the age, thirsting after real 
contents in its barren dialectic, was ready to take up eagerly. The 
manifold relations between these two systems which mutually laid 
hold upon one another and interpenetrated, determine the scientific 
character of the last centuries of the Middle Ages, and the general 
course of the development was, that these antagonistic systems, 
starting from an attitude of abrupt opposition, strove toward recon 
ciliation and adjustment, only to diverge all the more violently after 
the goal seemed to have been reached. This course of things 
appeared as necessarily in the conception of the reciprocal relations 
of the different sciences, as in the view of the ultimate relations 
of things. In both lines the attempt at synthesis was followed by 
a separation that went all the deeper. 

The religious thought of the West, whose highest problem had 
been to understand the working of divine grace, was confronted by 
Oriental philosophy in which the old Grecian philosophical tendency 
toward knowledge of Nature had at last attained metaphysical 

CHAP. 2, 25.] The Two Realms : Averroinm. 319 

supremacy : and here, too, again the process of appropriation began 
with the adoption of the last consequences, to ascend only by 
degrees back to the premises. 

1. Hence the form in which Arabian science was first taken up 
was that of Averroism. In this, however, science had marked off its 
boundaries in the most definite manner as against positive religion. 
This had taken place not only in reaction against the attacks to 
which the philosophical movement in the East had been subjected, 
but still more in consequence of the great mental revolutions which 
the age of the Crusades experienced through the intimate contact 
of the three monotheistic religions. The more ardently these relig 
ions fought in the sphere of historical reality, the more the sharp 
ness of their contrasting doctrines became blunted from the point 
of view of theory. Those who passed through this conflict of relig 
ions as thinking observers could not resist the impulse to seek the 
common element behind the differences, and to establish above the 
fields of battle the idea of a universal religion. 1 In order to attain 
this, every form of special historical revelation must be stripped off, 
and the path of universally valid scientific knowledge must be taken. 
So with the aid of Neo-Platonic memories, a return was made to the 
thought of a universal religion, founded upon science, and the ulti 
mate content of this common conviction was formed by the moral law. 
As Abelard in his own way had already reached this result, so 
Eoger Bacon later, under Arabian influences, designated morality as 
the content of the universal religion. 

This scientific natural religion, however, had had stamped upon it 
more and more by the Arabs the exclusive character of an esoteric 
doctrine. The distinction originating with Fhilo, and current in the 
entire patristic thought, between a verbal-historical and a spiritually 
timeless sense 2 of religious documents (cf. 18, 2) here became the 
doctrine that positive religion is an indispensable need for the mass 
of the people, while the man of science seeks the real truth back of 
religion, and seeks it only there, a doctrine in which Averroes 
and Maimonides were at one, and which completely corresponded to 
the social relations of Arabian science. For Arabian science always 
moved within narrow and closed circles, and as a foreign growth 

1 The court of the highly cultured Hohenstaufen Frederick II. in Sicily 
appears as a chief seat of this mode of thought, and in general of the exchange 
of thought between East and West. 

- Representing this opinion, the Eternal Gospel of Joachim of Floris was 
circulated among the Averroistic Amalricans. This completed for the entire 
compass of Christian dogma, the transformation of everything external into the 
internal, all the historical into the timelessly valid : the "pneumatic gospel " of 
Origen (cf. 18, 2) was asserted to have here attained reality, the period of the 
"spirit" to have begun. Cf. ,1. N. Schneider (Dillingen, 1874). 

320 Mediceval Philosophy : Second Period. [PART III 

never gained true sympathy with the mass of the people: Averroes, 
nevertheless, expressly honours Aristotle as the founder of this high 
est, most universal religion of the human race. 

Thus in line with this thought, Abubacer made his " Man in a 
Stute of Nature" who had attained in his isolation to the philosoph 
ical knowledge of God, come into contact again at last with histori 
cal humanity, and in so doing discover that what he had known 
clearly and in abstract thought, is here believed in its picturate 
wrappings, and that what holds for him as a self-evident demand of 
the reason is here extorted from the multitude by means of reward 
and punishment. 

If now it is hereby admitted that natural and revealed religion 
have ultimately the same content, it still follows that they necessa 
rily differ, at least in their expression of the common truth, that 
the conceptions which form the expression of philosophical religion 
are not understood by believers, while the picturate ideas of believ 
ers are not regarded as the full truth by philosophers. If, then, by 
theology, we understand the exposition of the positive doctrine of 
religion, arranged and defended according to the formal laws of 
science, i.e. Aristotelian logic, and this was the form which the 
relation of theology to religion had taken in the West as in the 
East, it follows that something may be true theologically which 
is not true philosophically, and vice versa. Thus is explained that 
doctrine of the twofold truth, 1 theological and philosophical, which 
went through the entire later Middle Ages, although we cannot 
exactly fix the authorship of this formula. 2 It is the adequate 
expression of the mental state necessarily brought about by the 
opposition of the two authorities under which the Middle Ages 
stood, viz. Hellenistic science and religious tradition ; and while at 
a later time it often served to protect scientific theories from the 
persecution of the Church, it was for the most part, even in these 
cases, the honest expression of the inner discord in which just the 
most important minds of the age found themselves. 

2. The science of the Christian peoples accepted this antithesis, 
and while the doctrine of the twofold truth was expressly pro 
claimed by bold dialecticians such as Simon of Tournay, or John of 
Brescia, and was all the more rigidly condemned by the power of 

1 Cf. M. Maywald, Die Lehre von der zweifachen Wahrheit (Berlin, 1871). 

2 As little can it be fixed with certainty what the origin of that widely ex 
tended formula was, which designated the founders of the three great positive 
religions as the three "deceivers" of mankind. Unhistorical, as is every 
Enlightenment, the philosophical opposition of that day could explain to itself 
only by empirical interests the mythical which could not stand before compara 
tive criticism. 

CHAP. 2, 25.] The Two Realms : Albert, Thomas. 321 

the Church, the leading minds could not evade the fact that philos 
ophy, as it had been developed under the influence of Aristotle and 
the Arabians, was, and must remain, in its inner nature, alien to 
precisely those doctrines of the Christian religion which were spe 
cific and distinctive. With a full consciousness of this opposition, 
Albert proceeded to his great task. He understood that the distinc 
tion between natural and recealed religion, which he found in exist 
ence, could no longer be put out of sight, that philosophy and 
theology could no longer be identified, but he hoped and laboured 
with all his strength that this distinction might not be allowed to 
become a contradiction. He abandoned the doctrine that the " mys 
teries" of theology, the doctrines of the Trinity and of the Incar 
nation, can be made rational, and, on the other hand, he corrected in 
favour of the Church doctrine the teaching of the " Philosopher " 
on such important points as the question concerning the eternity or 
temporal duration of the world. He sought to show that all which 
is known in philosophy by the "natural light" (lumine naturali) 
holds good also in theology, but that the human soul can know 
completely only that, the principles of which it carries within itself, 
and that, therefore, in such questions as those in which philosophical 
knowledge comes to no finally valid decision and must remain 
standing before the antinomy of different possibilities, revelation 
gives the decision, a view in which Albert follows mainly the 
results of Maimonides. Faith is meritorious just because it cannot 
be proved or established by any natural insight. Revelation is above 
reason, but not contrary to reason. 

This standpoint for harmonising natural and revealed theology 
is essentially that taken by Thomas, although he seeks to limit still 
more, if possible, the extent of that which is to be withdrawn from 
philosophical insight and given into the possession of faith. Accord 
ing to the fundamental thoughts of his system, moreover, he 
apprehends this relation as a relation of different stages of 
development, and sees accordingly, in philosophical knowledge, a 
possibility given in man s natural endowment, which is brought 
to full and entire realisation only by the grace active in revela 
tion. 

It is therefore important to notice that Scholasticism, just in this 
its highest point, was far from identifying philosophy and theology, 
or from making the task of the former, as has often been repre 
sented, an unresting comprehension of dogma. This conception 
belongs to the beginnings of mediaeval science, e.g. to Anselm, and 
is found sporadically in the times when Scholasticism was entering 
upon its dissolution. So, for example, Raymundus Lullus projected 

322 Mediaeval Philosophy : Second Period. [PART in. 

his " Great Art " l essentially in the opinion that this, by making 
possible a systematic explanation of all truths, will be adapted to 
convince all " unbelievers " of the truth of the Christian religion. 
So, too, later, Raymond of Sabunde aimed to prove with the help of 
Lull s Art that if God has revealed himself in a double manner, in 
the Bible (liber scriptus) and in Nature (liber vivus), the contents 
of these two revelations, of which the one lies at the basis of theol 
ogy, the other at the basis of philosophy, must evidently be the 
same. But in the classical time of Scholasticism the distinction 
between natural and revealed theology was always kept in mind, 
and was drawn the more sharply, the more the Ctrirch had occasion 
to guard against the confusion of its doctrine with " natural 
theology." 

3. Hence there were very faithful sons of tos Church who 
broadened again the cleft between philosophy and :haology, and ulti 
mately made it so wide that it could not be bridged At their head 
stands Duns Scotus, who taught that theology shoi. d be conceived 
and treated only as a practical discipline ; philosop y, on the con 
trary, as pure theory. Hence for him and for the coatinuers of his 
doctrine, the relation between the two is no longer ;hat of supple 
mentation, but that of separation. Between the two opposing terri 
tories of revelation and of rational knowledge, natural theology 
shrivels into an extreme poverty of domain. The compass of the 
mysteries of theology that are inaccessible for natural knowledge 
increases more and more ; with Duns Scotus the beginning of the 
created world in time and the immortality of the human soul belong 
to this sphere ; and Occam even denies the cogency of the usual 
arguments with which rational theology was wont to prove the 
existence of God. 

This criticism is rooted essentially in the purpose to assure to 
faith its just right, and in this purpose it is completely honest. In 
connection with the metaphysical dualism which had again become 
pronounced (see below, No. 5) the knowledge of the understanding, 
bound as it was to sense-perception, seemed incapable of searching 

1 This wrong-headed, and yet in many respects interesting and therefore 
frequently attempted, discovery, consisted in a system of concentric rings, each 
of which bore a group of concepts divided into circular compartments. By 
shifting these rings, all possible combinations between concepts were to be 
brought about, problems given, and their solutions stated. Thus there was a 
Figura A (Dei) which contained the whole theology, a Figura Animse which 
contained psychology, etc. Mnemo-technic attempts, and such as aim at the 
discovery of a universal language, or of a system of symbols for expressing 
philosophical thoughts, have frequently been attached to this ars combinatoria. 
The introduction of the algebraic method of reckoning by letters is also con 
nected with these efforts. 

CHAP. 2, 125.] The Two Realms : Duns Scotus, Occam. 323 

the mysteries of the supernatural world. Thus men like Gerson 
based their mystical doctrine precisely upon Nominalism. The 
difference between philosophy and theology is necessary; the con 
tradiction between knowledge and faith is unavoidable. Revelation 
has its source in grace, and has the divine realm of grace for its con 
tent ; rational knowledge is a natural process of reciprocal inter 
action between the knowing mind and the objects of perception. 
Therefore, though Nominalism escaped from the scholastic method 
with difficulty, and was late in reaching its goal, it necessarily 
ended in regarding Nature as the sole object of science. At all 
events, philosophy now set itself as secular science, over against 
theology as divine science. 

So Duns Scotus and Occam employed language which externally 
is quite in harmony with the " twofold truth." That definition of 
the boundaries was intended to assert, that in matters of faith dia 
lectic has nothing to say. But it could not fail to be the result, 
that in the case of others, this separation would lead to the oppo 
site consequence and back to the original meaning of the claim of 
a double truth. It became a charter of liberty for the "secular 
philosophy." Dialectical investigation could be pursued even to 
the boldest propositions, and yet all offence might be avoided if one 
only added that the proposition was so secundum rationem, but that 
seen ndum Jidem the opposite was of course true. This occurred so 
frequently that the Thomists and Lullists became zealous against it. 
In the case of many, to be sure, who availed themselves of this 
principle, we cannot doubt that this was their honest opinion ; but 
it is just as sure that others, with full consciousness of their pro 
cedure, found in this only a convenient pretext, in order to present 
under the protection of this restriction the doctrines of a philosophy 
that in its inner spirit was at variance with faith. At all events, 
this applies to the school of the Averroists which flourished in 
Padua toward the end of the fifteenth century. 

4. Parallel to this changeful process of transformation in the 
relation between theology and philosophy, and in closest connection 
with it, goes an analogous development of metaphysical psychology, 
and both have reference in like measure to the fundamental relation 
between the supersensuous and the sensuous worlds. Here, too, 
dualism is the starting-point, and afterwards again the end. This 
dualism had been developed to an especial degree of sharpness by 
the Victorines at the close of the first period. In this Mysticism 
the last bonds between body and soul were cut, and reconciliation 
was made impossible. The spiritual and material worlds fell apart 
as separate spheres of the universal reality. 

324 Mediaeval Philosophy : Second Period. [PART ITT. 

Now, however, Aristotelianism fulfilled its historical mission of 
overcoming the two-worlds theory in Augustine, as formerly in 
Plato, and in the Thomist psychology the conception of development, 
and of the gradual building up of phenomena, was intended to 
bridge that separation. While Hugo of St. Victor had drawn the 
dividing line in the created world through the midst of man s nature, 
by emphasising the complete impossibility of any comparison be 
tween the two substances there brought together, the human soul 
was now to be understood as just that connecting link, through the 
medium of which the two worlds come into organic interaction in 
the one course of development of all things. 

Thomas attains this result by an extraordinarily acute transfor 
mation of the Aristotelian doctrine of Forms and their relation to 
matter. The material and the immaterial worlds are characterised 
by the fact that, in the latter, pure Forms (format, separator; called 
also subsistent Forms) are real or actual as active intelligences with 
out any attachment to matter, while in the former, Forms realise 
themselves only in union with matter (inherent Forms). The hu 
man soul, as lowest of the pure intelligences, is a forma separata 
(on which rests its immortality) and, at the same time, as entelechy 
of the body, it is the highest of those Forms which realise them 
selves in matter. But these two sides of its nature are bound 
together in it to an absolute substantial unity, and this unity is the 
only Form which is at the same time subsistent and inherent. 1 In 
this way the series of individual beings proceeds from the lowest 
Forms of material existence, on past plant and animal life, through 
the human soul, with uninterrupted continuity over into the world 
of pure intelligences the angels, 2 and finally to the absolute Form 
the deity. The cleft between the two worlds is closed in Thomism 
by this central position of metaphysical psychology. 

5. But it seemed to the following period that the cleft was closed 
only by being plastered over, as it were, and that- the union of so 
heterogeneous attributes as the entelechy of the body and the sub 
sistence of a pure intelligence was more of a load than the con 
ception of individual substance was able to bear. Hence Duns 
Scotus, whose metaphysics likewise moves naturally within the 
Aristotelian terminology, introduced an (inherent) forma corporei- 
tatis between the intelligent soul, which he too designates as the 
" essential Form " of the body, and the body itself ; and thus the 

1 In this is concentrated in a conception the anthropocentric way of viewing 
the world, which even Thomism did not overcome. 

2 Thomas constructs his scale of forms in the material world according to 
Aristotle, in the spiritual world according to Dionysius the Areopagite. 

CHAP. 2, 25.] The Two Realms : Thomas, Scotus, Occam. 325 

Augustinian and Victorinian separation of the conscious essence 
from the physiological vital force was again re-established. 

Occam not only made this distinction his own, but, forced to 
insert another gradation, analysed the conscious soul into an intel 
lectual and a sensitive part, and ascribed real importance to this 
separation. It seems to him that the sensuous activities of con 
sciousness can as little be united with the rational nature whose 
vocation it is to behold the immaterial world, as can the form and 
motion of the body. Thus for him the soul is split up into a num 
ber of individual faculties, to determine the relation of which 
occasions great difficulties, especially with regard to their spatial 
inter-relation. 

6. The essential thing in this is that the world of conscious 
ness and that of corporeal bodies become again completely sepa 
rated ; and this is shown especially in Occam s theory of knowledge, 
which proceeded from these presuppositions to an extremely signifi 
cant innovation. 

In their doctrine of the " species intelligibiles " the two "Realists," 
Thomas and Duns Scotus, had alike followed, though with some vari 
ations, the old Greek idea, that in the knowing process, by means of 
the co-operation of the soul and of the external object, a copy of 
the latter arises, which is then apprehended and beheld by the soul. 
Occam strikes out these species intelligibiles as a useless doubling * of 
the external reality, which according to this view, in so far as it is 
an object of knowledge, would be assumed as having still another 
existence (in psychical reality). But by this act sensuous knowledge 
loses for him its character of being a copy as compared with its object. 
An idea (concept us, intellectio rei) is as such a state or an act of the 
soul (passio intentio am mce), and forms in this a sign (signum) 
for the corresponding external thing. But this inner structure is 
something of a different nature from the outer reality of which it is 
the sign, and therefore it is no copy of it. We can speak of a " re 
semblance " only in so far as in this case the inner reality (esse 
objective = content of consciousness) and the outer reality (esse for- 
maliter or subjective = objective reality in the present sense of the 
word "objective" 2 ) necessarily relate to each other, and, so to speak, 
form corresponding points in the two heterogeneous spheres. 

Thus the beginning of a psychological and epistemological idealism 

1 According to his methodical principle : entia prceter necessitatem non esse 
multiplicanda. 

2 The terms " objective " and " subjective " in the Middle Ac;es have accord 
ingly a meaning exactly the reverse of that which they have in present 
usage. 

326 Mediaeval Philosophy : Second Period. [PART III. 

develops among the Terminists out of the old duality of mind 
and body : the world of consciousness is another world than the 
world of things. What is found in the former is not a copy, but 
only a sign for something without which corresponds to it. Things 
are other than our ideas (tdece) of them. 

7. Lastly, Augustine s dualism appeared in its complete bald 
ness in his conception of history. The realm of God and that of the 
devil, the Church and the political state, here confronted each other 
in rigid antithesis. The historical conditions of which this doctrine 
was the reflex, had become changed completely since Augustine s 
day. But hitherto the Middle Ages had not only lacked historical 
conceptions which would have been adapted to correct this doctrine, 
but scientific thought had been employed in such a one-sidedly theo 
logical and dialectical manner, that ethical and social problems had 
remained farther outside the horizon of philosophers than had phys 
ical problems. And yet at the same time, history was seeing move 
ments of such grand dimensions that science also must necessarily 
take a position with regard to it. If she was able to do this in the 
second period in a manner completely worthy of the greatness of 
the subject, she owed her strength for this again to the Aristotelian 
system, which gave the means into her hand of mastering in thought 
the great connected structures of political and historical life, of 
arranging in her metaphysics these forms of the series of develop 
ment, and thus of putting into conceptions the mighty import of 
that which she was living through. Indeed, in this line in which 
the Arabian commentators had not gone before lies the most brilliant 
achievement of mediaeval philosophy, 1 and since Albert s interest lay 
more on the side of physics, the chief credit here falls to Thomas. 

Thomas regards the political state, not as did Augustine, as a con 
sequence of the fall, but as a necessary member in the world s life. 
In his view, therefore, law or right also flows from the divine nature 
and must be so conceived ; above all human institutions stands the 
lex naturalis, upon which rest morality and the life of society. In 
particular, however, as is proved by language, by the need of help 
which the individual feels, and by the impulse toward society, man 
is by his nature destined for life in a state. The end of the state is, 
according to Aristotle s teaching, to realise virtue, and from this end 
all the characteristics of the state are to be developed (in philosoph 
ical law Natural Right or Law) . But and here the new thought 
begins that civic virtue to which the state should educate its 
citizens does not exhaust man s destiny. In this he fulfils only his 

i Cf . W. Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, I. 418 f. 

CHAP. 2, 25.] The Two Realms : Thomas, Dante. 327 

purpose as an earthly being ; his higher destiny is the salvation 
which grace offers him in the community of the Church. But as 
the higher everywhere realises itself through the lower, and the 
lower exists for the sake of the higher, the political community is 
to be the preparation for that higher community of the State of 
God. Thus the state becomes subordinate to the Church as the 
means to the end, as the preparatory to the complete. The com 
munity of the earthly life is the school for that of the heavenly 

PR^AMBULA GRATIS. 

By the side of the teleology of Nature which Greek philosophy had 
worked out, patristic thought had set the teleology of history (cf. 
21, 6) ; but the two had remained unconnected. The doctrine of the 
state set forth by Thomas subordinates the one to the other in a 
system of thought, and in so doing completes the most deeply and 
widely reaching union of the ancient and Christian conceptions of 
the world that has ever been attempted. 

With this the capstone is fitted to the metaphysical structure of 
Thomism. By this transition from the community of Nature into 
that of grace, man fulfils the task which his position in the universe 
assigns him, but he fulfils it, not as an individual, but only in the 
race. The ancient thought of the state lives again in Christianity ; 
but the state is no longer an end in itself, it is the best means for 
carrying out the divine world-plan. Gratia naturam non tollit sed 
perficit. 

8. But even this highest synthesis did not long endure. As in 
political life, so also in theory, the relation of Church and state took 
on a form that was very much less harmonious. With Dante the 
relation of subordination is already exchanged for that of co-ordina 
tion. The poet shares with the metaphysician the thought that 
because man s destined end is to be attained only in the race, this 
makes a perfect unity in political organisation requisite. Both de 
mand the universal state, the " monarchia " and see in the Empire the 
fulfilment of this postulate. But the great Ghibelline cannot think 
theocratically, as does the Dominican monk ; and where the latter 
assigns to the imperium the place of subordination beneath the sacer- 
dotium, the former sets the two over against each other as powers of 
like authority. God has destined man for earthly and for heavenly 
happiness in like measure : to the former he is conducted by the 
state, by the natural knowledge of philosophy ; to the latter he is 
guided by the Church, by means of revelation. In this co-ordination 
the joy in the world, characteristic of the Renaissance, bursts forth 
as victoriously as does the feeling of strength which belongs to the 
secular state. 

328 Mediaeval Philosophy : Second Period. [PART III. 

And along this line the development proceeded. When the graded 
scale of reality constructed by Thomas was severed in the midst of 
man s nature, the spiritual and political powers fell apart, as did the 
spiritual and corporeal worlds ; and the theory afforded the con 
venient means of banishing the saccrdotium to the supra-mundane 
inner nature, and putting the imperium into sole control within 
the world of sense. This is precisely the point of view from which 
Occam, in his Disputatio with reference to the controversy between 
the papacy and the temporal power, took his position upon the side 
of the latter. Nor yet is it any longer possible, in accordance with 
his presuppositions, to base the theory of the state upon the realistic 
thought of the human race as a whole, bound together for the real 
isation of one end. The Nominalist sees as a substantial back 
ground in social and historical life, only the individuals who will, 
and he regards state and society as products of interests (bonum 
commune). In theory, as in life, individualism prevails. 1 

26. The Primacy of the Will or of the Intellect. 

W. Kahl, Die Lehre vom Primat des Willens bei Augustinus, Duns Scotus 
und Descartes. 

In closest connection with all these general questions stands a spe 
cial psychological problem, which was vigorously discussed through 
out this whole period, and in reference to which the points of 
opposition between the parties of the time may be recognised upon a 
smaller scale, but all the more sharply focussed. It is the question 
whether among the powers of the soul the higher dignity belongs 
to the will or to the intellect (utra potentia nobilior). It takes so 
broad a space in the literature of this period that the attempt might 
have been made to look upon the psychological antithesis which 
unfolds in connection with it as the leading motive of the whole 
period. But the course of the development shows too clearly that 
the real impelling forces lay in religious metaphysics, and the 
rigidity of systematic conception which distinguishes the philoso 
phical doctrines of this period explains sufficiently why it is that 
their position with reference to an individual problem may appear 
as typical for the different thinkers. It still remains characteristic 
that this problem is a question taken from the domain of the inner 
world. 

1 This doctrine of Occam s concerning secular power and law is followed out 
to the extreme consequence of the omnipotence of the state by Occam s friend, 
Marsilius of Padua, whose treatise, Defensor Pads (1346), carries out in 
rigorous lines the attempt to establish the theory of the state upon the utilitarian 
and nominalistic basis using the Epicurean theory of compact (above, 14, 6). 

CHAP. 2, 20.] Will and Intellect : Thomism, Scotism. 329 

In this question, also, the two main bodies of tradition, Augus- 
tinianism and Aristotelianism, were not at one ; but their relation was 
here in nowise that of an outspoken opposition. For Augustinianism 
the question was in general awkwardly stated. For in this system 
the oneness of nature in the personality was so strongly emphasised, 
and the inter-relation of the different sides of its activity was so 
often made prominent, that a relation of rank in the proper sense was 
really out of the question. But on the other hand, especially in his 
doctrine of knowledge, Augustine had assigned to the will as the 
impelling power even in the process of ideation a position 
so central that it was not shaken in its importance for empirical 
facts, even though the Neo-Platonic contemplation of the deity was 
maintained as the final goal of development. On the contrary, the 
intellectualism of the Aristotelian system was quite undoubted, 
and if it still admitted any increase, it had received it from the 
Arabian philosophy, especially from Averroism. Thus antitheses 
presented themselves which were soon enough to break forth to 
open controversy. 

Thomism in this point, also, followed Aristotle unconditionally, 
finding at its side in this case the nearly related German Mysticism, 
and as its opponents the Augustinians, Scotists, and Occamists, so 
that, as thus grouped, the opposition between the Dominicans and 
the Franciscans finds general expression. 

1. The question as to the pre-eminence of the will or of the intel 
lect develops at first as a purely psychological controversy, and de 
mands a decision upon the point, whether in the course of the psychical 
life the dependence of the will s decisions upon ideas, or that of the 
movements of ideas upon the will, is the greater. It was there 
fore adapted to further the beginnings of a treatment of psychology 
that concerned itself especially with the history of mental develop 
ment (cf. 24), and it would have been able to do this in a higher 
degree than was actually the case if it had not always been trans 
ferred to the ground of dialectic or to the metaphysical domain. 
This latter transfer occurred principally in consequence of the fact 
that the conception of freedom, which always involves ethical and 
religious questions, was looked upon as the point in controversy. 
Both parties, indeed, desired to maintain or defend man s " freedom " 
in the interest of responsibility ; but this was possible only as they 
gave different meanings to the word. 

Now, in individual cases, Thomas admits an influence of the will, 
not only upon motion, but also upon affirmation or denial of ideas. 
In particular, he recognises absolutely such an influence in belief. 
But ;n general he regards the will, quite according to the ancient 

330 Mediaeval Philosophy : Second Period. [PART in. 

model, as determined by knowledge of the good. The intellect not 
only apprehends in general the idea of the good, but also, in each 
individual case, discerns what is good, and thereby determines the 
will. The will necessarily strives for that which is known to be 
good ; it is therefore dependent upon the intellect. The latter is 
the supremus motor of the psychical life ; " rationality," so said 
Eckhart also, is the head of the soul, and even romantic love 
("Minne") clings only to knowledge. Freedom (as ethical ideal) 
is hence, according to Thomas, that necessity which exists upon the 
basis of knowledge, and, on the other hand, (psychological) freedom 
of choice (facultas electiva) is nevertheless only possible by reason 
of the fact that the understanding presents to the will various pos 
sibilities as means toward its end, the will then deciding for that 
which is known to be best, the view held by Albert also. This 
intellectualistic determinism, in connection with which Thomas him 
self always insisted that the decision of the will depends only upon 
purely internal knowing activities, was extended by his contemporary 
Gottfried of Fontaine to the point of making even the sensuous 
presentation (pliantasma) the causa ejficiens of the will s activity. 

But the opponents made their attack just in connection with this 
conception of necessary determination. The rising of ideas, so 
Henry of Ghent had already taught, and after him Duns Scotus, and 
still later Occam, is a natural process, and the will becomes un 
avoidably entangled in this if it is to be completely dependent upon 
ideas. But with this, said Scotus, contingency (i.e. possibility of 
being otherwise or " power to the contrary ") in the will s functions 
is irreconcilable : for the process of Nature is always determined in 
one way ; where it prevails there is no choice. With contingency, 
however, responsibility also falls to the ground. Responsibility can 
therefore be preserved only if it is acknowledged that the intellect 
exercises no compelling power over the will. To be sure, the co 
operation of the ideational faculty is indispensable in the case of 
every activity of the will : it presents the will its objects and the 
possibilities of its choice. But it does this only as the servant, and 
the decision remains with the master. The idea is never more than 
the occasioning cause (causa per accidens) of the individual volition; 
the doctrine of Thomas confuses practical consideration with pure 
intellect. If the latter gives the object, the decision is still solely 
a matter of the will; the will is the movens per se; to it belongs 
absolute self-determination. 

Indeterminism, as Scotus and Occam teach it, sees therefore in the 
will the fundamental power of the soul, and maintains conversely, 
that as a matter of fact the will on its side determines the develop- 

CHAP. 2, 26.] Will and Intellect : Thomism, Scotism. 331 

ment of the intellectual activities. Following the procedure of 
Henry of Ghent, 1 according to whom the theoretical functions 
become more active according as they are more immaterial, Scotus 
attempted to prove the proposition just stated, in a highly interest 
ing manner. The natural process, he says, produces as the first 
content of consciousness (cogitatio prima) a multitude of ideas 
which are more or less confused (confusce indistinctce) and im 
perfect. Of these only those become distinct (distincta) and perfect 
on which the will, which in this process is determined by nothing 
further, fixes its attention. Scotus also teaches at the same time 
that the will strengthens in their intensity these ideas which it 
raises from the confused to the distinct condition, and that the 
ideas to which the will does not apply itself ultimately cease to 
exist, on account of their weakness. 

In addition to these psychological arguments, we find appearing 
in the controversy appeals to the authority of Anselm and Aristotle 
on the one side, and to that of Augustine on the other, and further 
a series of other arguments. These are in part of a purely dia 
lectical nature. Such is the case when Thomas claims that 
the verum toward which the intellect aims is higher in rank than the 
bonnm toward which the will strives, and when Scotus doubts the 
authority for this gradation ; and so again when Thomas expresses 
the opinion that the intellect apprehends the pure, single conception 
of the good, while the will is concerned only with the special 
empirical forms assumed by the good, and when Henry of Ghent 
and Scotus, exactly reversing this statement, develop the thought 
that the will is always directed only toward the good as such, while 
the understanding has to show in what the good consists in a 
particular case. With such variations the matter was later tossed 
to and fro a great deal, and Johannes Bur id an is an example of 
those who stand undecided between determinism and indeterminism. 
For the latter view speaks responsibility, for the former the prin 
ciple that every event is necessarily determined by its conditions. 

Other arguments which become interwoven in the controversy 
trench upon the more general domains of the conceptions of the 
world and of life. 

2. To this class belongs, first of all, the transfer of the question 
of the relative rank of will and intellect to God. The extreme 
intellectualism of the Arabians had, in Aver roes, excluded the 
faculty of will from the Supreme Being, in accordance with the 
Aristolelian motif, that every act of will implies a want, a state of 

1 Whose view in this respect Richard of Middletown also completely adopted. 

832 Mediceval Philosophy : Second Period. [PART III. 

imperfection and dependence ; on the contrary Avicebron, who ex 
ercised a strong influence upon Duns Scotus, had defended the 
religious principle that the world was created by the divine will, 
and in a similar line of thought William of Auvergne had main 
tained the originality of the will as existing side by side with the 
intellect in the essence of God and in his creative activity. These 
antitheses were now continued in the controversy between Thomism 
and Scotism. 

Thomas, indeed, as a matter of course, recognises the reality of 
the divine will, but he regards it as the necessary consequence of the 
divine intellect, and as determined in its content by the latter. God 
creates only what in his wisdom he knows to be good ; it is neces 
sarily himself, i.e. the ideal content of his intellect, that forms the 
object of his will ; he necessarily wills himself, and in this consists 
the freedom, determined only by himself, with which he wills indi 
vidual things. Thus the divine will is bound to the divine wisdom, 
which is superior to it. 

But just in this the opponents of Aquinas see a limitation of 
omnipotence which does not comport with the conception of the 
ens realissimum. A will seems to them sovereign, only if there is 
for it no kind of determination or restriction. God created the 
world, according to Scotus, solely from absolute arbitrary will ; he 
might have created it, if he had so willed, in other forms, relations, 
and conditions ; and beyond this his completely undetermined will, 
there are no causes. The will of God with its undetermined crea 
tive resolves is the original fact of all reality, and no further ques 
tions must be asked as to its grounds, even as the decision made 
by the will of a finite being with its liberum arbitrium indifferentice, 
when placed before given possibilities, creates in every instance a 
new fact which cannot be understood as necessary. 

3. The sharpest formulation of this antithesis comes to light in 
the fundamental metaphysical principles of ethics. On both sides 
the moral law is naturally regarded as God s command. But 
Thomas teaches that God commands the good because it is good, 
and is recognised as good by his wisdom ; Scotus maintains that it is 
good only because God has willed and commanded it, and Occam 
adds to this that God might have fixed something else, might have 
fixed even the opposite as the content of the moral law. For 
Thomas, therefore, goodness is the necessary consequence and mani 
festation of the divine wisdom, and Eckhart also says that " be 
neath the garment of goodness " the essential nature of God is 
veiled; intellectual! sm teaches the perse itas boni, the rationally of 
the good. For intellectualism, morals is a philosophical discipline 

CHAP. 2, 26.] Will and Intellect : Thomism, Scotism. 333 

whose principles are to be known by the " natural light." " Con 
science " (synteresis ! ) is a knowledge of God sub ratione boni. With 
Scotus and Occam, on the contrary, the good cannot be an object of 
natural knowledge, for it might have been otherwise than it is ; it 
is determined not by reason, but by groundless will. Nothing, so 
Pierre d Ailly teaches with extreme consistency, is in itself, or 
per se, sin ; it is only the divine command and prohibition which 
make anything such, a doctrine whose range is understood when 
we reflect that, according to the view of these men, God s com 
mand becomes known to man only through the mouth of the 
Church. 

It is also closely connected with this that theology, which for 
Thomas still remained a "speculative" science, became with his 
opponents, as has been already indicated above (25, 3), a "prac 
tical " discipline. Albert had already made intimations of this sort, 
Richard of Middletown and Bonaventura had emphasised the fact 
that theology deals with the emotions ; Roger Bacon had taught 
that while all other sciences are based on reason or experience, 
theology alone has for its foundation the authority of the divine 
will: Duns Scotus completed and fixed the separation between 
theology and philosophy by making it a necessary consequence of 
his metaphysics of the will. 

4. The same contrast becomes disclosed with like distinctness 
in the doctrines of the final destiny of man, of his state in eternal 
blessedness. The ancient Qtupia, the contemplation of the divine 
majesty, free from will and from want, had in Augustine s teaching 
formed the ideal state of the pardoned and glorified man, and this 
ideal had been made to waver but little by the doctrines of the ear 
lier Mystics. Now it found new support in the Aristotelian intel- 
lectualism, in accordance with which Albert thought that man, in so 
far as he is truly man, is intellect. The participation in the divine 
being which man attains by knowledge is the highest stage of life 
which he can reach. On this account Thomas, too, sets the dianoetic 
virtues above the practical, on this account the visio divince essentice, 
the intuitive, eternal vision of God, which is removed beyond all 
that is temporal, is for him the goal of all human striving. From 
this vision follows eo ipso the love of God, just as every determinate 

1 This word (written also sinderesis, scinderesis} has, since Albert of Boll- 
stadt, occasioned much etymological cudgelling of brains. Since, however, 
among the later physicians of antiquity (Sext. Emp.) ri^em appears as a 
technical term for "observation," it may be that o-yvTifarjcrts, which is attested 
in the fourth century, originally signified "self-observation" in analogy with 
the Neo-Platonic usage in ffwalo-Brja-Ls or o-vvel5r)&lt;ri.s (cf. p. 234), and thus took 
on the ethico- religious sense of " conscience " (coxscientia). 

334 Mediaeval Philosophy : Second Period. [PART III. 

state of the will is necessarily attached to the corresponding state 
of the intellect. Just this tendency of Thomism was given its most 
beautiful expression by Dante, the poet of the system. Beatrice is 
the poetic embodiment of this ideal, for all time. 

Meanwhile a counter-current manifests its force on this point also. 
Hugo of St. Victor had characterised the supreme angel choir by 
love, and the second by wisdom ; and while Boriaventura regarded 
contemplation as the highest stage in the imitation of Christ, he 
emphasised expressly the fact that this contemplation is identical 
with "love." Duns Scotus, however, taught with a decided polemi 
cal tendency that blessedness is a state of the will, and that, too, of 
the will directed toward God alone ; he sees man s last glorification, 
not in contemplation, but in love, which is superior to contemplation, 
and he appeals to the word of the Apostle, "The greatest of these is 
love." 

Hence as Thomas regarded the intellect, and Duns Scotus the 
will, as the decisive and determining element of man s nature, 
Thomas could hold fast to Augustine s doctrine of the gratia irresisti- 
bilis, according to which revelation determines irresistibly the intel 
lect and with it the will of man, while Duns Scotus found himself 
forced to the " synergistic " view, that the reception of the opera 
tion of divine grace is to a certain extent conditioned by the free will 
of the individual. So the great successor of Augustine, with strict 
logical consistency, decided against the Augustinian doctrine of pre 
destination. 

5. On the other hand, the intellectualism of Thomas develops its 
extreme consequences in German Mysticism, whose founder, Eckhart, 
is entirely dependent upon the teacher of his Order in the con- 
ceptional outlines of his doctrine. 1 Eckhart goes far beyond his 
master only in the one respect that as a much more original person 
ality he is unwearied in his effort to translate the deep and mighty 
feeling of his piety into knowledge, and thus urged on by his inner 
nature he breaks through the statutory restrictions before which 
Thomas had halted. Convinced that the view of the world given in 
the religious consciousness must be capable of being made also the 
content of the highest knowledge, he sublimates his pious faith to a 
speculative knowledge, and in contrast with the pure spirituality of 
this he looks upon the Church dogma as only the external, temporal 
symbol. But while this tendency is one that he shares with many 

iCf. S. Denifle in the Archiv fur Litterat.- u. Kult.-Gesch. d. M.-A.,II. 
417 ff. So far, therefore, as Eckhart was really to be the "Father of German 
speculation," this speculation had its source in Thomas Aquinas and his teacher 
Albert. 

CHAP. 2, 26.] Will and Intellect : Eckhart. 335 

other systems, it is his peculiarity that he does not wish to have the 
inmost and truest truth kept as the privilege of an exclusive circle, 
but desires rather to communicate it to all people. He believes 
that the right understanding for this deepest essence of religious 
doctrine is to be found precisely in connection with simple piety, 1 
arid so he throws down from the pulpit among the people the finest 
conceptions constructed by science. With a mastery of language 
that marks the genius he coins Scholasticism into impressive preach 
ing, and creates for his nation the beginnings of its philosophical 
modes of expression, beginnings which were of determining in 
fluence for the future. 

But in his teaching the combined mystical and intellectualistic 
elements of Thomism become intensified by the Neo-Platonic ideal 
ism, which had probably reached him through the medium of Scotus 
Erigena, to the last logical consequence. Being and knowledge are 
one, and all that takes place in the world is in its deepest essence a 
knowing process. The procedure of the world forth out of God is 
a process of knowledge, of self-revelation, the return of things 
into God is a process of knowledge, of higher and higher intuition. 
The ideal existence of all that is real so at a later time said 
Nicolaus Cusanus, who made this doctrine of Eckhart s his own - 
is truer than the corporeal existence which appears in space and 
time. 

The original ground of all things, the deity, must therefore lie 
beyond Being and knowledge ; 2 it is above reason, above Being ; it 
has no determination or quality, it is " Nothing." But this " deity " 
(of negative theology) reveals itself in the triune God, 3 and the 
God who is and knows creates out of nothing the creatures whose 
Ideas he knows within himself ; for this knowing is his creating. 
This process of self-revelation belongs to the essence of the deity; 
it is hence a timeless necessity, and no act of will in the proper 
sense of the word is required for God to produce the world. The 
deity, as productive or generative essence, as " un-natured Nature " 
[or Nature that has not yet taken on a nature], is real or actual only 
by knowing and unfolding itself in God and the world as produced 

1 German Mysticism is thus connected with the more general phenomenon, 
that the fast increasing externalisation which seized upon the life of the Church 
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries drove piety everywhere into paths 
that lay outside the Church. 

2 Evidently the same relation that subsisted in the system of Plotinus between 
the Zv and the /oDs, a relation in which thought and Being were held to coincide. 

3 The distinction between deity and God (divinitas and deus) was made dia- 
lectically by Gilbert de la Porree in connection with the controversy over uni- 
versals and its relations to the doctrine of the Trinity. 

336 Mediaeval Philosophy : Second Period. [PART III. 

reality, as natured Nature. 1 God creates all said Nicolaus Cusa- 
nus that is to say, he is all. And on the other hand, according 
to Eckhart, all things have essence or substance only in so far 
as they are themselves God ; whatever else appears in them as 
phenomena, their determination in space and time, their "here" and 
"now" ("Hie " und " Nu" hie et nunc with Thomas), is nothing. 2 

The human soul, also, is therefore in its inmost nature of the 
divine essence, and it is only as a phenomenon in time that it 
possesses the variety of " powers " or " faculties " with which it is 
active as a member of the natura naturata. That inmost essence 
Eckhart calls the " Spark," 3 and in this he recognises the living 
point at which the world-process begins its return. 

For to the "Becoming" corresponds the reverse process, the 
"Anti-becoming" (" Entwerden"), the disappearing. And this, 
too, is the act of knowledge by means of which the things 
which have been made external to the deity are taken back 
into the original Ground. By being known by man the world of 
sense finds again its true spiritual nature. Hence human cogni 
tion, with its ascent from sense perception to rational insight, 4 
consists in the " elimination " (" Abscheiden ") of plurality and mul 
tiplicity; the spiritual essence is freed from its enveloping husks. 
And this is man s highest task in the temporal life, since knowledge 
is the most valuable of man s powers. He should indeed be also 
active in this world, and thus bring his rational nature to assert 
itself and gain control, but above all outer action, above the right 
eousness of works which belongs to the sphere of sense, stands first 
the "inner work," cleanness of disposition, purity of heart, and 
above this in turn stands retirement or "decease" (Abgeschieden- 
hdt) and " poverty " of soul, the complete withdrawal of the soul from 
the outer world into its inmost essence, into the deity. In the act 
of knowing it reaches that purposelessness of action, that action not 
constrained by an end, that freedom within itself, in which its beauty 
consists. 

But even this is not perfect so long as the knowing process does 
not find its consummation. The goal of all life is the knowledge of 

1 On the terms natura naturans and natura naturata, which were probably 
brought into use by Averroism (cf. 27, 1), cf. H. Siebeck, Archiv f. Gesch. d. 
Phil., III. 370 ff. 

2 Accordingly without accepting the dialectical formulas, Eckhart treats the 
Thomistic doctrine of Ideas quite in the sense of the strict Realism of Scotus 
Erigena. He speaks slightingly of the Nominalists of his time as "little 
masters." 

3 Also the " Gemuthe" or Synteresis - scintilla conscientm. 

* The single stages of this process are developed by Eckhart according to the 
Thomistic-Augustinian scheme. 

CHAP. 2, 27.] Problem of Individuality. 

God, but knowing is Being ; it is a community of life and of Being 
with that which is known. If the soul would know God, it must 
be God, it must cease to be itself. It must renounce not only sin 
and the world, but itself also. It must strip off all its acquired 
knowledge, and all present knowing of phenomena ; as the deity is 
" Nothing," so it is apprehended only in this knowledge that is a 
not-knowing doctaignomntia, it was later called by Nicolaus; and 
as that " Nothing " is the original ground of all reality, so this not- 
knowing is the highest, the most blessed contemplation. It is no 
longer an act of the individual, it is the act of God in man ; God 
begets his own essence within the soul, and in his pure eternal 
nature the "Spark" has stripped off all its powers through which it 
works in time, and has effaced their distinction. This is the state 
of supra-rational knowing when man ends his life in God, the 
state, of which Nicolaus of Cusa said, it is the eternal love (charitas), 
which is known by love (amore) and loved by knowledge. 

27. The Problem of Individuality. 

The doctrine of German Mysticism, which had arisen from the 
deepest personal piety and from a genuine individual need felt in 
a life whose religion was purely internal, thus runs out into an ideal 
of exaltation, of self-denial, of renunciation of the world, in the 
presence of which everything that is particular, every individual 
reality, appears as sin or imperfection, as had been the case in the 
ancient Oriental view. In this thought the contradiction that was 
inherent in the depths of the Augustinian system (cf. p. 287) became 
fully developed and immediately palpable, and it thus becomes evident 
that the Neo-Platonic intellectualism, in whatever form it appeared 
from the time of Augustine to that of Master Eckhart, was in itself 
alone always necessarily inclined to contest the metaphysical self- 
subsistence of the individual, while the other party maintained this 
self-subsistence as a postulate of the doctrine of the will. Accord 
ingly, when in connection with the increase of intellectualism the 
universalistic tendency increased also, the counter-current was neces 
sarily evoked all the more powerfully, and the same antithesis in 
motives of thought which had led to the dialectic of the controversy 
over universals (cf. p. 289) now took on a more real and metaphys 
ical form in the question as to the ground of existence in individual 
beings (principium indi v id ua tionis). 

1. The stimulus for this was furnished by the far-reaching conse 
quences to which universalism and intellectualism had led among 
the Arabians. For the Arabians, in interpreting the Aristotelian 

338 Mediaeval Philosophy : Second Period. [PART in. 

system, had proceeded in the direction which had been introduced 
in antiquity by Strato (cf. p. 179 f.), and which among the later com 
mentators had been maintained chiefly by Alexander of Aphrodisias. 
This direction was that of naturalism, which would fain remove 
from the system of the Stagirite even the last traces of a metaphys 
ical separation between the ideal and the sensuous. This effort had 
become concentrated upon two points : upon the relation of God to 
the world, and upon that of the reason to the other faculties. In 
both these lines the peculiar nature of the Arabian Peripatetic doc 
trine developed, and this took place by complicated transformations 
of the Aristotelian conceptions of Form and Matter. 

In general, we find in this connection in the Andalusian philoso 
phy a tendency to make matter metaphysically self-subsistent. It 
is conceived of, not as that which is merely abstractly possible, but 
as that which bears within itself as living germs the Forms peculiar 
to it, and brings them to realisation in its movement. At the same 
time Averroes, as regards particular cosmic processes, held fast to 
the Aristotelian principle that every movement of matter by which 
it realises out of itself a lower Form, must be called forth by a 
higher Form, and the graded series of Forms finds its termination 
above in God, as the highest and first mover. The transcendence 
of God could be united with this view, as the doctrine of Avicebron 
shows, only if matter were regarded as itself created by the divine 
will. But on the other hand, this same Jewish philosopher, pro 
ceeding from the same presuppositions, insisted that with the excep 
tion of the deity, no being could be thought of otherwise than as 
connected with matter, that accordingly even the spiritual Forms 
need for their reality a matter in which they inhere, and that finally 
the living community of the universe demands a single matter as 
basis for the entire realm of Forms. The more, however, in the 
system of Averroes, matter was regarded as eternally in motion 
within itself, and as actuated by unity of life, the less could the 
moving Form be separated from it realiter, and thus the same divine 
All-being appeared on the one hand as Form and moving force 
(natura naturans), and on the other hand as matter, as moved world 
(natura naturata). 

This doctrine with regard to matter, that it is one in nature, is 
informed within, and is eternally in motion of itself, became ex 
tended with Averroism as an extremely naturalistic interpretation 
of the philosophy of Aristotle. It now became reinforced by those 
consequences of dialectical Realism which compelled the view that 
God, as the ens generalissimum, is the only substance, and that in 
dividual things are but the more or less transient Forms in which 

CHAP. 2, 27.] Problem of Individuality : Averroes. 339 

this single substance becomes realised (cf. 23). The Amalricans 
thus teach that God is the one single essence (essentia) of all things, 
and that creation is only an assuming of form on the part of this 
divine essence, a realising, completed in eternal movement, of all 
possibilities contained in this one single matter. David of Dinant 1 
establishes this same pantheism with the help of Avicebron s con 
ceptions, by teaching that as "hyle" (i.e. corporeal matter) is the 
substance of all bodies, so mind (ratio mens) is the substance of 
all souls ; that, however, since God, as the most universal of all es 
sences, is the substance of all things whatever, God, matter, and 
mind are, in the last resort, identical, and the world is but their 
self-realisation in particular forms. 

2. But the metaphysical self-subsistence of the individual mind 
was involved in doubt by yet another line of thought. Aristotle 
had made the vows, as the everywhere identical rational activity, 
join the animal soul " from without," and had escaped the difficul 
ties of this doctrine because the problem of personality, which 
emerged only with the Stoic conception of the lyye^oviKov, did not 
as yet lie within the horizon of his thought. But the commenta 
tors, Greek and Arabian, who developed his system did not shrink 
before the consequences that resulted from it for the metaphysical 
value of mental and spiritual individuality. 

In the thought of Alexander of Aplirodisias we meet, under the 
name of the "passive intellect" (cf. p. 150), the capacity of the in 
dividual psyche to take up into itself, in accordance with its whole 
animal and empirical disposition, the operation of the active reason, 
and this intellectus agens (agreeably to the naturalistic conception of 
the whole system) is here identified with the divine mind, which is 
still thought only as "separate Form" (intellectus separatus). But 
with Simplicius, in accordance with the Neo-Platonic metaphysics, this 
intellectus agens which realises itself in man s rational knowledge 
has already become the lowest of the intelligences who rule the sub 
lunary world. 2 This doctrine finds an original development in the 
thought of Averroes. 3 According to his view, the intellectus passivus 
is to be sought in the individual s capacity for knowledge, a capacity 
which, like the individual himself, arises and perishes as Form of 
the individual body ; it has validity, therefore, only for the indi 
vidual, and for that which concerns the particular. The intellectus 

1 Following the Liber de Causis and the pseudo-Boethian treatise De Uno e.t 
Unitate; cf. B. Haureau in the Memoires de VAcad. des Inscript., XXIX. (1877), 
and also A. Jundt, Ilistoire du Pantheisme Populaire au M.-A. (Paris, 1875). 

2 The so-called "Theology of Aristotle" identifies this roOj with the Xo -yos. 
For particulars, see E. Renan, Av. et VAv., II. 6 ff . 

8 Gf. principally his treatise De Animce Beatitudine. 

340 Mediceval Philosophy : Second Period. [PART III. 

agens, on the contrary, as a Form existing apart from empirical in 
dividuals and independent of them, is the eternal generic reason of 
the human race, which neither arises nor perishes, and which con 
tains the universal truths in a manner valid for all. It is the sub 
stance of the truly intellectual life, and the knowing activity of 
the individual is but a special manifestation of it. This (actual) 
knowing activity (as intellects acquisitus) is indeed in its con 
tent, in its essence, eternal, since in so far it is just the active rea 
son itself ; on the contrary, as empirical function of an individual 
knowing process, it is as transitory as the individual soul itself. 
The completest incarnation of the active reason has, according to 
Averroes, been given in Aristotle. 1 Man s rational knowing is, 
then, an impersonal or supra-personal function : it is the individual s 
temporal participation in the eternal generic reason. This latter is 
the unitary essence which realises itself in the most valuable activi 
ties of personality. 

Intimations of this pan-psychism occasionally appear in the train 
of Neo-Platonic Mysticism at an earlier period in Western literature ; 
as an outspoken and extended doctrine it appears by the side of 
Averroism about 1200 ; the two are everywhere named in conjunc 
tion at the first when the erroneous doctrines of the Arabian 
Peripatetic thought are condemned, and it is one main effort of 
the Dominicans to protect Aristotle himself from being confused 
with this doctrine. Albert and Thomas both write a De Unitate 
Intellectus against the Averroists. 

3. Pan-psychism encounters with Christian thinkers an oppo 
sition in which the determining factor is the feeling of the meta 
physical value of personality, the feeling which had been nour 
ished by Augustine. This is the standpoint from which men like 
William of Auvergne and Henry of Ghent oppose Averroes. And 
this is also the real reason why the main systems of Scholasticism 
in diametrical contrast with Eckhart s Mysticism did not allow 
the Realism which was inherent in the intellectualistic bases of 
their metaphysics to come to complete development. Thomism 
was here in the more difficult case, for it maintained indeed, follow 
ing Avicenna s formula (cf. p. 299), that universals, and therefore 
also the genus "soul," exist only "individualised," i.e. in the indi 
vidual empirical examples as their universal essence (quidditas), 
but it ascribed to them, nevertheless, metaphysical priority in the 
divine mind. It was therefore obliged to explain how it comes 

1 And with this the unconditional recognition of the authority of the Stagirite 
is theoretically justified by Averroes. 

CHAP. 2, 27.] Problem of Individuality : Thomism, Scotixm. 341 

about that this one essence as universal matter presents itself in 
such manifold forms. That is to say, it asked after the PKINCIPIUM 
INDIVIDUATIONIS, and found it in the consideration that matter in 
space and time is quantitatively determined (materia signatd). In 
the capacity of matter to assume quantitative differences consists the 
possibility of individuation, i.e. the possibility that the same Form 
(e.g. humanity) is actual in different instances or examples as indi 
vidual substances. Hence, according to Thomas, pure Forms (sepa 
ratee sive subsistentes} are individualised only through themselves ; 
that is, there is but one example which corresponds to them. Every 
angel is a genus and an individual at the same time. The inherent 
Forms, on the contrary, to which the human soul also belongs in 
spite of its subsistence (cf. p. 324), are actual in many examples, in 
accordance with the quantitative differences of space and time 
which their matter presents. 

This view was opposed by the Franciscans, whose religious and 
metaphysical psychology had developed in intimate relation with 
Augustine s teaching. In their thought, first the individual soul, 
and then, with a consistent extension in general metaphysics, 
individual beings in general, are regarded as self-subsisting realities. 
They rejected the distinction of separate and inherent Forms. 
Bonaventura, Henry of Ghent, and still more energetically Duns 
Scotus, maintained, following Avicebron, that even intellectual 
Forms have their own matter, and Scotus teaches that the " soul " is 
not individualised and substantialised only after, and by means of, 
its relation to a definite body, as Thomas had taught, but that it is 
already in itself individualised and substantialised. On this point 
Scotism shows a discord which had evidently not come to notice in 
the mind of its author. It .emphasises on the one hand, in the 
strongest manner, the Reality of the universal, by maintaining the 
unity of matter (materia primo-prima) quite in the Arabian sense, 
and on the other hand it teaches that this universalis only actual 
by being realised by the series of Forms descending from the uni 
versal to the particular, and ultimately by means of the definite 
individual Form (hcecceitas) . This individual Form is therefore 
for Duns Scotus an original fact; no farther question as to its 
ground is permissible. He designates individuality (both in the 
sense of individual substance and in that of individual occurrence) 
as the contingent (contingens) ; that is, as that which is not to be 
deduced from a universal ground, but is only to be verified as actual 
fact. For him, therefore, as for his predecessor Roger Bacon, the 
inquiry for the principle of individuation has no meaning : the indi 
vidual is the " last " Form of all reality, by means of which alone 

342 Mediaeval Philosophy : Second Period. [PART III. 

universal matter exists, and the question rather is, how, in presence 
of the fact that the individual being with its determined form is 
the only Reality, one can still speak of a Reality of universal 
" natures." 1 

From this noteworthy limitation of the doctrine of Scotus it 
becomes explicable that while some of its adherents, as for example 
Francis of Mayron, proceeded from it to extreme Realism, it sud 
denly changed with Occam into the renewal of the nominalistic 
tJiesis, that only the individual is real and that the universal is but 
a product of comparative thought. 

4. The victorious development which Nominalism experienced in 
the second period of mediaeval philosophy rests upon an extremely 
peculiar combination of very different motives of thought. In the 
depths of this stream of development is dominant the Augustinian 
moment of feeling, which seeks to see the proper metaphysical value 
secured to the individual personality ; in the main philosophical 
current the anti-Platonic tendency of the Aristotelian theory of 
knowledge, now just becoming known, asserts itself, throwing its 
influence toward conceding the value of "first substance" to the 
empirical individual only; and on the surface plays a logico-gram- 
matical schematism, which has its origin in the first operation of 
the Byzantine tradition of ancient thought. 2 All these influences 
become concentrated in the impassioned, impressive personality of 
William of Occam. 

In their exposition of the doctrine of concepts and its application 
to the judgment and syllogism, the text-books of " modern " logic, 
as type of which that of Petrus Hispanus may serve, lay an impor 
tant emphasis upon the theory of " supposition " in a manner which 
is not without its precedent in antiquity. 3 According to this theory 
a class-concept or term (terminus) may, in language, and, as was 
then supposed, in logic also, stand for the sum of its species, and a 
species-concept for the sum of all its individual examples (homo = 
omnes homines), so that in the operations of thought a term is 
employed as a sign for that which it means. Occam develops Nom 
inalism in the forms of this Terminism* (cf. pp. 325 f). Individual 

1 This method for the solution of the problem of universals, peculiar to Duns 
Scotus, is usually called Formalism. 

2 In fact, we may see in the working of the text-book of Michael Psellos the 
first impetus of that accession of ancient material of culture which the West 
received by way of Byzantium, and which later in the Renaissance became 
definitely united with the two other lines of tradition that came, the one by 
way of Home and York, the other by way of Bagdad and Cordova. 

3 The reader need only be reminded of the investigations of Philodemus on 
signs and things siimitied (p. 102 ; cf. also p. 198). 

* Cf. K. Prantl in the Sitz.-Bcr. dc.r Munch. A cad., 1864, II. a 58 ff. 

CHAP. 2, 27.] Problem of Individuality : Terminism. 348 

things, to which Occam, following Scotus, concedes the Reality of 
original Forms, are represented in thought by us intuitively, without 
the mediation of species intelligibiles ; but these ideas or mental rep 
resentations are only the " natural " signs for the things represented. 
They have only a necessary reference to them, and have real simi 
larity with them as little as any sign is necessarily like the object 
designated. This relation is that of " first intention." But now as 
individual ideas stand for (supponunt) individual things, so, in 
thought, speech, and writing, the " undetermined " general ideas of 
abstract knowledge, or the spoken or written words which in turn 
express these general ideas, may stand for the individual idea. This 
"second intention," in which the general idea with the help of the 
word refers no longer directly to the thing itself, but primarily to the 
idea of the thing, is no longer natural, but arbitrary or according 
to one s liking (ad placitum instituta). 1 Upon this distinction Occam 
rests also that of real and rational science : the former relates imme 
diately or intuitively to things, the latter relates abstractly to the 
immanent relations between ideas. 

It is clear, according to this, that rational science also presupposes 
" real " science and is bound to the empirical material presented in 
the form of ideas by this real science, but it is also clear that even 
" real " knowledge apprehends only an inner world of ideas, which 
may indeed serve as " signs " of things, but are different from things 
themselves. The mind so Albert had incidentally said, and Nico- 
laus Cusanus at a later time carried out the thought knows only 
what it has within itself; its knowledge of the world, terministic 
Nominalism reasons, refers to the inner states into which its living 
connection with the real world puts it. As contrasted with the true 
essence of things, teaches Nicolaus Cusanus, who committed himself 
absolutely to this idealistic Nominalism, human thought possesses 
only conjectures, that is, only modes of representation which corre 
spond to its own nature, and the knowledge of this relativity of all 
positive predicates, the knowledge of this non-knowledge, the docta 
ignorant ia, is the only way to go beyond rational science and attain 
to the inexpressible, signless, immediate community of knowledge 
with true Being, the deity. 

5. In spite of this far-reaching epistemological restriction, the 
real vital energy of Nominalism was directed toward the develop 
ment of natural science ; and if its results during the fourteenth and 
fifteenth centuries remained very limited, the essential reason for this 

1 The agreement of this with the contrast between 06m and 0i)&lt;m, which had 
been asserted also in the ancient philosophy of language (Plato s Cratylus), 
is obvious. 

344 Mediaeval Philosophy : Second Period. [PART IIL 

was that the scholastic method with its bookish discussion of authori 
ties, which had now attained full perfection, controlled absolutely 
later as well as earlier the prosecution of science, and that the 
new ideas forced into this form could not unfold freely, a phe 
nomenon, moreover, which continues far into the philosophy of the 
Renaissance. For all that, Duns Scotus and Occam gave the chief 
impetus to the movement in which philosophy, taking its place 
beside the metaphysics whose interests had hitherto been essentially 
religious, made itself again a secular science of concrete, actual fact, 
and placed itself with more and more definite consciousness upon 
the basis of empiricism. When Duns Scotus designated the hcecceitas 
or original individual Form, as contingent, this meant that it was to 
be known, not by logical deduction, but only by actual verification 
as fact ; and when Occam declared the individual being to be the 
alone truly Real, he was thereby pointing out to " real science " the 
way to the immediate apprehension of the actual world. But in 
this point the two Franciscans are under the influence of Roger 
Bacon, who with all his energy had called the science of his time 
from authorities to things, from opinions to sources, from dialectic 
to experience, from books to Nature. At his side in this movement 
stood Albert, who supported the same line of thought among the 
Dominicans, knew how to value the worth of original observation 
and experiment, and gave brilliant proof in his botanical studies 
of the independence of his own research. But strongly as Roger 
Bacon, following Arabian models, urged quantitative determinations 
in observation, and mathematical training, the time was not yet 
ripe for natural research. Attempts like those of Alexander 
Nekkam (about 1200), or those of Nicolaus d Autricuria, at a later 
time (about 1350), passed away without effect. 

The fruitful development of empiricism during this period was 
only in the line of psychology. Under the influence of the Arabs, 
especially of Avicenna and of the physiological optics of Alhacen, 
investigations concerning the psychical life took on a tendency 
directed more toward establishing and arranging the facts of expe 
rience. This had been begun even by Alexander of Hales, by his 
pupil, Johann of Rochelle, by Vincent of Beauvais, and especially 
by Albert; and in the system of Alfred the Englishman (Alfred de 
Sereshel, in the first half of the thirteenth century) we find a 
purely physiological psychology with all its radical consequences. 
These stirrings of a physiological empiricism would, however, have 
been repressed by the metaphysical psychology of Thomism, if they 
had not found their support in the Augustinian influence, which 
held fast to the experience which personality has of itself, as its 

CHAP. 2, 27.] Problem of Individuality : Nicolaus Cusanus. 345 

highest principle. In this attitude Henry of Ghent, especially, came 
forward in opposition to Thomism. He formulated sharply the 
standpoint of inner experience and gave it decisive value, particu 
larly in the investigation of the states of feeling. Just in this 
point, in the empirical apprehension of the life of feeling, the 
theory of which became thus emancipated at the same time from 
that of the will and that of the intellect, he met support in Royer 
Bacon, who, with clear insight and without the admixture of meta 
physical points of view, distinctly apprehended the difference in 
principle between outer and inner experience. 

Thus the remarkable result ensued, that purely theoretical science 
developed in opposition to intellectualistic Thomism, and in connec 
tion with the Augustinian doctrine of the self-certainty of person 
ality. This self-knowledge was regarded as the most certain fact of 
"real science," even as it appeared among the nominalistic Mystics 
such as Pierre d Ailly. Hence " real science " in the departing 
Middle Ages allied itself rather to active human life than to Nature ; 
and the beginnings of a " secular " science of the inter-relations of 
human society are found not only in the theories of Occam and 
Marsilius of Padua (cf. p. 328), not only in the rise of a richer, 
more living, and more " inward " writing of history, but also in an 
empirical consideration of the social relations, in which a Nicolas 
d Oresme, 1 who died 1382, broke the path. 

6. The divided frame of mind in which the departing Middle 
Ages found itself, between the original presuppositions of its 
thought and these beginnings of a new, experientially vigorous 
research, finds nowhere a more lively expression than in the phil 
osophy of Nicolaus Cusanus, which is capable of so many interpre 
tations.- Seized in every fibre of his being by the fresh impulse of 
the time, he nevertheless could not give up the purpose of arrang 
ing his new thoughts in the system of the old conception of the 
world. 

This attempt acquires a heightened interest from the conceptions 
which furnished the forms in which he undertook to arrange his 
thoughts. The leading motive is to show that the individual, even 
in his metaphysical separateness, is identical with the most uni 
versal, the divine essence. To this end Nicolaus employs for the 
first time, in a thoroughly systematic way, the related conceptions 
of the infinite and the finite. All antiquity had held the perfect to 
be that which is limited within itself and had regarded only 
indefinite possibility as infinite. In the Alexandrian philosophy, 

1 Cf. concerning him W. Roscher, Zcitschr. f. Staatswissenschaft, 1863, 305 ff. 

346 Mediaeval Philosophy : Second Period. [PART III. 

on the contrary, the highest being was stripped of all finite at 
tributes. In Plotinus the " One " as the all-forming power is 
provided with an unlimited intensity of Being on account of the 
infinity of matter in which it discloses itself ; and also in Christian 
thought the power, as well as the will and the knowledge of God, 
had been thought more and more as boundless. Here the main 
additional motive was, that the will even in the individual is felt 
as a restless, never quiet striving, and that this infinity of inner ex 
perience was exalted to a metaphysical principle. But Nicolaus was 
the first to give the methtxl of negative theology its positive ex 
pression by treating infinity as the essential characteristic of God in 
antithesis to the world. The identity of God with the world, 
required as well by the mystical view of the world as by the 
naturalistic, received, therefore, the formulation that in God the 
same absolute Being is contained infinitely, which in the world 
presents itself in finite forms. 

In this was given the farther antithesis of unity and plurality. 
The infinite is the living and eternal unity of that which in the 
finite appears as extended plurality. But this plurality and 
Cusanus lays special weight on this point is also that of opposites. 
What in the finite world appears divided into different elements, 
and only by this means possible as one thing by the side of another 
in space, must become adjusted and harmonised in the infinitude 
of the divine nature. God is the unity of all opposites, the coin- 
cidentia oppositorum. 1 He is, therefore, the absolute reality in 
which all possibilities are eo ipso realised (possest, can-is), while 
each of the many finite entities is in itself only possible, and is real 
or actual only through him. 2 

Among the oppositions which are united in God, those between him 
and the world, that is, those of the infinite and the finite, and of 
unity and plurality, appear as the most important. In consequence 
of this union the infinite is at the same time finite ; in each of his 
manifestations in phenomena the unitary deus implicitus is at the 
same time the deus explicitus poured forth into plurality (cf. p. 
290). God is the greatest (maximum) and at the same time also 

1 Nicolaus also designates his own doctrine, in contrast with opposing sys 
tems, as a coincidentia oppositorum, since it aims to do justice to all motives of 
earlier philosophy. Cf. the passages in Falckenberg, op. cit., pp. 00 ff. 

2 Thomas expressed the same thought as follows : God is the only necessary 
being, i.e. that which exists by virtue of its own nature (a thought which is to be 
regarded as an embodiment of Anselm s ontological argument, cf ; 23, 2), while 
in the case of all creatures, essence (or quidditas whatness) is really separate 
from existence in such a way that the former is in itself merely possible and 
that the latter is added to it as realisation. The relation of this doctrine to the 
fundamental Aristotelian conceptions, actus and potentia, is obvious. 

CHAP. 2, 27.] Problem of Individuality : Nicolaus Cusanus. 347 

the smallest (minimum). But, on the other hand, in consequence 
of this union it follows also that this smallest and finite is in its 
own manner participant in the infinite, and presents within itself, 
as does the whole, a harmonious unity of the many. 

Accordingly, the universe is also infinite, not indeed in the same 
sense in which God is infinite, but in its own way; that is, it is 
unlimited in space and time (interminatum, or privitively infinite). 
But a certain infinity belongs likewise to each individual thing, 
in the sense that in the characteristics of its essence it carries 
within itself also the characteristics of all other individuals. All 
is in all : omnia ubique. In this way every individual contains 
within itself the universe, though in a limited form peculiar to this 
individual alone and differing from all others. In omnibus part ibus 
relucet totum. Every individual thing is, if rightly and fully known, 
a mirror of the universe, a thought which had already been ex 
pressed incidentally by the Arabian philosopher Alkendi. 

Naturally this is particularly true in the case of man, and in his 
conception of man as a microcosm Nicolaus attaches himself 
ingeniously to the terministic doctrine. The particular manner in 
which other things are contained in man is characterised by the 
ideas which form in him signs for the outer world. Man mirrors 
the universe by his " conjectures," by the mode of mental repre 
sentation peculiar to him (of. above, p. 343). 

Thus the finite also is given with and in the infinite, the individ 
ual with and in the universal. At the same time the infinite is 
necessary in itself; the finite, however (following Duns Scotus), is 
absolutely contingent, i.e. mere fact. There is no proportion 
between the infinite and the finite ; even the endless series of the 
finite remains incommensurable with the truly infinite. The deri 
vation of the world from God is incomprehensible, and from the 
knowledge of the finite no path leads to the infinite. That which 
is real as an individual is empirically known, its relations and the 
oppositions prevailing in it are apprehended and distinguished by 
the understanding, but the perception or intuition of the infinite 
unity, which, exalted above all these opposites, includes them all 
within itself, is possible only by stripping off all such finite knowl 
edge, by the mystical exaltation of the docta ignorantia. Thus the 
elements which Cusanus desired to unite fall apart again, even in 
the very process of union. The attempt to complete the mediaeval 
philosophy and make it perfect on all sides leads to its inner 
disintegration. 

PART IV. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

J. E. Erdmann, Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Darstellung der Geschichte 
der neueren Philosophic. 3 pts., in 6 vols. Riga and Leips. 1834-53. 

H. Ulrici, Geschichte und Kritik der Principien der neueren Philosophic. 2 
vols. Leips. 1845. 

Kuno Fischer, Geschichte der neueren Philosophic. 4th ed. Heidelb. 1897 ft . 
[Eng. tr. of Vol. I., Descartes and His School, by J. P. Gordy, N.Y. 1877.] 

Ed. Zeller, Geschichte der deutschen Philosophic seit Leibniz. 2d ed., Berlin, 
1875. 

W. Windelband, Geschichte der neueren Philosophic. 2 vols. Leips. 2d ed. 1899. 

R. Falckenberg, Geschichte der neueren Philosophic. Leips. 1886. [Eng. tr. by 
A. C. Armstrong, N.Y. 1893.] 

J. Schaller, Geschichte der Naturphilosophie seit Bacon. 2 vols. Leips. 18U-44. 

J. Bauinann, Die Lehren von Raum, Zeit und Mathematik in der neueren Phi 
losophic. 2 vols. Berlin, 1868 f. 

F. Vorlander, Geschichte der philosophischen Moral-, Rechts-, und Staatslehre 
der Englander und Franzosen. Marburg, 1855. 

F. Jodl, Geschichte der Ethik in der neueren Philosophic. 2 vols. Stuttgart, 
1882-89. 

B. Punjer, Geschichte der christlichen Beligionsphilosophie seit der Reforma 
tion. 2 vols. Braunschweig, 1880-83. [Eng. tr. of Vol. I., History of the 
Christian Philosophy of Religion from the Reformation to Kant, by W. 
Hastie, Edin. and N.Y. 1887.] 

[B. F. Burt, History of Modern Philosophy. 2 vols. Chicago, 1892.] 

THE antitheses which make their appearance in mediaeval philoso 
phy at the time of its close have a more general significance ; they 
show in theoretical form the self-conscious strengthening of secular 
civilisation by the side of that of the Church. The undercurrent, 
which for a thousand years had accompanied the religious main 
movement of the intellectual life among the Western peoples, 
swelling here and there to a stronger potency, now actually forced 
its way to the surface, and in the centuries of transition its slowly 
wrested victory makes the essential characteristic for the beginning 
of modern times. 

Thus gradually developing and constantly progressing, modern 

Philosophy of the Renaissance. 349 

science freed itself from mediaeval views, and the intricate process 
in which it came into being went hand in hand with the multifold 
activity with which modern life in its entirety began. For modern 
life begins everywhere with the vigorous development of details ; 
the tense (lapidare) unity into which mediaeval life was concen 
trated, breaks asunder in the progress of time, and primitive vigour 
bursts the band of common tradition with which history had 
encircled the mind of the nations. Thus the new epoch announces 
itself by the awakening of national life; the time of the world- 
empire is past in the intellectual realm also, and the wealth and 
variety of decentralisation takes the place of the unitary concen 
tration in which the Middle Ages had worked. Rome and Paris 
cease to be the controlling centres of Western civilisation, Latin 
ceases to be the sole language of the educated world. 

In the religious domain this process showed itself first in the fact 
that Koine lost its sole mastery over the Church life of Christianity. 
Wittenberg, Geneva, London, and other cities became new centres 
of religion. The inwardness of faith, which in Mysticism had 
already risen in revolt against the secularisation of the life of the 
Church, rose to victorious deliverance, to degenerate again at once 
into the organisation which was indispensable for it in the outer 
world. But the process of splitting into various sects, which set 
in in connection with this external organisation, wakened all the 
depths of religious feeling, and stirred for the following centuries 
the passion and fanaticism of confessional oppositions. Just by this 
means, however, the dominance at the summit of scientific life of a 
complete and definitive religious belief was broken. What had 
been begun in the age of the Crusades by the contact of religions 
was now completed by the controversy between Christian creeds. 

It is -not a matter of accident that the number of centres of 
scientific life in addition to Paris was also growing rapidly. While 
Oxford had already won an importance of its own as a seat of 
the Franciscan opposition, now we find first Vienna, Heidelberg, 
Prague, then the numerous academies of Italy, and finally the 
wealth of new universities of Protestant "Germany, developing their 
independent vital forces. But at the same time, by the invention of 
the art of printing, literary life gained such an extension and such a 
widely ramifying movement that, following its inner impulse, it 
was able to free itself from its rigid connection with the schools, 
strip off the fetters of learned tradition, and expand unconstrained 
in the forms shaped out for it by individual personalities. So 
philosophy in the Renaissance loses its corporate character, and 
becomes in its best achievements the free deed of individuals ; it 

350 Philosophy of the Renaissance. [PART IV. 

seeks its sources in the broad extent of the real world of its own 
time, and presents itself externally more and more in the garb of 
modern national languages. 

In this way science became involved in a powerful fermentation. 
The two-thousand-year-old forms of the intellectual life seemed to 
have been outlived and to have become unusable. A passionate, and 
at the first, still unclear search for novelty filled all minds, and 
excited imagination gained the mastery of the movement. But, in 
connection with this, the whole multiplicity of interests of secular 
life asserted themselves in philosophy, the powerful development 
of political life, the rich increase in outward civilisation, the exten 
sion of European civilisation over foreign parts of the world, and 
not least the world-joy of newly awakened art. And this fresh and 
living wealth of new content brought with it the result that philos 
ophy became pre-eminently subject to no one of these interests, but 
rather took them all up into itself, and with the passing of time 
raised itself above them again to the free work of knowing, to the 
ideal of knowledge for its own sake. 

The new birth of the purely theoretical spirit is the truf meaning of 
the scientific " Renaissance," and in this consists also its kinship of 
spirit with Greek thought, which was of decisive importance for its 
development. The subordination to ends of practical, ethical, and 
religious life which had prevailed in the whole philosophy of the 
Hellenistic-Roman period and of the Middle Ages, decreased more 
and more at the beginning of the modern period, and knowledge of 
reality appeared again as the absolute end of scientific research. 
Just as at the beginnings of Greek thought, so now, this theoretical 
impulse turned its attention essentially to natural science. The 
modern mind, which had taken up into itself the achievements of 
later antiquity and of the Middle Ages, appears from the beginning 
as having attained a stronger self-consciousness, as internalised, and 
as having penetrated deeper into its own nature, in comparison 
with the ancient mind. But true as this is, its first independent 
intellectual activity was the return to a disinterested concep 
tion of Nature. The whole philosophy of the Renaissance pressed 
toward this end, and in this direction it achieved its greatest 
results. 

Feeling such a relationship in its fundamental impulse, the 
modern spirit in its passionate search for the new seized at first 
upon the oldest. The knowledge of ancient philosophy brought out 
by the humanistic movement was eagerly taken up, and the systems of 
Greek philosophy were revived in violent opposition to the mediaeval 
tradition. But from the point of view of the whole movement of 

Philosophy of the Renaissance. 351 

history this return to antiquity presents itself as but the instinctive 
preparation for the true work of the modern spirit, 1 which in this 
Castalian bath attained its youthful vigour. By living itself into the 
world of Greek ideas it gained the ability to master in thought its 
own rich outer life, and thus equipped, science turned from the sub- 
tility of the inner world with full vigour back to the investigation 
of Nature, to open there new and wider paths for itself. 

The history of the philosophy of the Renaissance is therefore in 
the main the history of the process in which the natural science 
mode of regarding the world is gradually worked out from the 
humanistic renewal of Greek philosophy. It falls, therefore, appro 
priately into two periods, the humanistic period and the natural 
science period. As a boundary line between the two we may per 
haps regard the year 1600. The first of these periods contains the 
supplanting of mediaeval tradition by that of genuine Grecian 
thought, and while extremely rich in interest for the history of 
civilisation and in literary activity, these two centuries show from 
a philosophical point of view merely that shifting of earlier thoughts 
by which preparation is made for the new. The second period in 
cludes the beginnings of modern natural research which gradually 
conquered their independence, and following these the great meta 
physical systems of the seventeenth century. 

The two periods form a most intimately connected whole. For 
the inner impelling motive in the philosophical movement of Hu 
manism was the same urgent demand for a radically new knowledge 
of the world, which ultimately found its fulfilment in the process in 
which natural science became established and worked out according 
to principles. But the manner in which this work took place, and 
the forms of thought in which it became complete, prove to be in 
all important points dependent upon the stimulus proceeding from 
the adoption of Greek philosophy. Modern natural science is the 
daughter of Humanism. 

1 In this respect the course of development of science in the Renaissance ran 
exactly parallel to that of art. The line which leads from Giotto to Leonardo, 
Raphael, Michael Angelo, Titian, Diirer, and Rembrandt, passes gradually from 
the reanimation of classical forms to independent and immediate apprehension 
of Nature. And Goethe is likewise proof that for us moderns the way to 
Nature leads through Greece. 

CHAPTER I. 

THE HUMANISTIC PERIOD. 

Jac. Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien. 4th ed., Leips. 1886. 
[The Civilisation of the Renaissance. Tr. by S. G. C. Middlemore, Lond. 

1878 and 1890. 
Mor. Carricre, Die philosophische Weltanschauung der Reformationszeit. 2ded., 

Leips. 1887. 

A. Stockl, Geschichte der Philosophic des Mittelalters. 3d vol., Mainz, 1866. 
[J. A. Symonds, The Renaissance in Italy. 5 pts. in 7 vols., 1875-86.] 

THE continuity in the intellectual and spiritual development of 
European humanity manifests itself nowhere so remarkably as in 
the Renaissance. At no time perhaps has the want for something 
completely new, for a total and radical transformation, not only in 
the intellectual life, but also in the whole state of society, been felt 
so vigorously and expressed so variously and passionately as then, 
and no time has experienced so many, so adventurous, and so ambi 
tious attempts at innovation as did this. And yet, if we look closely, 
and do not allow ourselves to be deceived, either by the grotesque 
self-consciousness o*r by the nai ve grandiloquence which are the 
order of the day in this literature, it becomes evident that the whole 
multiform process goes on within the bounds of ancient and mediae 
val traditions, and strives in obscure longing toward a goal which 
is an object rather of premonition than of clear conception. It was 
not until the seventeenth century that the process of fermentation 
became complete, and this turbulent mixture clarified. 

The essential ferment in this movement was the opposition 
between the inherited philosophy of the Middle Ages, which was 
already falling into dissolution, and the original works of Greek 
thinkers which began to be known in the fifteenth century. A new 
stream of culture flowed from Byzantium by the way of Florence 
and Rome, which once more strongly diverted the course of Western 
thought from its previous direction. In so far the humanistic 
Renaissance, the so-called re-birth of classical antiquity, appears as 
a continuation and completion of that powerful process of appropri- 

352 

CHAP. 1.] Humanistic Period. 353 

ation presented by the Middle Ages (cf. pp. 264 ff., 310 f.) ; and if this 
process consisted in retracing in reverse order the ancient move 
ment of thought, it now reached its end, inasmuch as essentially all 
of the original ancient Greek literature which is accessible to-day, 
now became known. 

The becoming known of the Greek originals, and the spread of 
humanistic culture, called out a movement of opposition to Scholas 
ticism, at first in Italy, then also in Germany, France, and England. 
As regards subject-matter, this opposition was directed against the 
mediaeval interpretations of Greek metaphysics ; as regards method, 
against authoritative deduction from conceptions taken as assump 
tions ; as regards form, against the tasteless stiffness of monastic 
Latin : and with the wonderful restoration of ancient thought, with 
the fresh imaginative nature of a life-loving race, with the refine 
ment and wit of an artistically cultivated time for its aids this oppo 
sition won a swift victory. 

But this opposition was divided within itself. There were Plato- 
nists, who for the most part would better be called Neo-Platonists ; 
there were Aristotelians, who, in turn, were again divided into differ 
ent groups, vigorously combating one another, according to their 
attachment to one or another of the ancient interpreters. There, 
too, were the reawakened older doctrines of Greek cosmology, of 
the lonians and Pythagoreans; the conception of Nature held by 
Democritus and Epicurus rose to new vigour. Scepticism and the 
mixed popular and philosophical Eclecticism lived again. 

While this humanistic movement was either religiously indiffer 
ent or even engaged together with open " heathenism " in warfare 
against Christian dogma, an equally violent controversy between 
transmitted doctrines was in progress in the life of the Church. 
The Catholic Church intrenched itself against the assault of thought 
more and more firmly behind the bulwark of Thomism, under the 
leadership of the Jesuits. Among the Protestants, Augustine was the 
leading mind a continuation of the antagonism observed in the 
Middle Ages. But when dogmas were thrown into philosophical 
form in the Protestant Church, the Reformed branch remained 
nearer to Augustine, while in the Lutheran Church, in consequence 
of the influence of Humanism, a tendency toward the original form 
of the Aristotelian system prevailed. In addition to these ten 
dencies, however, German Mysticism, with all the widely ramified 
traditions which united in it (cf. 26, 5), maintained itself in the 
religious need of the people, to become fruitful and efficient for the 
philosophy of the future, more vigorous in its life than the Clmrch 
erudition that sought in vain to stifle it. 

354 Philosophy of the Renaissance. [PAKT IV. 

The new which was being prepared in these various conflicts was 
the consummation of that movement which had begun with Duns 
Scotus at the culmination of mediaeval philosophy, viz. the separa 
tion of philosophy from theology. The more philosophy established 
itself by the side of theology as an independent secular science, the 
more its peculiar task was held to be the knowledge of Nature. In this 
result all lines of the philosophy of the Renaissance meet. Philoso 
phy shall be natural science, this is the watchword of the time. 

The carrying out of this purpose, nevertheless, necessarily moved 
at first within the traditional modes of thought; these, however, 
had their common element in the anthropocentric character of their 
Weltanschauung, which had been the consequence of the develop 
ment of philosophy as a theory and art of life. For this reason the 
natural philosophy of the Renaissance in all its lines takes for its 
starting-point, in constructing its problems, man s position in the 
cosmos ; and the revolution in ideas which took place in this aspect, 
under the influence of the changed conditions of civilisation, became 
of decisive importance for shaping anew the whole theory of the 
world. At this point metaphysical imagination and fancy was most 
deeply stirred, and from this point of view it produced its cosmical 
poetry, prototypal for the future, in the doctrines of Giordano 
Bruno and Jacob Boehme. 

The following treat in general the revival of ancient philosophy : L. Heeren, 
Geschichte der Studien der classischen Litteratur (Gottingen, 1797-1802) ; 
G. Vogt, Die Wiederbdehung des classischen Alterthums (Berlin, 1880 f.). 

The main seat of Platoiiism was the Academy of Florence, which was 
founded by Cosmo de Medici, and brilliantly maintained by his successors. 
The impulse for this had been given by Georgius Gemistus Pletho (1355-1450), 
the author of numerous commentaries and compendiums, and of a treatise in 
Greek on the difference between the Platonic and the Aristotelian doctrine. 
Cf. Fr. Schultze, G. G. P. (Jena, 1874). Bessarion (born 1403 in Trebizond, 
died as Cardinal of the Roman church in Ravenna, 1472) was his influential 
pupil. Bessarion s main treatise, Adversus Calumniator em Platonis, appeared 
at Rome, 14(59. Complete Works in Migne s coll. (Paris, 180(5). The most 
important members of the Platonic circle were Marsilio Ficino of- Florence 
(1433-1499), the translator of the works of Plato and Plotinus, and author 
of a Theologia Platonic.a (Florence, 1482), and at a later time, Francesco 
Patrizzi (1529-1597). who brought the natural philosophy of this movement to 
its completes! expression in his Nova de fJniversis Philosophia (Ferrara, 1591). 

A similar instance of Xeo-Platonism alloyed with Neo-Pythagorean and 
ancient Pythagorean motives is afforded by John Pico of Mirandola (1463-94). 

The study of Aristotle in the original sources was promoted in Italy by 
Georgius of Trebizond (1396-1484 ; Comparatio Platonis et Aristotelit, 
Venice, 1523) and Theodoras Gaza (died 1478), in Holland and Germany 
by Rudolf Agricola (1442-1485), and in France by Jacques Lefevre (Faber 
Stapulensis, 1455-1537). 

The Aristotelians of the Renaissance (aside from the churchly-scholaslic 
line) divided into the two parties of the Averroists and the Alexandrists. 
The University of Padua, as the chief seat of Averroism, was also the place 
of the liveliest controversies between the two. 

CHAP. 1.] Humanistic Period. 355 

As representatives of Averroism we mention Nicoletto Vernias (died 
1499), especially Alexander Achillini of Bologna (died 1518 ; works, Venice, 
1545); further, Augostino Nifo (1473-1546 ; main treatise, De Intellectu et 
Dcemonibus ; Opuscula, Paris, 1654), and the Neapolitan Zimaia (died 1532). 

To the Alexandrists belong Eimolao Barbaro of Venice (1454-1493 ; 
Compendium Sciential Naturalis ex Aristotele, Venice, 1547), and the most 
important Aristotelian of the Renaissance, Pietro Pomponazzi (born 1402 in 
Mantua, died 1524 in Bologna. His most important writings are De Immortali- 
tate Animai with the Defensorium against Niphus, De fato libero arbitrio prce- 
denlinatione providentia dei libri quinque , cf. L. Ferri, La Psicolo(jia di P. P., 
Rome, 1877), and his pupils, Gasparo Contarini (died 1542), Simon Porta 
(died 1555), and Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558). 

Among the later Aristotelians, Jacopo Zabarella (1532-1589), Andreas 
Ceesalpinus (1519-1603), Cesare Cremonini (1552-1031) and others seem 
rather to have adjusted the above oppositions. 

Of the renewals of other Greek philosophers, the following are especially to 
be mentioned : 

Joest Lips (1547-1606), Manuductio ad Stoicam Philosophiam (Antwerp, 
1604), and other writings ; and Caspar Schoppe, Elementa Stoicce Philosophies 
Moralis (Mainz, 1606). 

Dav. Sennert (1572-1637), Physica (Wittenberg, 1618) ; Sebastian Basso 
(Philosophic yatitrnUft adversus Aristotelem, Geneva, 1621) ; and Johannes 
Ma&nenus, Democritus Jteviviscens (Pavia, 1646). 

Claude de B^rigard as renewer of the Ionic natural philosophy in his 
Cerotli Pisani (Udine, 1643 ff.). 

Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), De Vita Moribus et Doctrina Epicuri (Ley- 
den, 1647) [works, Lyons, 1658 J, and lastly 

Emanuel Maignanus (1601-1671), whose Cursus Philosophicus (Toulouse, 
1652) defends Empedoclean doctrines. 

The following wrote in the spirit of the ancient Scepticism : Michel de 
Montaigne (1533-1592 ; Essais, Bordeaux, 1580, new editions, Paris, 1865, 
and Bordeaux, 1870) [Kng. tr. by Cotton, ed. by Hazlitt, Lond. 1872 ; also by 
Florio, ed. by Morley, Lond. 1887J, Frangois Sanchez (1562-1632, a Portu 
guese who taught in Toulouse, author of the Tractatus de multum nobili et 
prima universali scientia quod nihil scitur, Lyons, 1581 ; cf. L. Gerkrath, F. S., 
Vienna, 1860), Pierre Charron (1541-1603; De la Sayesne, Bordeaux, 1601) ; 
later Francois de la Motte le Vayer (1586-1672, Cinq Dialogues, Mons, 1673), 
Samuel Sorbiere (1615-1670, translator of Sextus Empiricus), and Simon 
Foucher (1644-96, author of a history of the Academic Sceptics, Paris, 1690). 

The sharpest polemic against Scholasticism proceeded from those Humanists 
who set against it the Roman eclectic popular philosophy of sound common 
sense in an attractive form, and as far as possible in rhetorical garb. Agricola 
is to be mentioned here also, with his treatise De Inventions Dialectica (1480). 
Before him was Laurentius Valla (1408-1457 ; Dialectica; Disputationes contra 
Aristoteleos, Ven. 1499), Ludovico Vives (born in Valencia, 1492, died 
in Brugge, 1546; De tiisciplinis, Brugge, 1531, works, Basel, 1555; cf. A. 
Lange in Schmidt s Encyclopadie der Padagogik, Vol. IX.), Marius Nizolius 
(1498-1576; De pcria principiis et vera ratione phflosophandi, Parma, 1553), 
finally Pierre de la Ram^e (Petrus Ramus, 1515-1572, Institittiones Dialec 
tic^ Paris, 1543; cf. Ch. Waddington, Paris, 1849 and 1855). 

The tradition of Thomistic Scholasticism maintained itself most strongly 
at the Spanish universities. Among its supporters the most prominent was 
Francis Suarez of Granada (1548-1617; Disputationes Metaphysics, 1605, 
works, 26 vols., Paris, 1856-66 ; cf. K. Werner, A , und die Scholastik der 
letzten Jahrhunderte, Regensburg, 1861) ; the collective work of the Jesuits of 
Coimbra, the so-called Collegium Conembricense, is also to be mentioned. 

Protestantism stood from the beginning in closer relation to the humanistic 
movement. In Germany especially the two went frequently hand in hand; cf. 
K. Hagen, Deutschlands litterarixche und religiose Verhaltnisse im Refonna- 
tionszeitalter, 3 vols., Frankfort, 1868. 

At the Protestant universities Aristotelianism was introduced principally 

356 The Renaissance : ^Humanistic Period. [PAUT IV. 

by Philip Melancthon. In the edition of his works by Bretschneider and 
Bindseil the philosophical works form Vols. 13. and 16. Of chief importance 
among them are the text-books on logic (dialectic) and ethics. Cf. A. Richter, 
MSs Verdienste um den philosophischen Unterricht (Leips. 1870); K. Hart- 
felder, M. als Praiceptor Germanice (Berlin, 1889). 

Luther himself stood much nearer the position of Augustinianism (cf. Ch. 
Weisse, Die Chrixtologie Luther s, Leips. 1852). This was still more the case 
with Calvin, while Zwingli was friendlier inclined toward contemporaneous 
philosophy, especially the Italian Neo-Platonism. The scientific importance of 
all three great reformers lies, however, so exclusively in the theological field 
that they are to be mentioned here only as essential factors of the general intel 
lectual movement in the sixteenth century. 

Protestant Aristotelianism found its opponents in Nicolaus Taurellus 
(1547-1606, Professor in Basel and Altorf ; Philosophic Triumphus, Basel, 
1573 ; Alpes Ccesiv, Frankfort, 1597 ; cf. F. X. Schmidt-Sehwarzenberg, N. T., 
Der erste dentsche Philosophy Erlangen, 1864), further in Sociniamsm founded 
by Lelio Sozzini of Sienna (1525-1562) and his nephew Fausto (1539-1604 ; 
cf. A. Fock, Der Sodniniiismus, Kiel, 1847, and the article A , by Herzog in his 
Theol. Enc., 2d ed., XIV. 377 ff), and especially in the popular movement of 
Mysticism. Among the representatives of this movement are prominent 
Andreas Osiander (1498-1552), Caspar Schwenckfeld (1490-1561), Sebas 
tian Franck (1500-1545; cf. K. Hagen, op. cit., III. chap. 5) and especially 
Valentine Weigel (155:5-1588 ; Libellus de Vita Beata, 1606, Der guldne Griff, 
1613, Vom Ort der Welt, 1613, Dialogns de Christianismo, 1614, YvuQi a-ai/Tov, 
1615 ; cf. J. O. Opel, V. W., Leips. 1804). 

The tendency toward natural philosophy in attachment to Nic. Cusanus 
appears more strongly in Charles Bouille (Bovillus, 1470-1553 ; De, Intellectu 
and De Sensibus ; De Sapientia. Cf. J. Dippel, Versuch einer system. Darstel- 
lung der Philos. des O. B., Wiirzburg, 1862), and Girolamo Cardano (1501- 
1576 ; De Vita Propria, De Varietate Berum, De Subtilitate ; works, Lyons, 
1663). Cf. on this and the following, Rixner und Siber, Leben und Lehrmeinun- 
gen berithmter Physiker im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, 1 Hefte, Sulzbach, 1819 ff.). 

The most brilliant among the Italian natural philosophers is Giordano Bruno 
of Nola, in Campania. Born in 1548, and reared in Naples, he met so much sus 
picion in the Dominican Order, into which he had entered, that he fled, and from 
that time on, led an unsettled life. He went by way of Rome and upper Italy 
to Genoa, Lyons, Toulouse, held lectures in Paris and Oxford, then in Witten 
berg and Helmstadt, visited also Marburg, Prague, Frankfort, and Zurich, and 
finally, in Venice, met the fate of coming into the hands of the Inquisition by 
treachery. He was delivered to Rome, and there, after imprisonment for sev 
eral years, was burned, 1600, on account of his steadfast refusal to retract. 
His Latin works (3 vols., Naples, 1880-91) concern partly the Lullian art (esp. 
De Imaginum Signorum et Idearnm Composition^) , and in part are didactic 
poems or metaphysical treatises (De Monade Numero et Fiynra ; De Triplici 
Minimi &gt;) : the Italian writings (ed. by A. Wagner, Leips. 1829, new ed. by P. de 
Lagarde, 2 vols., Gottingeri, 1888) are partly satirical compositions (II Candelajo, 
La Cena delle Cineri, Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante, German by Kuhlenbeck, 
Leips. 1890, Cabala del Cavallo Pegaseo*), and on the other hand, the most 
complete expositions of his doctrines : Dialoghi della Causa Principio ed Uno, 
German by Lasson (Berlin, 1872) ; Degli Eroici Fnrori ; DelP Injinito, Universo 
e Dei Mondi. Cf. Bartholmess, G. B. (Paris, 1816 f.) ; Dom. Berti, Vita di G. B. 
(Turin, 1867), and Documenti Intorno a G. B. (Turin, 1880) ; Chr. Sigwart in 
Kleine Sehriften, I. (Freiburg, 1889) ; II. Hrunnhofer, G. B. s Weltanschauung 
und Verhdngniss (Leips. 1882). [. Bruno, by I. Frith, Lond., Triibner ; T. 
Whitaker in Mind, Vol. IX.]. 

Another tendency is represented by Bernardino Telesio (1508-1588; De 
rerum natura juxta propria principia, Rome, 1565 and Naples, 1586. On him 
see F. Fiorentino, Florence, 1872 and 1874 ; L. Ferri, Turin, 1873), and his more 
important successor, Tommaso Campanella. Born 1568, in Stilo of Calabria, 
he early became a Dominican, was rescued and brought to France after many 
persecutions and an imprisonment of several years. There he became intimate 
with the Cartesian circle, and died in Paris, 1639, before the completion of the 

CHAP. 1, 28.] The Warring Traditions. 357 

full edition of his writings, which was to be called Instauratio Scientiarum. A 
new edition, with biographical introduction by d Ancona has appeared (Turin, 
1854). Of his very numerous writings may be mentioned: Prodromus Philos 
ophic Instanrqndce, 1617 ; liealis Philosophies Partes Qualuor (with the ap 
pendix, Civitas Soils}, 1623 ; De MonarcMa Hispanica, 1625 ; Philosophies 
Rationalis Partes fyuinque, 1638 ; Universally Philosophic sen metaphysicarum 
rerum juxta propria principiapartes tres, 1638. Cf. Baldachiui, Vita f. Filosojia 
di T. C. (Naples, 1840 and 1843) ; Dom. Berti, Nuovi Documents di T. C. 
(Rome, 1881). 

Theosophical-magical doctrines are found with John Reuchlin ( 1455-1 522 ; 
DeVerbo Mirifico, De Arte Cabbalistica), Agrippa of Nettesheim (1487-1535; 
De Occuita Philosophia ; De Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum), Francesco 
Zorzi (1460-1540, De Harmonia Mundi, 1 aris, 1549). 

A more important and independent thinker is Theophrastus Bombastus Par 
acelsus of Ilohenheitn (born 1493 at Kinsiedeln, he passed an adventurous life, 
was Professor of Chemistry in Basel, and died in Salzburg, 1541). Among his 
works (ed. by Huser, Strassburg, Itil6-18), the most important are the Opus 
Paramirum, Die yrosse Wundarznei, and De Nature, Iferum. Cf. K. Eucken, 
Beitraye zur Gesch. der neueren Philos., Heidelberg, 1886. Of his numerous 
pupils the most important are Johann Baptist van Helmont (1577-l(i44 ; Ger 
man ed. of his works, 1683), and his son, Franz Mercurius, also Robert Fludd 
(1574-1637, Philosophia Mosaica, Guda, 1638), and others. 

The most noteworthy deposit of these movements is formed by the doctrine 
of Jacob Boehme. He was born, 1575, near Gorlitz, absorbed all kinds of 
thoughts in his wanderings, and quietly elaborated them. Settled as a shoe 
maker at Gorlitz, he came forward, 1610, with his main treatise Aurora, which 
at a later time after he had been temporarily forced to keep silence, was followed 
by many others, among them especially Vierzig Frayen von der 8eele (1620), 
Mysterium Magnum (1623), Von der Gnademcahl (1623). He died 1624. Coll. 
works ed. by Schiebler, Leips. 1862. Cf. H. A. Fechner, J. B., sein Leben und 
seine Schriften, Gorlitz, 1853 ; A. Peip, J. B. der deutsche Philosoph, Leips. 1860. 

28. The Struggle between the Traditions. 

The immediate attachment to the Greek philosophy which became 
prevalent in the Renaissance, was not entirely without its precedent 
in the Middle Ages, and men like Bernard of Chartres and William 
of Conches (cf. p. 302) were prototypes of the union of an increas 
ing interest for knowledge of Nature with the humanistic move 
ment. It is noteworthy, and characteristic of the changing fortune 
of transmitted doctrines, that now, as then, the union between 
Humanism and natural philosophy attaches itself to Plato, and 
stands in opposition to Aristotle. 

1. In fact, the revival of ancient literature showed itself at first 
in the form of a strengthening of Platonism. The humanistic move 
ment had been flowing on since the days of Dante, Petrarch, and 
Boccaccio, and arose from the interest in Roman secular literature 
which was closely connected with the awakening of the Italian 
national consciousness ; but this current could not become a vic 
torious stream until it received the help of the impulse from with 
out which proceeded from the removal of the Byzantine scholars to 
Italy. Among these the Aristotelians were of like number and im 
portance with the Piatonists, but the latter brought that which was 

358 The Renaissance : Humanistic Period. [PART IV. 

relatively less known, and therefore more impressive. In addition 
to this, Aristotle was regarded in the West as the philosopher who 
was in agreement with the Church doctrine, and thus the opposition, 
which longed for something new, hoped much more from Plato; and 
still further there was the aesthetic charm that comes from the writ 
ings of the great Athenian, and for which no time was more keenly 
susceptible than this. Thus Italy first became intoxicated with an 
enthusiasm for Plato that matched that of departing antiquity. As 
if to connect itself immediately with this latter period, the Academy 
was again to live in Florence, and under the protection of the 
Medicis a rich scientific activity actually developed here, in which 
a reverence was paid to the leaders like Gemistus Pletho and Bes- 
sarioii which was not less than that once given to the Scholarchs of 
Neo-Platonism. 

But the relationship with this latter system of thought went 
deeper; the Byzantine tradition, in which the Platonic doctrine was 
received, was the Neo-Platonic tradition. What at that time was 
taught in Florence as Platonism was in truth Neo-Platonism. Mar- 
silio Ficino translated Plotinus as well as Plato, and his " Platonic 
Theology" was not much different from that of Proclus. So, too, 
the fantastic natural philosophy of Patrizzi is in its conceptional 
basis nothing but the Neo-Platonic system of emanation ; but it is 
significant that in this case the dualistic elements of Neo-Plato 
nism are entirely stripped off, and the monistic tendency brought out 
more purely and fully. On this account the Neo-Platonist of the 
Renaissance places in the foreground the beauty of the universe; on 
this account even the deity, the Unomnia (One-all) is for him a 
sublime world-unity which includes plurality harmoniously within 
itself ; on this account he is able to glorify even the infinity of the 
universe in a way to fascinate the fancy. 

2. The pantheistic tendency, which is so unmistakable in this, 
was enough to make this Platonism an object of suspicion to the 
Church, and thus to give its Peripatetic opponents a welcome in 
strument with which to combat it ; and an instrument that was 
used not only by the scholastic Aristotelians, but also by the others. 
On the other hand, to be sure, the Platonists could reproach the 
new humanistic Aristotelianism for its naturalistic tendencies, and 
praise their own tendency toward the super-sensuous, as allied to 
Christianity. Thus the two great traditions of Greek philosophy 
fought their battle over again, while each charged the other with 
its unchristian character. 1 In this spirit Pletho, in his v6p.uv a-vy- 

1 Quite the same relation is repeated in the case of the different groups of 
Aristotelians, each of which wished to be regarded orthodox, even at the price 

CHAP. 1, 28.] Warring Traditions : Platonists, Aristotelians. 359 

ypa&lt;j&gt;ij, conducted his polemic against the Aristotelians, and incurred 
thereby condemnation from the Patriarch Gennadios in Constanti 
nople ; in this spirit George of Trebizond attacked the Academy, 
and in the same spirit, though milder, Bessarion answered him. 
Thus the animosity between the two schools, and the literary stir 
it produced in antiquity, were transferred to the Renaissance, and 
it was in vain that men like Leonicus Thomseus of Padua (died 
15,33) admonished the combatants to understand the deeper unity 
that subsists between the two heroes of philosophy. 

3. Meanwhile there was absolutely no unity among the Aristote 
lians themselves. The Grecian interpreters of the Stagirite and 
their adherents looked down with as much contempt upon the 
Averroists as upon the Thomists. Both passed for them in like 
manner as barbarians ; they themselves, however, were for the most 
part prepossessed in favour of that interpretation of the Master 
which was closely allied to Stratonism, and which was best repre 
sented among the commentators by Alexander of Aphrodisias. Here, 
too, one transmitted theory stood in opposition to the others. The 
conflict was especially severe in Padua, where the Averroists saw 
their fortress threatened by the successful activity of Pomponatius 
as a teacher. The main point of controversy was the problem 
of immortality. Neither party admitted a full, individual immor 
tality, but Averroism believed that it possessed at least a compensa 
tion for this in the unity of the intellect, while the Alexandrists 
attached even the rational part of the soul to its animal conditions, 
and regarded it as perishable with them. Connected with this were 
the discussions on theodicy, providence, destiny and freedom of the 
will, miracles and signs, in which Pomponazzi frequently inclined 
strongly to the Stoic doctrine. 

In the course of time this dependence upon commentators and 
their oppositions was also stripped off, and the way prepared for a 
pure, immediate apprehension of Aristotle. This succeeded best 
with Caesalpinus, who avowed his complete allegiance to Aristotle. 
An equally correct understanding of the Peripatetic system was 
gained by the German Humanists from a philological standpoint, 
but following Melancthon s precedent they adopted this in their 
own doctrine only in so far as it agreed with Protestant dogma. 

4. In all these cases the adoption of Greek philosophy led to an 
opposition to Scholasticism as regards the real content or matter of 

of the " twofold truth." In this the Averroists, especially, were ready, and so 
it came about that one of them, Nifo, had himself entrusted by the Pope with 
the refutation of Pomponazzi s doctrine of immortality. The latter, indeed, also 
covered himself with the same shield. 

360 The Renaissance : Humanistic Period. [PART IV. 

the opposing systems. Another line of Hamanism, which was more 
in sympathy with Roman literature, inclined to a predominantly 
formal opposition, of which John of Salisbury may be regarded as 
a mediaeval forerunner. The taste of the Humanists rebelled against 
the barbarous outward form of mediaeval literature. Accustomed to 
the polished refinement and transparent clearness of the ancient 
writers, they were not able to value rightly the kernel so full of 
character, which lay within the rough shell of the scholastic termi 
nology. The minds of the Renaissance, with their essentially aes 
thetic disposition, had no longer any feeling for the abstract nature 
of that science of abstract conceptions. Thus they opened the battle 
in all directions, with the weapons of jest and of earnest ; instead of 
conceptions they demanded things; instead of artificially constructed 
words, the language of the cultivated world ; instead of subtle proofs 
and distinctions, a tasteful exposition that should speak to the 
imagination and heart of the living man. 

Laurentius Valla was the first to make this cry resound. Agric- 
ola took it up in lively controversy, and Erasmus also joined in. 
The models of these men were Cicero and Quintilian, and when at 
their hand the method of philosophy was to be changed, the scho 
lastic dialectic was dislodged and in its place were introduced the 
principles of rhetoric and grammar. The true dialectic is the 
science of discourse. 1 The "Aristotelian " logic therefore becomes 
the object of most violent polemic ; the doctrine of the syllogism is 
to be simplified and driven from its commanding situation. The 
syllogism is incapable of yielding anything new ; it is an unfruitful 
form of thought. This was later emphasised by Bruno, Bacon, and 
Descartes, as strongly as by these Humanists. 

But the more closely the dominance of the syllogism was con 
nected with dialectical " Realism," the more nominalistic and termi- 
nistic motives connected themselves with the humanistic opposition. 
This shows itself in the cases of Vives and Nizolius. They are 
zealous against the reign of universal conceptions; in this, according 
to Vives, lies the true reason for the mediaeval corruption of the 
sciences. Universals, Nizolius teaches, 2 are collective names which 
arise by " comprehension," not by abstraction ; individual things 
with their qualities constitute reality. It concerns us to apprehend 
these, and the secondar}^ activity of the understanding which com 
pares, is to be carried out as simply and unartificially as possible. 
Hence all metaphysical assumptions, which have made so great a 

1 Petr. Kamus, Dialect. Instil., at the beginning. 

2 Mar. Nizolius, De Ver. Princ., I. 4-7 ; III. 7. 

CHAP. 1,28.] Warring Traditions: Humanists, Ramus. 361 

difficulty in previous dialectic, must be banished from logic. Em 
piricism can use only & purely formal logic. 

The "natural" dialectic, however, was sought in rhetoric and 
grammar, for, Ramus held, it should teach us only to follow in our 
voluntary thinking the same laws which, according to the nature of 
reason, control also our involuntary thinking, and present themselves 
spontaneously in the correct expression of this involuntary process 
of thought. In all reflection, however, the essential thing is to 
discover the point of view that is determinative for the question, 
and then to apply this correctly to the subject. Accordingly Ramus, 
following a remark of Vives, 1 divides his new dialectic into the doc 
trines of Inventio and Judicium. The first part is a kind of general 
logic, which yet cannot avoid introducing again in the form of the 
" loci " the categories, such as Causality, Inherence, Genus, etc., and 
thus, enumerating them without system, falls into the nai ve meta 
physics of the ordinary idea of the world. The doctrine of judgment 
is developed by Ramus in three stages. The first is the simple de 
cision of the question by subsuming the object under the discovered 
point of view ; here the doctrine of the syllogism has its place, 
which is accordingly much smaller than formerly. In the second 
place the judgment is to unite cognitions that belong together to a 
systematic whole, by definition and division ; its highest task, how 
ever, it fulfils only when it brings all knowledge into relation to 
God, and finds it grounded in him. Thus natural dialectic culminates 
in theosophy. 2 

Slight as was the depth and real originality of this rhetorical 
system, it yet excited great respect in a time that was eager for the 
new. In Germany, especially, Eamists and anti-Ramists engaged 
in vehement controversy. Among the friends of the system, Jo 
hannes Sturm is especially worthy of note, a typical pedagogue of 
Humanism, who set the task for education of bringing the scholar 
to the point where he knows things, and how to judge concerning 
them from a correct point of view, and to speak in cultivated 
manner. 

5. A characteristic feature of this movement is its cool relation 
toward metaphysics ; this very fact proves its derivation from the 
Roman popular philosophy. Cicero, to whom it especially attached 
itself, was particularly influential by virtue of his Academic Scepti 
cism or Probabilism. Surfeit of abstract discussions alienated 
a considerable part of the Humanists from the great systems of 

1 Lud. Vives, De Causis Corr. Art. (first part of De DiscipUnis}, III. 5. 

2 Cf. E. Laas, Die Piidaqogik des ./. St. kritisch und historisch beleuchtet 
(Berlin, 1872). 

362 The Renaissance : Humanistic Period. [PART IV. 

antiquity also. The extension of religious unbelief or indifferent- 
ism was an additional motive to make scepticism appear in many 
circles as the right temper for the cultivated man. The charm of 
outer life, the glitter of refined civilisation, did the rest to bring 
about indifference toward philosophical subtleties. 

This scepticism of the man of the world was brought to its 
complete expression by Montaigne. With the easy grace and fine 
ness of expression of a great writer, he thus gave French literature 
a fundamental tone which has remained its essential character. 
But this movement also runs in the ancient track. Whatever of 
philosophical thought is found in the " Essays " arises from Pyr 
rhonism. Hereby a thread of tradition which had for a long time 
been let fall is again taken up. The relativity of theoretical opin 
ions and ethical theories, the illusions of the senses, the cleft 
between subject and object, the constant change in which both are 
involved, the dependence of all the work of the intellect upon such 
doubtful data, all these arguments of ancient Scepticism meet us 
here, not in systematic form, but incidentally in connection with 
the discussion of individual questions, and thus in a much more 
impressive manner. 

Pyrrhonism was at the same time revived in a much more scho 
lastic form by Sanchez, and yet in a lively manner, and not without 
hope that a sure insight might yet at some time be allowed to man. 
He concludes individual chapters, and the whole work, with 
"Nescis? At ego nescio. Quid?" To this great "Quid? "he has 
indeed given no answer, and guidance to a true knowledge was a 
debt that he did not discharge. But he left no doubt as to the 
direction in which he sought it. It was the same which Montaigne 
also pointed out : science must free itself from the word-lumber of 
the wisdom of the schools, and put its questions directly to things 
themselves. Thus Sanchez demands a new knowledge, and has, 
indeed, a dim foreboding of it, but where and how it is to be sought 
he is not prepared to say. In many passages it seems as though he 
would proceed to empirical investigation of Nature, but just here he 
cannot get beyond the sceptical doctrine of outer perception, and if 
he recognises the greater certainty of inner experience, this inner 
experience in turn loses its value because of its indefiniteness. 

Charron comes forward with firmer step, since he keeps before 
him the practical end of wisdom. Like his two predecessors he 
doubts the possibility of certain theoretical knowledge ; in this 
respect all three set up the authority of the Church and of faith : 
a metaphysics can be revealed only ; the human power of knowl 
edge is not sufficient for it. But, proceeds Charron, the human 

CHAP. 1, 28.] Warring Traditions : Sanchez, Catholicism. 363 

knowing faculty is all the more sufficient for that self-knowledge 
which is requisite for the moral life. To this self-knowledge 
belongs, above all, the humility of the sceptic who has no confidence 
that he knows anything truly, and in this humility is rooted the 
freedom of spirit with which he everywhere withholds his theoretical 
judgment. On the other hand, the ethical command of righteous 
ness and of the fulfilment of duty is known without a doubt in 
this self-knowledge. 

This diversion toward the practical realm, as might be expected 
from the general tendency of the time, was not permanent. The 
later Sceptics turned the theoretical side of the Pyrrhonic tradi 
tion again to the front, and the effect which resulted from this 
tendency for the general tone of the time applied ultimately, for the 
most part, to the certainty of dogmatic convictions. 

6. The Church doctrine could no longer master these masses of 
thought which now made their way so powerfully into the life of 
this period, as it had succeeded in doing with the Arabian-Aristote 
lian invasion: this new world of ideas was too manifold and too full 
of antitheses, and, on the other hand, the assimilative power of the 
Church dogma was too far exhausted. The Roman Church limited 
itself, therefore, to defending its spiritual and external power with 
all the means at its disposal, and was only concerned to fortify its 
own tradition and make it as sure as possible within itself. In this 
changed form the Jesuits now performed the same task that in the 
thirteenth century had fallen to the mendicant orders. With their 
help the definitive and complete form of Church dogma was fixed 
against all innovations at the Council of Trent (1563), and Thomism 
declared to be authoritative in essentials for philosophical doctrine. 
Thereafter there could be no more any question as to changes of 
principle, but only as to more skilful presentations and occasional 
insertions. In this way the Church excluded itself from the fresh 
movement of the time, and the philosophy dependent upon it fell 
into unavoidable stagnation for the next following centuries. Even 
the short after-bloom which Scholasticism experienced about 1600 
in the universities of the Iberian peninsula bore no real fruit. 
Suarez was an important writer, clear, acute, accurate, and with a 
great capacity for a luminous disposition of his thoughts ; he sur 
passes also, to a considerable degree, most of the older Scholastics in 
the form of his expression ; but in the content of his doctrine he is 
bound by tradition, and a like constraint will be understood as a 
matter of course in the case of the collective work of the Jesuits of 
Coimbra. 

Over against this form of religious tradition, another now made 

364 The Renaissance : Humanistic Period. [PART IV. 

its appearance in the Protestant churches. Here, too, the opposition 
claimed the older tradition, and put aside its mediaeval modifications 
and developments. The Kefonnation desired to renew original Chris 
tianity as against Catholicism. It drew the circle of the canonical 
books narrower again ; putting aside the Vulgate, it recognised only 
the Greek text as authoritative ; it returned to the Nicene creed. The 
controversy over dogmas in the sixteenth century theoretically 
considered hinges upon the question, which tradition of Chris 
tianity shall be the binding one. 

But the theological antithesis drew the philosophical antithesis 
after it, and here again a relation was repeated which had appeared 
at many points during the Middle Ages. In the doctrine of Augus 
tine, the religious need found a deeper, richer satisfaction, and a 
more immediate expression than in the conceptions worked out by 
the Scholastics. Earnestness in the consciousness of sin, passionate 
longing for redemption, faith that was internal in its source and 
its nature, all these were traits of Augustine s nature which 
repeated themselves in Luther and Calvin. But it is only in the 
doctrine of Calvin that the permanent influence of the great Church 
Father is shown ; and yet just by this means an antagonism between 
Thomism and Augustinianism was once more created, which evinced 
itself as especially important in the French literature of the seven 
teenth century (cf. 30 f.). For the Catholics under the guidance 
of Jesuitism, Thomas was the ruling authority; for the Reformed 
Churches, and for the freer tendencies in Catholicism itself, Augus 
tine held the same position. 

German Protestantism followed other courses. In the develop 
ment of the Lutheran dogma, Luther s genius was aided by the co 
operation of Melancthon and thus of Humanism. Little as the 
theoretico-aesthetical and religiously indifferent nature of the 
Humanists 1 might accord with the mighty power of Luther s soul 
with its profound faith, he was, nevertheless, obliged, when he would 
give his work scientific form, to accommodate himself to the neces 
sity of borrowing from philosophy the conceptions with which to lay 
his foundations. Here, however, Melancthon s harmonising nature 
came in, and while Luther had passionately rejected scholastic 
Aristotelianism, his learned associate introduced humanistic Aris- 
totelianism as the philosophy of Protestantism, here, too, opposing 
the older tradition to the remodelled tradition. This original 
Aristotelianism had to be corrected in many passages, to be sure, by 

1 On the relation of the Reformation and Humanism cf. Th. Ziegler, Gesch. 
derEthik, II. 414 ff. 

CHAP. 1, 28.] Warring Traditions : Protestantism. 365 

means of the Scriptures, and the combination of doctrines could not 
reach such an. organic union as had been attained by the slow ripen 
ing of Thomism in the Middle Ages ; but the Peripatetic system was 
in this instance treated rather as but a supplement to theology in the 
department of profane science, and for this end, Melancthon knew 
how to sift, arrange, and set forth the material in his text-books with 
so great skill that it became the basis for a doctrine which was in 
the main one in its nature, and as such was taught at the Protestant 
universities ior two centuries. 

7. But in Protestantism there were still other traditional forces 
active. Luther s work of liberation owed its origin and its success 
not least to Mysticism, not indeed to that sublime, spiritualised 
form of viewing the world to which the genius of Master Eckhart 
had given expression, but to the movement of deepest piety which, 
as " practical Mysticism," had spread from the Rhine in the " League 
of the Friends of God," and in the "Brothers of the Common Life." 
For this Mysticism, the disposition, purity of heart, and the imita 
tion of Christ were the sole content of religion; assent to dog 
mas, the external works of holiness, the whole worldly organisation 
of Church life, appeared to be matters of indifference and even 
hindrances : the believing soul demands only the freedom of its own 
religious life, a demand that transcends all these outward works. 
This was the inner source of the Reformation. Luther himself had 
not only searched Augustine, he had also edited the " German The 
ology " : and his word let loose the storm of this religious longing, 
with which, in the conflict against Koine, an impulse of national 
independence was also mingled. 

But when the Protestant State Church became again consolidated 
in the fixed forms of a theoretical system of doctrine, and clung to 
this the more anxiously in proportion as it was obliged to struggle 
for its existence in the strife of Confessions, then the supra-confes- 
sional impulse of Mysticism became undeceived, as did also the 
national consciousness. The theological fixation of the thought of 
the Reformation appeared as its ruin, and as Luther had once waged 
his warfare against the "sophistry" of the Scholastics, so now a 
movement of Mysticism that was quietly stirring farther and wider 
among the people, directed itself against his own creation. In men 
like Osiander and Schwenckfeld he had to contend against parts of 
his own nature and its development. But in this movement it 
became evident that the doctrines of mediaeval Mysticism had been 
quietly maintained and continued in legendary form amid all kinds 
of fantastic ideas and obscure imagery. The Mysticism which comes 
to light in the teachings of men like Sebastian Franck, or in the 

366 The Renaissance : Humanistic Period. [PART VL 

secretly circulated tracts of Valentine Weigel, has its support in the 
idealism of Eckhart, which transformed all the outer into the inner, 
all the historical into the eternal, and saw in the process of Nature 
and history but the symbol of the spiritiial and divine. This con 
stituted, though frequently in strange form, the deeper ground of 
the battle which the Mystics of the sixteenth century waged in 
Germany against the " letter " of theology. 

8. Look where we will in the intellectual movement of the fif 
teenth and sixteenth centuries, we see everywhere tradition arrayed 
against tradition, and every controversy is a battle between trans 
mitted doctrines. The spirit of the Western peoples has now taken 
up into itself the entire material which the past offers for its cul 
ture, and in the feverish excitement into which it is finally put by 
direct contact with the highest achievements of ancient science, it 
struggles upward to the attainment of complete independence. It 
feels sufficiently hardened to execute work of its own, and overflow 
ing with its wealth of thought, it seeks new tasks. One feels the 
impulsive blood of youth pulsate in its literature, as though some 
thing unheard of, something which had never before been, must 
now come into being. The men of the Renaissance announce to us 
nothing less than the approach of a total renovation of science and 
of the state of humanity. The warfare between the transmitted 
doctrines leads to a surfeit of the past; learned research into the 
old wisdom ends with throwing aside all book-rubbish, and full of 
the youthful joy of dawning, growing life, the mind goes forth into 
the cosmic life of Nature ever young. 

The classical portrayal of this temper of the Renaissance is the 
first monologue in Goethe s Faust. 

29. Macrocosm and Microcosm. 

By Scotism and Terminism the faith -metaphysics of the Middle 
Ages had become disintegrated and split in twain : everything 
supersensuous had been given to dogma, and as the object of philos 
ophy there remained the world of experience. But before thought 
had as yet had time to become clear as to the methods and special 
problems of this secular knowledge, Humanism, and with it above 
all, the Platonic Weltanschauung, burst in. No wonder that the solu 
tion of the problem, which was itself at first seen but dimly, was first 
sought in connection with this theory : and this doctrine must have 
been the more welcome, especially in its Neo-Platonic form, as it 
showed the world of the supersensuous presageful in the back 
ground, but made the particulars of the world of sense stand out 

CHAI. 1, 29.] Macrocosm and Microcosm: Bruno, Boehme. 367 

distinctly in purposefully defined outlines. The supersensuous 
itself, and all therein that was connected with man s religious life, 
might be cheerfully set off to theology ; philosophy could dedicate 
itself to the task of being natural science, with all the calmer con 
science in proportion as it followed the Neo-Platonic precedent of 
apprehending Nature as a product of spirit, and thus believed that 
in the conception of the deity it retained a point of unity for the 
diverging branches of science, the spiritual and the secular. Did 
theology teach how God reveals himself in the Scripture, it was now 
the business of philosophy to apprehend with admiration his revela 
tion in Nature. On this account the beginnings of modern natural 
science were theosophical and thoroughly Neo- Platonic. 

1. The characteristic fact, however, is that in this revival of 
Neo-Platonism, the last dualistic motives which had belonged to the 
same were also completely set aside. They disappeared together 
with the specifically religious interest which had supported them, 
and the theoretical element of recognising in Xature the creative 
divine power came forward pure and unmixed. 1 The fundamental 
tendency in the natural philosophy of the Renaissance was therefore 
the fanciful or imaginative conception of the divine unity of the liv 
ing All, the admiration of the macrocosm : the fundamental thought 
of Plotinus of the beauty of the universe has been taken up by no 
other time so sympathetically as by this ; and this beauty was now 
also regarded as a manifestation of the divine Idea. Such a view 
is expressed in almost entirely Neo-Platonic forms by Patrizzi, in a 
more original form and with strongly poetical quality by Giordano 
Bruno, and likewise by Jacob Boehme. With Bruno the symbol of 
the all-forming and all-animating primitive light is still dominant 
(cf. p. 245) ; with Boehme, on the contrary, we find that of the 
organism ; the world is a tree which from root to flower and fruit 
is permeated by one life-giving sap, and which is formed and ordered 
from within outward by its own germinal activity. 2 

In this inheres naturally the inclination to complete monism and 
pantheism. Everything must have its cause, and the last cause can 
be but one, God. 3 He is, according to Bruno, at the same time 
the formal, the efficient, and the final cause ; according to Boehme 
he is at once the rational ground and efficient cause (" Urgrund" 
and " Ursache ) of the world (principium and causa with Bruno). 

1 In a certain sense this might also be expressed by saying that thereby the 
Stoic elements of Neo-Platonism came with controlling force into the fore 
ground. 

2 Cf. the remarkable agreement between Bruno, Delia Causa Pr. e. U., II. 
(Lag. I. 231 f.) and Boehme, Aurora, Vorrede. 

8 Aurora, Chap. III. 

368 The Renaissance : Humanistic Period. [PART IV 

Hence the universe is also nothing but "the essential nature of God 
himself made creatural." l And yet the idea of the transcendence 
of God is here, too, connected with this view, as it had been in Neo- 
Platonism. Boehme holds that God should be thought not as a 
force devoid of reason and "science," but as the "all-knowing, all- 
seeing, all-hearing, all-smelling, all-tasting" spirit: and Bruno adds 
another analogy; for him God is the artist who works unceasingly 
and shapes out his inner nature to rich life. 

Harmony is accordingly, for Bruno also, the inmost nature of the 
world, and he who can apprehend it with the gaze of enthusiasm 
(as does the philosopher in the dialogues and poetic inventions Deyli 
Eroici Furori), for him the apparent defects and imperfections of 
detail vanish in the beauty of the whole. He needs no special the 
odicy ; the world is perfect because it is the life of God, even down 
to every detail, and he only complains who cannot raise himself to 
a view of the whole. The world-joy of the aesthetic Renaissance 
sings philosophical dithyrambs in Bruno s writings. A universalistic 
optimism that carries everything before it prevails in his poetic 
thought. 

2. The conceptions which lie at the basis of this unfolding of the 
metaphysical fantasy in Bruno had their source in the main in 
Nicolaus Cusanus, whose teachings had been preserved by Charles 
Bouille, though in his exposition they had to some degree lost their 
vivid freshness. Just this the Nolan knew how to restore. He not 
only raised the principle of the coincidentia oppositorum to the artis 
tic reconciliation of contrasts, to the harmonious total action of 
opposing partial forces in the divine primitive essence, but above all 
he gave to the conceptions of the infinite and the finite a far wider 
reaching significance. As regards the deity and its relation to the 
world, the Neo-Platonic relations are essentially retained. God 
himself, as the unity exalted above all opposites, cannot be appre 
hended through any finite attribute or qualification, and there 
fore is unknowable in his own proper essence (negative theology) ; 
but at the same time he is still thought as the inexhaustible, infinite 
world-force, as the natura naturans, which in eternal change forms 
and "unfolds" itself purposefully and in conformity with law, into 
the natura naturata. This identification of the essence of God and 
the world is a general doctrine of the natural philosophy of the 
Renaissance ; it is found likewise in Paracelsus, in Sebastian Franck, 
in Boehme, and finally also with the whole body of the " Platonists." 
That it could also assume an extremely naturalistic form, and could 

1 Aurora, Chap. II. 

CHAP. 1, 29.] Macrocosm and Microcosm : Bruno. 369 

lead to the denial of all transcendence, is proved by the agitative and 
boastfully polemical doctrine of Vanini. 1 

For the natura naturata, on the other hand, for the " universe " 
the sum-total of creatures the characteristic of true "infinity" is 
not claimed, but rather that of unlimitedness in space and time. 
This conception gained an incomparably clearer form and more 
fixed significance by the. Copernican theory. The spherical form of 
the earth and its revolution about its axis had been a familiar idea 
to Cusanus as well as to the old Pythagoreans, perhaps, indeed, 
through them ; but only the victoriously proved hypothesis of the 
motion of the earth about the sun could furnish a rational basis for 
the completely new view of man s position in the universe, which is 
peculiar to modern science. The anthropocentric idea of the world 
which had ruled the Middle Ages became out of joint. Man, as 
well as the earth, must cease to be regarded as centre of the universe 
and centre of the world. Men like Patrizzi and Boehme also raised 
themselves above such " restriction " on the basis of the teaching of 
Copernicus, which for that reason was condemned by the dogmatic 
authorities of all confessions ; but the fame of having thought out 
the Copernican system to its end, both in natural philosophy and in 
metaphysics, belongs to Giordano Bruno. 

He developed from this system the theory that the universe forms 
a system of countless worlds, each of which moves about its central 
sun, leads its own proper life, grows from chaotic conditions to clear 
and definite formation, and again yields to the destiny of dissolution. 
The tradition of Democritus and Epicurus had perhaps a share in 
the formation of this conception of a plurality of worlds arising and 
perishing again ; but it is the peculiar feature of Bruno s doctrine, 
that he regarded the plurality of solar systems not as a mechanical 
juxtaposition, but as an organic living whole, and regarded the pro 
cess of the growth and decay of worlds as maintained by the pulse- 
beat of the one divine All-life. 

3. While in this way universalism, with its bold flight into spatial 
and temporal boundlessness, threatened to claim the fantasy entirely 
for its own, there was an effective counterpoise in the Peripatetic- 
Stoic doctrine of the analogy between macrocosm and microcosm, 
which found in man s nature the sum, the " quintessence " of the 
cosmical powers. We see this doctrine reviving in the most varied 

1 Lucilio Vanini (born 1585 at Naples, burned 1619 at Toulouse), a dissolute 
adventurer, wrote Amphitheatrum ^Eternce Providentice (Lyons, 1(515) and De 
admirandis naturae ref/ince deceque mortalium arcanis (Paris, 1616). 

2 Nicolaus Copernicus, De Revolutionists Orbium Cortestium (Nuremberg, 
1543). 

370 The Renaissance : Humanistic Period. [PART IV. 

forms during the Renaissance ; it controls entirely the theory of 
knowledge at this period, and moreover the Neo-Platonic triple 
division is almost universally authoritative in connection with it, 
furnishing a scheme for a metaphysical anthropology. One can know 
only what one himself is, is the mode in which this was expressed 
by Valentine Weigel : man knows the all in so far as he is the all. 
This was a pervading principle of Eckhart s Mysticism. But this 
idealism now took on a definite form. As body, man belongs to the 
material world ; indeed, he unites within himself, as Paracelsus, and 
following him Weigel and Boehme teach, the essence of all material 
things in finest and most compact form. Just on this account he is 
competent to understand the corporeal world. As intellectual being, 
however, he is of " sidereal " origin, and is therefore able to know 
the intellectual world in all its forms. Finally, as a divine " spark," 
as spiraculum vitce, as a partial manifestation of the highest princi 
ple of life, he is also able to become conscious of the divine nature 
whose image he is. 

A more abstract application of this same principle, according to 
which all knowledge of the world is rooted in man s knowledge of 
himself, is found in the thought of Campanetta, involving not the 
Neo-Platonic separation of world-strata (although this too is present 
in Campanella), but the fundamental categories of all reality. Man 
is the thought here too knows in the proper sense only himself, 
and knows all else only from and through himself. All knowledge 
is perception (sentire), but we perceive, not the things, but only 
the states into which these set us. In this process, however, we 
learn by experience that inasmuch as we are, we can do something, 
we know something and will something, and further, that we find 
ourselves limited by corresponding functions of other beings. From 
this it follows that power, knowledge, and will are the"primali- 
ties " of all reality, and that if they belong to God in an unlimited 
degree, he is known as all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good. 

4. The doctrine that all knowledge of God and of the world is 
ultimately locked up in man s knowledge of himself, is nevertheless 
only an epistemological inference from the more general metaphys 
ical principle according to which the divine nature was held to be 
fully and entirely contained in each of its finite manifestations. 
Giordano Bruno follows the Cusan also in holding that God is the 
smallest as well as the greatest, as truly the vital principle of the 
individual being as that of the universe. And accordingly every 
individual thing, and not merely man, becomes a " mirror " of the 
world-substance. Each without exception is according to its essen 
tial nature the deity itself, but each in its own way, which is 

CHAP. 1, 29.] Macrocosm and Microcosm: Campanella, Bruno. 371 

different from all the rest. This thought Bruno incorporated in his 
conception of the monad. He understood by this the individual 
substance (Einzelwesen), which, as continually "formed" matter, 
constitutes one of the partial manifestations of the world-force, in the 
interaction of which the world-life consists. It is living from the 
beginning, and is imperishable ; it is corporeal as well as spiritual 
in its nature. Each monad is a form in which the Divine Being 
finds individual existence, a finite existence-form of the infinite 
essence. Since, now, there is nothing but God and the monads, the 
universe is animated even to the smallest nook and corner, and the 
infinite all-life individualises itself at every point to a special and 
peculiar nature. It results from this that each thing, in the move 
ments of its life, follows in part the law of its special nature, and 
in part a more general law, just as a planet or heavenly body 
moves at the same time on its own axis and about its sun. Cam- 
panella, who took up this doctrine also in connection with the 
Copernican system, designated this striving toward the whole, this 
tendency toward the original source of all reality, as religion, and 
spoke in this sense of a "natural" religion, that is of religion as 
"natural impulse," one would now perhaps say centripetal im 
pulse, which he with logical consistency ascribed to all things in 
general, and which in man was held to assume the special form of 
"rational" religion; that is, of the striving to become one with God 
by love and knowledge. 

This principle of the infinite variability of the divine ground of 
the world which presents itself in a special form in every particular 
thing, is found in a similar form also with Paracelsus. Here, as 
with Nicolaus Cusanus, it is taught that all substances are present 
in everything, that each thing therefore presents a microcosm, and 
yet that each has also its special principle of life and activity. 
This special mind or spirit of the individual is called by Paracelsus 
the Archeus ; Jacob Boehme, to whom this doctrine passed over, calls 
it the Prinms. 

With Bruno the conception of the monad connects itself in a very 
interesting manner, though without further effect upon his physical 
views, with that of the atom, which was brought to him, as to the 
earlier period, by the Epicurean tradition through Lucretius. The 
"smallest" in metaphysics the monad, in mathematics the point 
is in physics the atom, the indivisible spherical element of the 
corporeal world. Memories of the Pythagorean and Platonic theory 
of the elements, and of the related atomic theory of Democritus, 
became thus alive in the midst of Neo-Platonism ; they found also 
an independent revival with men like Basso, Sennert, and others, 

372 

The Renaissance : Humanistic Period. [PART IV. 

and so led to the so-called corpuscular theory, according to which 
the corporeal world consists of inseparable atom-complexes, the cor 
puscles. In the atoms themselves, the theory assumed in connec 
tion with their mathematical form an original and unchangeable 
law of action, to which, it held, the mode of action of the corpuscles 
is also to be traced. 1 

5. Here the workings of mathematics assert themselves in the old 
Pythagorean form, or as modified by Democritus and Plato. The 
ultimate constituents of physical reality are determined by their 
geometrical form, and the qualitative determinations of experience 
must be traced back to this. The combination of elements presup 
poses numbers and their order as the principle of multiplicity. 2 
Thus spatial forms and number-relations again make their appear 
ance as the essential and original in the physical world, and thereby 
the Aristotelian-Stoic doctrine of the qualitatively determined forces, 
of the inner Forms of things, of the qualitates occultce, was displaced. 
As this latter doctrine had formerly gained the victory over the 
principle of Pythagoras, Democritus, and Plato, so it must in turn 
yield to this : and herein lies one of the most important prepara 
tions for the origin of modern natural science. 

The beginnings of this are found already with Nicolaus Cusanus ; 
but now they receive an essential strengthening from the same 
source from which their presence in his thought is explained: 
namely, from the old literature, and in particular from the Neo- 
Pythagorean writings. Just for this reason, however, they still 
have the fantastic metaphysical garb of -number-mysticism and num 
ber-symbolism. The book of Nature is written in numbers ; the har 
mony of things is that of the number-system. All is arranged by 
God according to measure and number ; all life is an unfolding of 
mathematical relations. But just as in antiquity, so here, this 
thought is unfolded at first as an arbitrary interpretation of concep 
tions, and a mysterious speculation. The procedure of the world 
forth from God, from the construction of the Trinity on, as, for 
example, in the attempt of Bouille, is again to be conceived as the 
process of the transformation of unity into the number-system. Such 
fantasies were followed by men like Cardan and Pico. Reuchlin 
added further the mythological creations of the Jewish Cabbala. 

6. Thus the principle which was destined for the most fruitful 
development made its entrance into the new world wrapped again 
in the old metaphysical fantasticalness, and fresh forces were 

1 Cf. K. Lasswitz, Geschichte des Atomismus, I. pp. ! 
Leips. 1890). 

2 Cf. for this especially G. Bruno, De Triplici Minima. 

ff. (Hamburg and 

CHAP. 1, 29.] Macrocosm and Microcosm : Paracelsus. 373 

needed to strip off this covering, and free it for its right working. 
Meanwhile, however, it became mingled with quite other efforts, 
which likewise had their origin in the Neo-Platonic tradition. To 
the idea of a universal psychical life, to the fanciful spiritualisation 
of Nature, belonged also the impulse to interfere in the course of 
things with mysterious means, with conjurations and magic arts, 
and so to guide it according to the will of man. Here, too, a higher 
thought hovered before the fantastic impulse of the excited age, 
the thought of mastering Nature by a knowledge of the forces 
working in it. But this thought was also received in the wrappings 
of ancient superstition. If, as was the case with the Neo-Platonists, 
the life of Nature was regarded as a dominance of spirits, as a mys 
teriously connected system of internal forces, it was a proper aim 
to make these subject by knowledge and will. Thus magic became 
a favourite subject of thought in the Renaissance, and science again 
concerned itself with the task of bringing system into superstition. 

Astrology, with its influences of the stars upon human life, the 
interpretation of dreams and signs, necromancy, with its conjura 
tions of spirits, the predictions of persons in the ecstatic state, all 
these elements of the Stoic and Neo-Platonic divination were then in 
most luxuriant bloom. Pico and Reuchlin brought them into con 
nection with the number-mysticism ; Agrippa of Nettesheim adopted 
all the sceptical attacks against the possibility of rational science, 
in order to seek help in mystical illuminations and secret magic 
arts. Cardan proceeded with all seriousness to the task of deter 
mining the laws of these operations, and Campanella conceded them 
an unusually wide space in his idea of the world. 

Physicians especially, whose vocation demanded an interference 
in the course of Nature and might seem permitted to expect special 
advantage in secret arts, showed an inclination toward these magic 
arts. From this point of view Paracelsus desired to reform medi 
cine. He also proceeds from the sympathy of all things, from the 
idea of the universe as a spiritually connected system. He finds 
the essence of disease in the injuring of the individual vital prin 
ciple, the Archeus, by foreign powers, and seeks the means where 
with to free and strengthen the Archeus. Since this latter process 
must come about by a corresponding composition of materials, all 
sorts of magical drinks, tinctures, and other secret remedies must be 
brewed, and thus the arts of alchemy were set in motion, which, in 
spite of all its fantastic performances, ultimately yielded a number 
of useful results for chemical knowledge in the course of its incred 
ibly extended pursuits. 

In this connection the fundamental metaphysical presupposition 

374 The Renaissance : Humanistic Period. [PART IV. 

of the unity of all vital force led of itself to the thought that there 
must be also a simple, most efficacious, universal remedy for the 
strengthening of every Archeus whatever, a panacea against all 
diseases and for the maintenance of all the vital forces ; and con 
nection with the macrocosmic efforts of magic nourished the hope 
that the possession of this secret would lend the highest magic 
power, and afford the most desirable treasures. All this was to be 
achieved by the " philosopher s stone " ; it was to heal all diseases, 
transmute all substances into gold, conjure all spirits into the power 
of its possessor. And thus the purposes which it was thought 
would be satisfied in the ventures of alchemy, were ultimately very 
real and sober. 

7. The introduction of this magical view of Nature into the subtle 
religious system of German Mysticism constitutes the peculiar feat 
ure of Boehme s philosophy. He, too, is seized by the thought that 
philosophy should be knowledge of Nature ; but the deep earnest 
ness of the religious need which lay at the basis of the German 
Reformation did not allow him to content himself with the separa 
tion of religious metaphysics and natural science, customary at his 
time, and he sought to work the two into one again. Similar efforts 
which tended to transcend the dogmatic, fixed form of Protestant 
ism, and hoped to solve the problems of the new science with the 
aid of a Christian metaphysics, throve also by the side of the official 
Peripatetic system. Taurellus aimed to produce such a supra-con- 
fessional philosophy of Christianity, and with a true instinct for his 
purpose, adopted many elements of the Augustinian doctrine of the 
will, but was not able to work enough real material from the inter 
ests of his time into these thoughts, and so came ultimately rather 
to a complete separation of empirical research from all metaphysics. 
A similar process went on in the mystical movement, which grew 
with the popular opposition against the new orthodoxy all the more 
in proportion as the latter dried and hardened within itself. The 
mystical doctrines also remained suspended in vague generality until 
the teaching of Paracelsus was brought to them, at first by Weigel, 
and then completely by Boehme. 

In Boehme s doctrine Neo-Platonism assumes again a completely 
religious colouring. Here, too, man is regarded as the microcosm 
from and by which the bodily, the " sidereal," and the divine worlds 
can be known, if one follows the right illumination and is not mis 
led by learned theories. Self-knowledge, nevertheless, is religious 
knowledge, which finds the opposition of good and evil as a funda 
mental trait of human nature. The same opposition fills the whole 
world; it rules in heaven as on earth, and since God is the sole 

CHAP. I, 29.] Macrocosm and Microcosm : Boehme. 375 

cause of all, this opposition must be sought in him also. Boehme 
extends the coincidentia oppositorum to the extreme limit, and finds 
the ground of duality in the necessity of the self-revelation of the 
divine Primordial Ground. As light can be revealed only in con 
nection with darkness, so God s goodness can be revealed only in 
connection with his anger. Thus Boehme portrays the process of 
the eternal self-generation of God, describing how from the dark 
ground of Being within him the urgent impulse ("Drang"), or will, 
which has only itself for its object, attains self-revelation in the 
divine wisdom, and how that which lias thus become revealed forms 
itself into the world. While the theogonic development thus passes 
over immediately into the cosmogonic, the effort is everywhere 
shown in this latter development to carry the fundamental religious 
antithesis into the physical categories of the system of Paracelsus. 
Thus three kingdoms of the world and seven forms, or " qiialia " 
(" Qualen"), are constructed, which ascend from the material forces 
of attraction and repulsion to those of light and warmth, and from 
there on to those of the sensible and intellectual functions. To this 
portrayal of the eternal nature of things is then attached the history 
of the earthly world, which begins with the fall of Lucifer and 
the process of rendering the spiritual essence perceptible to the 
senses, and ends with the overcoming of the proud infatuation 
(" Vergafftsein") for the creature, with the mystical devotion of 
man to the deity, and ultimately with the restoration of the spiritual 
nature. All this is presented by Boehme in prophetic discourse, 
full of deep conviction, with a unique mingling of profundity and 
dilettantism. It is the attempt of the Eckhartian Mysticism to 
become master of the modern interests of science, and the first still 
tentatively uncertain step toward raising natural science into an 
idealistic metaphysics. But because this is made from the stand 
point of the deepest religious life, the intellectualistic features of 
the older Mysticism retreat, with Boehme, more into the background. 
While with Eckhart, the world-process both in its arising and in its 
passing was regarded as a knowing process, with Boehme it is rather 
a straggling of the will between good and evil. 

8. In all these ways the result of the separation of philosophy 
from dogmatic theology always was that the knowledge of Nature 
that was sought took on the form of the older metaphysics. This 
procedure was inevitable so long as the desire for a knowledge of 
Nature could provide neither a material of facts which it had itself 
acquired, nor new conceptions to serve as forms for the elaboration 
of this material. As a prerequisite for this, it was necessary to see 
the inadequacy of metaphysical theories, and putting them aside, 

376 The Renaissance : Humanistic Period. [PART IV. 

to turn to empiricism. This service was rendered to the genesis of 
modern thought by the tendencies of Nominalism and Terminism, 
in part, also, by the rhetorical and grammatical opposition to the 
science of the schools, and also by the revival of ancient Scepticism. 

The writings of Ludovico Vives must be regarded as a common 
starting-point for these various efforts ; but they prove also that 
the importance of these endeavours is essentially negative in char 
acter. In place of the obscure words and arbitrary conceptions of 
metaphysics, a demand is made in nominalistic fashion for the im 
mediate, intuitive apprehension of things themselves by experience : 
but the remarks as to the manner in which this should be scientifi 
cally set about are meagre and uncertain ; he speaks of experiment, 
but without any very deep insight into its nature. Quite so lies 
the case at a later time with Sanchez. And if the artificial subtle 
ties of the syllogistic method were attacked with great hue and cry, 
this line of thought had ultimately only the Ramistic fancies of 
" natural logic " to put in their stead. 

Further, this empiricism, just by virtue of its origin from Termin- 
ism, could move only with a very uncertain step in the presence of 
external Nature. It could not deny the background of Occam s 
dualism. Sense-perception was held to be, not a copy of a thing, 
but an inner state of the subject corresponding to the presence of 
the thing. These scruples could be only strengthened by the 
theories of ancient Scepticism, for this added the doctrine of the 
deceptions of the senses and the consideration of the relativity and 
change of all perceptions. Hence this empiricism of the Humanists 
now also threw itself more upon inner perception, which was univer 
sally regarded as much surer than outer perception. Vives is most 
fortunate where he speaks the language of empirical psychology; 
men like Nizolius, Montaigne, and Sanchez shared this view, and 
Charron gave it practical significance. Strenuously as all these urge 
toward looking at things themselves, outer perception ultimately 
turns out comparatively empty. 

How little certain of itself, and how little fruitful in principles 
this empiricism was at that time, is shown best of all by its two 
main representatives in Italy, Telesio and Campanella. The former, 
one of the most stirring and influential opponents of Aristotelianism ? 
is everywhere famous even in his own time (and also with Bruno 
and Bacon), as he who demanded most strongly that science 
should build only on the basis of facts perceived by the senses. He 
founded in Naples an academy which he called the Academia Cosen- 
tina, after the name of his home, and, in fact, contributed much 
toward the cultivation of the sense for empirical natural science. 

CHAP. 1, 29.] Macrocosm and Microcosm : Campanella. 377 

But if we look to see how he treats Nature "juxta prapriajnrincipia," 
we are met by genuinely physical theories which from few observations 
hastily leap over to most general metaphysical principles quite after 
the fashion of the ancient Ionics. The dry-warm and the moist-cold 
are set forth as the two opposing fundamental forces, out of whose 
conflict both the macrocosmic and the microcosmic life are to be ex 
plained. This same inner contradiction appears almost more promi 
nent still in Campanella. He teaches the most pronounced sens 
ualism. All knowledge is for him a "feeling" (sentire) ; even 
recollection, judgment, and inference are for him but modified 
forms of that feeling. But in his case also, sensualism tilts over 
into psychological idealism ; he is far too good a Nominalist not to 
know that all perception is but a feeling of the states of the percip 
ient himself. Thus he takes his starting-point in inner experience, 
and following the principle of the analogy of macrocosmus and 
microcosmus, builds upon a simple aper$u (cf. above) an extended 
ontology. Into this he then draws also the quite scholastic antith 
esis of Being and Non-being (ens and non-ens), which, following the 
Neo-Platonic example, is identified with that of the perfect and 
imperfect, and between the two he spreads the variegated meta 
physical picture of a world-system arranged in successive strata. 

So tenaciously do the long-wonted habits of metaphysical thought 
cling everywhere to the beginnings ol the new research. 

CHAPTER II. 

THE NATURAL SCIENCE PERIOD. 

Damiron, Essai sur VHistoire de la Philosophic au 17 me Siecle. Paris, 1846. 
Kuno Fischer, Francis Bacon und seine Nachfolger. 2d ed., Leips. 1875. 
Ch. de Rfimusat, Histoire de la Philosophic en Angleterre depuis Bacon jusqu^a 
Locke. 2 vols., Paris, 1875. 

Natural science acquired its decisive influence upon the develop 
ment of modern philosophy by first gaining its own independence 
with the aid of a conscious use of a scientific method, and then from 
this position being able to determine the general movement of 
thought as regards both form and content. In so far the develop 
ment of the method of natural science from Kepler and Galileo 
down to Newton is not indeed itself the evolution of modern philos 
ophy, but is yet that series of events in reference to which this 
evolution constantly proceeds. 

For this reason the positive beginnings of modern philosophy are 
in general to be sought, not so much in neV conceptions with new 
content, as in methodical reflection, out of which, with the progress 
of time, there resulted of course new material and so new points of 
view for the treatment of both theoretical and practical problems. 
But at first the points of departure of modern thought were in all 
cases where permanently fruitful conceptions of the task and thereby 
conditioned procedure of the new science grew out of the humanistic 
opposition against Scholasticism, and out of the excited metaphysical 
fantasies of the transitional period. 

In this consists from the outset an essential difference between 
modern and ancient philosophy. The former is as reflective in its 
beginning as the latter was nai ve, and this is self-explaining, since 
the former must develop out of those traditions which the latter 
created. In this way it is characteristic of the greater number of 
the systems of modern philosophy to seek the path to the real or 
" material " problems by considering the science of method and the 
theory of knowledge ; and in particular the seventeenth century with 
respect to its philosophy may be characterised as a strife of methods. 

378 

CHAP. 2.] Natural Science Period. 379 

While, however, the movement of the humanistic period had 
in the main taken place in Italy and Germany, the cooler and more 
considerate temper of the two western civilised peoples now became 
prominent. Italy was made dumb by the counter-reformation, Ger 
many was crippled by the ruinous war between the confessions. 
England and France, on the contrary, experienced in the seventeenth 
century the bloom of their intellectual civilisation, and between 
them the Netherlands became a flourishing seat of art and science. 

In the development of the method of natural science the lines of 
empiricism and of mathematical theory converged : in philosophical 
generalisation the two came forward in an independent attitude. 
The programme of the experience philosophy was laid down by Bacon, 
but the method which formed its fundamental thought was not car 
ried out by him in the fruitful manner which he had anticipated. 
Much more comprehensive was the form in which Descartes brought 
together the scientific movement of his time to establish rationalism 
anew, by filling the scholastic system of conceptions with the rich 
content of the Galilean research. From this resulted far-reaching 
metaphysical problems, which in the second half of the seventeenth 
century called forth an extraordinarily vigorous movement of philo 
sophical thought, a movement in which the new principles entered 
into manifold antithetical combinations with the principles of mediiB- 
val philosophy. Out of the Cartesian school rose Occasionalism, of 
which Geulincx and Malebranche are the chief representatives. But 
the complete issue of this development was found in the two great 
philosophical systems brought forward by Sj)inoza and Leibniz. 

The influence which the powerful development of theoretical phil 
osophy exercised also upon the treatment of practical problems shows 
itself principally in the field of the philosophy of law (or right). In 
this department Hobbes, who was in like measure a disciple of Bacon 
and of Descartes, and as such marks an important point in the line 
of development of methods and metaphysics above noted, takes the 
decisive position as the introducer of an ethical naturalism which is 
found in altered form even with his opponents, such as Herbert of 
Cherbury and Cumberland. In these antitheses the problems of the 
philosophy of the Enlightenment are in process of preparation. 

The series of great natural scientists who exercised an immediate influence 
also upon philosophical questions was opened by Johann Kepler (1501-1630) 
of Weil, a town in Wiirttemberg, who died in Regensburg after a life spent in 
struggle with need and anxiety. Among his works (ed. by Frisch, Frankfurt, 
18f)8-71, 8 vols.), the most important are Myxterium Cosmographicum, Harmo- 
nice Mwtdt, Axtronomia Nova sen Physica Ccelcstis Tradiia Commentariis de 
Motibnx SMlcK Mortis. Of. Chr. Sigwart, Kleine Schriften, I. 182 ff. ; R. Eucken, 
PMlos. Monatsh., 1878, pp. 30 ff. In immediate attachment to him stands 
Galileo Galilei (born 1564 at Pisa, died 1642 at Arcetri). His works were 

380 Philosophy of the Renaissance. [PART IV. 

published in 15 vols. (Florence, 1842-56) with a biographical supplementary 
volume by Arrago. Vols. 11-14 contain the Fisico-Mathe matica ; among which 
we notice II Saggiatore (1623) and the dialogue on the Ptolemaic and the 
Copernican systems (1632). Cf. H. Martin, Galileo, Us droits de la science 
et la methode des sciences physiques (Paris, 1668) ; P. Natorp, Gal. als Philo- 
soph. (Philos. Monatsh., 1882, pp. 193 ff.). Isaac Newton (1642-1727) comes 
into consideration chiefly on account of his Philosophic Naturalis Principia 
Mathematica (1687; 2d ed. by Cotes, 1713; German by Wolfers, 1872) and 
his Optics (1704). Of his contemporaries we notice the chemist, Robert Boyle 
(1626-1691; Chemista Scepticus ; Origo Formarum et Qualitatum ; De Ipsa 
Natura^, and the Netherlander, Christian Huyghens (1629-1695 ; De Causa 
Gravitatis ; De Lumine). 

Cf. W. Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences (Lond. 1837; German by 
Littrow, Leips. 1839 ff.) ; E. F. Apelt, Die Epochen der Geschichte der Mensch- 
heit (Jena, 1845) ; E. Diihring, Kritische Geschichte der Principien der 
Mechanik (Leips. 1872) ; A. Lange, Gesch. des Materialism us, 2d td., Iseiiohn, 
1873 [Eng. tr. History of Materialism by E. C. Thomas, Lond., 4th ed., 1892J ; 
K. Lasswitz, Gesch. der Atomistik, 2 vols. (Hamburg and Leips. 1890). 

Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount of St. Albans, was born in 
1561, studied in Cambridge, had a brilliant career under the reigns of Elizabeth 
and James I., until, as the result of political opposition, he was proceeded 
against, convicted of venality, and deposed from the position of Lord High 
Chancellor. He died 1626. The latest edition of his works is that by Spedding 
and Heath (Lond. 1857 ff.). Aside from the Essays (Sermones Fideles) the 
main writings are De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (1623 ; originally 
published under the title, The Two Books of Francis Bacon on the Projicience 
and Advancementof Learning, Divine and Human, 1605) and Novum Organon 
Scientiarum (1620 ; originally under the title, Cogitata et Visa, 1612). i Cf. 
Ch. de Remusat, Bacon, Sa vie, son temps, sa philosophic et son influence 
jusqu a nos jours (Paris, 1854) ; H. Heussler, Fr. B. und seine geschichtliche 
Stellung (Breslau, 1889) ; [Bacon, by J. Nichol, in Blackwood s series, Edin. 
1888 : Ed. of the Novum Organum by Fowler, Oxford, 1878]. 

Uen6 Descartes (Cartesius), born 1596, in Touraine, and educated in the 
Jesuit school at La Fleche, was originally destined for a soldier and took part in 
the campaigns of 1618-1621 in the service of various leaders, but then betook 
himself for the first time to Paris, and later, withdrew for many years, at differ 
ent places in the Netherlands, into a scientific solitude, which he kept in the 
most diligent and careful manner. After controversies in which his doctrine 
had become involved at the universities in that country had rendered this place 
of residence disagreeable, he accepted, in 1649, an invitation of Queen Christine 
of Sweden to Stockholm, where he died the following year. His works have 
been collected in Latin in the Amsterdam editions (1650, etc.), and in French 
by V. Cousin (11 vols., Paris, 1824 ff.) ; the important writings have been trans 
lated into German by Kuno Fischer (Mannheim, 1863) [Eng. tr. of the Method, 
Meditations and Selections from the Principles by J. Veitch, Edin. and Lond., 
1st ed., 1850-52, 10th ed., 1890 ; of the Meditations by Lowndes, Lond. 1878, 
also in Jour. Spec. Phil., Vol. IV., 1870, by W. K. Walker; and of the Rules for 
the Direction of the Mind, with selections from the Med. s, The. World, The 
Passions of the Soul, etc., by H. A. P. Torrey, N.Y. 1892]. The main works 
are Le Monde ou Traite de la Lumiere (posthumously printed, 1654) ; Essays, 
16 !7, among them the Discours de la Methode and the Dioptrics; Meditationes 
df, Prima Philosophia, 1641, supplemented by the objections of various savants 
and Descartes replies ; Principia Philosophic. 1644 ; Passions de I Ame, 1650. 
Cf. F. Bouillier, Histoire de la Philosophic. Cartesienne (Paris, 1854) ; X. Schmid- 

1 It is well known that very recently much noise has been made over the 
discovery that Lord Bacon wrote Shakspere s works also, in his leisure hours. 
To fuse two great literary phenomena into one may have something alluring in 
it, but in any case a mistake has been made in the person. For it would be 
much more probable that Shakspere had incidentally composed the Baconian 
philosophy. [The Germans seem to take this " noise " much more seriously 
than Shakspere s countrymen. Tr.] 

CHAP. 2.] Natural Science Period. 381 

schwarzenberg, E. D. und seine Reform der Philosophic (Nordlingen, 1859) ; 
G. Glogau in Zeitschr. f. Philos., 1878, pp. 209 ft . ; P. Natorp, Z&gt;. s Erkenntniss- 
theorie (Marburg, 1882). [Descartes by .1. P. Mahaffy in Blackwood s series, 
Edin. and Phila., 1881 ; W. Wallace, Art. Descartes in Enc. Brit. ; H. Sidgwick 
in Mind, Vol. VII. ; Rhodes in Jour. Spec. Phil., XVII. 

Between these two leaders of modern philosophy stands Thomas Hobbes, 
born 1588, educated at Oxford, who was early drawn over to France by his 
studies, and frequently afterwards returned thither, was personally acquainted 
with Bacon, Gassendi, Campanella, and the Cartesian circle, and died 1079. 
Complete edition of his works, English and Latin by Molesworth, Lond. 1839 ff. 
His h rst treatise, Elements of Law, Natural and Political (1(539), was pub 
lished by his friends in 1(550, in two parts, Human Nature and De Corpore 
Politico. He published previously Elementa Philosophic de Cive, 1(542 and 1(547, 
and further Leviathan or The Matter, Form, and Authority of Government, 1651. 
A comprehensive statement is given in the Elementa Philosophic, I., De Cor 
pore, II., De Hnmine, Ki(i8 (both previously in English in 1(555 and 1058. Cf. 
F. Tonnies in Vierteljahrwhr. f. w. Philos., 1879 ft. [Hobbes, by G. C.Robert 
son in Blackwood s series, Edin. and Phil. 1880, also Art. Hobbes, in Enc. 
lint, by same author.] F. Tonnies. Hobbes (Stuttgart, 1890). 

Of the Cartesian School (cf. Bouillier, op. cit.) are to be noted the Jansen- 
ists of Port-Koyal, from whose circles came the Loyique ou Vart depenser (1002), 
ed. by Anton Arnauld (1012-1094), and Pierre Nicole (1025-1095) ; also the 
Mystics, Blaise Pascal (1(523-1(502 ; Pe.nxees sur la Iteliyion ; cf. the monographs 
by J. G. Dreydorff, Leips. 1870 and 1875), and Pierre Poiret (1040-1719; De 
Eruditione Triplici, Solida Superjicinria et Falxa. 

The development to Occasionalism proceeds gradually in Louis de la Forge 
(TraitedeV Esprit Humain. 10(50;, Clauberg( 1022-1005 ; De Conjunction Corpo- 
ris et Animce in Homine ), Cordemoy (Le Discernement du Corps et de VAme, 
1(500), but finds its complete development independently of these thinkers in 
Arnold Geulincx (1025-10(59; a university teacher in Loewen and Leyden). 
His main works are the Ethics (1605; 2d ed. with notes, 1675); Logic, 1002, 
and Methodus, 1663. New ed. of his works by J. P. N. Land (3 vols., The 
Hague, 1891-3). Cf. E. Pfleiderer, A. G. als Hauptvertrt-ler der occ. Metaphyxik 
und Ethik (Tiibingen, 1882) ; V. van der Hseghen, G. Etude sur sa Vie, sa 
Philosophic et ses Onvrayes (Liittich, 1880). 

From the Oratorium founded by Cardinal Berulle, a friend of Descartes, to 
which Gibieuf also belonged (De Libertate Dei et Creature, Paris, 1030), wt nt 
forth Nicole Malebranche (1038-1715). His main work, De. la Recherche de la 
Verite, appeared 1(575, the Entretiens sur la Metaphysique et sur la lleliyion in 
1(588. Coll. works by J. Simon (Paris, 1871). 

Haruch (Benedict de) Spinoza, born in 1(532 at Amsterdam in the commu 
nity of Portuguese Jews, and later expelled from this community on account 
of his opinions, lived in noble simplicity and solitude at various places in Hol 
land, and died at The Hague 1677. He had published an exposition of the 
Cartesian philosophy with an independent metaphysical appendix (1663) and 
the Tractatns Theoloyico-politicus (anonymously in 1070). After his death 
appeared in his Opera Posthnma (1077), his main work, Ethira More, Ceometrico 
Demonstrata, the Tractatus Politicus, and the fragment De Intellectus Emenda- 
tione. His correspondence and his recently discovered youthful work, Tractatus 
(brevis) de Deo et Homine ejusque Felicitate, also come into consideration. 
On the latter cf. Chr. Sigwart (Tubingen, 1870). The best edition of his works 
is that by Van Vloten and Land (2 vols., Amsterdam, 1882 f.). Cf. T. Camerer, 
Die Lehre #;&gt;. (Stuttgart, 1877). [Spinoza, by J. Caird, Edin. 1888; Spinoza 
by Martineau, Lond. 1883; also in Types of Ethical Theory, Oxford, 1886; F. 
Pollock, Spinoza, His Life and Phil., Lond. 1880 ; Seth, Art. Spinoza, in Enc. 
Ilrif ; Arts, in Jour. Spec. Phil., Vols. 11 and 16, by Morris and Dewey ; Eng. 
tr. of priii. works by Elwes, Bohn Lib., 1884, of the gtkic* by White, Lond. 1883, 
and of Selections by Fullerton, N.Y. 1892.] 

Of philosophical writers in Germany who attached themselves to the train of 
the movement among the two civilised peoples of the West are to be mentioned 
Joachim Jung (1-J87-1057 ; Loyica Hamburyiensis, 1638); cf. G. E. Guhrauer, 

382 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

J. J. und sein Zeitalter (Stuttg. and Tub. 1859); the Jena mathematician, 
Erhard VVeigel, the teacher of Leibniz and Puffendorf ; Walther von Tschirn- 
hausen (1(551-1708; Medicina Mentis sive Artis Inveniendi Praecepta Generalia, 
Amsterdam, 1(587), and Samuel Puffendorf (1632-1604; under the pseudonym 
Severinus a Monzambano, De Statu Eei publiae Germanicce, 16(57, German by 
H. Bresslau, Berlin, 1870 ; De Jure Naturae et Gentium, London, 1672). 

Leibniz belongs in this period, not only in point of time, but also as regards 
the origination and the motives of his metaphysics, while with other interests 
of his incredibly many-sided nature, he ranges on into the age of the Enlighten 
ment ; cf. on this, Part V. Here, therefore, we have to consider principally his 
methodological and metaphysical writings : De Principio IndMdui, 1663 ; De 
Arte Combinatoria, 1666 ; Nova Methodus pro Maximis et Minimis, 1684 ; De 
Scientia Universali sen Calculo Philosophico, 1684 (cf. A. Trendelenburg, Hist. 
Beitrage zur Philos., III. 1 ff.); De Primes Philosophies Emendatione, 1694; 
Systeme Nouveau de la Nature, 1695, with the three Eclaircissements connected 
with it, 1696 ; also the Monadologie, 1714, the Principes de la Nature et de la 
Grace, 1714, and a great part of his extended correspondence. Among the 
editions of his philosophical writings the excellent edition by J. E. Erdmann 
(Berlin, 1840) has now been surpassed by that of C. J. Gerhardt (7 vols., Ber 
lin, 1875-91). On the system as a whole cf. L. Feuerbach, Darstellung, Ent- 
wicklung und Kritik der Leibnizischen Philos. (Ansbach, 1837), A. Nourisson, 
La Philos. de L. (Paris, 1830); E. Wendt, Die Entwicklung der LSschen Mo- 
nadenlehre bis 1695 (Berlin, 1886). [E. Dillmann, Eine neue Darst. der 
L. schen Monadenlchr? . Leips. 1891. See also the lit. on p. 444.] 

On the historical and systematic relation of the systems to one another: II. 
C. W. Sigwart, Ueber den Zusammenhang des Spinozismus mit der cartes. 
Philos. (Tub. 1816) and Die Leibniz 1 sche Lehre von der prastabilirten Harmonie 
in ihrem Zusammenhany mit fraheren Philosop hemen (ib. 1822) ; C. Schaar- 
schmidt, Descartes und Spinoza (Bonn, 1850) ; A. Foucher de Careil, Leibniz, 
Descartes et Spinoza (Paris, 1863) ; E. Pfleiderer, L. und Geulincx (Tub. 1884); 
E. Zeller, Sitz.-Ber. d. Berliner Akad, 1884, pp. 673 ff. ; F. Tonnies, Leibniz und 
Jfobbes in Philos. Monatsh ; 1887, pp. 357 ff. ; L. Stein, Leibniz und Spinoza 
(Berlin, 1890). [E. Caird, Art Carfrsianism, in Enc. Brit., reprinted in Vol. 2 
of his Essays, Lond. and N.Y. 1892 ; Saisset s Modern Pantheism.] 

To the founders of the philosophy of law (cf. C. v. Kaltenborn, Die Vorlaufer 
des Hugo Grotius, Leips. 1848 ; and R. v. Mohl, Gesch. und Litteratur der 
Staatswissenschaften, Erlangen, 1855-58) belong Nicolo Macchiavelli (1469- 
1527 ; II Principe, Discorsi sulla prima decade di Tito Livio ; [Works, tr. by C. 
E. Detmold, Boston, 1883.] Thomas More (1480-1535 ; De Optimo Eei publican 
Statu sive de Nova InsulaUtopia, 1516); Jean Bodin (1530-1597); SixLivresde 
la Republique, 1577; an extract from the Heptaplomeres has been given by 
Guhrauer, Berlin, 1841) ; Albericus Gentilis (1551-1611 ; De Jure Belli, 1588) ; 
Johannes Althus (1557-1638; PolUica, Groningen, 1610, cf. O. Gierke, Unters. 
z. deut*ch. Staats- u. Eechtsgesch., Breslau, 1880); Hugo de Groot (1583-1645 ; 
De Jure Belli et Pads, 1645; cf. H. Luden, H. G., Berlin, 1806). 

Of the Protestants who treat of the philosophy of law may be named, be 
sides Melancthon, J. Oldendorf (Elementaris Introductio, 1539), Nic. Hemming 
(De Lege Naturae, 1562), Ben Winkler (Principia Juris, 1615) ; of the Catho 
lics besides Suarez, Rob. Bellarmin (1542-1621 ; De Potestate Pontificis in 
Temporalibus) and Mariana (1537-1624 ; De Eege et Regis Institutions). 

Natural religion and natural morals in the seventeenth century found in 
England their main supporters in Herbert of Cherbury (1581-1(548 ; Tractatus 
de Veritate, 1624 ; De Eeligione GentiUum Errorumque apud eos Causis, 1663 ; 
on him Oh. de Ketnusat, Paris, 1873), and Richard Cumberland (De Legibus 
Naturae Disquisitio Philosophica, Lond. 1672). Among the Platonists or Neo- 
Platonists of England at the same time are prominent Ralph Cudworth (1617- 
1688 ; The Intellectual System of the Universe, Lond. 1678, Latin, Jena, 1733) 
and Henry More (1614-1687 ; Encheiridion Metaphysicum. His correspondence 
with Descartes is printed in the latter s works, Vol. X., Cousin s ed.). [Phil, 
of Cudworth, by C. E. Lowrey, with bibliog., N.Y. 1884 ; Tulloch s Eational 
Theol. and Christian Phil, in Eng. in \lth Cent. ] Theophilus Gale and his 
son, Thomas Gale, may be added to the authors above. 

CHAP. 2, 30.] Problem of Method : Bacon. 383 

30. The Problem of Method. 

All beginnings of modern philosophy have in common an impul 
sive opposition against " Scholasticism," and at the same time a 
nai ve lack of understanding for the common attitude of dependence 
upon some one of its traditions, which they nevertheless all occupy. 
This fundamental oppositional character brings with it the conse 
quence, that in all cases where it is not merely wants of the feelings, 
or fanciful views that are set over against the old doctrines, reflec 
tion on new methods of knowledge stands in the foreground. Out of 
the insight into the unfruitf ulness of the " syllogism," which cbuld 
merely set forth in proof or refutation that which was already 
known, or apply the same to a particular case, arises the demand 
for an ars inveniendi, a method of investigation, a sure way to the 
discovery of the new. 

1. If now nothing was to be accomplished with the help of 
rhetoric, the nearest expedient was to attack the matter by the 
reverse method, proceeding from the particular, from the facts. 
This had been commended by Vives and Sanchez, and practised by 
Telesio and Campanella. But they had neither gained full confi 
dence in experience nor known afterwards how to make any right 
beginning with their facts. In both lines Bacon believed that he 
could point out new paths for science, and in this spirit he set up 
his "New Organon" as over against the Aristotelian. 

Every -day perception he confesses, admitting the well-known 
sceptical arguments offers, indeed, no sure basis for a true knowl 
edge of Nature ; in order to become an experience that can be used 
by science it must first be purified from all the erroneous additions 
which have grown together with it in our involuntary way of regard 
ing things. These perversions or falsifications of pure experience 
Bacon calls idols, and presents his doctrine of these fallacious images 
in analogy with the doctrine of the fallacious conclusions in the old 
dialectic. 1 There are first the "idols of the tribe" (idola tribus), 
the illusions that are given in connection with human nature in 
general, following which we are always suspecting an order and an 
end in things, making ourselves the measure of the outer world, 
blindly retaining a mode of thought which has once been excited by 
impressions, and the like; then the "idols of the cave" (idola 
specus) , by reason of which every individual by his natural disposi 
tion, and his situation in life, finds himself shut into his cave ; 2 

1 Nov. Org. I. 39 ff. 

2 Ilacon s strongly rhetorical language, rich in imagery, aims by this term 
(cf. De Augm. V. ch. 4) to recall Plato s well-known parable of the Cave (Hep. 

384 

The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

then the "idols of the market" (idola fori), the errors which are 
everywhere brought about by intercourse among men, especially by 
language, and by adherence to the word which we substitute for the 
idea; finally, the "idols of the theatre" (idola theatri), the illusory 
phantoms of theories which we credulously receive from human 
history and repeat without subjecting them to any judgment of our 
own. In this connection Bacon finds opportunity to direct a most 
violent polemic against the word-wisdom of Scholasticism, against 
the rule of authority, against the anthropomorphism of earlier 
philosophy, and to demand a personal examination of things them 
selves, an unprejudiced reception of reality. Nevertheless he does 
not get beyond this demand ; for the statements as to how the 
mera experientia is to be gained and separated from the enveloping 
husks of the idols are extremely meagre, and while Bacon teaches 
that one must not limit himself to accidental perceptions, but must 
set about his observation methodically, and supplement it by 
experiment x which he thinks out and makes for himself, this also is 
but a general designation of the task, and a theoretical insight into 
the essential nature of experiment is still wanting. 

Quite similar is the case with the method of Induction, which 
Bacon proclaimed as the only correct mode of elaborating facts. 
With its aid we are to proceed to general cognitions (axioms), in 
order that we may ultimately from these explain other phenomena. 
In this activity the human mind, among whose constitutional errors 
is over-hasty generalisation, is to be restrained as much as possible; 
it is to ascend quite gradually the scale of the more general, up to 
the most general. Healthy and valuable as these prescriptions are, 
we are the more surprised to find that with Bacon their more de 
tailed carrying out is completed in conceptions and modes of view 
which are entirely scholastic. 2 

All knowledge of Nature has for its end to understand the causes 
of things. Causes, however, are according to the old Aristotelian 
scheme formal, material, efficient, or final. Of these only the 
" formal " causes come into consideration ; for all that takes place 
has its grounds in the " Forms," in the " natures " of things. Hence 
when Bacon s Induction searches for the "Form" of phenomena, 
e.g. for the Form of heat, Form is here understood quite in the 
sense of Scotism as the abiding essence or nature of phenomena. 
The Form of that which is given in perception is composed out of 

514), which is the more unfortunate as, in the Platonic passage, it is precisely 
the general limited nature of knowledge by the senses that is dealt with. 

1 Nov. Org. I. 82. 

2 Cf. the circumstantial exposition in the second book of the Nov. Org 

CHAP. 2, 30.] Problem of Method : Bacon. 385 

simpler "Forms" and their "differences," and these it is important 
to discover. To this end as many cases as possible in which the 
phenomenon in question appears, are brought together into a tabula 
prcesentice, and in like manner, those in which the phenomenon is 
lacking are brought together into a tabula absentia^; to these is 
added, in the third place, a tabula graduum, in which the varying 
intensity with which the phenomenon appears is compared with the 
varying intensity of other phenomena. The problem is then to be 
solved by a progressive process of exclusion (exclusio). The Form 
of heat, for example, is to be that which is everywhere present 
where heat is found, which is nowhere where heat is lacking, and 
which is present in greater degree where there is more heat, and 
in lesser degree where there is less heat. 1 AVhat Bacon presents 
accordingly as Induction is certainly no simple enumeration, but 
an involved process of abstraction, which rests upon the meta 
physical assumptions of the scholastic Formalism 2 (cf. 27, 3); the 
presage of the new is still quite embedded in the old habits of 
thought. 

2. It is accordingly comprehensible that Bacon was not the man 
to bring to the study of Nature itself methodical or material 
furtherance : but this derogates nothing from his philosophical 
importance, 3 which consists just in this, that he demanded the gen 
eral application of a principle, to which he yet was unable to give 
any useful or fruitful form in the case of the most immediate 
object for its use : namely, the knowledge of the corporeal world. 
He had understood that the new science must turn from the endless 
discussion of conceptions back to things themselves, that it can 
build only upon direct perception, and that it must rise from this 
only cautiously and gradually to the more abstract, 4 and he had 
understood no less clearly that in the case of this Induction, the 
point at issue was nothing other than the discovery of the simple 

1 In which case it turns out that the Form of heat is motion, and, indeed, a 
motion which is expansive, and thus divided by inhibition and communicated 
to the smaller parts of the body [motus expansivus, cohibitus et nitens per paries 
minores] . 

2 Cf. Chr. Sigwart, Logik, IT. 93, 3. 

8 Cf. Chr. Sigwart in the Preuss. Jahrb., 1863, 93 ff. 

4 The pedagogical consequences of the Baconian doctrine as contrasted with 
Humanism, with which, in general, the movement of natural science came in 
conflict in this respect, were drawn principally by Amos Comenius (1592-1671). 
His Didncticn Magna presents the course of instruction as a graded ascent from 
the concrete and perceptive to the more abstract ; his Orbis Pictus aims to give 
for the school a perceptional basis for instruction aboi:t things ; his Janua Lin- 
guarum Iteserrata, finally, aims to have the learning of foreign languages 
arranged so as to be taught only as it is requisite as a means for acquiring 
knowledge about things. The pedagogical views of Rattich are similar (1571- 
1035). 

The Eewu*t&icek*m\hral Science Period. [PART IV. 

foam "J&fijffaaa&ure " of which, in their regular 
grifetji^^ndriccsi&imta^n^jthsjaEho^e^compass of what we perceive is 
teSite^X;pteiried3ilJtj^irtctitgi^hef thought, will find the Forms by which 
SfaAuce.nnu&t(!k)p drifter^Mreftedm Buihfrhile in his cosmology he did not 
to&lt;the traditional atomism, and even 
greafijsjiehievement of the Copernican 
fchatqljis i&mipimaal principle should be applied 
C&fp/q mti&. .Jfcibkiionbjr the bodily existence in its 
.^b ftttlrma) otitaHrprsxibsses, but also the movement of 
& oE&gt; MM *riHf, saipecially also the social and 
iiej examined as to their mov- 

fncr; ffrre.rfs f*6hit?c&gt;srimr l ?iM,\Yi Wi k.ftvf mrkhifr] inf natural science, and ex- 

and social naturalism 
remarks of his work 
of programmes J for 
everywhere from the 

)iihatorfitaa!i)tiupiiii, and all the activities of 
his life as a product of the same simple elements of reality which 

anthropological inter- 
i, an end in itself, any 
His entire thought is 
he conceives in the 
ultimately for its sole 

fjiaW^fo8ii*atocl9^Hiimii&lt;^efflIth,^IwiDrld by his knowledge 
eofhfio\\wHdiio-iE*tt9ifetfe/ii! - &lt; e;joBi!fa , vaiid oi&ithe only lasting power. 
Wibite t&eftef^wIaBiig^^ to make itself 

Hiri^t^(ft l^^wiaikni^ f (tedds M^atiitqpfekjq blind endeavour became 
: ,J&3KK&gt;8tfteD &hffliiif{&litt tThHfcniwanj; can owe his mastery 
kstigatoiditi ^JrufcHeir true essence. For 
the means of 

subjecting nature to the human mind, and his great work for the 
K&gt;e^va&m,0f&gt;it^^iitMtfe^to^ " Temporis Par- 

SS^SSIn ^Sffiu^% Y !|S^ J3^]^tf&gt;9& min is. 

In this, Bacon expressed what was moving^ the heart of thousands 
at his time, under the^^p^-^^ Qf^^e^ ^e^, With that series 

5, adventures, 

2 Cl. O. Peschel, Gesch. des Zcitalters der Entdeckungen, 2d ed., Leips..(KK79t 

CHAP. 2, 30.] Problem of Method : Bacon. 387 

change had been introduced within a short time into the greater as 
well as the lesser life of man. A new epoch of civilisation seemed 
to be opened, and an exotic excitement seized upon men s fancy. 
Unheard-of things should succeed; nothing was to be impossible 
any longer. The telescope disclosed the mysteries of the heavens, 
and the powers of the earth began to obey the investigator. 
Science would be the guide of the human mind in its victorious 
journey through Nature. By her inventions, human life should be 
completely transformed. What hopes in this respect set free the 
fancy for its flights we see from Bacon s Utopian fragment of the 
Nova Atlantis, and also from Campanella s Civitas Soils. The 
English Chancellor, however, held that the task of the knowledge 
of Nature was ultimately to make of invention, which had hitherto 
been for the most part a matter of chance, a consciously exercised 
art. To be sure, he gave life to this thought only in the fantastic 
picture of Solomon s house, in his Utopia ; he guarded himself from 
seriously carrying it out ; but this meaning which he attributed to 
the ars inveniendi made him an opponent of purely theoretical and 
" contemplative " knowledge ; just from this point of view did he 
combat Aristotle and the unfruitfulness of monastic science. In 
his hand philosophy was in danger of falling from the rule of a 
religious end under that of technical interests. 

But the issue proved again that the golden fruits of knowledge 
ripen only where they are not sought. In his haste for utility 
Bacon missed his goal, and the intellectual creations which have 
enabled natural science to become the basis of our external civilisa 
tion proceeded from the superior thinkers, who, with pure disinter 
ested thought, and without any eagerness to improve the world, 
desired to understand the order of Nature which they admired. 

3. His tendency toward the practical end of invention blinded 
Bacon to the theoretical value of mathematics. This value had at 
first come to consciousness in the fantastic forms which praised the 
number-harmony of the universe in Neo-Platonic exuberance (cf. 
29, 5), imitating the Pythagorean methods. The great investiga 
tors of Nature set out from a like admiration for the beauty and 
order of the universe ; but the new in their teachings consists in 
just this, that they no longer seek this mathematical significance of 
the cosmical order in symbolic number-speculations, but aim to 
understand and prove it from facts. Modern investigation of Nature 
was born as empirical Pythagoreanism. This problem had been seen 
already by Leonardo da Vinci 1 to have been the first to solve it 

1 Cf. with regard to him as a philosopher, K. Prantl, SUz.-Ber. der Mun- 
chcner Akad., 1885, 1 ff. 

388 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

is the glory of Kepler. The psychological motive of his research 
was the philosophical conviction of the mathematical order of the 
universe, and he verified his conviction by discovering the laws of 
planetary motion by means of a grand induction. 

In this procedure it became evident, on the one hand, that the true 
task of induction in natural science consists in finding out that 
mathematical relation which remains the same in the entire series 
of the phenomena determined by measurement, and, on the other 
hand, that the object, in connection with which this task can be 
performed by research, is none other than motion. The divine 
arithmetic and geometry which Kepler sought in the universe was 
found in the laws of occurrence and change (Geschehens) . Proceed 
ing from this principle, with a more distinct methodical conscious 
ness, Galileo created mechanics as the mathematical theory of motion. 
It is extremely instructive to compare the thoughts which the latter 
presents in the Saggiatore with Bacon s interpretation of Nature. 
Both aim to analyse into their elements the phenomena given in per 
ception, in order to explain phenomena from the combination of 
these elements. But where Bacon s Induction seeks the " Forms, " 
Galileo s method of resolution (analysis) searches out the simplest 
processes of motion capable of mathematical determination ; and 
while interpretation with the former consists in pointing out how 
the natures co-operate to form an empirical structure, the latter 
shows in his method of composition (synthesis) that the mathemati 
cal theory under the presupposition of the simple elements of 
motion leads to the same results which experience exhibits. 1 From 
this standpoint experiment also acquires quite another significance : 
it is not merely a shrewd question put to Nature, but is the intelli 
gent and intentional interference by which simple forms of occur 
rence are isolated in order to subject them to measurement. Thus, 
all that Bacon had merely presaged receives with Galileo a definite 
significance usable for the investigation of Nature, by means of the 
mathematical principle and its application to motion ; and in accord 
ance with these principles of mechanics Newton was able by his 
hypothesis of gravitation to give the mathematical theory for the 
explanation of Kepler s laws. 

With this, the victory of the principle of Democritus and Plato, 
that the sole object which true knowledge of Nature can deal with 
is what is capable of quantitative determination, was sealed in a 
completely new form ; but this time the principle was applied not 
to the Being, but to the Becoming or change in Nature. Scientific 

1 This methodical standpoint Hobbes makes entirely his own (cf. De Corp., 
ch. 6), and indeed in expressly rationalistic antithesis to the empiricism of Bacon. 

CHAI-. 2, 30.] Problem of Method: Galileo, Hobbes. 389 

insight reaches as far as the mathematical theory of motion extends. 
Exactly this standpoint of the Galilean physics is taken in theoreti 
cal philosophy by Hobbes. 1 Geometry is the only certain discipline ; 
all knowledge of Nature is rooted in it. We can know only such 
objects as we can construct, so that we derive all further conse 
quences from this our own operation. Hence knowledge of all 
things, in so far as it is accessible for us, consists in tracing back 
what is perceived to motion of bodies in space. Science has to 
reason from phenomena to causes, and from these latter in turn to 
their effects : but phenomena are, in their essence, motions ; causes 
are the simple elements of motion, and effects are again motions. 
Thus arises the apparently materialistic proposition : philosophy is 
the doctrine of the motion of bodies ! This is the extreme conse 
quence of the separation of philosophy from theology, which began 
with the English Franciscans. 

The essential result for philosophy in these methodical begin 
nings of natural research is, therefore, twofold : empiricism was 
corrected by mathematics, and the shapeless Pythagoreanism of the 
humanistic tradition was made by empiricism definite mathemati 
cal theory. These lines meet and are bound together in Galileo. 

4. In mathematical theory, accordingly, was found that rational 
factor which Giordano Bruno had demanded in his treatment of the 
Copernican doctrine for a critical elaboration of sense perception. 2 
Rational science is mathematics. Proceeding from this conviction, 
Descartes undertook his reform of philosophy. Educated in the 
Scholasticism of the Jesuits, he had attained the personal convic 
tion 3 that satisfaction for an earnest craving for truth was to be found 
neither in metaphysical theories nor in the learned polymathy of 
the empirical disciplines, but in mathematics alone ; and by follow 
ing the pattern of mathematics, himself, as is well known, a cre 
ative mathematician, he thought to transform all the rest of human 
knowledge : his philosophy aims to be a universal mathematics. In 
the generalisation of the Galilean principle requisite for this pur 
pose, some of the factors which made the principle fruitful for the 
special tasks of natural research fell away, so that Descartes teach 
ing is not usually counted as an advance in the history of physics; 
but the power of his influence upon the philosophical development, 
in which he was the ruling mind for the seventeenth century and 
beyond, was all the greater. 

To those methodical thoughts which are common to Bacon and 

1 Cf. the bejrinninsr of DP Corpore. 

8 G. Bruno, DeW Inf. Univ. e Mond. 1 in. (L. 307 f.). 

8 Cf. the fine exposition in the Disco urs de la Method*. 

390 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

Galileo, Descartes added a postulate of the greatest importance : he 
demanded that the method of induction or resolution should lead to 
a single principle of highest and absolute certainty, from which after 
wards, by the method of composition, the whole compass of experi 
ence must find its explanation. This demand was entirely original, 
and had its root in the felt need for a systematic, connected whole 
of all human knowledge ; it rested ultimately upon his surfeit of 
the traditional reception of historically collected knowledge, and 
upon his longing for a new philosophical creation from one mould. 
Descartes will, then, by an inductive enumeration and a critical 
sifting of all ideas, press forward to a single, certain point, in order 
from this point to deduce all further truths. The first task of phil 
osophy is analytic, the second synthetic. 

The classical carrying out of this thought is presented in the 
Meditations. The philosopher portrays his struggle after truth in 
a dramatic dialogue with himself. Proceeding from the principle 
" de omnibus dubitandum," the whole circuit of ideas is reviewed 
on all sides, and in the process we meet the whole apparatus of 
sceptical arguments. We experience the change of opinions and the 
deceptions of the senses too often, says Descartes, to permit of our 
trusting them. In the face of the variety of impressions which the 
same object makes under different circumstances, it is not possible 
to decide which of these impressions, and, indeed, whether any one 
of them, contains the true essence of the thing ; and the liveliness 
and sureness with which we can dream in our actual experience 
must excite in us the scruple which can never be completely set 
aside, as to whether we are not perhaps dreaming even when we 
believe that we are awake and perceiving. Meanwhile, at the basis 
of all the combinations which the imagination can produce lie the 
simple elementary acts of consciousness, and in connection with 
these we meet with truths of which we are undeniably obliged to 
say that we cannot help recognising them, as, for example, the 
simple propositions of arithmetic 2x2 = 4, and the like. But 
how if now we were so constituted that from our very nature we 
must necessarily err ? how if some demon had created us, whose 
pleasure it was to give us a Reason that would necessarily deceive 
while it supposed itself to be teaching the truth ? Against such a 
delusion we should be defenceless, and this thought must make us 
mistrustful even with reference to the most evident utterances of 
reason. 

After fundamental doubt has been thus pressed even to the far 
thest extreme, it proves that the doubt breaks off its own point, 
that it itself presents a fact of completely unassailable certainty : 

CHAP. 2, 30.] Problem of Method :. 

in order to doubt, in order to dream, in order to be deceived, I must 
be. Doubt itself proves that I, as a thinking conscious being (res
cogitans), exist. The proposition cogito sum is true as often as I 
think or pronounce it. And, indeed, the certaionty of Being is con-
tained in none of my activities except that of consciousness. That 
I go to walk I can imagine in my dream :1 that I am conscious can- 
not be merely my imagination, for imagination is itself a kind of 
consciousness. 2 The certainty of the Being or existence of conscious-
ness is the one fundamental truth which Descartes finds by the 
analytic method. 

Rescue from doubt consists therefore in the Augustian argument
of the Reality of the conscious nature or essence (cf. § 22,1). But
its application with Descartes 3 is not the same as with Augustine
himself and with the great number of those on whom his doctrine
was influential just in the transition period. For Augustine, the  
self-certainty of the soul was valued as the surest of all experiences 
as the fundamental fact of inner perception by means of which the 
latter obtains for the theory of knowledge a preponderance over
outer perception. Thus - not to recall again Charron’s moralising
interpretation - Campanella particularly had employed the Augus-
tinian principle when, not unlike the great Church Father, he gave
to the elements of this experience of self the meaning of metaphysic- 
cal prime elements (cf. 29, 3). In a completely analogous manner
-	not to speak of Locke 4 - Tschirnhausen, in a supposed adherence 
to Descartes, had later regarded self-knowledge as the experimenta evi-
dentissima,5 which is therefore to serve as the a posterieri beginning of  
philosophy (cf. below, No. 7), so that from it all further knowledge 
can be constructed a priori; for in self-knowledge is contained the 
threefold trlith, that we are effected by some things, well and by 
others ill, that we understand some and not others, and that in the 
process of ideation we occupy a passive attitude with reference to 

1 Descartes reply to Gassendi s objection (V. 2) ; cf. Princ. Phil. I. 9. 

2 The ordinary translation of cogitare, cogitatio by "think" (Denken) is
liable to occasion misunderstanding, since Denken in German [and the same is
true of think, in English, at least in philosophical terminology] signifies a par- 
ticular kind of theoretical consciousness. Descartes himself elucidates the meaning of cogitare (Mfd. III.; Princ. Phil. I. 9), by enumeration : he understands by it to doubt, affirm, deny, understand, will, abhor, imagine, feel a sensation, etc. For that which is common to all these functions we have in-German scarcely any word but " Bewusstsein " [consciousness]. The same is true with regard to Spinoza s use of the term ; cf. his Princ. Phil. Cart. I., Prop. IV.,  Schol., and also Eth. II., Ax. III., and elsewhere.  

3 Who besides, at the outset, seems not to have known the historical oi^jjn 
this argument. Cf. Obj. IV., and Eesp. 

* Cf. below, 33 f. 

6 Tschirnhausen, Med. Ment. (1695), pp. 290-94. 

392 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

the outer world, three points of attachment for the three rational 
sciences, ethics, logic, and physics. 

5. With Descartes, on the contrary, the proposition cogito sum 
has not so much the meaning of an experience, as rather that of the 
first fundamental rational truth. Nor is its evidence that of an infer 
ence, 1 but that of immediate intuitive certainty. The analytic method 
seeks here, as with Galileo, the simple, self -intelligible elements, out 
of which all else is to be explained ; but while the physicist discovers 
the perceptional elementary form of motion, which is to make com 
prehensible all that takes place in the corporeal world, the meta 
physician is hunting for the elementary truths of consciousness. In 
this consists the rationalism of Descartes. 

This rationalism expresses itself in the fact that the superiority 
of self-consciousness is found in its complete clearness and distinct 
ness, and in the fact that Descartes propounded as his principle for 
the synthetic method the maxim, Everything must be true which is as 
clear and distinct as self-consciousness, i.e. which presents itself before 
the mind s vision as surely and underivably as the mind s own exist 
ence. " Clear " is defined by Descartes 2 as that which is intuitively 
present and manifest to the mind, " distinct " as that which is en 
tirely clear in itself and precisely determined. And those mental 
presentations or ideas, 3 as he calls them after the manner of later 
Scholasticism which are in this sense clear and distinct, whose 
evidence is not to be deduced from any others, but is grounded 
solely in themselves, he calls innate ideas* With this expression 
he indeed incidentally connects also the psycho-genetic thought that 
these ideas are imprinted upon the human soul by God, but for the 
most part he desires to give only the epistemological significance of 
immediate, rational evidence. 

These two meanings are peculiarly mingled in Descartes proofs 
for the existence of God, which form an integrant constituent of his 
theory of knowledge, in so far as this "idea" is the first for which, 
in the synthetic procedure of his method a clearness and distinct 
ness or intuitive evidence of the " natural light," equal to that of 
self-consciousness, is claimed. The new (so-called Cartesian) proof 
which he introduces in this connection, 5 has a multitude of scholastic 

1 Resp. ad Obj. II. 2 Princ, Phil I. 45. 

3 [German Idee. I follow the ordinary English usage in spelling the word as 
used by Descartes without a capital.] 

4 Cf. E. Grimm, D. s Lehre von den angeborenen Ideen (Jena, 1873), and also 
P. Natorp, Z&gt;. s Erkenntnisstheorie (Marburg, 1882). That innatus is better 
translated by eingeboren than by the usual angeboren has been remarked by 
11. Kucken, Geschichte und Kritik der Grundbegriffe der Gegenwart, p. 73. 

5 Med. III. 

CHAP. 2, 30.] Problem of Method : Descartes. 393 

assumptions. Hd argues that the individual self-consciousness 
knows itself to be finite, and therefore imperfect (according to the 
old identification of determinations expressing value with ontological 
gradations), and that this knowledge can be derived only from the 
conception of an absolutely perfect being (ens perfectissinuim) . This 
latter conception which we find within us must have a cause which, 
nevertheless, is not to be found within our own selves, nor in any 
other finite things. For the principle of causality requires that at 
least as much Reality be contained in the cause as there is in the 
effect. This in the scholastic sense realistic principle is now 
applied, in analogy to Anselm s argument, to the relation of the 
idea in the mind (esse in intellectu or esse objective) to the Real 
(esse in re or esse formaliter), in order to give the inference -that we 
should not have the idea of a most perfect being if the idea had not 
been produced in us by such a being himself. This anthropologico- 
metaphysical proof has then with Descartes the significance that 
by it that former sceptical hypothetical phantom of a deceiving 
demon is again destroyed. For since the perfection of God involves 
his veracity, and it is impossible that he should so have created us 
that we should necessarily err, confidence in the lumen naturale, that 
is, in the immediate evidence of rational knowledge, is restored, and 
thus definitively grounded. Thus modern rationalism is introduced 
by Descartes by thS circuitous route of Scholasticism. For this 
proof gives the charter for acknowledging with complete certainty 
as true all propositions which manifest themselves in clear and dis 
tinct light before the reason. Here belong, firstly, all truths of 
mathematics, but here belongs also the ontological proof for the 
existence of God. For with the same necessity of thought thus 
Descartes takes up Anselm s argument 1 with which the geometri 
cal propositions with regard to a triangle follow from the definition 
of the triangle, it follows from the mere definition of the most Real 
being that the attribute of existence belongs to him. The possibility 
of thinking God suffices to prove his existence. 

In this way it follows from the criterion of clearness and distinct 
ness, that of finite things also, and especially of bodies, so much can 
be known as is clearly and distinctly perceived. But this is for 
Descartes the mathematical element, and is limited to the quantitative 
determinations, while all the sensuous-qualitative elements in percep 
tion are regarded by the philosopher as unclear and confused. On this 
account metaphysics and the theory of knowledge terminate for him, 
too, in a mathematical physics. He designates 2 the sensuous appre- 

1 Med. V. 2 Med. VI. 

394 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PAKT IV. 

hension of the qualitative, "imagination" (imaginatio). The appre 
hension of that which can be mathematically constructed he terms, on 
the other hand, "intellectual" knowledge (intellectio) , and strongly as 
he knows how to prize the help which experience gives in the former, 
a really scientific insight rests, in his opinion, only upon the latter. 

The distinction between distinct and confused presentations 
(which goes back to Duns Scotus and farther) serves Descartes 
also to solve the problem of error, which results for him out of his 
principle of the veracitas dei, because it does not seem possible to 
see how, in accordance with that principle, perfect deity could so 
arrange human nature as to allow it to err at all. Here Descartes 
helps himself 1 by a peculiarly limited doctrine of freedom, which 
might be consistent with either Thomistic determinism or Scotist 
indeterminism. It is assumed, that is, that only clear and distinct 
presentations exercise so cogent and compelling a power upon the 
mind that it cannot avoid recognising them, while with reference to 
the unclear and confused presentations it retains the boundless and 
groundless activity of the liberum arbitrium indijfer entice (its farthest- 
reaching power, which in the Scotist fashion is set in analogy with 
the freedom of God). Thus error arises when affirmation and nega 
tion follow arbitrarily (without rational ground) in the case of 
unclear and indistinct material for judgment. 2 The demand which 
follows from this of withholding judgment in all cases where a suffi 
ciently clear and distinct insight is not present recalls too distinctly 
the ancient firo^ij ("suspense") to permit us to overlook the rela 
tionship of this theory of error, with the doctrines of the Sceptics 
and Stoics as to the &lt;rvyKaTa#ecris (cf . pp. 167, 208) . 3 In fact, Descartes 
recognised distinctly the will-factor in judgment (agreeing here, 
too, with the epistemology of Augustine and Duns Scotus), and 
Spinoza followed him in this, so far as to designate affirmation or 
denial as a necessary characteristic of every idea, and thus to teach 
that man cannot think without at the same time willing. 4 

6. Descartes mathematical reform of philosophy had a peculiar 
fate. Its metaphysical results began a rich and fruitful develop 
ment; its tendency as regards method, however, soon became sub- 

1 Med. IV. 

2 Error appears accordingly as an act of free will parallel to the act of sin, 
and thus as guilt ; it is the guilt or fault of self-deception. This thought was 
carried out particularly by Malebranche (Entret. III. f.). 

3 This relationship extends consistently to Descartes ethics also. From the 
clear and distinct knowledge of reason follows necessarily right willing and act 
ing ; from the obscure and confused impulses of the sensibility result practically 
sin and theoretically error, by abuse of freedom. The ethical ideal is the 
Socratic-Stoic ideal of the rule of reason over the sensibility. 

* Eth. II., Prop. 49. 

CHAP. 2, 30.] Problem of Method : Cartesians. 395 

jected to a misunderstanding which exactly reversed its meaning. 
The philosopher himself desired to see the analytical method em 
ployed in a great proportion of instances, even in the case of par 
ticular problems, and thought of the synthetic method as a progress 
in discovery from one intuitive truth to another. His disciples, 
however, confounded the creatively free intellectual activity, which 
Descartes had in mind, with that rigidly demonstrative system of 
exposition which they found in Euclid s text-book of geometry. The 
monistic tendency of the Cartesian methodology, the fact that it set 
up a highest principle from which all other certainty should follow, 
favoured this exchange, and out of the new method of investigation 
there came into being again an ars demonstrandi. The ideal of 
philosophy appeared to be the task of developing from its funda 
mental principle all its knowledge as a system of as rigidly logical 
consistency as that with which Euclid s text-book deduces geome 
try with all its propositions from axioms and definitions. 

A request of this sort had been answered by Descartes with a 
tentative sketch, though with express reference to the doubtfulness 
of this transfer; 1 but the allurement to find the significance of 
mathematics for philosophical method in the circumstance, that it is 
the ideal of demonstrative science, seems only to have been strength 
ened thereby. At least, it was in this direction that the influence 
of the Cartesian philosophy proved strongest for the following 
period. In all the change of epistemological investigations until 
far into the eighteenth century this conception of mathematics was 
a firmly established axiom for all parties. Indeed, it became even 
a lever for scepticism and mysticism, under the direct influence of 
Descartes, in the case of men like Pascal. Since no other human 
science, so the latter argued, neither metaphysics nor the empirical 
disciplines, can attain mathematical evidence ; man must be modest 
in his efforts after rational knowledge, and must the more follow 
the impulse of his heart toward presageful faith, and the feeling of 
tact which belongs to a noble conduct of life. The Mystic Poiret 
(influenced by Boehme), also, and the orthodox sceptic Huet, 2 
turned away from Cartesianism because it could not pause in its 
programme of universal mathematics. 

Positive beginnings toward a transformation of the Cartesian 
method into the Euclidean line of proof we found in the Port-Koyal 

1 Itesp. ad Ob). II. 

2 Pierre Daniel Huet (16:50-1721), the learned Bishop of Avranches, wrote 
Cen.wra Phil nsoph ire, Cartrsiaiice (1(589), and Trnite de la Faiblesse de VJfsprit 
Humain (1723). His Autobiography (1718) is also instructive on the point 
mentioned above. Cf. on him Ch. Barthohness (Paris, 1850). 

396 The Renaissance : Natural /Science Period. [PART IV. 

logic and in the logical treatises of Geulincx ; but in the system of 
Spinoza this methodical schematism stands before us complete and 
perfect as from one mould. He first gave an exposition of the Car 
tesian philosophy " more geometrico," by developing the content of 
the system step by step in propositions, after first setting up defini 
tions and axioms. Each of these propositions was proved from the 
definitions, axioms, and preceding propositions ; while corollaries 
and scholia giving freer elucidations were added to certain of the 
propositions. Into this same rigid, unwieldy form Spinoza pressed 
his own philosophy also in the Ethics, and believed that it was thus 
as surely demonstrated as the Euclidean system of geometry. This 
presupposed not only the flawless correctness of the demonstrative 
process, but also an unambiguous evidence and an unassailable 
validity of the definitions and axioms. A look at the beginning of 
the Ethics (and not only of the first, but also of the following 
books) suffices to convince one of the naivete with which Spinoza 
brings forward the complicated and condensed constructions of 
scholastic thought as self-evident conceptions and principles, and 
thereby anticipates implicitly his whole metaphysical system. 

This geometrical method has, however, in Spinoza s thought and 
in this consists its psycho-genetic justification at the same time 
its material as well as formal significance. The fundamental re 
ligious conviction that all things necessarily proceed from the 
unitary essence of God seemed to him to require a method of philo 
sophical knowledge, which in the same manner should derive from 
the idea of God the ideas of all things. In the true philosophy the 
order of ideas ought to be the same as the real order of things. 1 But 
from this it follows of itself that the real process of the procedure 
of things forth from God must be thought after the analogy of the 
logical procedure of the consequent from its ground or reason, and 
thus the character of the method which Spinoza fixed upon for the 
problem of philosophy involved in advance the metaphysical char 
acter of its solution ; cf. 31. 

7. Little as men dared, in the immediately following period, to 
make the content of the Spinozistic philosophy their own, its method 
ical form exercised, nevertheless, an impressive influence : and the 
more the geometrical method became settled in the philosophy of 
the schools, the more the syllogistic procedure entered again with it, 
since all knowledge was to be deduced from the highest truths by 

1 The view that true knowledge as genetic definition must repeat the process 
by which its object arises was carried out especially by Tschirnhausen, who did 
not shrink from the paradox that a complete definition of laughter must be able 
to produce laughter itself ! (Med. Ment., 67 f.) 

CHAP. 2, 30.] Problem of Method : Spinoza, Leibniz. 397 

regular inferences. Especially did the mathematically schooled 
Cartesians in Germany take up the geometrical method along this 
line: this was done by Jung and Weigel, and the academic impulse 
to the preparation of text-books found in this method a form with 
which it could have the utmost sympathy. In the eighteenth cen 
tury Christian Wolff (of. Part V.) pursued this line in the most 
comprehensive manner with his Latin text-books, and for the sys- 
tematisation of a firmly established and clearly thought out material 
there could be in fact no better form. This was shown when Puffen- 
dorf undertook to deduce the entire system of Natural Right by the 
geometrical method, as a logical necessity from the single principle 
of the need of society. 

When this view was in process of coming into existence Leibniz 
came into sympathy with it under the especial influence of Erhard 
Weigel, and was at the beginning one of its most consistent sup 
porters. He not only made the jest of giving this unwonted garb 
to a political brochure, 1 but was seriously of the opinion that philo 
sophical controversies would find their end for the first time when 
a philosophy could once make its appearance in as clear and certain 
a form as that of a mathematical calculation. 2 

Leibniz pursued this thought very energetically. The stimulus 
of Hobbes, who also though with quite another purpose, cf . 31, 2 
declared thinking to be a reckoning with the conceptions! signs 
of things, may have been added; the Art of Lull and the pains 
which Giordano Bruno had taken with its improvement were well 
known to him. In Cartesian circles, also, the thought of transform 
ing the mathematical method to a regular art of invention had been 
much discussed : besides Joachim Jung, the Altorf Professor Joh. 
Christopher Sturm, 3 had also exercised an influence upon Leibniz in 
this respect. Finally, the thought of expressing the fundamental 
metaphysical conceptions, and likewise the logical operations of 
their combination after the manner of the mathematical sign-lan 
guage by definite characters, seemed to offer the possibility of writ 
ing a philosophical investigation in general formulae, and by this 
means raising it beyond the capability of being expressed in a 
definite language an effort toward a universally scientific lan 
guage, a "Lingua Adamica," which likewise appeared at the time 

1 In the pseudonymous Specimen demonstrationum politicnrum pro rege Polo- 
norum eligendo (1069), he proved by "geometrical method" in sixty proposi 
tions and demonstrations that the Count Palatine of Neuburg must be chosen 
king of the Poles. 

2 De Scientia Universali sen Calculo Philosophico (1084). 

8 The author of a Compendium Universalium sen Metaphysicce EudidecR. 

398 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

of Leibniz in numerous supporters. 1 So, too, Leibniz busied himself 
to an extraordinary degree with the thought of a characteristica uni- 
versalis, and a method of philosophical calculus. 2 

The essential outcome of these strange endeavours was, that an 
attempt was necessarily made to establish those highest truths, 
from the logical combination of which all knowledge was to be 
deduced. So Leibniz, like Galileo and Descartes, must proceed to 
search out that which, as immediately and intuitively certain, forces 
itself upon the mind as self-evident, and by its combinations grounds 
all derived knowledge. In the course of these reflections Leibniz 
stumbled upon the discovery 3 (which Aristotle had made before 
him), that there are two completely different kinds of this intuitive 
knowledge : universal truths self-evident to reason, and facts of 
experience. The one class has timeless validity ; the other, validity 
for a single instance : verites eternelles and verites defait. Both have 
in common that they are intuitively certain, i.e. are certain in them 
selves and not by deduction from anything else ; they are called, 
therefore, pnm f e veritates, or, also, primoe possibilitates, because in 
them the possibility of all that is derivative has its ground. For 
the " possibility " of a conception is known either by a " causal 
definition" which derives the same from the first possibilities, that 
is, a priori; or by the immediate experience of its actual existence, 
that is, a posteriori. 

These two kinds of " primitive truths" the rational and the 
empirical, as we see Leibniz attached in a very interesting manner 
to the two Cartesian marks of intuitive self-evidence, clearness and 
distinctness. To this end he shifts to a slight extent the meaning 
of both expressions. 4 That idea is clear which is surely distin 
guished from all others and so is adequate for the recognition of its 
object; that idea is distinct which is clear even to its particular 
constituent parts and to the knowledge of their combination. 
According to this, the a priori, " geometrical " or " metaphysical " 
eternal truths are clear and distinct ; while on the other hand the 
a posteriori, or the truths relating to facts, are clear, indeed, but not 
distinct. Hence the former are perfectly transparent, conjoined 
with the conviction of the impossiblity of the opposite, while in the 
case of the latter the opposite is thinkable. In the case of the 
former the intuitive certainty rests upon the Principle of Contradic- 

1 Such attempts had been projected by J. J. Becker (1661), G. Dalgarn (1661), 
Athanasius Kircher (1603), and J. Wilkins (1668). 

2 Cf. A. Trendelenburg, Historische Beitrdge zn Philosophic, Vols. II., III. 
8 Meditationes de Cognitione Veritate et Ideis (1684). 

* Ib. at the beginning, Erd s. ed., p. 79. 

CHAP. 2, 31.] Substance and Causality. 399 

tion; in the case of the latter the possibility guaranteed by the 
actual fact needs still an explanation in accordance with the Prin 
ciple of Sufficient Reason. 

At the beginning, Leibniz intended this distinction only with 
reference to the imperfection of the human understanding. In the 
case of rational truths we see into the impossibility of the opposite ; 
with empirical truths this is not the case, and we must content our 
selves with establishing their actuality : * but the latter also, in the 
natura rerum and for the divine understanding, are so grounded 
that the opposite is impossible, although it remains thinkable for 
us. If Leibniz compared this distinction with that of commensur 
able and incommensurable magnitudes, he meant at the beginning 
that incommensurability lies only in man s limited knowing capacity. 
But in the course of his development this antithesis became for 
him an absolute one ; it gained metaphysical significance. Leibniz 
now distinguished realiter between an unconditional necessity, which 
involves the logical impossibility of the opposite, and a conditional 
necessity, which has " only " the character of a matter of fact. He 
divided the principles of things into those of which the opposite is 
unthinkable, and those of which the opposite is thinkable : he dis 
tinguished metaphysically, also, between necessary and contingent 
truths. This, however, cohered with metaphysical motives, which 
arose from an after-working of the Scotist theory of the contin 
gency of the finite, and overthrew the geometrical method. 

31. Substance and Causality. 

The real [as contrasted with formal] result of the new methods 
was in metaphysics, as in natural science, a transformation of the 
fundamental ideas of the nature of things, and of the mode of 
their connection in the processes of Nature : the conceptions of sub 
stance and causality acquired a new content. But this change 
could not proceed so radically in metaphysics as in natural science. 
In this latter more limited realm, after the Galilean principle had 
once been found, it was possible in a certain measure to begin ab ovo 
and produce a completely new theory : in the more general philo 
sophical doctrines the power and authority of tradition were much too 
great to make it possible or permissible that it should be completely 
set aside. 

This distinction asserted itself already in connection with the 
delicate relation sustained to religious conceptions. Natural science 

1 The Aristotelian distinction of Si6n and Sn. 

400 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

could isolate itself absolutely from theology, and maintain toward 
it an attitude of complete indifference : metaphysics, by its concep 
tion of the deity- and by its theory of the mental or spiritual 
world, was brought again and again into hostile or friendly contact 
with the religious sphere of ideas. A Galileo declared that the 
investigations of physics, whatever their result might be, had not 
the least thing to do with the teaching of the Bible, 1 and a Newton 
was not prevented by his mathematical natural philosophy from 
burying himself with the most ardent piety in the mysteries of the 
Apocalypse. But the metaphysicians, however indifferent their 
thought as regards religion, and however strictly they might prose 
cute their science in the purely theoretical spirit, were still always 
obliged to consider that they had to do with objects concerning 
which the Church doctrine was fixed. This gave modern philosophy 
a somewhat delicate position : mediaeval philosophy had brought to 
the objects of Church dogma an essentially religious interest of its 
own as well ; modern philosophy regarded them, if at all, from the 
theoretical standpoint only. Hence those felt themselves most 
secure who, like Bacon and Hobbes, restricted philosophy also 
entirely to natural research, declined to enter upon a metaphysics 
proper, and were willing to let dogma speak the only words with 
regard to the deity and the super-sensible destiny of man. Bacon 
did this with large words behind which it is difficult to recognise 
his true disposition ; 2 Hobbes rather let it be seen that his natural 
istic opinion, like the Epicurean, saw in ideas as to the supernatural 
a superstition resting upon a defective knowledge of Nature, a 
superstition which by the regulation of the state becomes the bind 
ing authority of religion. 3 Much more difficult, however, was the 
position of those philosophers who held fast to the metaphysical 
conception of the deity in their very explanation of Nature; Des 
cartes whole literary activity is filled with an anxious caution 
directed toward avoiding every offence to religion, while Leibniz 
could attempt to carry through in a much more positive manner the 
conformity of his metaphysics to religion ; and on the other hand 
the example of Spinoza showed how dangerous it was if philosophy 
openly brought to the front the difference between its conception of 
God and the dogmatic conception. 

1. The main difficulty of the case inhered in the circumstance 
that the new methodical principle of mechanics excluded all tracing of 

1 Cf. the letter to the Grand Duchess Christine, Op. II. 26 ff. 

2 De Augm. Scient. IX., where the supernatural and incomprehensible is set 
forth as the characteristic and serviceable quality of faith. 

8 Leviathan, I. 6 ; cf. the drastic expression, ib. IV. 32. 

CHAP. 2, 31.] Substance and Causality : Bacon. 401 

corporeal phenomena back to spiritual forces. Nature was despiritu- 
alised; science would see in it nothing but the movements of smallest 
bodies, of which one is the cause of the other. No room remained 
for the operation of supernatural powers. So first of all, at one 
stroke, magic, astronomy, and alchemy, in which the Neo-Platonic 
ghosts and spirits had held sway, became for science a standpoint of 
the past. Leonardo had already demanded that the phenomena of the 
external world should be explained by natural causes only ; the great 
systems of the seventeenth century without exception recognise only 
such, and a Cartesian, Balthasar Bekker, wrote a book l to show that 
in accordance with the principles of modern science, all appear 
ances of ghosts, conjurations, and magic arts must be reckoned as 
injurious errors, a word of admonition which was very much in 
place in view of the luxuriant superstition of the Renaissance. 

But with the spirits, teleology, also, was obliged to give place. 
The explanation of natural phenomena by their purposiveness 
always came ultimately in some way or other to the thought of a 
spiritual creation or ordering of things, and so was contradictory 
to the principle of mechanics. At this point the victory of the 
system of Democritus over the natural philosophy of Plato and 
Aristotle was most palpable ; this, too, was emphasised most forcibly 
by the new philosophy. Bacon counted the teleological mode of - 
regarding Nature as one of the idols, and, indeed, as one of the 
dangerous idols of the tribe, the fundamental errors which become 
a source of illusion to man through his very nature : he taught that 
philosophy has to do only with formal or efficient causes, and ex 
pressed his restriction of philosophy to physics and his rejection of 
metaphysics precisely by saying that the explanation of Nature is 
physics if it concerns causce ejjicientes, metaphysics if it concerns "&gt; 
causce finales." 1 In the case of Hobbes, who was the disciple of 
Bacon and Galileo, the same view is self-explaining. But Descartes, 
also, desires to see all final causes kept at a distance from the 
explanation of Nature he declares it audacious to desire to know 
the purposes of God. 3 Much more open, and keenest by far, is the 
polemic of Spinoza* against the anthropomorphism of teleology. 
In view of his idea of God and God s relation to the world, it is 
absurd to speak of ends of the deity, and especially of such as have 
reference to men ; where all follows with eternal necessity from the 
essential nature of the deity, there is no room for an activity accord 
ing to ends. The English Neo-Platonists, such as Cudworth and 

1 Balthasar Bekker (1634-1698), De Betoverte Wercld (1690). 

2 De Augm. III. 4. * Med. IV. 
* Cf. principally Eth. I. Append. 

402 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

Henry More, combated this fundamental mechanico-antiteleological 
feature of the new metaphysics with all the eloquence of the old 
arguments, but without success. The teleological conviction was 
obliged to renounce definitively the claim of affording scientific 
explanation of particular phenomena, and only in the metaphysical 
conception of the whole did Leibniz (cf. below, No. 8), and similarly 
a part of the English students of Nature, find ultimately a satisfac 
tory adjustment between the opposing principles. 

With the exclusion of the spiritual from the explanation of 
Nature, still a third element of the old view of the world fell away, 
viz. the thought of the difference in kind and in value of the 
spheres of Nature, as it had been embodied most distinctly in 
the Neo-Platonic graded realm of things, following the ancient 
Pythagorean precedent. In this respect the fantastic natural 
philosophy of the Renaissance had already done a forcible work of 
preparation. The Stoic doctrine of the omnipresence of all sub 
stances at every point of the universe had been revived by Nicolaus 
Cusauus ; but it was in connection with the victory of the Coperni- 
can system, as we see in Bruno, that the idea of the homogeneity of 
all parts of the universe first completely forced its way to recogni 
tion. The sublunary world could no longer be contrasted as the 
realm of imperfection, with the more spiritual spheres of the stellar 
heaven ; matter and motion are alike in both. It was from this 
thought that Kepler and Galileo proceeded, and it became complete 
when Newton recognised the identity of force in the fall of the 
apple and the revolution of the stars. For modern science, the old 
distinction in essence and in value between heaven and earth exists 
no longer. The universe is one in nature throughout. This same 
view, moreover, presented itself in opposition to the Aristotelian 
and Thomistic development system of Matters and Forms. It did 
away with the whole army of lower and higher forces the much 
combated qualitates occultce; it recognised the mechanical principle 
of motion as the only ground of explanation for all phenomena, and 
therefore, removed also the distinction in principle between the ani 
mate and the inanimate. Though here Neo-Platonism had co 
operated toward overcoming this antithesis by its view of the 
animation of the entire universe, the reverse task now arose for 
the Galilean mechanics, namely, that of explaining mechanically 
the phenomena of life also. The discovery of the mechanism of the 
circulation of the blood by Harvey 1 (1626) gave to this tendency a 

1 In which he had been anticipated by Michael Servetus (burned 1553 in 
Geneva by Calvin s instrumentality). 

CHAP. 2, 31.] Substance and Causality: Descartes, Locke. 403 

vigorous impulse ; Descartes expressed it in principle in his state 
ment that the bodies of animals are to be regarded scientifically as 
most complex automata, and their vital activities as mechanical 
processes. Hobbes and Spinoza carried out this thought more 
exactly ; a zealous study of reflex motions began in the medical 
schools of France and the Netherlands, and the conception of the 
soul as vital force became completely disintegrated. Only the 
Platonists and the adherents of the vitalism of Paracelsus and 
Boehme, such as Van Helmont, held fast to this conception in the 
old manner. 

2. This mechanistic despiritualisation of Nature corresponded 
completely to that dualistic theory of the world, which from episte- 
mological motives had been in course of preparation in terministic 
Nominalism, the theory of a total difference between the inner and 
the outer world. To the knowledge of their qualitative difference 
was now added that of their real and causal separateness. The 
world of bodies appeared not only quite different in kind from that 
of mind, but also as entirely sundered from it in its existence 
and in the course of its motions. The doctrine of the intellectuality 
of the sense qualities, revived in the philosophy of the Renaissance 
by the Humanists, had contributed an extraordinary amount toward 
sharpening the above antithesis. The doctrine that colours, tones, 
smells, tastes, and qualities of pressure, heat, and touch are not 
real qualities of things, but only signs of such in the mind, had 
passed over from the Sceptical and Epicurean literature into most of 
the doctrines of modern philosophy with a repetition of the ancient 
illustrations. Vives, Montaigne, Sanchez, and Campanella were at 
one in this ; Galileo, Hobbes, and Descartes revived the teaching of 
Democritus, that to these qualitative differences of perception noth 
ing but quantitative differences correspond in the natura rerum, and 
this in such a way that the former are the inner modes of mentally 
representing the latter. Descartes regarded sense qualities as ob 
scure and confused ideas, while the conception of the quantitative 
determinations of the outer world, on account of its mathematical 
character, was for him the only clear and distinct idea of them. 

According to Descartes, therefore, not only the sensuous feelings, 
but also the contents of sensation, belong not to the spatial, but to 
the psychical world only, and represent in this sphere the geomet 
rical structures of which they are the signs. In our examination of 
an individual object we can, 1 to be sure, gain a knowledge of this 

1 Cf. Med. VI. which allows perhaps the plainest view of the very close 
relation which Descartes physical research had to experience. 

404 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

true mathematical essence of bodies only by the aid of perceptions, 
and in these perceptions the true mathematical essence is always 
alloyed with the qualitative elements of the " imagination." But 
just in this consists the task of physical research, to dissolve out 
this real essence of bodies from the subjective modes of our mental 
representation by means of reflection upon the clear and distinct ele 
ments of perception. John Locke, who later adopted and made 
popular this view of Descartes, designated 1 those qualities which 
belong to bodies in themselves as primary, and called those sec 
ondary, on the other hand, which belong to a body only by virtue of 
its action upon our senses. 2 Descartes allowed as primary qualities 
only shape, size, position, and motion, so that for him the physical 
body coincided with the mathematical (cf. below, No. 4). In order 
to maintain a distinction between the two, Henry More, 3 on the con 
trary, demanded that impenetrability, regarded as the property of 
filling space, should also be reckoned to the essential nature of bodies, 
and Locke, 4 in accordance with this view, took up " solidity " into 
the class of primary qualities. 

With Hobbes 5 these thoughts become modified more in accordance 
with the terministic conception. He regards space (as phantasma 
rei existentis) and time (as phantasma motus) as also modes of men 
tal representation, and it is just because we can therefore construct 
these ourselves that mathematical theory has the advantage of being 
the sole rational science. But instead of drawing phenomenalistic 
conclusions from this premise, he argues that philosophy can treat 
only of bodies, and must leave everything spiritual to revelation. 
Scientific thought consequently consists, for him, only in the imma 
nent combination of signs. These are partly involuntary in percep 
tions, partly arbitrary in words (similarly Occam, cf. 27, 4). It 
is only by means of the latter that general conceptions and proposi 
tions become possible. Our thinking is hence a reckoning with 
verbal signs. It has its truth in itself and stands as something 
completely heterogeneous by the side of the outer world to which 
it relates. 

3. All these suggestions become compressed in the system of 
Descartes to form the doctrine of the dualism of substances. The 
analytic method was intended to discover the simple elements of 
reality which were self-explanatory and not susceptible of farther 

1 Essay, Human Understanding, II. 8, 23 f. 

2 As tertiary qualities, Locke added further the " powers " for the operation 
of one body upon others. 

8 Desc. CEuv. (C.), X. pp. 181 ff. 

* Essay, II. 4. 

5 Human Nature, chs. 2-5 ; Leviathan, chs. 4 ff. 

CHAP. 2, 31.] Substance and Causality: Hobbes, Descartes. 405 

deduction. Descartes discovered that all that can be experienced is 
a species either of spatial or of conscious Being or existence. Spa- 
tiality, or the quality of filling space, and consciousness (" extension " 
and "thought" according to the usual translation of extensio and cogi- 
tatio) are the ultimate, simple, original attributes of reality. All 
that is is either spatial or conscious. For these two prime predi 
cates are related disjunctively. What is spatial is not conscious ; 
what is conscious is not spatial. The self-certainty of mind is only 
that of the personality as a conscious being. Bodies are real in so 
far as they have in themselves the quantitative determinations of 
spatial existence and change, of extension and motion, All things 
are either bodies or minds ; substances are either spatial or con 
scious : res extensce and res cogitantes. 

The world falls thus into two completely different and completely 
separated realms : that of bodies and that of minds. But in the 
background of this dualism there stands in the thought of Descartes 
the conception of the deity as the ens perfectissimum or perfect sub 
stance. Bodies and minds are finite things; God is infinite Being. 1 
The Meditations leave no doubt as to the fact that Descartes ac 
cepted the conception of God quite in accordance with the inter 
pretation of scholastic Realism. The mind in its own Being, which 
it recognises as a limited and imperfect one, apprehends with the 
same intuitive certainty the Keality of the perfect, infinite Being 
also (cf. above, 30, 5). To the ontological argument is added the 
relation of God and the world in the form brought forward by 
Nicolaus Cusanus, namely, that of the antithesis of the infinite and 
the finite. But the above-mentioned relationship with the Kealism 
of the Middle Ages appears most distinctly in the development of 
metaphysics that succeeded Descartes : for the pantheistic conse 
quences of this presupposition, which had been carefully held back 
in the scholastic period, were now spoken out with complete clear 
ness and sureness. And if we find in the doctrines of Descartes 
successors a strong similarity with those which in the Middle Ages 
could lead but a more or less repressed existence, this is intelligible 
even without the assumption of a direct historical dependence, 
merely by the pragmatic connection and the logical necessity of the 
conclusions. 

4. The common metaphysical name of "substance," applied to 
God in the infinite sense, and to minds and bodies in a finite sense, 
could not permanently cover the problems which were hidden be- 

1 So likewise Malebranche said (Eech. III. 2, 9 a. E.) that God could properly 
be called only Celui qui est, he is Vetre sans restriction, tout etre infini est 
universel. 

406 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

neath it. The conception of substance had come into a state of flux, 
and needed further re-shaping. It had almost lost touch with 
the idea of "thing," the category of inherence; for just the combi 
nation of a multiplicity of determinations into the idea of a unitary 
concrete entity, which is essential to this category, was completely 
lacking in Descartes conception of finite substances, since these 
were held to be characterised by one fundamental quality, spatiality 
or consciousness. All else that was found in substances must there 
fore be regarded as a modification of its fundamental quality, of its 
attribute. All qualities and states of bodies are modes of their spa 
tiality or extension: all qualities and states of mind are modes of 
consciousness (modi cogitandi). 

It is involved in this that all particular substances belonging to 
either class, all bodies on the one hand and all minds on the other, 
are alike in their essence, their constitutive attribute. But from 
this it is only a step farther to the idea in which this likeness is 
thought as metaphysical identity. All bodies are spatial, all minds 
are conscious ; individual bodies are distinguished from one another 
only by different modes of spatiality (form, size, situation, motion) ; 
individual minds are distinguished from one another only by differ 
ent modes of consciousness (ideas, judgments, activities of will). 
Individual bodies are modes of spatiality, individual minds are 
modes of consciousness. In this way the attribute obtains meta 
physical preponderance over individual substances, which now 
appear as its modifications ; the res extensce become modi extensionis / 
the res cogitantes, modi cogitationis. 

Descartes himself drew this conclusion only in the domain of nat 
ural philosophy, to which in general he restricted the carrying out of 
his metaphysical doctrine in its principles. Here, however, the 
general conception of modification took on, of itself, a definite sig 
nificance, and one capable of apprehension by perception or imagina 
tion, viz. that of limitation (determinatio) . Bodies are parts of space, 
limitations of the universal space-filling quality or extension. 1 Hence 
for Descartes the conception of body coincides with that of a limited 
spatial magnitude. A body is, as regards its true essence, a portion 
of space. The elements of the corporeal world are the " corpuscles," 2 

1 Cf. Princ. Phil. II. 9 f., where, at the same time, it appears quite clearly 
that this relation of the individual body to universal space is made equivalent 
to that of individual and species. 

2 For the corpuscular theory, Descartes found many suggestions in Bacon, 
Hobbes, Basso, Sennert, and others. The variety in the development of this 
theory, which rests upon the dialectic between the mathematical and the physi 
cal momenta, has more interest for natural science than for philosophy. An 
excellent exposition is found in Lasswitz, Geschichte der Atomistik. 

CHAP. 2, 31.] Substance and Causality : Malebranche. 407 

i.e. the firm spatial particles which realiter are no longer divisible : 
as mathematical structures, however, they are infinitely divisible ; 
that is, there are no atoms. From these presuppositions follow, 
likewise, for Descartes, the impossibility of empty space, and the 
infinitude of the corporeal world. 

For the mental world the analogous claim was pronounced by 
Malebranche. In connection with the epistemological motives (of. 
below, No. 8) which made it seem to him that no knowledge of 
things is possible except in God, he came 1 to the conception of the 
raison universelle, which, as being alike in all individual minds, can 
not belong to the modes of the finite mind, but is rather that of 
which finite minds are themselves modifications, and can, just on 
this account, be none other than an attribute of God. God is in so 
far the " place of minds " or spirits, just as space is the place of 
bodies. Here, also, as the expression proves, the relation which 
obtains in conceptions between the universal and the particular 
underlies the thought, and following the analogy of the Cartesian 
conception of space and body this relation is thought in percep 
tional or picturate terms as participation. 2 All human insight is a 
participation in the infinite Reason, all ideas of finite things are but 
determinations of the idea of God, all desires directed toward the 
particular object are but participations in that love toward God as 
the ground of its essence and life, which necessarily dwells in the 
finite mind. To be sure, Malebranche came into a very critical 
situation by thus making the finite mind disappear completely in 
the universal divine mind, as its modification. For how, in accord 
ance with this, should he explain the self-subsistence and self- 
activity which it seemed were quite notoriously present in those 
inclinations and volitions of man which opposed God ? In this 
difficulty nothing availed but the word " freedom," in using which 
Malebranche was indeed obliged to confess that freedom was an 
impenetrable mystery. 3 

5. Iii this course of thought pursued by Malebranche appears 
clearly the inevitable logical consistency with which the attributes, 
which were regarded by Descartes as the common essence belonging 
to either of the two classes of finite substances, could ultimately be 
thought only as the attributes of the infinite substance or deity. But 
precisely in this point consists the fundamental motive of Spi- 
nozism, which developed along this line out of Cartesianism directly 
and at the outset, and at the same time developed to the farthest 

1 Rech. de la Ver. III. 2, 6; Entret. I. 10. 

2 Recall the Platonic /*^0e ! 8 Cf. above, p. 394, note 2. 

408 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

consequence. Spinozism likewise holds as firmly to the qualitative 
as to the causal dualism of spatiality and consciousness. The spa 
tial and the spiritual worlds are entirely heterogeneous and abso 
lutely independent of each other. But the whole endless series of 
bodies, with their divisions, forms, and motions, are only the modes 
of extension, just as the endless series of minds with their ideas 
and volitions are only the modes of consciousness. Hence these 
finite " things " are no longer entitled to the name of " substance." 
That only can be called substance, whose attributes are extension 
and consciousness themselves, viz. the infinite existence or Being, 
the deity. But its essence, in turn, cannot be exhausted in these 
two attributes which are accessible to human experience ; the ens 
realissimum involves within itself the actuality of the infinite num 
ber of all possible attributes. 

The ultimate ground of this position also lies in the scholastic- 
realistic conception of the most real being. Spinoza s definition of 
substance or the deity, as the essence (essentia) which involves its 
own existence, is only the condensed expression of the ontological 
proof for the existence of God: the "ase itas" is preserved in the 
term " causa sui " / substance as that " quod in se est et per se con- 
cipitur" is again but another transcription of the same thought. 
Proceeding from these definitions, the proof for the oneness and 
infinitude of substance 1 followed as a matter of course. 

That, however, we have here to do with an entirely realistic 
course of thought becomes clearly manifest from Spinoza s doctrine 
of the nature of substance itself and of its relation to the attributes. 
For the Spinozistic system says absolutely nothing of substance or 
of the deity farther than the formal determinations contained in the 
conception of the ens realissimum, of absolute Being. Every predi 
cate expressing any content is, on the contrary, expressly denied : 
and in particular Spinoza is especially careful to refuse 2 to the divine 
essence the modifications of consciousness, such as intellectual cog 
nition [_intellectus, ErJcenntniss ] and will. Just as little of course 
does he recognise the modifications of extension as being predicates 
of the divine essence, though he had no polemical inducement to 
express this especially. God himself is therefore neither mind 
nor body ; of him it can only be said, that he is. It is evident that 
the old principle of negative theology is here present with a changed 
form of expression. Knowledge of all finite things and states leads 
to two highest universal conceptions : space-filling quality or exten 
sion, and consciousness. To both of these a higher metaphysical 

1 Eth. I. Props. 1-14. 2 Ib . L 3 L 

CHAP. 2, 31.] Substance and Causality : Spinoza. 409 

dignity is ascribed than to finite things ; they are the attributes, 
and the things are their modes. But if the process of abstraction 
now rises from these two determinations, the last which contain any 
content, to the most general, to the ens generalissimum, then all 
definite content falls away from the conception of this being, and 
only the empty Form of substance is left. For Spinoza, also, the 
deity is all and thus nothing. His doctrine of God lies quite 
along the path of Mysticism. 1 

But if God is thus the general essence of finite things, he does 
not exist otherwise than in them and with them. This applies first 
of all to the attributes. God is not distinct from them, and they are 
not distinct from him, just as the dimensions of space are not dis 
tinct from space itself. Hence Spinoza can say also that God con 
sists of countless attributes, or Deus SIVE omnia ejus attributa. 2 And 
the same relation is afterwards repeated between the attributes and 
the modes. Every attribute, because it expresses the infinite essence 
of God in a definite manner, is again infinite in its own way ; but 
it does not exist otherwise than with and in its countless modifica 
tions. God then exists only in things as their universal essence, 
and they only in him as the modes of his reality. In this sense 
Spinoza adopts from Nicolaus Cusanus and Giordano Bruno the 
expressions natura naturans and natura naturata. God is Nature : 
as the universal world-essence, he is the natura naturans; as sum- 
total of the individual things in which this essence exists modified, 
he is the natura naturata. If in this connection the natura naturans 
is called occasionally also the efficient cause of things, this creative 
force must not be thought as something distinct from its workings ; 
this cause exists nowhere but in its workings. This is Spinoza s 
complete and unreserved pantheism. 

Finally this relation is repeated yet again in the distinction which 
Spinoza establishes between the infinite and the finite modes. 3 If 
each of the countless finite things is a mode of God, the infinite 
connection or coherence which exists between them must also be 
regarded as a mode, and, indeed, as an infinite mode. Spinoza affirms 
three of these. 4 The deity as the universal world-thing appears in 
individual things, which are finite modes ; to them corresponds as 

1 To this corresponds also his theory of cognition with its three stages, 
which sets "intuition, 1 as the immediate apprehension of the eternal logical 
resulting of all things from God, as knowledge sub specie ceternitatis, above 
perception and the activity of the intellect. 

2 Which, however, is in nowise to be interpreted as if the attributes were 
self-subsistent prime realities and " CJod " only the collective name for them 
(as K. Thomas supposed, Sp. als Metaphysiker, Konigsberg, 1840). Such a 
crassly nominalistic cap-stone would press the whole system out of joint. 

8 Eth. I. 23 and 30 ff. * Ep. 64 (Op. 11. 219). 

410 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

infinite mode the universe. In the attribute of extension the finite 
modes are the particular space-forms ; the infinite mode is infinite 
space, or matter J itself in its motion and rest. For the attribute of 
consciousness, the intellectus infinitus 2 stands beside the particular 
functions of ideation and will. Here Spinoza reminds us imme 
diately of the realistic pantheism of David of Dinant (of. 27, 1). 
His metaphysics is the last word of mediaeval Kealism. 3 

6. With these motives relating to the problem of the qualitative 
difference of substances modern philosophy struggled out of its 
dualistic presuppositions to a monistic adjustment ; but at the 
same time, still more powerful motives became mingled in the 
process, motives which grew out of the real and causal separation 
of the spatial and the conscious worlds. At first, indeed, it was the 
principles of mechanics themselves which demanded the attempt to 
isolate completely the course of events in each of the two spheres 
of finite substances. 

This succeeded in the corporeal world in a relatively simple 
manner. In this domain, the idea of cause had acquired a completely 
new significance through Galileo. According to the scholastic con 
ception (which even in Descartes Meditations, in a decisive passage, 
was still presented with axiomatic validity) causes were substances 
or things, while effects, on the other hand, were either their activities 
or were other substances and things which were held to come about 
only by such activities : this was the Platonic-Aristotelian concep 
tion of the alria. Galileo, on the contrary, went back to the idea of 
the older Greek thinkers (of. 5), who applied the causal relation 
only to the states that meant now to the motions of substances 
not to the Being of the substances themselves. Causes are motions, 
and effects are motions. The relation of impact and counter-impact, 
of the passing over of motion from one corpuscle to another, 4 is the 
original fundamental form of the causal relation, the form which is 
clear to perception or imagination (anscliaulich), is intelligible in 

1 This equivalence holds good with Spinoza as well as with Descartes. 

2 This intellectns infinitns appears again in the ethical part of the Spinozistie 
system as amor intellectualis quo dens se ipsum amat. In both cases Male- 
branche s " raison universMe " amounts to the same thing. 

3 Geulincx also, in a manner similar to that of Spinoza and Malebranche, 
regards finite bodies and minds as only "limitations," " prcecisiones " of the 
universal infinite body and the divine mind. Cf. Met. p. 56. If we think away 
limitation from ourselves, he says, ib. 237 ff., there is left God. 

4 Hence for Descartes the mechanical principle excluded possibility of action 
at a distance, just as it excluded empty space. This forced him to the artificial 
hypotheses of the vortex theory, by which he aimed to give a physical ground for 
the Copernican view of the world (popular exposition by Fontenelle, Entretiens 
sur la Pluralite des Mondes, 1686). The grounds on which this doctrine was 
displaced by the Newtonian theory of gravitation are no longer philosophical, 
but purely physical in their nature. 

CHAP. 2, 31.] /Substance and Causality : Galileo, Descartes. 411 

itself, and explains all others. And the question as to the nature 
of this fundamental relation was answered by the principle of math 
ematical equality, which, in turn, passed over into that of metaphysi- 
cal identity. So much motion in the cause, so much in the effect 
also. Descartes formulated this as the law of the conservation of 
motion in Nature. The sum of motion in Nature remains always 
the same : what a body loses in motion it gives to another. As 
regards the amount of motion, there is in Nature nothing new, 
especially no impulse from the spiritual world. 1 Even for the king 
dom of organisms this principle was carried through, at least as a 
postulate, though as yet with very weak grounds. Animals, also, 
are machines whose motions are evoked and determined by the 
mechanism of the nervous system. Descartes thought of this 
mechanism more precisely (and with him Hobbes and Spinoza) as 
a motion of finest (gaseous) substances, the so-called spiritus ani- 
males, 2 and sought the point of transition from the sensory to the 
motor nervous system in man, in a part of the brain which has no 
correlative, i.e. is a single and not a paired organ, the pineal gland or 
conarium. 

The other part of the task proved much more difficult : namely, 
that of understanding the mental life without any relation to the 
corporeal world. Easy and clear to perception as was the action of 
one body upon another, it did not yield a mode of representing an 
incorporeal connection between different minds, that could be used 
scientifically. Spinoza, for example, expressed the general meta 
physical postulate very energetically, when he promised in entering 
upon the third book of the Ethics, that he would treat the actions 
and desires of man as if lines, surfaces, and bodies were the subject 
of discussion ; for the important thing is neither to asperse them nor 
to deride them, but to understand them. But the solution of this 
problem was limited in advance to investigating the causal connec 
tion between the activities of consciousness in the individual mind : 
dualism demanded a psychology free from all physiological constitu 
ents. It is all the more characteristic of the predominance of the 
spirit of natural science in the seventeenth century, that it attained 
this psychology demanded by the theory, only in the most limited 
degree. And even the beginnings toward this are ruled by the 
endeavour to apply the methodical principle of mechanics, which 

1 Hence Hobbes excluded from physics the Aristotelian and Thomistic concep 
tion of the unmoved mover, while Descartes, who in this point also proceeded 
more metaphysically, made motion to have been communicated to matter at the 
beginning by God. 

2 An inheritance from the physiological psychology of the Greeks, in particu 
lar from that of the Peripatetics. 

412 The Renaissance : Natural /Science Period. [PART IV. 

was celebrating its triumphs in the theory of outer experience, to 
the comprehension of the inner world also. 

For just as the investigation of Nature from Galileo to Newton 
directed its energies toward finding out the simple fundamental 
form of corporeal motion, to which all complex structures of outer 
experience could be reduced, so Descartes desired to establish the 
fundamental forms of psychical motion, out of which the multiplic 
ity of inner experiences would become explicable. In the theoreti 
cal domain this seemed attained by establishing the immediately 
evident truths (the innate ideas) ; in the practical field there grew 
out of this demand the new problem of a statics and a mechanics of 
the movements of feeling (Gemiithsbewegungen) . In this spirit Des 
cartes and Spinoza produced their natural history of the emotions 
(Affecte) and passions, 1 the latter author by combining the thoughts 
of the former with those of Hobbes. Thus Descartes derives the 
whole host of particular passions, as species and sub-species, from 
the six fundamental forms of wonder (admiratio), love, and hate, 
desire (desir), pleasure and pain [or joy and sadness, Lust und 
Unlusf} (Icetitia Iristitia) ; thus Spinoza develops his system of 
the emotions out of desire, pleasure, and pain (appetitus, Icetitia, 
tristitia) by pointing out the ideational processes in connection 
with which these emotions have become transferred from their 
original object, the self-preservation of the individual, to other 
ideas." 

A peculiar side-attitude is taken in this regard by the two English 
thinkers. For Bacon and Hobbes, a mechanical conception of the 
mental is the more natural in proportion as they endeavour to 
draw the mental more closely into the circle of the physical. Both, 
that is, regard the empirical psychical life, and therefore, also, the 
sphere of consciousness which in Descartes system was to have 
nothing to do with the corporeal world, as something which essen 
tially belongs thereto ; on the other hand, there is set over against 
the whole world of perception rather a something spiritual [spirit 
ual in the religious sense, Geiatliche8~\ than a something mental or 
intellectual [Geistiges"]. Ideas and volitions as they are known by 
experience are held to be at bottom activities of the body also, and 
if besides these we speak yet of an immortal soul (spiraculum) , of 
a spiritual world and of the divine mind or spirit, this should fall 
to the province of theology. But according to this view the natural 
science theory cannot be characterised much otherwise than as an 

1 Descartes, Les Passions de VAme; Spinoza, Eth. III., and Tract. Brev. II. 
6 ft. Cf . below, No. 7. 

CHAP. 2, 31.] Substance and Causality: Descartes, Hobbes. 413 

anthropological materialism; for it aims to understand tlie entire 
series of empirical psychical activities as a mechanical process con 
nected with the bodily functions. This problem was propounded by 
Bacon ; Hobbes attempted to solve it, and in doing so became the 
father of the so-called associational psychology. With the same 
outspoken sensualism as Campanella, of whose deductions his own 
frequently remind us, especially with regard to the mechanism of 
ideas, he seeks to show that sense-impressions give the only ele 
ments of consciousness, and that by their combination and trans 
formation memory and thought also come about. In the practical 
domain the impulse toward self-preservation and the feelings of 
pleasure and pain which arise in connection with impressions are 
then characterised analogously as the elements out of which all 
other feelings and activities of will arise. Hobbes, too, projected 
thus a "natural history" of the emotions and passions, and this 
was not without influence upon that of Spinoza, whose theory of 
the emotions is always looking towards the other attribute [i.e. 
extension]. 

From these presuppositions of method the denial of the freedom 
of the will in the sense of indeterminism followed with inexorable 
consistency for Hobbes and for Spinoza. Both attempted and 
Spinoza did it in the baldest form that can be conceived to exhibit 
the strict necessity which prevails even in the course of the process 
of motivation : they are types of determinism. For Spinoza, there 
fore, there is no freedom in the psychological sense. Freedom can 
mean only, on the one hand, metaphysically, the absolute Being of 
the deity determined by nothing but itself, and, on the other hand, 
ethically, the ideal of the overcoming of the passions through 
reason. 

7. In this it became already evident that in the presence of the 
facts of psychology, that absolute separation between the corporeal 
and the mental world which metaphysics demanded was not to be 
maintained. But Descartes himself met quite the same experience. 
The nature of the mind itself might, indeed, explain the clear and 
distinct ideas and the forms of the rational will which resulted 
from these, but it could not explain the obscure and confused ideas, 
and the emotions and passions connected with them. These present 
themselves rather as a disturbance of the mind 1 (perturbationes 
aiiimi), and since this perturbation which gives occasion for the 

1 This is the interest, not only ethical, but also theoretical, which induced Des 
cartes to treat states psychologically so different as emotions and passions, from 
the same point of view and in one line. Cf. for the following Passions de I Ame, 
L, and Meds. V. and VI. 

414 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

abuse of freedom (cf. above, 30, 5) cannot be due to God, its 
origin must be sought ultimately in an influence exercised by the 
body. In the disturbances of the feeling there is, therefore, for 
Descartes an indubitable fact, which cannot be explained from the 
fundamental metaphysical principles of his system. Here, there 
fore, the philosopher sees himself forced to recognise an exceptional 
relation, and he adjusts this for himself in a way that had been 
foreshadowed by the anthropology of the Victorines (cf. 24, 2). 
The nature (nature,) of man, he teaches, consists in the inner union 
of two heterogeneous substances, a mind and a body, and this marvel 
lous (i.e. metaphysically incomprehensible) union has been so 
arranged by God s will that in this single case the conscious and 
the spatial substances act upon each other. Animals remain, for 
Descartes, bodies ; their " sensations " are only nervous movements, 
out of which stimulations of the motor system arise in accordance 
with the reflex mechanism. In the human body, however, the 
mental substance is present at the same time, and in consequence 
of this co-existence the storm of the animal spirits in the pineal 
gland excites a disturbance in the mental substance also, which 
manifests itself in the latter as an unclear and indistinct idea, i.e. 
as sense-perception, as emotion, or as passion. 1 

With the disciples, the systematic impulse was greater than with 
the master. They found in this influxus physicus between mind 
and body the vulnerable point in the Cartesian philosophy, and ex 
erted themselves to set aside the exception which the philosopher 
had been obliged to assert in the anthropological facts. This, how 
ever, did not go on without effecting a new, and in a certain sense 
regressive, alteration in the conception of causality, in that the 
metaphysical moment once more gained preponderance over the me 
chanical. The immanent causal processes of the spatial and of the 
conscious worlds were regarded as intelligible in themselves ; but 
the transcendent causal process from one of these worlds into the 
other formed a problem. No difficulty was found in the idea that 
one motion transformed itself into another or that one function of 

1 On this Descartes then builds his Ethics. In such perturbations the mind 
occupies a passive attitude, and it is its task to free itself from these in clear 
and distinct knowledge. Spinoza carried out this intellectualistic morals in an 
extremely grand and impressive manner (Eth. IV. and V.). The antithesis of an 
active and passive attitude of the finite mind is indeed gained from the stand 
point of his metaphysics only artificially (Eth. III., Def. 2) : but he carried 
through with compelling consistency the thought, that the overcoming of the 
passions follows from a knowledge of them, from the insight into the necessary 
divine system of all things ; he taught that human nature must perfect itself in 
the blessedness of the active emotions which consist only in the activity of the 
pure impulse toward knowledge (Eth. V. 15 ff.), and thus set up an ideal of 
life which reaches the height of the Greek Btupla,. 

CHAP. 2, 31.] Substance and Causality : Geulincx. 415 

consciousness for example, a thought should pass over into an 
other : but it seemed impossible to understand how sensation should 
come out of motion, or motion out of will. Physical and logical caus 
ality seemed to offer no difficulty ; so much the greater was that 
presented by psycho-physical causality. In the case of the latter the 
consciousness dawned that the relation of equality or identity 
between cause and effect, by means of which mechanical and logi 
cal dependence seemed intelligible, does not exist. Hence an 
inquiry must here be made for the principle by which the two ele 
ments of the causal relation, cause and effect, which do not in them 
selves belong together, are connected with each other. 1 Where this 
principle was to be sought could not be a matter of doubt for the 
disciples of Descartes : God, who produced the union of the two 
substances in man s nature, has also so arranged them that the 
functions of the one substance are followed by the corresponding 
functions of the other. But on this account these functions in 
their causal relation to one another are not properly, and in their 
own nature, efficient causes, but only occasions in connection with 
which the consequences determined by divine contrivance appear in 
the other substance, not causce efficientes, but causce occasionales. 
The true " cause " for the causal connection between stimuli and 
sensations, and between purposes and bodily movements, is God. 

Such considerations are multiplied in the whole development of 
the Cartesian school. Clauberg brings them into use for the theory 
of perceptions, Cordemoy for that of purposive motion ; their full 
development is attained in the " Ethics " of Geulincx. Yet in the 
latter author doubt is not entirely excluded as to whether God s 
causality in this connection is regarded as a special intervention in 
each individual case, or as a general and permanent arrangement. 
In some passages, indeed, the former is the case, 2 but the spirit of 
the doctrine, taken as a whole, doubtless involves the latter. Geu 
lincx expresses himself most clearly in the illustration of the clocks : 3 
as two clocks which have been made alike by the same artificer 
continue to move in perfect harmony, " absque ulla causalitate qua 
alterum hoc in altero causat, sed propter meram dependentiam, qua 
utrumque ab eadem arte et simili industria constitutum est," so the 

1 That the fundamental difficulty in all causal relations was in this actually 
stumbled upon, first became clear at a later time through Hume. Cf. 34. 

2 For example, in the analogy of the child in the cradle, Eth. 123. It seems, 
besides, that the first edition of the Ethics (1605), in fact, introduced more the 
deus ex, machina, while the annotations added in the second edition (1675) pre 
sent throughout the profounder view. 

* Eth., p. 124, note 19. 

416 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

corresponding functions of mind and body follow each other in 
accordance with the world-order once determined by God. 1 

8. This anthropological rationale of Occasionalism fits from the 
beginning into a more general metaphysical course of thought. The 
Cartesian system already contained the premises for the inference 
that in the case of all that takes place in finite substances, the effi 
cient principle derives, not from these substances themselves, but from 
the deity. Thinking in minds takes place by means of the inborn 
ideas which God has given them; to the corporeal world he has 
communicated a quantum of motion which changes only in its dis 
tribution among the individual corpuscles, but in the case of the 
individual body it is, so to speak, only temporarily concealed. 
Minds can create new ideas as little as bodies can create new mo 
tion ; the sole cause is God. 

The Cartesians had all the more occasion to emphasise the sole 
causality of God, as their doctrine encountered violent contradiction 
in the orthodoxy of both Confessions, and became involved in the 
theological controversies of the time. Friend and foe had quickly 
recognised the relationship of Cartesianism with the doctrine of 
Augustine ; 2 and while on this account the Jansenists and the 
Fathers of the Oratory, who lived in the Augustinian-Scotist atmos 
phere, were friendly to the new philosophy, the orthodox Peripa 
tetics, and especially the Jesuits, made war upon it all the more 
violently. Thus the old opposition between Augustianism and Thorn- 
ism came out in the controversy over Cartesianism. The conse 
quence was that the Cartesians brought into the foreground as far 
as possible those elements in which their doctrine was allied to the 
Augustinian. So Louis de la Forge 3 attempted to prove the com 
plete identity of Cartesianism with the doctrine of the Church 
Father, and emphasised especially the fact that according to both 
thinkers the sole ground of all that takes place in bodies as well as 
minds is God. Just this was later designated by Malebranche 4 as 
the sure mark of a Christian philosophy, while the most dangerous 

1 If, therefore, Leibniz, when he later claimed for his "pre-established har 
mony " (J?c/airc. 2 and 3) this same analogy in frequent use at that time, charac 
terised the Cartesian conception by an immediate dependence of the two clocks 
upon one another, and the Occasionalistic by a constantly renewed regulation of 
the clocks on the part of the clock-maker, this was applicable at most to some 
passages in the first edition of the Ethics of Geulincx. 

2 Kinship and opposition apply also to still other points. Descartes and the 
priests of the Oratory (Gibieuf, Malebranche) are at one against Thomism in 
the Augustinian and Scotist doctrine of the boundless freedom of the deity ; 
they maintain again that the good is good because God so willed it, not per se 
(cf. 26, 2, 3), etc. 

3 Trait, de I Espr. Hum., Pref. 4 Recherche, VI. 2, 3. 

CHAP. 2, 31.] Substance and Causality : Occasionalism. 417 

error of heathen philosophy consists in the assumption of metaphys 
ical self-subsistence and capacity for spontaneous action on the part 
of finite things. 

With Geulincx, likewise, all finite things are deprived of the 
causal moment or element of substantiality. In this he proceeds 
from the principle that one can himself do that only of which he 
knows how it is done. From this it follows in the anthropological 
field, that the mind cannot be the cause of the bodily movements 
no one knows how he sets to work even but to raise his arm ; it 
follows farther in the cosmological field, that bodies which have no 
ideas whatever cannot operate at all, and finally, for the theory of 
knowledge, that the cause of perceptions is to be sought not in the 
finite mind for this does not know how it comes to perceive 
nor in bodies; therefore it is to be sought only in God. He pro 
duces in us a world of ideas which in its wealth of qualities is much 
richer and more beautiful than the actual corporeal world itself. 2 

The epistemological motif finds finally with Malebranche 9 a still 
more profound apprehension. Cartesian dualism makes a direct 
knowledge of the body by mind absolutely impossible : such a knowl 
edge is excluded not only because no iiijluxus physicus is possible 
between the two, but also because, in view of the total heterogeneity 
of the two substances, it is not possible to see how even an idea of 
the one is thinkable in the other. In this respect, also, mediation 
is possible only through the deity, and Malebranche takes refuge in 
the Neo-Platonic world of Ideas in God. Man does not know bodies ; 
he knows their Ideas in God. This intelligible corporeal world in God 
is, on the one hand, the archetype of the actual corporeal world cre 
ated by God, and on the other hand, the archetype of those ideas 
which God has communicated to us of this actual corporeal world. 
Our knowledge is like the actual bodies, just as two magnitudes 
which are equal to a third are equal also to each other. In this 
sense Malebranche understood that philosophy teaches that we 
behold all things in God. 

9. Quite different was the solution which Spinoza gave to the 
Occasionalistic problems. The explanation of any mode of the one 
attribute by a mode of the other was excluded by the conception of 

1 Kth.,p. 113; Met., p. 26. 

2 The remnant of self-activity in finite beings that remains in the system of 
Geulincx consists in the immanent mental activity of man. Cf. Eth. 121 f. 
The " autology," or inspectio sni, is, therefore, not only the epistemological 
starting-point of the system, but .also its ethical conclusion. Man has nothing 
to do in the outer world. Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis. The highest virtue is 
a modest contentment, submission to God s will humility, dc.tfpo tio sui. 

3 Rech. III. 2. 

418 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

the attribute as he had defined it (see above, No. 5) ; it held of the 
attribute as of substance, 1 in se est et per se concipitur. Accordingly 
there could be no question of the dependence of the spatial upon 
consciousness, or vice versa; the appearance of such a dependence 
which presents itself in the anthropological facts needed, therefore, 
another explanation, and as a matter of course this was to be sought 
by the aid of his conception of God. If, however, the doctrine that 
God is the sole cause of all that takes place is for this reason found 
also with Spinoza, his agreement with the Occasionalists exists only 
in the motive and the word, but not in the meaning or spirit of the 
doctrine. For according to Geulincx and Malebranche, God is the 
creator ; according to Spinoza, he is the universal essence or nature 
of things ; according to the former, God creates the world by his 
will ; according to the latter, the world follows necessarily from the 
nature of God [or is the necessary consequence of the nature of God]. 
In spite of the likeness in the word causa, therefore, the causal rela 
tion is reallv thought here in a sense entirely different from that 
which it has there. With Spinoza it means not, "God creates the 
world," but, "he is the world." 

Spinoza always expresses his conception of real dependence, of 
causality, by the word " follow " (sequi, consequi) and by the addi 
tion, "as from the definition of a triangle the equality of the sum 
of its angles to two right angles follows." The dependence of the 
world upon God is, therefore, thought as a mathematical consequence. 2 
This conception of the causal relation has thus completely stripped 
off the empirical mark of "producing " or " creating " which played 
so important a part with the Occasionalists, and replaces the percep 
tional idea of active operation with the logico-mathematical relation 
of ground and consequent [or reason and consequent; Grund und 
Folge~\. Spinozism is a consistent identification of the relation of 
cause and effect with that of ground and consequent. The causality 
of the deity is, therefore, not in time, but is eternal, that is, timeless ; 
and true knowledge is a consideration of things sub quadam ceterni- 
tatis specie. This conception of the relation of dependence resulted 
of itself from the conception of the deity as the universal essence or 
nature : from this nature all its modifications follow timelessly, just 
as all propositions of geometry follow from the nature of space. 
The geometrical method knows no other causality than that of the 
"eternal consequence"; for rationalism, only that form of depend 
ence which is peculiar to thought itself, namely, the logical proced- 

1 Eth. I., Prop. 10. 

2 Cf. Schopenhauer, Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden 
Grundf, ch. 6. [Fourfold Hoot, etc., Bohn Lib.] 

CHAP. 2, . 51 .] Substance and Causality: Spinoza. 419 

ure of the consequent from its antecedent reason, passes as in itself 
intelligible, and on this account as the schema also for events or 
cosmic processes : l real dependence also should be conceived neither 
mechanically nor teleologically, but only logico-mathematically. 

But now, as in geometry, all follows indeed from the nature of 
space, and yet each particular relation is fixed by other particular 
determinations, so, too, in the Spinozistic metaphysics the Acces 
sary procedure of things forth from God consists in the determina 
tion of every individual finite entity by other finite things. The 
sum of finite things and the modes of each attribute form a chain 
of strict determination, a chain without beginning and without end. 
The necessity of the divine nature rules in all ; but no mode is nearer 
to the deity, or farther from the deity, than is any other. In this 
the thought of Nicolaus Cusanus of the incommensurability of the 
finite with the infinite asserts itself no series of stages of emana 
tion leads from God down to the world : everything finite is deter 
mined again by the finite, but in all God is the sole ground of their 
essence or nature. 

If this is the case, the unity of essence must appear also in the 
relation of the attributes, however strictly these may be separated 
qualitatively and causally. It is still the same divine essence which 
exists here in the form of extension, and there in the form of con 
sciousness. The two attributes are then necessarily so related to 
each other that to every mode of the one a definite mode of the 
other corresponds. This correspondence or parallelism of the attri 
butes solves the enigma of the connection of the two worlds : ideas 
are determined only by ideas, and motions only by motions ; but it 
is the like cosmic content of the divine essence which forms the con 
nection of the one class, and also that of the other ; the same con 
tent is in the attribute of consciousness as in the attribute of 
extension. This relation is presented by Spinoza in accordance 
with the scholastic conceptions of the esse in intellectu and the esse 
in re. The same that exists in the attribute of consciousness as 
object (objective), as the content of our ideas, exists in the attribute 
of extension as something actual, independent of any idea or mental 
representation (formaliter) . 2 

1 Spinoza s pantheism has therefore the closest resemblance to the scholastic 
mystical Realism of Scotus Erigena (cf. 23, 1), only that in the latter s 
system it is still more the case that the logical relation of the general to the 
particular forms the only schema ; from this resulted, in his case, the emanistic 
character which is lacking in Spinoza. 

2 But neither of these two modes of existence is more original than the other, 
or forms a prototype for the other: both express equally the nature of God 
(exprimere ) . Hence an idealistic interpretation of Spinoza is as incorrect as 
a materialistic, although both might be developed out of his system. 

420 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

Spinoza s conception, then, is this: every finite thing as a mode 
of the divine essence, e.g. man, exists in like measure in both attri 
butes, as mind and as body : and each of its particular functions 
belongs also in like measure to both attributes, as idea and as 
motion. As idea, it is determined by the connection of ideas, as 
motion by that of motions ; but in both, the content is the same by 
virtue of the correspondence of the attributes. The human mind is 
the idea (Idee) of the human body, both as a whole and in detail. 1 

10. The conclusion of this movement of thought which had 
passed through so many divar in cations was reached in the meta 
physical system of Leibniz, a system which is equalled by none 
in the entire history of philosophy in all-sidedness of motives and 
in power of adjustment and combination. It owes this importance 
not only to the extensive learning and the harmonising mind of its 
author, but especially to the circumstance that he was at home in 
the ideas of ancient and mediaeval philosophy with as deep and fine 
an understanding of their significance as he had for the conceptions 
formed by the modern study of Nature. 2 Only the inventor of the 
differential calculus, who had as much understanding for Plato and 
Aristotle as for Descartes and Spinoza, who knew and appreciated 
Thomas and Duns Scotus as well as Bacon and Hobbes, only he 
could become the creator of the " pre-established harmony." 

The reconciliation of the mechanical and the ideological views of the 
world, and with this the uniting of the scientific and the religious 
interests of his time, was the leading motive in the thought of Leib 
niz. He wished to see the mechanical explanation of Nature, the 
formulation of which in its scientific conceptions he himself essen 
tially furthered, carried through to its full extent, and at the same 
time he cast about for thoughts by the aid of which the purposeful 
living character of the universe might nevertheless remain compre 
hensible. The attempt must therefore be made an attempt for 
which there were already intimations in the doctrine of Descartes 
to see whether the whole mechanical course of events could not be 
ultimately traced back to efficient causes, whose purposeful nature 
should afford an import and meaning to their working taken as a 
whole. The whole philosophical development of Leibniz has the 
aim to substitute for the corpuscles, " entelechies," and to win back 
for the indifferent God of the geometrical method the rights of the 
Platonic atria. The ultimate goal of his philosophy is to under- 

1 The difficulties which arose in this connection from self-consciousness, and 
those also from the postulate of the countless attributes, Spinoza did not solve : 
cf. the correspondence with Tschirnhausen, Op. II. 219 f. 

8 Cf. Syst. Nouv. 10. 

CHAP. 2, 31.] Substance and Causality : Leibniz. 421 

stand the mechanism of the cosmic processes as the means and phe 
nomenal form by which the living content or import of the world 
realises itself. For this reason he could no longer think "cause " as 
only "Being," could no longer think God merely as ens perfectissi- 
mum, could no longer think " substance " as characterised merely by 
an attribute of unchangeable existence, and could no longer think its 
states merely as modifications, determinations, or specifications of 
such a fundamental quality : cosmic processes or change became 
again for him active working (Wirken) ; substances took on the 
meaning of forces, 1 and the philosophical conception of God also 
had, for its essential characteristic, creative force. This was Leib 
niz fundamental thought, that this creative force evinces itself in 
the mechanical system of motions. 

Leibniz attained this dynamical standpoint first in his theory of 
motion, and in a way which of itself required that the same stand 
point should be carried over into metaphysics. 2 The mechanical 
problem of inertia and the process begun by Galileo of resolving 
motion into infinitely small impulses, which together formed the 
starting-point for the authoritative investigations in natural science 
by Huyghens and Newton, led Leibniz to the principle of the infini 
tesimal calculus, to his conception of the " vis viva, " and es 
pecially, to the insight that the essential nature of bodies, in which 
the ground of motion is to be sought, consists not in extension, nor 
yet in their mass (impenetrability), but in their capacity to do 
work, in force. But if substance is force, it is super-spatial and im 
material. On this account Leibniz finds himself compelled to think 
even corporeal substance as immaterial force. Bodies are, in their 
essential nature, force; their spatial form, their property of filling 
space and their motion are effects of this force. The substance of 
bodies is metaphysical. 3 In connection with Leibniz doctrine of 
knowledge this purports that rational, clear, and distinct cognition 
apprehends bodies as force, while sensuous, obscure, and confused 
cognition apprehends them as spatial structures. Hence, for Leib 
niz, space is neither identical with bodies (as in Descartes), nor the 
presupposition for them (as with Newton), but a force-product of 
substances, a phcenomenon bene fundatum, an order of co-existence, 

1 La substance est un etre capable d action. Princ. de la Nat. et de la Grace, 
I. Cf. Syst. Nouv. 2 f., "Force primitive." 

2 Siist. Nouv. 3. 

8 With this the co-ordination of the two attributes, extensio and cogitatio, was 
again abolished ; the world of consciousness is the truly actual, the world of 
extension is phenomenon. Leibniz sets the intelligible world of substances over 
against the phenomena of the senses or material world in a completely Platonic 
fashion (Nouv. Ess. IV. 3). Cf. 33 f. 

422 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

not an absolute reality, but an ens mentale. 1 And the same holds 
true, mutatis mutandis, of time. From this it follows further, that 
the laws of mechanics which refer to these spatial manifestations 
of bodies are not rational, not " geometrical " truths, but truths 
which relate to matters of fact, and are contingent. They could be 
thought otherwise \_i.e. the opposite is not inconceivable]. Their 
ground is not logical necessity, but purposiveness or appropriate 
ness. They are lois de convenance; and have their roots in the choix 
de la sagesse. 2 God chose them because the purpose of the world 
would be best fulfilled in the form determined by them. If bodies 
are machines, they are such in the sense that machines are purpos- 
ively constructed works. 3 

11. Thus again in Leibniz, but in a maturer form than in Neo- 
Platonism, life becomes the principle for explaining Nature ; his 
doctrine is vitalism. But life is variety, and at the same time unity. 
The mechanical theory led Leibniz to the conception of infinitely 
many individual forces, metaphysical points, 4 as likewise to the 
idea of their continuous connection. He had originally leaned 
toward the atomic theory of Democritus and the nominalistic meta 
physics ; the Occasionalist movement, and above all, the system of 
Spinoza, made him familiar with the thought of the All-unity ; and 
he found the solution, as Nicolaus Cusanus and Giordano Bruno had 
found it before, in the principle of the identity of the part with the 
whole. Each force is the world-force, the cosmic force, but in a 
peculiar phase ; every substance is the world-substance, but in par 
ticular form. Hence Leibniz gives to the conception of substance 
just this meaning : it is unity in plurality. 5 This means that every 
substance in every state " represents " the multitude of other sub 
stances, and to the nature of " representing " belongs always the 
unifying of a manifold. 6 

With these thoughts are united, in the system of Leibniz, the 

1 Cf. chiefly the correspondence with des Bosses. 

2 Princ. 11. 3 Ib 3. 

4 Syst. Nouv. 11. 6 Monad. 13-16. 

6 Leibniz is here served a very good turn (cf. op. cit.} by the ambiguity in 
the word " representation " (which applies also to the German " vorstdlen " [and 
to the English "representation "]), in accordance with which the word means, 
on the one hand, to supply the place of or serve as a symbol of, and on the 
other hand, the function of consciousness. That every substance "repre 
sents" the rest means, therefore, on the one hand, that all is contained in all 
(Leibniz cites the ancient ffv^-rrvoia -jrdvra. and also the omnia ubique of the 
Renaissance), and on the other hand, that each substance "perceives" all the 
rest. The deeper sense and justification of this ambiguity lies in the fact that 
we cannot form any clear and distinct idea whatever of the unifying of a 
manifold, except after the pattern of that kind of connection which we expe 
rience within ourselves in the function of consciousness ("synthesis" in Kant s 
phraseology) . 

CHAP. 2, 31.] Substance and Causality: Leibniz. 423 

postulates which had been current in the metaphysical movement 
since Descartes; namely, that of the isolation of substances with 
reference to one another, and that of the correspondence of their 
functions having its origin in the common world-ground. Both motifs 
are most perfectly brought out in the Monadology. Leibniz calls his 
force-substance monad, an expression which might have come to 
him along various lines of Renaissance tradition. Each monad is 
with reference to the rest a perfectly independent being, which can 
neither experience nor exercise influence. The monads "have no 
windows," and this " windowlessness " is to a certain extent the 
expression of their " metaphysical impenetrability." * But this 
quality of being completely closed to outward influence receives 
first of all a positive expression from Leibniz in his declaration 
that the monad is a purely internal principle : 2 substance is hence a 
force of immanent activity : the monad is not physical, but psychical 
in its nature. Its states are representations (Vorstellungen), and 
the principle of its activity is desire (appetition),ihe "tendency" to 
pass over from one representation to another. 3 

Each monad is nevertheless, on the other hand, a " mirror of the 
world " ; it contains the whole universe as a representation within 
itself; in this consists the living unity of all things. But each is 
also an individual, distinct from all others. For there are no two 
substances in the world alike. 4 If now the monads are not distin 
guished by the content which they represent, for this is the same 
with all, 5 their difference can be sought only in their mode of 
representing this content, and Leibniz declares that the difference 
between the monads consists only in the different degree of clearness 
and distinctness with which they " represent " the universe. Descartes 
epistemological criterion thus becomes a metaphysical predicate by 
reason of the fact that Leibniz, like Duns Scotus (cf. p. 331), con 
ceives of the antithesis of distinct and confused as an antithesis in 
the force of representation or in intensity. Hence the monad is re 
garded as active in so far as it represents clearly and distinctly, as 
passive in so far as it represents obscurely and confusedly : 6 hence, 
also, its impulse (appetition) is directed toward passing from obscure 

1 Monad. 7. Cf. Syst. Nouv. 14, 17. 

2 Monad. 11. 8 Ib. 15-19. 

4 Leibniz expressed this as the principium identitatis indiscernibilium 
(Monad. 9). 

5 Here, to be sure, Leibniz overlooked the fact that no real content is reached 
in this system of mutual representation of substances. The monad a represents 
the monads 6, c, d, . . . x. But what is the monad b ? It is in turn the repre 
sentation of the monads a, c, d, . . . x. The same is true for c, and so on in 
infinitum. 

6 Monad. 49. 

424 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

to clear representations, and the "clearing up" of its own content is 
the goal of its life. To this above-mentioned intensity of the repre 
sentations Leibniz applies the mechanical principle of infinitely 
small impulses : he calls these infinitely small constituent parts of 
the representative life of the monads petites perceptions, 1 and needs 
this hypothesis to explain the fact, that according to his doctrine the 
monad evidently has very many more representations than it is con 
scious of (cf. below, 33). In the language of to-day the petites per 
ceptions would be unconscious mental states ( Vorstellungen) . 

Of such differences in degree of clearness and distinctness there 
are infinitely many, and in accordance with the law of continuity 
natura non facit saltum the monads form an uninterrupted graded 
series, a great system of development, which rises from the " simple " 
monads to souls and minds. 2 The lowest monads, which represent 
only obscurely and confusedly, i.e. unconsciously, are therefore only 
passive ; they form matter. The highest monad, which represents 
the universe with perfect clearness and distinctness, just for this 
reason there is but one such, and is accordingly pure activity, is 
called the central monad God. Inasmuch as each of these monads 
lives out its own nature, they all harmonise completely with each 
other at every moment 3 by virtue of the sameness of their content, 
and from this arises the appearance of the action of one substance 
upon others. This relation is the harmonie preetablie des substances 
a doctrine in which the principle of correspondence, introduced 
by Geulincx and Spinoza for tne relation of the two attributes, 
appears extended to the totality of all substances. Here as there, 
however, the principle as carried out involves the uninterrupted 
determination in the activity of all substances, the strict necessity 
of all that takes place, and excludes all chance and all freedom in 
the sense of uncaused action. Leibniz also rescues the conception 
of freedom for finite substances only in the ethical meaning of a 
control of reason over the senses and passions. 4 

The pre-established harmony this relationship of substances in 
their Being and life needs, however, a unity as the ground of its 
explanations, and this can be sought only in the central monad. 
God, who created the finite substances, gave to each its own content 

1 Ib. 21. 

2 Princ. 4. In this connection the "soul" is conceived of as the central 
monad of an organism, in that it represents most distinctly the monads consti 
tuting this, and accordingly only with a lesser degree of distinctness the rest of 
the universe. Monad. 61 ff. 

8 Syst. Noun. 14. 

4 Eo magis est Ubertas quo magis agitur ex ratione, etc. Leibniz, De Libert. 
(Op., Erd. ed.,069). 

CHAP. 2, 32.J Natural Right, 425 

in a particular grade of representative intensity, and thereby so 
arranged all the monads that they should harmonise throughout. 
And in this necessary process in which their life unfolds, they 
realise the end of the creative Universal Spirit in the whole 
mechanical determination of the series of their representations. 
This relation of mechanism to teleology makes its way finally, also, 
into the epistemological principles of Leibniz. The deity and the 
other monads sustain the same relation to each other as the infinite 
and finite substances sustain in the system of Descartes. But for 
the rationalistic conception of things, only the infinite is a necessity 
of thought, while the finite, on the contrary, is something " contin 
gent," in the sense that it might also be thought otherwise, that the 
opposite contains no contradiction (cf. above, 30, 7). Thus the 
antithesis of eternal and necessary truths takes on metaphysical 
significance : only God s Being is an eternal truth; he exists, accord 
ing to the principle of contradiction, with logical or absolute necessity. 
Finite things, however, are contingent; they exist only in accordance 
with the principle of sufficient reason, by virtue of their determina 
tion by another; the world and all that belongs to it has only 
conditioned, hypothetical necessity. This contingency of the world, 
Leibniz, in agreement with Duns Scotus, 1 traces back to the will of 
God. The world might have been otherwise ; that it is as it is, it 
owes to the choice which God made between the many possibilities* 

Thus in Leibniz all threads of the old and the new metaphysics 
run together. With the aid of the conceptions formed in the school 
of mechanics he formulated the presages of the philosophy of the 
Renaissance into a systematic structure, where the ideas of Greece 
found their home in the midst of the knowledge acquired by modern 
investigation. 

32. Natural Right. 

The Philosophy of Right of the Renaissance was also dependent, 
on the one hand, upon the stimulus of Humanism, and on the other, 
upon the needs of modern life. The former element is shown not 
only in the dependence upon ancient literature, but also in the re 
vival of the ancient conception of the state, and in the attachment 
to its traditions ; the latter make their appearance as a theoreti 
cal generalisation of those interests, in connection with which the 

1 The relations of Leibniz to the greatest of the Scholastics are to be recog 
nized not only in this point, but also in many others ; though as yet they have 
unfortunately not found the consideration or treatment that they deserve. 

2 Cf., however, in addition, below, 35. 

426 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

secular states during this period took on the form of autonomous 
life. 

1. All these motives show themselves first in Maccliiavelli. In 
his admiration of Rome, the Italian national feeling speaks imme 
diately, and it was from the study of ancient history that he gained 
his theory of the modern state, at least as regards its negative side. 
He demanded the complete independence of the state from the 
Church, and carried Dante s Ghibelline doctrine of the state to its 
farthest consequence. He combats the temporal sovereignty of the 
Papacy as the permanent obstacle to an Italian national state, and 
so that separation between the spiritual and the secular, which is 
common to all the beginnings of modern thought, is completed for 
the practical field in his system, as it had been before with Occam 
and Marsilius of Padua (cf. p. 328). The consequence of this, 
however, as with the Nominalists just mentioned, was that the state 
was conceived not teleologically, but in purely naturalistic fashion 
as a product of needs and interests. From this fact is explained 
the singleness of aim and regardlessness with which Macchiavelli 
carried out his theory of the acquisition and preservation of princely 
power, and with which he treated politics solely from the point of 
view of the warfare of interests. 

The relation of church and state, moreover, excited an especial 
interest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, because it played 
a part that was always important and often decisive in the conflicts 
and shiftings of confessional oppositions. Here an interesting 
exchange of conceptions came about. The Protestant view of the 
world, which in accordance with its first principle changed the 
mediaeval distinction in value between the spiritual and the secular, 
and removed the ban of the " profane " from the secular spheres 
of life, saw in the state also a divine order; and the Reformation 
Philosophy of Right, under the lead of Melancthon, limited the right 
of the state more by the right of the invisible, than by the claims 
of the visible Church ; indeed, the divine mission of the magistrates 
afforded a valuable support for the Protestant State-church. Much 
less could the Catholic Church feel itself under obligation to the 
modern state; and although it thereby departed from Thomism, it 
allowed itself to be pleased by such theories as those of Bellarmin 
and Mariana, in which the state was conceived of as a work of 
human composition or as a compact. For with this theory the state 
lost its higher authority, and to a certain extent its metaphysical 
root ; it appeared capable of abolition ; the human will which had 
created it might dissolve it again, and even its supreme head was 
deprived of his absolute inviolability. While the Protestants re- 

CHAI&gt;. 2, 32.] Natural Right : Macehiavelli, Reformers. 427 

garded the state as an immediate divine order, for the Catholics, as 
being a human arrangement, it needed the sanction of the Church 
and ought not to be regarded as valid where this was lacking ; but 
it should retain this sanction only when it placed itself at the service 
of the Church. So Campanella taught that the Spanish Empire 
(monarchia) had as its task to place the treasures of foreign parts 
of the world at the disposal of the Church for her contest with the 
heretics. 

2. But in time these oppositions in the philosophy of rights 
yielded to confessional indifferentism, which had attained the mas 
tery in theoretical science also, and since the state was regarded as 
essentially an order of earthly things, the relation of man to God 
fell outside its sphere of action. Philosophy demanded for the 
citizen the right which she claimed for herself, the right of a free, 
individual attitude toward the religious authorities of the time, and 
became thereby the champion of toleration. The state has not to 
trouble itself about the religious opinion of individuals, the right of 
the citizen is independent of his adherence to this or that confes 
sion : this demand was the necessary result of the confessional 
controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which had 
heaved and tossed so passionately to and fro. In this view unbe 
lieving indifference, and positive conviction which had to defend 
itself against political authority of the opposite creed, came to an 
agreement. 

In this spirit Macehiavelli had already written against the sole 
authority of the Roman Church ; but it was by Thomas More that 
the principle of toleration was first proclaimed in its completeness. 
The inhabitants of his happy island belong to the most varied con 
fessions, which all live peacefully side by side without any polit 
ical importance being attributed to the variety of their religious 
views. They have even united upon a common worship, which each 
party interprets in its own sense, and supplements by special forms 
of worship. So, too, Jean Bodin, in his Heptaplomeres, makes 
highly educated typical representatives, not only of the Christian 
confessions, but also of Judaism, Mohammedanism, and Heathen 
dom, find a form of worshipping God, which is equally satisfactory 
to all. Finally, in a more abstract manner, Hugo Grotius com 
pletely separated divine and human right in the sharp distinctness 
with which he presented the principles of the philosophical science 
of rights, basing divine right upon revelation and human right upon 
reason ; demanding at the same time, however, an equally sharp 
and thoroughgoing separation of the spheres of life to which they 
apply. 

428 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

But the classical "Doomsday Book " for the toleration movement 
was Spinoza s Theologico-political Tractate, which went to the root of 
the much-treated matter. Utilising many thoughts and examples 
from the older Jewish literature influenced by Averroism, this work 
demonstrated that religion, and especially the religious documents, 
have neither the province nor the design of teaching theoretical 
truths, and that the essence of religion consists not in the recogni 
tion of particular dogmas, but in the disposition and the will and 
action determined by it. From this it follows iucontestably that 
the state has still less ground or right to trouble itself about the 
assent of its citizens to particular dogmas, and that it should rather 
by virtue of its real authority restrain every attempt toward a con 
straining of the conscience, which may proceed from any of the 
ecclesiastically organised forms of religious life. The mystically 
profound religious nature of Spinoza alienated him from the dog 
matic government of the churches and from belief in the literal 
statements of their historical documents. He asserted the principle 
that religious books, like all other phenomena of literature, must be 
historically explained as to their theoretical import, that is, must be 
understood from the point of view of the intellectual condition of 
their authors, and that this historical criticism takes away from 
those former theoretical views their binding and normative signifi 
cance for a later time. 

3. With the political and churchly political interests became 
associated the social. No one gave them a more eloquent expression 
than Thomas More. After a thrilling portrayal of the misery of 
the masses the first book of the Utopia comes to the conclusion that 
society would do better if instead of the Draconian justice with which 
she punishes the violation of her laws, she should stop the sources of 
crime. The author maintains that the greater part of the guilt for 
the wrong-doing of the individual is due to the perverted arrange 
ment of the whole. This latter consists in the inequality of property 
brought about by the use of money, for this inequality gives occasion 
to all the aberrations of passion, of envy, and of hatred. The ideal 
picture of the perfect state of society upon the island of Utopia, 
which More sketches in contrast to the present condition, is in its 
main features an imitation of the ideal state of Plato. This human 
istic revival is, however, distinguished from its prototype in a 
manner characteristic for modern socialism, by its abolition of class- 
distinctions, which seemed necessary to the ancient thinker in conse 
quence of his reflection upon the actually given difference in the 
intellectual and moral status of individuals. In an abstraction 
that was a prototype for the succeeding development More proceeded 

CHAP. 2, 32.] Natural Right : Spinoza, More, Bacon. 429 

from the thought of the equality of all citizens before the law, and 
changed into an equality of claim or title for all citizens those forms 
of community which Plato had demanded of the ruling classes as a 
renunciation of the natural impulses toward an individual sphere of 
interests. With Plato the preferred classes were to renounce all 
private property in order to devote themselves entirely to the gen 
eral weal : with More the abolition of private property is demanded 
as the surest means for doing away with crime, and is based upon 
the equality of title which all have to the common possession. But 
at the same time the English Chancellor still holds fast to the ideal 
model of the ancient philosopher, in so far as to treat this entire 
equality in the division of material interests, as the indispensable 
basis for making it possible to all citizens to enjoy in like measure 
the ideal goods of society, science, and art. A normal working day 
of six hours for all members of society will be enough, he thinks, to 
satisfy all external needs of the community : the remaining time 
should remain free for every one for nobler employment. With these 
characteristics the programme for all the higher forms of modern 
socialism grows in the thought of More out of the Platonic project. 

But the spirit of the Eenaissance was animated by much more 
worldly interests. Stimulated by the magic of discoveries, dazzled 
by the glitter of inventions, it set itself the task of transforming by 
its new insights the whole outer condition of human society as 
related to the natural conditions of life, and saw before itself an 
ideal of comfort for human life, which should develop from a com 
plete and systematic use of the knowledge and control of Nature 
made possible by science. All social injuries will be healed by 
raising human society, by means of the scientific advancement of 
external civilisation, beyond all the cares and all the need which 
now vex it. A few inventions like the compass, the art of printing, 
and gunpowder, says Bacon, have sufficed to give human life new 
motion, greater dimensions, mightier development. What trans 
formations stand before us when invention once becomes an intel 
ligently exercised art ! The social problem is thus transferred to 
an improvement of the material condition of society. 

In Bacon s New Atlantis l a happy island-people in carefully 
guarded seclusion is brought before us, which by skilful regula 
tions receives information of the progress in civilisation made by 
all other peoples, and at the same time, by the systematic prosecu 
tion of research, discovery, and invention, raises to the highest 

1 The title of this Utopia and much else in it is a reminiscence of Plato s 
fragment, Critias (113 f.). 

430 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

point the control of Nature for the practical interests of human life. 
All kinds of possible and impossible inventions are related in fan 
tastic prophecy/ and the whole activity of the " House of Solomon " 
is directed toward improving the material state of society, while the 
portrayal of the political relations is only superficial and unim 
portant. 

In Campanella s State of the Sun, on the other hand, in which the 
after-effects of More s Utopia, are very noticeable, we come to a com 
plete project of the socialistic future state, which is even pedanti 
cally ordered down to all of its minor relations. This state does not 
shrink in any direction from the most extreme violence to the free 
dom of the individual s life. From the mathematically delineated 
plan of the imperial city to the division of hours for daily work 
and enjoyment, the determination of professions, the pairing of the 
men and women, the astrologically predetermined hour for sexual 
unions, all takes place here from an arrangement by the state for 
the welfare of the whole, and an extended, carefully worked out 
system of bureaucracy (in which there is an admixture of metaphys 
ical motives) 2 is built up upon the graded knowledge of the citizens. 
The more any one knows, the more power he ought to have in the 
state, in order to rule and improve by his knowledge the course of 
Nature. The points of view in this improvement look essentially 
toward external civilisation in Campanella s system also. With 
him, indeed, four hours of daily labour should suffice on the average 
to assure the good cheer of society, and upon this prosperity all 
should have a like claim. 

4. In spite of all that is fantastic and whimsical, 3 the thought 
nevertheless asserts itself in Campanella s State of the Sun, still 
more than in More s Utopia, that the state should be an artificial 
product of human insight for the removal of social injuries. Neither 
writer desired to set up a mere creation of fancy, any more than did 
Plato ; they believe in the possibility of realising " the best political 
constitution " by rational reflection upon an order of social relations 

1 In addition to the microscope and the telescope, the microphone and tele 
phone are not wanting ; there are giant explosive materials, flying-machines, 
all sorts of engines with air and water power, and even "some kinds" of 
perpetual motion ! But the author lays special value upon the fact that by 
better culture of plants and animals, by unsuspected chemical discoveries, by 
baths and air-cures, diseases are to be banished and life prolonged ; experiments 
on animals are also introduced in the interest of medicine. 

2 Beneatli the supreme ruler, Sol or Metaphysicus, who must embody all 
knowledge within himself, stand first of all three princes, whose spheres of 
activity correspond to the three " primalities " of Being, Power, Wisdom and 
Love (cf. 29, 3), etc. 

3 Fantastic is especially the strong element of astrological and magical super 
stition ; whimsical, his monkish rude treatment of the sexual relations. 

CHAP. 2, 32.] Natural Right : Campanella, Grrotius. 431 

that shall be in accordance with Nature. In this, to be sure, they 
encountered much opposition. Cardanus combated Utopias on 
principle, and in their stead commended to science the task of 
comprehending the necessity with which the actual states of history 
develop in their special definite nature, out of the character, the 
relations of life, and the experiences of peoples ; he would have 
them regarded as natural products like organisms, and would apply 
to their conditions the medical categories of health and disease. 
In a larger way, and free from the Pythagorean astrology in which 
the mathematician Cardanus indulged, but with a strongly con 
structive fancy, the practical statesman Bodin attempted to under 
stand the manifold character of historical reality as manifested in 
political life. 

But the tendency of the time was much more toward seeking a right 
founded in Nature for all times and relations alike, and to be recog 
nised by reason alone : although a man like Albericus Gentilis desired 
to reduce the principles of private right to physical laws by analogies 
of childlike crudeness. A firmer and more fruitful ground was 
gained when human nature, instead of general " Nature," was taken 
as a starting-point. This was done by Hugo Grotius. Like Thomas 
Aquinas, he found the fundamental principle of natural right in the 
social need, and found the method for its development in logical 
deduction. That which reason recognises as agreeing with man s 
social nature and following therefrom in this consists the jus 
naturale* that cannot be changed by any historical mutation. 
The thought of such an absolute right, which exists only by its 
foundation in reason, and which exists independently of the politi 
cal power and rather as the ultimate ground of this power, was 
brought home to Grotius by the analogy of international law with 
which his investigation was primarily concerned. On the other 
hand, however, by virtue of this material principle, private right be 
came the authoritative presupposition for political right also. The 
satisfaction of individual interests, protection of life and property, 
appeared as the essential end to be subserved by the ordering of 
rights. Formally and methodically, on the contrary, this philo 
sophical system of rights was entirely deductive ; it aimed only to 
draw the logical consequences of the principle of society. In like 
manner Hobbes also regarded the corpus politicum as a machine 
capable of b eing deduced from the conception of its end by pure 
intellectual activity, and the philosophical doctrine of rights as a 
perfect demonstrable science. At the same time this field seemed 

1 De Jure Bell, et Pac. I. 1, 10. 

432 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

adapted in a pre-eminent degree to the application of the geometri 
cal method, and Puffendorf introduced the whole apparatus of this 
method by combining Grotius and Hobbes, and developing the whole 
system synthetically from the thought that the individual s instinct 
toward self-preservation could be rationally and successfully fulfilled 
only by satisfying his social need. In this form natural right per 
sisted as the ideal of a "geometrical" science until far on into 
the eighteenth century (Thomasius, Wolff, indeed, even to Fichte 
and Schelling), and survived the general decline of the Cartesian 
principle. 

5. Looking now at the contents rather than at the form, we find 
that the ultimate ground of public life and of social coherence was 
placed in the interests of individuals : the mechanics of the state 
found in the character of the impulses of the individual man that 
self-intelligible and simple element, 1 out of which the complex 
structures of life viewed as a subject of law and rights (Rechtslebens) 
might be explained in accordance with the Galilean principle. With 
this the doctrine of the state also went back to the Epicurean theory of 
social atomism 2 (cf. pp. 174 f.), and the synthetic principle by which 
the origin of the state was to be understood was the contract. From 
Occam and Marsilius down to Bousseau, Kant, and Fichte, this con 
tract theory was dominant in political philosophy. Grotius and 
Hobbes devoted themselves to carrying it out in the most careful 
manner. To the political contract by which the individuals unite 
themselves to a community of interests, is attached the contract of 
sovereignty or subjection, by means of which the individuals hand 
over their rights and authority to the magistracy. This proved to 
be a general frame in which the most varied political theories fitted. 
While Grotius, and likewise Spinoza, found the interests of the 
citizens to be best guaranteed by an aristocratic republican constitu 
tion, Hobbes could deduce from the same presupposition his theory 
of a purely secular absolutism, according to which the political power 
should be inviolably united in one personality, the universal will in 
the individual will of the sovereign. 

In closest connection with the contract theory appears the devel 
opment of the conception of sovereignty. The source of all power, 
according to this theory, is the popular will, from which the politi 
cal contract and the contract of submission have proceeded; the 
proper bearer of the sovereignty is the people. Meanwhile the con- 

1 The term "conatas" applies in this sense to both domains, the physical 
and the psychical, with Hobbes and Spinoza. 

a As in the theoretical domain, so also in the practical, the principle of 
Deinocritus and Epicurus obtains with great efforts a late victory. 

CHAP. 2, 32.] Natural Riyht : Contract Theory. 433 

tract and the transfer of right and power completed thereby, are 
regarded by some writers as irrevocable, and by others as capable 
of recall. So Bodin, in spite of his doctrine of popular sovereignty, 
maintains the unlimited character and unconditional authority of 
the royal power, the inviolability of the ruler and the uiijustifia- 
bility of all opposition against him ; with Hobbes the sovereignty 
of the people is still more completely absorbed into that of the 
monarch, whose will here stands quite in the sense of the Vetat c est 
raoi as the sole source of rights in the positive political life. In oppo 
sition to this view, and decidedly more consistent in view of their 
presupposition, the " monarchomachischen [opposed to an absolute 
monarchy] theories," whose chief representative besides Buchanan 
(1506-1582) and Languet (1518-1581) was Althus of Lower Sax 
ony, maintained that the governmental contract becomes liable to 
dissolution as soon as the sovereign ceases to rule rightly, i.e. in the 
interest and according to the will of the people. If the contract is 
broken on one side, it is no longer binding for the other party ; 
in this situation the sovereignty returns again to its original bearers. 
If man has made the state with a purpose and under reflection, then 
he abolishes it again when it becomes evident that it has failed to 
fulfil its purpose. Thus the Renaissance is already providing in 
advance the theory of revolution. 1 

All these theories, however, received their especial colouring from 
motives growing out of the particular relations of church and state, 
a colouring which depended upon the question whether the unre 
stricted power of the ruler was felt as dangerous or as beneficial in 
consequence of his relation to the Confessions. The most radical 
standpoint in real politics was taken by Hobbes by virtue of his 
religious indifferentism : religion is a private opinion, and only that 
opinion which the sovereign professes has political standing or value. 
No other religion or Confession can be tolerated in public life. 
Hobbes gave the philosophical theory for the historical cujus regio 
illius religio. And Spinoza attached himself to him in this. He 
stood for freedom of thought and against all compulsion of con 
science, but for him religion was only a matter of knowledge and 
disposition; for the public manifestation of religious feeling in the 
church and in public worship, it was in the interest of order and 
peace that only the form fixed by the magistracy should obtain. In 
a more positive sense the Protestant Philosophy of Right declared for 

1 These principles were defended with special application to the English con 
ditions of the seventeenth century, and to the right of the "Revolution" of 
that time by the poet John Milton (Defensio pro Populo Anglicano, 1051), and 
by Algernon Sidney (Discourses of Government, 1683). 

434 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

the sovereignty in church and state of the kingdom existing by the 
grace of God ; while in this school, also, as for example in the case 
of Althus, the sovereignty of the people was defended as over 
against a magistracy holding another creed. The same motive was 
decisive where the Jesuits maintained that the magistracy might be 
removed and that the assassination of the prince was excusable 
(cf. above). 

G. In the case of Hobbes the rationale of the contract theory 
rested on more general motives. If the social and political life was 1 
to be comprehended from the point of view of " human nature," the 
English philosopher found the fundamental, all-determining charac 
teristic of human nature in the impulse toivard self-preservation or 
egoism, th e simple, self-evident principle for explaining the entire 
volitional life. Here his materialistic metaphysics and sensualistic 
psychology (cf. 31) made it appear that this instinct toward self- 
preservation, in its original essence, was directed only toward the 
preservation and furtherance of the sensuous existence of the indi 
vidual. All other objects of the will could serve only as means to 
bring about that supreme end. Agreeably to this principle, also, 
there was no other norm of judgment for man as a natural being 
than that of furtherance or hindrance, of profit or of harm : the 
distinction of good and evil, of right and wrong, is not possible 
upon the standpoint of the individual, but only upon the social 
standpoint, where the common interest instead of the individual s 
interest forms the standard. So egoism became the principle of all 
practical philosophy; for if the individual s instinct toward self- 
preservation was to be restricted and corrected by the command of 
the state, yet this state itself was regarded as the most ingenious 
and perfect of all the contrivances which egoism had hit upon to 
attain and secure its satisfaction. The state of nature, in which the 
egoism of each stands originally opposed to the egoism of every 
other, is a war of all against all: to escape this the state was 
founded as a contract for the mutual warrant of self-preservation. 
The social need is not original : it only results necessarily as the 
most efficient and certain means for the satisfaction of egoism. 

Spinoza adopted this doctrine, but gave it a more ideal signifi 
cance by introducing it into his metaphysics. " Suum esse con- 
servare " is for him also the quintessence and fundamental motive 
or all willing. But since every finite mode belongs equally to both 
attributes, its impulse toward self-preservation is directed as well 
toward its conscious activity, i.e. its knowledge, as toward its main 
tenance in the corporeal world, i.e. its power. This individual 
striving, interpreted along the lines of the Baconian identity of 

CHAP. 2, 32.] Natural Right : ffobbes, Cambridge Men. 435 

knowledge and power, forms for ^Spinoza the ground of explanation 
for the empirical life of the state, in accordance with the principle 
that each one s right extends as far as his power. In this process 
of explanation Spinoza moves mainly in the lines of Hobbes, and 
deviates from him only, as noticed above, in his view as to the best 
form of constitution. This same complication of conceptions, how 
ever, presents itself to Spinoza as affording also a starting-point for 
his mystico-religious ethics. For since the true "esse" of every 
finite thing is the deity, the only perfect satisfaction of the impulse 
toward self-preservation is to be found in "love to God." That 
Malebranche, who spoke so vehemently of the "atheistical Jew," 
taught the same in slightly different words "mit ein bischen 
anderen Worten" has already been mentioned ( 31, 4). 

7. Hobbes theory of egoism the "selfish system," as it was 
later termed for the most part found vigorous opposition among 
his countrymen. 1 The reduction of all activities of the will, without 
any exception, to the impulse toward self-preservation excited both 
ethical revolt and the theoretical contradiction of psychological expe 
rience. The warfare against Hobbes was undertaken primarily by 
the Neo-Platonist school of Cambridge, whose chief literary repre 
sentatives were Ralph Cudivorth and Henry More. In this contro 
versy the antithesis of &lt;ucns and 0rts developed after the ancient 
prototype. For Hobbes, right and moral order arose from social 
institution; for his opponents they were original and immediately 
certain demands of Nature. Both parties opposed the lex naturalis 
to the theological dogmatic grounding of practical philosophy : but 
for Hobbes natural law was the demonstrable consequence of intel 
ligent egoism ; for the " Platouists " it was an immediate certainty, 
innate in the human mind. 

Cumberland proceeded against Hobbes in the same line. He 
would have man s social nature regarded as being as original as his 
egoism : the " benevolent " altruistic inclinations, whose actual ex 
istence is not to be doubted, are objects of direct self-perception 
which have an original independence of their own ; the social need 
is not the refined product of a shrewd self-seeking, but as Hugo 
Grotius had conceived of it a primary, constitutive characteristic 
of human nature. While egoism is directed toward one s own 
private weal, the altruistic motives are directed toward the uni 
versal weal, without which private weal is not possible. This 
connection between the welfare of the individual and that of the 

1 Cf. J. Tulloch, national Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in 
the 17th Cent. (Lond. 1872). 

436 The Renaissance : Natural Science Period. [PART IV. 

public, which in Hobbes appeared as due to the shrewd insight 
of man, is regarded by Cumberland as a provision of God, whose 
commandment is hence considered to be the authoritative principle 
for obeying those demands which express themselves in the benevo 
lent inclinations. 

To the side of this natural morality of reason, which was thus 
defended against orthodoxy on the one hand and sensualism on the 
other, came the natural religion of reason, which had been set up 
by Herbert of Cherbury in opposition to these same two positions. 
Keligion also shall be based neither upon historical revelation nor 
upon human institution ; it belongs to the inborn possession of the 
human mind. The consensus gentium so argues Herbert in the 
manner of the ancient Stoics proves that belief in the deity is 
a necessary constituent of the human world of ideas, a demand 
of reason ; but on this account that only which corresponds to those 
demands of the reason can stand as true content of religion, as 
contrasted with the dogmas of religions. 

Thus the questions of practical philosophy which appear in 
English literature in the very lively discussion excited by Hobbes, 
gradually became transferred to the psychological realm. What is 
the origin of right, morals, and religion in the human mind ? so 
runs the problem. With this, however, the movements of the 
philosophy of the Enlightenment are introduced. 

PART V. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT. 

In addition to the literature cited on p. 348, cf . 

Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the 18th Cent. Lond. 1876. 

J. Mackintosh, On the Progress of Ethical Philosophy during the 17th and 

18th Centuries. Edin. 1872. 
Ph. Damiron, Memoires pour servir a I Histoire de la Philosophic au 18 me Siecle. 

3 vols., Paris 1858-64. 

E. Zeller, Geschichte der deutschen Philosophic seit Leibniz. Miinchen, 1873. 
Also H. Hettner, Litteraturgeschichte des 18. Jahr. 3 parts. 

THE natural rhythm of intellectual life brought with it the result 
that in the modern as in the Greek philosophy a first cosmologico- 
metaphysical period was followed by a period of an essentially 
anthropological character, and that thus once more the newly 
awakened, purely theoretical efforts of philosophy must yield to a 
practical conception of philosophy as " world-ivisdom." In fact, all 
features of the Greek sophistic movement are found again with 
ripened fulness of thought, with broadened variety, with deepened 
content, and, therefore, also, with added energy in their antitheses 
in the Philosophy of the Enlightenment, which coincides approxi 
mately in time with the eighteenth century. In the place of Athens 
now appears the whole breadth of the intellectual movement among 
European civilised peoples, and scientific tradition counts now as 
many thousands of years as it then counted centuries ; but the 
tendency as a whole and the objects of thought, the points of view 
and the results of the philosophising, show an instructive similarity 
and kinship in these two periods so widely separated in time and 
so different in the civilisations which formed their background. 
There prevails in both the same turning of thought toward the 
subject s inner nature, the same turning away from metaphysical 
subtlety with doubt and disgust, the same preference for an em 
pirical genetic consideration of the human psychical life, the same 
inquiry as to the possibility and the limits of scientific knowledge, 

437 

438 Philosophy of the Enlightenment. [PART V. 

and the same passionate interest in the discussion of the prob 
lems of life and society. No less characteristic, lastly, for both 
periods is the penetration of philosophy into the broad circles of 
general culture and the fusion of the scientific with the literary 
movement. 

But the basis for the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century 
was given in the general features of a secular view of life, as they 
had been worked out during the Renaissance by the fresh move 
ments in art, religion, politics, and natural research. While these 
had found their metaphysical formulation in the seventeenth cen 
tury, the question now came again into the foreground, how man 
should conceive, in the setting of the new Weltanschauung, his own 
nature and his own position : and in the presence of the value set 
upon this question, the interest in the various metaphysical concep 
tions in which the new Weltanschauung had been embodied, retreated 
more and more decidedly into the background. Men contented 
themselves with the general outlines of metaphysical theories, in 
order to employ themselves the more thoroughly with the questions 
of human life ; and all the doctrines of the Enlightenment which 
offer such a vehement polemic against speculation are, in truth, 
working from the beginning with a metaphysics of the " sound com 
mon sense " which at last raised its voice so high, and which ulti 
mately only assumed as self-evident truth that which had fallen to 
it from the achievements of the labour of preceding centuries. 

The beginnings of the philosophy of the Enlightenment are to be 
sought in England, where, in connection with the well-ordered con 
ditions which followed the close of the period of the revolution, a 
powerful upward movement of literary life claimed philosophy also 
in the interests of general culture. From England this literature 
was transplanted to France. Here, however, the opposition of the 
ideals which it brought with it to the social and political status, 
worked in such a way that not only was the presentation of the 
thoughts more excited and vehement from the outset, but the 
thoughts themselves also take on a sharper point, and turn their 
negative energy more powerfully against the existing conditions in 
Church and state. At first from France, and then from the direct 
influence of England, 1 also, Germany received the ideas of the 
Enlightenment, for which it had already received an independent 
preparation in a more theoretical manner: and here these ideas 
found their last deepening, and a purification and ennobling as well, 

1 Cf. G. Zart, Der Einfluss der englischen Philosophen auf die deutsche Philos. 
des 18. Jahrh. (Berlin, 1881). 

Philosophy of the Enlightenment. 439 

as they came to an end in the German poetry with which the 
Renaissance of classical Humanism was completed. 

John Locke became the leader of the English Enlightenment by 
finding a popular form of empirico-psychological exposition for the 
general outlines of the Cartesian conception of the world. While 
the metaphysical tendency of the system brought forth an idealistic 
after-shoot in Berkeley, the anthropologico-genetic mode of con 
sideration extended quickly and victoriously to all problems of 
philosophy. Here the opposition between the sensualistic associa- 
tional psychology and the nativistic theories of various origin con 
tinued to have a decisive influence upon the course of development. 
It controlled the vigorous movement in moral philosophy, and the 
development of deism and natural religion, which was connected 
with it ; and it found its sharpest formulation^ in the epistemological 
field, where the most consistent and deepest of English thinkers, 
David Hume, developed empiricism to positivism, and thereby called 
forth the opposition of the Scottish school. 

The pioneer of the French Enlightenment was Pierre Bayle, whose 
Dictionnaire turned the views of the cultivated world completely in 
the direction of religious scepticism ; and it was along this line 
chiefly that the English literature was then taken up in Paris. 
Voltaire was the great writer, who not only gave this movement its 
most eloquent expression, but also presented the positive elements 
of the Enlightenment in the most emphatic manner. But the 
development pressed with much greater weight toward the negative 
side. In the common thinking of the Encyclopvedists became com 
pleted step by step the change from empiricism to sensualism, from 
naturalism to materialism, from deism to atheism, from enthusiastic 
to egoistic morals. In opposition to such an Enlightenment of the 
intellect, whose lines all converge in the positivism of Co)idillac, 
there appeared in Rousseau a feeling-philosophy of elemental power, 
leading to the intellectual shaping of the Revolution. 

Germany was won for the Enlightenment movement by the 
Leibnizian philosophy and the great success which Wolff achieved, 
in his activity as a teacher, in developing and transforming it, but 
here, in consequence of the lack of a unifying public interest, the 
tendency toward individual culture was predominant. For the ends 
of this individual culture, the ideas of the " philosophical century " 
were elaborated in psychological and epistemological as well as in 
the moral, political, and religious fields with great multiplicity, but 
without any new creation of principles until fresh life and higher 
points of view were brought by the poetical movement and the great 
personalities of its bearers, Lessing and Herder, to the dry intelli- 

440 Philosophy of the Enlightenment. [PART V. 

gence with which a boastful popular philosophy had extended itself, 
especially in connection with the Berlin Academy. 1 This circum 
stance kept the German philosophy of the eighteenth century from 
losing itself in theoretico-sceptical self-disintegration like the Eng 
lish, or from being shattered in practical politics like the French: by 
contact with a great literature teeming with ideas a new great 
epoch of philosophy was here prepared. 

John Locke, born 1632, at Wrington near Bristol, was educated at Oxford, 
and became involved in the changeful fortunes of the statesman Lord Shaftes- 
bury. He returned home from exile in Holland with William of Orange in 
1688, filled several high political offices under the new government which he 
also often publicly defended, and died while living in the country at leisure, in 
1704. His philosophical work bears the title An Essay concerning Human 
Understanding (1690) ; besides this are to be mentioned Some Thoughts on 
Education (1693), The, Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), and, among his 
posthumous works, Of the Conduct of the, Understanding. Cf. Fox Bourne, 
The Life of J. L. (Lond. and N.Y. 1876); Th. Fowler, J. L. (Lond. 1880); 
\_Locke, by A. C. Fraser, Blackwood series, Edin. and Phila. 1890, and article 
Locke in Enc. Brit.; T. 11. Green in his Int. to Hume; J. Devvey, Leibniz" 1 s 
New Essays, Chicago, 1888 ; Edition of his works by Low, 1771, also ed. Lond. 
1853 ; Phi los. wks. in Bohn Lib. Crit. ed. of the Essay by Fraser, 1894]. 

George Berkeley was born in Killerin, Ireland, in 1685, took part as a clergy 
man in missionary and colonisation attempts in America, became Bishop of 
Cloyne 1734, and died 1753. His Theory of Vision (1709) was a preparation 
for his Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). This main 
work was later followed by the Three Dialogues between Hi/las and Philonous, 
and by Alciphron or the Minute Philosopher. Edition of his works by Fraser, 
4 vols., Lond. 1871 ; the same writer has also given a good exposition of his 
thought as a whole (Blackwood series, Edin. and Lond. 1881). Cf. Collyns 
Simon, Universal Immaterialism, Lond. 1862. 

The Associational Psychology found its chief supporters in Peter Brown 
(died 1735 Bishop of Cork; The Procedure, Extent, and Limits of Human Un 
derstanding, 1719), David Hartley (1704-1757 ; De Motus Sensns et Idearum 
Generatione, 1746 ; Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expec 
tations, 1749), Edward Search, pseudonym for Abraham Tucker (1705-1774 ; 
Light of Nature, 7 vols., Lond. 1768-1777), Joseph Priestley (1733-1804 ; Hart 
ley s Theory of the Human Mind on the Principle of the Association of Ideas, 
1775; Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit, 1777), John Home Tooke 
(1736-1812; Eirea wrepbevTa or The Dirersions of Parley, 1798; cf. Stephen, 
Memoirs of J. II. T., Lond. 1813), Krasmus Darwin (1731-1802 ; Zoon omia or 
the Laws of Organic Life, 1794-1796), finally, Thomas Brown (1778-1820; 
Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect, 1804 ; posthumously, the Lectures 
on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, l820, delivered in Edinburg). Cf. Br. 
ISchoenlank, Hartley u. Priestley alsBegriinder desAssociationismus(Ha,\\e,\882); 
L. Ferri, Sulla Doitrina Psichologica deir Associazione, Saggio Storico e Critico 
(Home, 1878) [Fr. tr. Paris, 1883. Cf. also Hartley and James Mill by G. 
S. Bower, Lond. 1881. For bibliography for the writers mentioned in this and 
the following paragraphs consult Porter s appendix to Eng. tr. Ueberweg s 
Hist. P/7.]. 

Of the opponents to this movement who Platonise in the older manner, 
Richard Price (1723-1791) became known especially by his controversy with 
Priestley : 

Priestley, The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity (1777); Price, Letters on 
Materialism and Philosophical Necessity; Priestley, Free Discussions of the 
Doctrines of Materialism (1778). 

1 Cf. Ch. Bartholmess, Histoire Philosophique de V Academic de Prusse, 
Paris, 1859. 

Philosophy of the Enlightenment. 441 

Among the English moral philosophers, Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley 
Cooper, 1071-1713) takes a most important place. His writings were collected 
under the title, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions and Times (1711). 
Cf. G. v. Gizycki, Die Philosophic ShSs (Leips. and Heidelberg, 1876). After 
him various groups diverge. The intellectualistic tendency is represented by 
Samuel Clarke (1075-1729; A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of 
God, 1705; Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty, 1715; cf. his 
correspondence with Leibniz) and William Wollaston (1059-1724 ; The Relig- 
ion of Nature Delineated, 1722). The morality based on feeling was repre 
sented by Francis Hutcheson (1094-1747 ; Inquiry into the Original of our 
Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 1725 ; A System of Moral Philosophy, 1755 ; cf. 
Th. Fowler, Shaftesburt/ and Hutcheson, Lond. 1882) ; Henry Home, pseud, 
for Lord Kames (1090-1782 ; Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural 
Religion, 1751; Elements of Criticism, 1762); Edmund Burke (1730-1797; 
Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beauti 
ful, 1750) ; Adam Ferguson (1724-1810 ; Institutions of Moral Philosophy, 
1709), and in a certain sense also, Adam Smith (1723-1790 ; Theory of Moral 
Sentiments, 1759) ; the principle of authority was defended by Joseph Butler 
(1092-1752; Sermons upon Human Nature, 1720) [Butler, in Blackwood series 
by W. L. Collins, 1881], and William Paley (1743-1805; Principles of Moral 
and Political Philosophy, 1785). The ethics of the associonational psychology 
was developed chiefly by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832 ; Introduction to the 
Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789; Traite de Legislation Civile et 
Penale, brought together by E. Dumont, 1801 ; Deontology, ed. by J. Bowring, 
1834 ; works in 11 vols., Edin. 1843). In a peculiar isolated position appears 
Beruhard de Mandeville (1(570-1733 ; The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices 
made Public Benefits, 1700, later with illustrative dialogues, 1728 ; Inquiry into 
the Origin of Moral Virtue, 1732 ; Free 1 houghts on Religion, Church, Govern 
ment. 1720). On him cf. P. Sakmann (Freiburg, 1898). 

The literature of Deism coincides, for the most part, with the above-named 
literature of moral philosophy ; but in addition to those named the following 
writers are also prominent : John Toland (1070-1722 ; Christianity not Myste 
rious, 1096 ; Letters to Serena, 1704 ; Adeisida-mon, 1709 ; Pantheisticon, 1710) ; 
Anthony Collins (1070-1729 ; A Discourse of Free Thinking, 1713) ; Matthew 
Tindal (1050-1733 ; Christianity as Old as the Creation, 1730) ; Thomas Chubb 
(1079-1747 ; A Discourse concerning Reason icith Regard to Religion, 1730) ; 
Thomas Morgan (died 1743 ; The Moral Philosopher, 3 parts, 1737 ff.) ; finally, 
Lord Bolingbroke (1072-1751); works ed. by Mollet in 5 vols., 1753 f. ; cf. 
F. v. Kaumer, Abhandl. drr Berl. Akad. 1840). Cf. V. Lechler, Geschichte des 
englischen Deismus (Stuttgart and Tub. 1841). 

England s greatest philosopher is David Hume, born, 1711, in Edinburg, and 
educated there. After he had spent some time as merchant, he lived for several 
years in France, occupied in study, and composed his work of genius, the 
Treatise on Human Nature (printed 1739 f.). The failure of this book induced 
him to work it over and publish it under the title Inquiry concerning Human 
Understanding, as a second volume of his more successful Essays, Moral, Politi 
cal and Literary (1748), and to add An Inquiry concerning the Principles of 
Morals (1751), and also The Natural History of Religion (1755). As libraria n 
of the Advocates Library in Ediuburg he found opportunity to write his History 
of England. After a stay in Paris, where he received great honour and came 
into connection with Rousseau among others, he was for some time Under 
secretary of State in the Foreign Office, but finally returned to Edinburg, where 
he died, 1776. The Dialogues concerning Natural Religion and some smaller 
treatises appeared posthumously. Ed. of his works by Green and Grose in 
4 vols. (Lond. 1875). His autobiography was published by his friend, Adam 
Smith (1777). Cf. J. H. Burton. Life and Correspondence of D. H. (Edin. 
1840-50) ; E. Feuerlein in the Zeitschr. " Der Gedanke" (Berlin, 1803 f.) ; 
E. 1 fleiderer, Empirismus und Skepsis in D. H. s Philosophie (Berlin. 1874) ; 
T. Huxley, D. H. (Lond. 1879) ; Fr. Jodl, I.cbcu n. Pi,ilnsn,,hie D. //. s (Halle, 
1872) ; A. Meinong, Hume-Stitdien (Vienna, 1877, 1882) ; G. v. Gizycki, Die 
Ethik D. //. s (Breslau, 1878). fW. Knight, Blackwood series, 1880; esp. 
Int. by T. H. Green in his ed. of the works. Selby-Bigge eds. of the Treatise 
(1888) and the Enquiry (with Introd. 1894), Clav. Press, are excellent. 

442 Philosophy of the Enlightenment. [PART V. 

The Scottish School was founded by Thomas Reid (1710-1796, Professor 
at Glasgow ; Inquiry into the Human Mind on the. Principles of Common Sense, 
1764; Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Alan, 1785; Essays on the Active 
Powers of Man, 1788, complete ed. by W. Hamilton, Edin. 1827). [Selections 
ed. by E. H. Sneath, N.Y. 1892, contains bibliog. Cf. A. Seth, Scottish Philoso 
phy, Edin. and Lond. 1886, and art. Eeid in Enc. Brit. ] Besides James 
Oswald (died 1793, Appeal to Common Sense, in Behalf of Religion, 1766) 
and James Beattie (died 1805, Es*ay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, 
1770), the school had its chief academical and literary representative in Dugald 
Stewart (1753-1828, Professor in Edinburg ; Elements of the Philosophy of the 
Human Mind, 3 parts, 1792-1827 ; ed. of his works by W. Hamilton, 10 vols., 
Edin. 185411). 

Pierre Bayle, the type of sceptical polyhistory, born 1647 at Carlat, led 
a life disquieted by twice changing his Confession, was finally a professor in 
Sedan and Rotterdam, an 1 died 1706. His influential life work is embodied in 
his Dictionnaire Historiq-ie &lt;&gt;t Critique, (1695 and 16D7). Cf. L. Feuerbach, P. 
Bayle nach seine n fur die Gexchichte der Philosophic und Menschhe.it interessan- 
testen Momenten, Ansbach, 1833. 

Of the works of Voltaire (Francois Arouet le Jeune, 1694-1778 ; the main 
events of his literary life are his flight to London, his stay with the Marquise 
du Chatelet in Cirey, his visit with Frederick the Great in Potsdam, and his 
rest in old age at the country seat Ferney, near Geneva), the following are 
principally to be considered here : Lettres sur les Anglais (1784), Metaphysiqne 
de Newton (1740), Elements de la Philosophic de Newton mis a la Portee de 
tout le Monde (1741), Examen important de Mi/lord Jiolingbroke (1736), Can- 
dide ou sur V Optimisme (\lol), Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764), Le, Philosophe 
Ignorant (1767), Reponse au Systeme de la Nature (1777), the poem Les 
Systemes, etc. Cf. E. Bersot, La Philosophic de V. (Paris, 1848); D. F. Strauss, 
V. (Leips. 1870); J. Morley, V. (Lond. and N.Y. 1872). 

More sceptical in metaphysical aspects appear natural scientists and mathe 
maticians such as Maupertuis (1698-1759; active in connection with the 
Berlin Academy ; Essai de Philosophic Morale, 1750 ; Essai de Cosmologie, 
1751 ; controversial writings between him and the Wolffian, S. Konig, collected 
Leips. 1758), or d Alembert (Melanges de Litterature, d 1 Histoire et de Philoso 
phic, 1752); others proceed more naturalistically, such as Button (1708-1788; 
Histoire Naturelle Generale et Particuliere, 1749 ff.) and Jean Battiste Robinet 
(173-3-1820; De la Nature, 1761; Considerations Philosophiques de la Grada 
tion Naturelle des Formes d Etre 1767). 

Sensualism appears in connection with materialism in Julien Offrai de 
Lamettrie (1709-1751 ; Histoire Naturelle de VAme, 1745; V Homme Machine, 
1748 ; UArtde, Jouir, 1751 ; (Euvres, Berlin, 1751 ; on him F. A. Lange, Gesch. 
des Mater., I. 326 ff. [Eng. tr. Hist, of Mater., Vol. II. 49 ff.] ; Neree Quepat, 
Paris, 1873) ; it appears solely as psychological theory with Charles Bonnet 
(1720-1793; Essai de Psychologic, 1755; Essai Analytique sur les Faculte.s de 
r Ame, 1759; Considerations sur les Corps Organises, 1762; Contemplation de 
la Nature, 1764 ; Palingenesies Philosophiques, 1769), and with a positivistic 
pointing in Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-1780 ; Essai sur V Origine, de la 
Connaissance Humaine, 1746; Traite des Systemes, 1749; Traite des Sensa 
tions, 1754 ; Logique, 1780 ; Langue des Calculs in the complete edition, Taris, 
1798 ; cf. F. Uethorfi, C. ou I Empirisme et le Rationalisme, Paris, 1864). The 
last representatives of these theories are, on the one hand, Pierre Jean George 
Cabanis (1757-1808 ; Les Rapports du Physique et du Moral de V Homme, 1802 ; 
(Euvres, Paris, 1821-25), on the other side, Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de 
Tracy (1754-1836; Elements d Ideologic, in 4 parts, 1801-15, together 1826). 
Cf. Fr. Picavet, Les Ideologues (Paris, 1891). 

The literary concentration of the Enlightenment movement in France was the 
Encyclopaedia (Encyclopedic ou Dictionnaire Raisonnedes Sciences, des Arts et 
des Metiers, 28 vols., 1752-1772, supplement and index, 7 vols., extending to 1780). 
Besides d Alembert, who wrote the introduction, the editor and intellectual 
head of the circle from which it proceeded was Denis Diderot (1713-1784; 
Pensees Philosophiques, 1746 ; Pensees sur V Interpretation de la Nature, 1754 ; 
of the posthumous publications the Promenade d wn Sceptique, the Entretien 

Philosophy of the Enlightenment. 443 

d Alembert et de Diderot, and the Eeve (V Alcmbert are to be emphasised; 
worthy of mention also is the Essdi de Print nre ; (Euvres Completes, Paris, 
187o, 20 vols. ; of. K. Itosenkranz, D., sein Lebm und seine Werke, Leips. 186(5; 
J. Morley, U. and the Encyclopaedists, Loud. 1878). Further collaborators upon 
the Encyclopaedia (aside from Voltaire and Rousseau, who became separated 
from the work at an early date) were Turgot (article Existence), Daubenton, 
Jaucourt, Duclos, Grimm, llolbach, etc. From the same circle ( Les Philo- 
sophes ") proceeded later the Systeme de la Nature (pseud, author, Mirabeau, 
1770), which is in the main to be attributed to Dietrich von Holbach (1728-1789, 
from the Palatinate ; Le, bon Sens ou Idees Naturelle.s opposees aux Idees Sur- 
nnturelles, 1772 ; Elements de la Morale Universelle, 1776, etc.). [On the 
Systems de la Nature cf. Lange, Hist, of Mat., II. 92 ff.] With him co-oper 
ated Grimm (1728-1807 ; Correspondance Litteraire, 1812), the mathematician 
Lagrange, the Abbe Galiani, Naigeon, and others ; the concluding chapter, 
"Abrfige du Code de la Nature." is perhaps from Diderot s pen; Helve"tius 
wrote a very popular exposition, " Vrai Sens du Systeme de la Nature," 1771. 
The same writer (Claude Adrien Helvetius, 1715-1771) gave the sharpest expres 
sion to the morals of the sensualistic associational psychology in his much read 
book, De V Esprit (1758 ; cf. also his posthumous work, De V Homme de ses 
Facnltes et de son Education, 1772). 

The theory of English constitutionalism was adopted in France by Montes 
quieu (1689-1755 ; Lettres Persanes, 1721 ; De V Esprit des Lois, 1748). Social 
problems were treated on the one side by the so-called Physiocrats such as 
Quesnay ( Tableaux Economiques, 1758; ; Turgot (Ileflerions snr la Forma 
tion et la Distribution des Eichesses, 1774, opposed by (ialiani, Dialogues sur le. 
Commerce des Bles} and others, on the other side by the Communists such as 
Morelly (Code de la Nature, 1755), and Mably, the brother of Condillac (De 
la Legislation ou Principes des Lois, 1776. 

The most notable figure of the French Enlightenment was Jean Jacques 
Rousseau (born, 1712, in Geneva, died, 1778, in Ermenonville after an adven 
turous life, which toward the end was troubled by melancholy and hallucinations 
of persecution). His main writings aside from the autobiographical Confes 
sions [tr., Lond. 1876] are Disc. ours sur les Sciences et les Arts (1750), Dis- 
cours sur V Origine et les Fondemens de V Inegalite parmi les Hommes (1773), 
La Nouvelle Heloise (1761), Emile ou sur V Education (1762) [abr. tr., Boston, 
1885], Du Contrat Social (1762). Cf. F. Brockerhoff, 7?., sein Leben und seine 
Werke (Leips. 1863 and 1874) ; E. Feuerlein in " De r Gedanke. " (Berlin, 1866) ; 
L. Moreau, J. J. E. et le Siecle Philosophique (Paris, 1870) ; J. Morley, J. J. E. 
(Lond. 1873) ; K. Fester, E. und die, deutsche Geschichtsphilosophie (Stuttgart, 

The philosophical theory of the Revolution was developed chiefly by 

1890) ; [E. Caird, Jt. in Essays, Vol. I.]. 

Re 

Charles Francois de St. -Lambert (1716-1803 ; Principes des Mce.urs chez toutes 
les Nations ou Catechisme Universel, 1798), Const. Fr. Chassebceuf Comte de 
Volney (1757-1820; Les Euines, 1791; La Loi Naturelle ou Principes Phy 
siques de la Morale, deduits de V Organisation de V Homme et de V Univers ou 
Catechisme du Citoyen Fran^ais, 1793), Marie Jean Ant. Nic. de Condorcet 
(1743-1794 ; Esquisse d un Tableau Historique du Progres de V Esprit llumain, 
1795), Dominique Garat (1749-1833; cf. Conte Ee.ndu des Seances des Ecoles 
Normales, II. 1-40). Cf. L. Ferraz, La Philosophic de la devolution (Paris, 
1890). 

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the many-sided founder of German philosophy, 
was born, 1646, in Leipsic, studied there and at Jena, received his degree in 
Altorf, and was then, through his acquaintance with Boyneburg, drawn into the 
diplomatic service of the Elector of Mayence. In this service, pursuing political 
and scientific plans of his own, he travelled as a member of an embassy to Paris 
and London, with an incidental visit to Spinoza in The Hague, and then entered 
the service of the court of Hanover and Brunswick as librarian and court his 
torian. In all these positions he was active in his public and diplomatic capacity 
in the interests of the German national spirit and of peace between the Confes 
sions. Later he lived at the court of the first Prussian Queen Sophie Charlotte, 
a Hanoverian princess, in Charlottenberg and Berlin, where the Academy was 
founded under his direction ; afterwards he lived for some time in Vienna, to 

444 Philosophy of the Enlightenment. [PART V. 

consult archives. Here he gave the stimulus for the foundation of an academy, 
a project which was later carried out, and the St. Petersburg Academy was also 
due to his influence. He died, 1716, at Hanover. The manifold nature of his 
activity, and the way in which his life was split up, is shown also in the fact that 
his scientific views are, for the most part, deposited only in fragmentary essays, 
and in an incredibly extensive correspondence. The best edition of his philo 
sophical writings is the most recent by C. J. Gerhardt, 7 vols. (Berlin, 1875-1*0). 
The metaphysical treatises have been cited above (p. 382). For his influence 
upon the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the following come chiefly into con 
sideration, aside from the correspondence with Bayle and Clarke : Essais de 
Theodicce sur la Bonte de Dieu, la Liberte de V Homme ft V Oriyine du Mai 
(Amsterdam, 1710), and the Nouveaux Essais sur VEntendement Humain, first 
published in 1765, by Raspe. Cf. G. E. Guhrauer, G. [V. Frhr. v. L. (Breslau, 
1842) ; E. Pfleiderer, L. als Patriot, Staatsmann und Bildungstrager (Leips. 
1870); art. L. in Ersch und Gruber s Enc., by W. Windelb and ; L. Feuer- 
bach, Darstellung, Entwicklung und Kritik der LSschen Phil. (Ansbach, 1844) ; 
E. Nourisson, La Philosophic d&lt;&gt; L. (Paris, 1860) ; L. Grote, L. und seine Zeit 
(Hanover, 1869) ; O. Caspar!, L s Philosophic (Leips. 1870) ; J. T. Merz, L. 
(Lond. 1884); [J. Dewey, Leibniz s New Exsays, Chicago, 1888; art. Leibniz 
in Enc. Brit., by Sorley ; P:ng. tr. of Imp. Phil. Works, by G. M. Duncan, New 
Haven, 1890 ; of the New Essays, by A. G. Langley, Lond. and N.Y. 1893]. 

Among the most influential " Enlighteners" in Germany was Leibniz s con 
temporary and fellow-countryman, Christian Thomasius (1655-1728; Einlei- 
tung zur Vernunftlehre, Ausf nhrung der Vernunftlehre, both in 1691 ; Einl. zur 
Sittenlehre, 1692 ; Ausfuhrung d. Sittenlehre, 1696 ; Fundamenta Juris Naturae 
et Gentium ex Sensu Communi Deducta, 1705 ; cf. A. Luden,&lt;7. Th., Berlin, 1805). 

The centre of scientific life in Germany during the eighteenth century was 
formed by the teaching and school of Christian Wolff. He was born, 1679, 
in Breslau, studied at Jena, was Privat-docent at Leipsic, and taught in Halle 
until he was driven away in 1723 at the instigation of his orthodox opponents ; 
he then became Professor at Marburg. In 1740 Frederick the Great called him 
back to Halle with great honour, and he was active there until his death in 
1754. He treated the entire compass of philosophy in Latin and German text 
books ; the latter all bear the title Vernunftige Gedanken [" Rational Thoughts," 
treating psychology, metaphysics, physics, physiology, botany, astronomy, 
ethics, politics, etc.] ; in detail: von den Kraften des menschlichen Verstandes, 
1712 ; von Gott, der Welt und der tfeele des Menschen, auch alien Dingen uber- 
haupt, 1719; von der Menschen Thun und Lassen, 1720; vom geseUschaftlichen 
Lcben der Menschen, 1721; von den Wirkungen der Natur, 1723; von den 
Absichten der nat iirlichen Dinye, 1724; von den Theilen der Menschen, Thiere, 
und Pflanzen, 1725. The Latin works, Philosophia Rationales sive Logica, 
1718; Philosophia Prima SIVP Ontologia, 1728; Cosmologin, 1731; Psycholo- 
gia Empirica, 1732; Eatioualis, 1734; The.ologia Naturalis, 1736; Philosophia 
Practica Universalis, 1738 ; Jus Natures, 1740 ff. ; Jus Gentium, 1749 ; Philo 
sophia Moralis, posthumously pub., 1756. Cf. K. G. Ludovici, Ausfdhrlicher 
Entwurfeiner volUtandigen Historic der Wolfschen Philosophic (Leips. 1736 ff.). 
Also VV. L. G. v. Eberstein, Versuch finer Geschichte der Log ik und Metaphysik 
bei den Deutschen von Leibniz an (Halle, 1799). 

Among the Wolffians may be named, perhaps, G. B. Bilfinger (1693-1750, 
Dilucidationes Philosophical de Deo, Anima Humana, Mundo, etc., 1725) ; 
M. Knutzen (died 1751; Ryxtema Causarum Kfficientium, 1746; cf. B. Erd- 
mann, M. Kn. und seine. Zeit. Leips. 1876) ; J. Chr. Gottsched (1700-1766; 
Erste Grande der gesammten WcHitiKisshe.it, 1734) ; Alex. Baumgarten (1714- 
1762; Metaphysira, 1739; ^Esthetica, 1750-58). 

As representatives of the geometrical method appear M. G. Hansch (1683- 
1752; Ars Inveniendi, 1727) and G. Ploucquet (1716-1790; cf. A. F. Bock, 
Sammlung von Schriftrn, welche dem logischen Calciil des Hernn P. betreffen, 
Frankfort and Leips/ 1766) ; as opponents of the same, Pierre Crousaz (J663- 
1/48; Logik, 1712 and 1724; Lehrc vom Schonen, 1712), Andreas Rudiger 
(1671-1731 ; De Sensu Veri et Falsi, 1709; Philosophia Synthetica, 1707) and 
Chr. A. Crusius (1712-1775 ; Entwurf der nothwendigen Vernunfticahrheiten, 
1745 ; Weg zur Geicissheit und Zuverliissigkeit der menschlichcn Erkenntniss, 
1747.) An eclectic intermediate position is taken by J. Fr. Budde (1667-1729 ; 

Philosophy of the Enlightenment. 445 

Institutional Philosophic Eclectics, 1705) and by the historians of philosophy,,!. J. 
Brucker and I). Tiedmann, and also by Joh. Lossius (Die physichen Ursachen 
des Wahren, 1775) and A. Platner (1744-1818 ; PhiloHOpMtche Aphorismen, 
1776 and 1782). 

Of more independent importance are J. H. Lambert (born, 1728, at Mtil- 
hausen, died, 1777, in Berlin ; Kosmoloyische Briefe, 1761 ; Neues Organon, 
1764; Architektonik, 1771) and Nic. Tetens (1730-1805; Philosophised e Ver- 
suche uber die Menschliche Natur und Hire Entwickluny, 1776 f. ; cf. Fr. Harms, 
Ueber die Psycholoyie des N. T., Berlin, 1887). Both stand in literary connec 
tion with Kant (cf. Tart VI. ch. 1), whose pre-critical writings belong like 
wise in this setting; these are principally Allgemeine Naturyeschichte. und 
Theorie des Himmels, 1755 ; Principiorum Primorum Coynitionis Metaphysical 
Nova Dilucidatio, 1755; Monadologia Physica, 1756; Die falsche Spitzfindig- 
ke.it der vier syllogistischen Fiyuren, 1762 ; Der einzig moyliche Beweisyrund 
zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes, 1763 ; Versuch. den Beyriff der nega- 
tiven Grossen in die Weltwcisheit einzuftihren, 1763 ; Ueber die Deutlichkrit der 
Grundsatze der natiirlichen Theologie und Moral, 1764 ; Beobachtunyen ilber 
das Gefnhl des Schonen und Erhabenen, 1764 ; Traume eines Geistersehers, 
erluutert durch Traume der Metaphysik, 1766 ; De Mundi Sensibilis atque 
Intelliyibilis Forma et Principiis, 1770. Cf. li. Zimmerman, Lambert der Vor- 
giinyer KanCs, 1879. [On Lambert and Tetens, cf. A. liiehl, Der philoso- 
phische Kriticismus, Leips. 1876. For the pre-critical writings of Kant, E. 
Caird, The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Glasgow, Lond., and N.Y. 
1889, Fischer s Kant; Cohen, Die systematischen Beyriffe in Kant s vorkrit- 
ischen tichriften, and the works cited in first par., p. 536.] 

Deism found a vigorous and instructive support in Germany among numer 
ous Wolfh ans, though nothing new in principle was added. Characteristic of 
this was the translation of the Bible by Lorens Schmidt. The standpoint of 
historical criticism of the biblical writings was maintained by Salomon Semler 
(1725-1791). The sharpest consequences of the deistic criticism were drawn 
by Samuel Reimarus (1699-1768; Abhandlunyen von den vornehmsten Wahr- 
heiten der nat tirlirhen Religion, 1754 ; Betrachtung uber die Triebe der Thiere, 
1760, especially his Schuizsrhrift fur die vernunftiyen Verehrer Gottes, 1767 
[not pub.], from which Leasing edited the " Woli enbiittler Fragmeiite," and, 
in more recent time, Dav. Fr. Strauss edited an extract, Leips. 1862). Joh. 
Chr. Edelmann was a Spinozistic free-thinker (1698-1767). Cf. K. Monckeberg, 
Iteimarus itnd Edelmann (Hamburg, 1867). 

The movement of the so-called Pietism, allied to Mysticism, which was 
begun by Spener (1635-1705), and carried forward with organising energy 
by Aug. Herm. Francke (1663-1727), had only an indirect influence upon phil 
osophy during this period ; at a still farther distance stand the more isolated 
members of mystic sects such as Gottfried Arnold (16H6-1714) and Conrad 
Dippel (1673-1734). 

Empirical psychology was represented among the Germans in the eigh 
teenth century by numerous names, comprehensive collections, text-books, and 
special investigations. There are Casimir von Creuz (1724-1770), Joh. Gottl. 
Krtiger (Versnch einer experimentalen Seelenlehre, 1756), J. J. Hentsch (] er- 
such i (ber die Folge der Veranderung der Seele, 1726), J. Fr. Weiss (De. \atura 
Animi et Potissimum Cordis Humcmi, 1761), Fr. v. Irwing (Erfahrungen 
und U nter suchuny en uber den Menschen, 1777 ff. ) et al. The Magazin zur 
Erfahrnngsseelenli-hre," edited by Moritz (1785-1793), formed a place for col 
lecting contributions to this favourite science. Further literature in K. Fortlage, 
System der Psycholoyie, I. 42 f . 

A theory of art upon the basis of empirical psychology is found in Baum- 
garten s pupil, G. Fr. Meier (1718-1777), and especially in Joh. Georg Sul- 
zer (1720-1779 ; Theorie der angenehmen Empjindungen, 1762 ; Vermischte 
Schriften, 1773 ff. ; Allgemeine Theorie der schonen Kunste, 1771-1774, a 
lexicon of esthetics). 

Of the Popular Philosophers may be mentioned Moses Mendelssohn 
(1729-1786 ; Briefe uber die Empfindunyen, 1755 ; Ueber die Evidenz in den 
Mftuphysischen Wissenschaften, 1764; Phcedon, 1767; Mnryenstunden, 1785; 
Ff r*e,ed. by Brasch, Leips. 1881), the book-dealt- Fr. Nicolai (1733-1811), 
who published successively the Bibliothek der schonen Wissenschaften, the 

446 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PART V. 

Briefe die neueste deutsche Literatur betreffend, the Allgemeine deutschc Biblio- 
tkek;, and the Neue Allgemeine deutsche, Bibliothek ; further.!. Aug. Eberhard 
(1738-1809), Joh. Bernh. Basedow (1723-1790), Thomas Abbt (1738-170(5), 
Joh. Jac. Engel (1741-1802; editor of the Philosoph fur die Welt}, J. J. H. 
Feder (1740-1821), Chr. Meiners (1747-1810), Chr. Garve (1742-1798). 

A highly interesting position personally is occupied by Frederick the Great, 
the Philosopher of Sanssouci. On him, cf . Ed. Zeller, Fr. d. Gr. als. Philosoph 
(Berlin, 1886). 

Of Leasing s writings those of chief importance for the history of philosophy 
are the Hamburger Dramaturgic, the Erziehung des menschen Geschlechtx, 
the Wolfenbuttler Fragmente, and the theological controversial writings. Cf. 
Rob. Zimmerman, Leibniz und Lessing (titudien uud Kritiken, I. 126 ff.) ; 
E. Zirngiebl, Der Jacobi-Mendelssohn l sche Streit iiber Lessing s Spinozismus 
(Munich, 1861) ; C. Hebler, Lessing- Studien (Bern, 1862) ; W. Dilthey (Preuss. 
Jahrb. 1879). [Kng. tr. of the Ham. Dram, and Education of Human Race 
in Bohn Lib.; of Laoccoon, by Phillimore, Lond. 1875 ; cf. Sime, Lessing, Loud. 
1873, 1879.] 

Among Herder s writings belong in this period, Ueber den Ursprung der 
Sprache, 1772; Auch eine Philosophic der Geschichte der Menschheit, 1774; 
Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele, 1778 ; Ideen zur 
Philosophic der Geschichte der Menschheit, 1784 ff. [Eng. tr., Lond. 1800]; 
Gott, Gesprache uber Spinoza s System, 1787 ; Briefe zur Beforderung der 
Humanitat, 1793 ff. (on his later philosophical literary activity, cf. below, Part 
VI. ch. 2). Cf. R. Haym, H. nach seinem Leben und seinen Werken (Berlin, 
1877-85) ; E. Melzer, H. als Geschichtsphilosoph (Neisse, 1872) ; M. Kronen- 
berg, H. s Philosophic (Heidi. 1889) [art. Herder in Enc. Brit, by J. Sully]. 

Cf. also J. Witte, Die Philosophie unserer Dichterheroen (Bonn, 1880). 

CHAPTER I. 

THE THEORETICAL QUESTIONS. 

"THE proper study of mankind is man." This word of Pope s 
is characteristic of the whole philosophy of the Enlightenment, not 
only in the practical sense that this philosophy finds the ultimate 
end of all scientific investigation to be always man s " happiness," 
but also, in the theoretical point of view, in so far as this philosophy, 
as a whole, aims to base all knowledge upon the observation of the 
actual processes of the psychical life. After Locke had set up the 
principle, 1 that prior to all metaphysical considerations and contro 
versies the general question must be decided of how far human 
insight reaches, and that this in turn is possible only by exact exhi 
bition of the sources from which knowledge derives, and of the 
course of development by which it is brought about, from that 
time epistemology, the theory of knowledge, was brought into the 
front rank of philosophical interests, and at the same time empirical 
psychology was recognised as the authoritative and decisive court of 
last resort for epistemology. The legitimate reach of human ideas 
should be judged by the way in which they arise. Thus experiential 
psychology with all the tacit assumptions which are customary in 
it becomes at once the basis of the whole philosophical view of the 
world, and the favourite science of the age, and is at the same time 
the instrument of mediation between science and general literature. 
As in this latter field, the predominant characteristic among both 
Englishmen and Germans was that of depicting minds and reflect 
ing or viewing one s self in the literary looking-glass, so philosophy 
should draw only the image of man and of the activities of his con 
sciousness. Societies for the "observation of man" were founded, 
all sorts of dilettante accounts of remarkable experiences were gar 
nered in large " magazines," and the government of the French 
Republic in its official system of instruction, 2 replaced "philoso 
phy " by the sounding title, "Analyse de 1 entendement humain." 

1 Introduction to the Essay. Cf. M. Drobisch, Locke, Der Vorldufer Kant s 
(Zeitxchr. f. exacte Philosophic, 18(il). 

2 Cf. the highly amusing Seances des ficoles Normal, first year. 

447 

448 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PAHT V. 

While accordingly among the theoretical questions of the Enlight 
enment philosophy, those as to the origin, development, and know 
ing power of human ideas stood uppermost, these were from the 
beginning placed beneath the presupposition of popular metaphysics, 
viz. that of naive realism. There, " without," is a world of things, 
of bodies or of who knows what else, and here is a mind which is 
to know them. How do the ideas, which reproduce within the mind 
that world of things, get into it ? This way of stating the problem 
of knowledge, which is like that of the ancient Greeks, controls the 
theoretical philosophy of the eighteenth century completely, and 
attains in it both most perfect formulation and decisive disintegra 
tion. Just in this respect the Cartesian metaphysics with its dualism 
of conscious and corporeal substances takes a controlling position 
through the entire age of the Enlightenment, and the popular 
empirical mode of expression in which it was presented by Locke, 
made this author the leader of the new movement. The methodical 
and metaphysical considerations which had reached a great develop 
ment, and one full of character in Descartes important disciples, 
were now translated into the language of empirical psychology, and 
so arranged for the comprehension of the ordinary mind. 

In connection with this, however, the terminism which was in 
herent in all modern philosophy, and which had been fostered 
especially in England (Hobbes), forced its way victoriously to the 
surface ; the qualitative separation of the content and forms of 
consciousness from the " outer world," to which alone they were 
nevertheless held to relate, was carried farther and deeper, step by 
step, until it at last reached its extreme consequence in Hume s 
positivism. To the scientific dissolution which metaphysics thus 
experienced, corresponded in turn a popularly practical and preten 
tiously modest turning away from all speculation of more than 
ordinary refinement, or an all the more express profession of 
adherence to the truths of sound common sense. 

Whatever metaphysical interest remained vigorous in the En 
lightenment literature attached itself to the religious consciousness 
and to those endeavours which hoped to attain out of the strife of 
religious Confessions to a universal and rational conviction. In the 
deism which extended over Europe from the English free-thinking 
movement, the positive views of the world and of life of the En 
lightenment period became concentrated, and while these convic 
tions at the outset developed out of the connection with the natural 
science metaphysics of the preceding century, and in consequence 
of this devoted an especially lively interest to the problems of 
teleology, they became shifted with time more and more from the 

CHAP. 1, 33.] Innate Ideas : Cambridge Platonists. 449 

metaphysical to the moral, from the theoretical to the practical 
domain. 

33. Innate Ideas. 

With regard to the question as to the origin of ideas the philoso 
phy of the Enlightenment found already in the field the sharply 
pronounced antithesis of Sensualism and Rationalism. 

1. The first of these had been defended by Hobbes on the theo 
retical as also upon the practical domain, inasmuch as he held man, 
in so far as he is an object of scientific knowledge, to be an entirely 
sensuous being, bound to the sensations and impulses of the body. 
All ideas, in his view, have their origin in the activity of the senses, 
and the mechanism of association was held to explain the arising of 
all other psychical structures from these beginnings. Such doctrines 
seemed to bring in question the super-sensuous dignity of man, and 
that not only in the eyes of the orthodox opponents of Hobbes ; the 
same motive determined the Neo-Platonists also to lively opposi 
tion. Cudworth especially had distinguished himself in this respect ; 
in his combating of atheism 1 he had Hobbes in mind as one of his 
main opponents, and in opposition to the doctrine that all human 
ideas arise from the operation of the outer world upon the mind, 
he appeals especially to mathematical conceptions. The corporeal 
phenomena never completely correspond to these ; the most we can 
sav is that they resemble them. 2 In treating the conception of God, 
on the other hand, he lays claim to the argument of the consensus 
gentium, and carries it out 3 in most extensive manner to show that 
this idea is innate. In like manner, Herbert of Cherbury had already 
grounded all the main doctrines of natural religion and morals by 
the aid of the Stoic and Ciceronian doctrine of the communes notitice. 

The doctrine of innate ideas was conceived in a somewhat differ 
ent sense by Descartes 4 and his disciples. Here the psychological 
question as to the origin of ideas was less in mind, although this 
question, too, at a decisive passage in the Meditations (Med. III.) 
received the answer that the innateness of the idea of God was 
to be conceived of as a sign which the creator had imprinted upon 
his creature ; but on the whole the great metaphysician had laid 
more weight upon the point that the criterion of innateness consists 
in immediate evidence or certainty. Hence he had finally extended 
the designation (almost stripped of the psychological meaning be- 

1 In the Systema fnti Hi &lt;-fn&lt;tlt . especially at the close, V. f&gt;, 28 ff. 

2 Ih. V. 1, 108 ff. (p. .tor, ff. Mosh. ). 

8 The whole fourth chapter is devoted to this task. 

4 Cf. E. Grimm, l)i x&lt;-nri&lt;&gt;.S /./Vuv r,m &lt;/i ii ni/i/i /ntrenen Ideen, Jena, 1873. 

450 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PARTY. 

longing to it at the outset) of the Latin idece innatce to all that 
lumine naturali dare et distincte percipitur. Direct assent had been 
adduced by Herbert of Cherbury also as the characteristic mark of 
innate ideas. 1 

2. Locke s polemical attitude toward the maintenance of innate 
ideas has, indeed, an epistemological purpose, but is really deter 
mined only by the psycho-genetic point of view. He asks primarily 
only whether the soul at its birth brings complete knowledge into 
the world with it, and finds this question deserving of a negative 
answer. 2 In consequence of this the development of the thesis 
"No innate principles in the mind" in the first book of Locke s 
Essay is directed less against Descartes than against the English 
Neo-Platonists. 3 It combats first of all the consensus gentium, by an 
appeal to the experience of the nursery and of ethnology ; it finds 
that neither theoretical nor practical principles are universally 
known or acknowledged. Nor does it except from this demonstra 
tion (with an express turn against Herbert) even the idea of God, 
since this is not only very different among different men, but is even 
entirely lacking with some. Nor does Locke allow the evasion 
suggested by Henry More,* that innate ideas might be contained in 
the soul not actually, but implicitly : this could only mean, accord 
ing to Locke, that the soul is capable of forming and approving 
them, a mark which would then hold for all ideas. The imme 
diate assent, finally, which was held to characterise that which is 
innate, does not apply in the case of the most general abstract 
truths, just where it is wanted ; and where this immediate assent 
is found it rests upon the fact that the meaning of the words and of 
their connection has been already apprehended at an earlier time. 5 

Thus the soul is again stripped of all its original possessions : at 
birth it is like an unwritten sheet (cf. p. 203), white paper void 
of all characters. 6 In order to prove this positively, Locke then 
pledges himself to show that all our "ideas" 7 arise from experience. 
Here he distinguishes simple and complex ideas in the assumption 
that the latter arise out of the former : for the simple ideas, how- 

1 De Ventate (1656), p. 76. 

2 In which, moreover, Descartes completely agreed with him, for it was Des 
cartes opinion also that it was not to be assumed that the mind of the child 
pursues metaphysics in its mother s womb. Op. (C.) VIII. 269. 

8 Cf. (and also for the following) G. Geil, Die Abhangigkeit Locke s von 
Descartes (Strassburg, 1887). 

* H. More, Antidot. adv. Ath. I. 3 and 7, and Locke, I. 2, 22. Cf. Geil, op. 
cit., p. 49. 

5 Locke, I. 2, 23 f. 6 Ib . n. j f 2 . 

7 The term " idea" had lost its Platonic sense already in later Scholasticism 
and taken on the more general meaning of any mental modification whatever 
( Vorstellung) . 

CHAP. 1, 33.] Innate Ideas : Locke. 451 

ever, he announces two different sources : sensation and reflection, 
outer and inner perception. Under sensation he understands the 
ideas of the corporeal world, brought about by the medium of the 
bodily senses ; under reflection, on the other hand, the knowledge 
of the activities of the soul itself called out by the above process. 
Psycho-genetically, therefore, these two kinds of perception are so 
related that sensation is the occasion and the presupposition for 
reflection, as regards their matter or content the relation is, that 
all content of ideas arises from sensation, while reflection, on the 
contrary, contains the consciousness of the functions performed in 
connection with this content. 

3. To these functions, however, belonged also all those by means 
of which the combination of the elements of consciousness into 
complex ideas takes place, i.e. all processes of thought. And here 
Locke left the relation of the intellectual activities to their original 
sensuous contents in a popular indefiniteness which gave occasion 
to the most various re-shapings of his teaching soon after. For, on 
the one hand, those activities appear as the "faculties " of the mind, 
which in reflection becomes conscious of these its own modes of 
functioning (as for example, the capacity of having ideas itself, 1 
" perception," is treated as the most original fact of reflection, to 
understand which every one is sent to his own experience) ; on the 
other hand, the mind, even in these relating activities, such as 
recollecting, distinguishing, comparing, connecting, etc., is regarded 
throughout as passive and bound to the content of the sensation. 
Hence it was possible for the most various views to develop out of 
Locke s doctrine, according to the varying degree of self-activity 
which was ascribed to the mind in its process of connecting its 
ideas. 

Of particular interest in this connection, by reason of the problems 
of epistemology and metaphysics derived from the Middle Ages, was 
the development of the abstract ideas out of the data; "of sensation. 
Like the greater part of English philosophers, Locke was an ad 
herent of Nominalism, which professed to see in general concepts 
nothing but internal, intellectual structures. In explaining these 
general ideas, however, Locke made more account of the co-opera 
tion of "signs," and in particular of language. Signs or words, 
when attached more or less arbitrarily to particular parts of ideas, 
make it possible to lay special stress upon these parts and bring 
them out from their original complexes, and thereby render possible 
the farther functions by which such isolated and fixed contents of 

1 Essay, II. 9, 1 f. 

452 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PART V 

consciousness are put into logical relations to one another. 1 Hence 
for Locke, as formerly for the Epicureans, and then for the Ter- 
minists, logic was coincident with the science of signs, semiotics. 11 
By this means room was gained for a demonstrative science of con 
ceptions and for all abstract operations of the knowing mind, quite 
in the spirit of Occam, in spite of the sensualistic basis upon which 
all content of ideas was held to rest. None of these determinations 
were philosophically new, lior has their exposition in Locke any 
originality or independent power of thought : it is, however, smooth 
and simple, of agreeable transparency and easy to understand; it 
despises all scholastic form and learned terminology, glides skilfully 
over and away from all deeper problems, and thus made its author 
one of the most extensively read and influential writers in the history 
of philosophy. 

4. Strongly as Locke had emphasised the independent existence 
of inner experience by the side of the outer (as followed from his 
metaphysical attachment to Descartes, on which see below, 34, 1), 
he yet made the dependence of reflection upon sensation, as regards 
origin and content, so strong that it proved the decisive factor in 
the development of his doctrine. This transformation to complete 
sensualism proceeded along different paths. 

In the epistemological and metaphysical development of Nomi 
nalism this transformation led with Locke s English successors to 
extreme consequences. Berkeley 3 not only declared the doctrine of 
the Reality of abstract conceptions to be the most extraordinary of 
all errors in metaphysics, but also like the extreme Nominalists 
of the Middle Ages denied the existence of abstract ideas within 
the mind itself. The illusory appearance of such ideas arises from 
the use of words as general terms ; but in truth, even in connection 
with such a word, we always think merely the sensuous idea, or the 
group of sensuous ideas, which at the beginning gave rise to that 
term. Every attempt to think the abstract alone shatters upon the 
sensuous idea, which always remains as the sole content of intellectual 
activity. For even the remembered ideas and partial ideas which 
can be separated out, have no other content than the original sense- 

1 The development of these logical relations between the ideational contents 
which have been singled out and fixed by means of the verbal signs, appears 
with Locke, under the name of the lumen naturale. Descartes had understood 
by this as well intuitive as also demonstrative knowledge, and had set all this 
natural knowing activity over against revelation ; Locke, who treats the intuitive 
with terministic reserve (cf. 34, 1), restricts the signification of the " light of 
nature " to the logical operations and to the consciousness of the principles 
which obtain in these, according to the nature of the thinking faculty. 

2 Essay, IV. 21, 4. 

8 Princ. of Human Knowledge, 5 ff. 

CHAP. 1, 33.] Innate Ideas : Berkeley, Hume. 453 

impressions, because an idea can never copy anything else than 
another idea. Abstract ideas, therefore, are a fiction of the schools ; 
in the actual activity of thought none but sensuous particular ideas 
exist, and some of these can stand for or represent others similar to 
them, on account of being designated by the same term. 

Daviil Hume adopted this doctrine in its full extent, and on the 
ground of this substituted for Locke s distinction of outer and inner 
perception another antithesis with altered terminology, viz. that 
of the original and the copied. A content of consciousness is either 
original or the copy of an original, either an " impression" or an 
" idea" All ideas, therefore, are copies of impressions, and there 
is 110 idea that has come into existence otherwise than by being a 
copy of an impression, or that has any other content than that 
which it has received from its corresponding impression. It ap 
peared, therefore, to be the task of philosophy to seek out the orig 
inal for even the apparently most abstract conceptions in some 
impression, and thereby to estimate the value for knowledge which 
the abstract conception has. To be sure, Hume understood by im 
pressions by no means merely the elements of outer experience; 
he meant also those of inner experience. It was, therefore, accord 
ing to Locke s mode of expression, the simple ideas of sensation 
and reflection which he declared to be impressions, and the wide 
vision of a great thinker prevented him from falling into a short 
sighted sensualism. 

5. A development of another sort, which yet led to a related goal, 
took place in connection with the aid of physiological psychology. 
Locke had only thought of sensation as dependent upon the activity 
of the bodily senses, but had regarded the elaboration of sensation 
in the functions underlying reflection as a work of the mind ; and 
though he avoided the question as to immaterial substance, he had 
throughout treated the intellectual activities in the narrower sense 
as something incorporeal and independent of the body. That this 
should be otherwise regarded, that thinkers should begin to consider 
the physical organism as the bearer or agent not only of the simple 
ideas, but also of their combination, was easily possible in view of 
the indecisive ambiguity of the Lockian doctrines, but was still 
more called out by one-sided conclusions drawn from Cartesian and 
Spinosittic theories. 

Descartes, namely, had treated the whole psychical life of the 
animal as a mechanical process of the nervous system, while he had 
ascribed the human psychical life -to the immaterial substance, the 
res cogitans. The more evident the completely sensuous nature of 
human ideation now seemed in consequence of Locke s investigation, 

454 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PART V. 

the nearer lay the question whether it was possible to maintain the 
position, that the same processes which in the animal seemed capa 
ble of being understood as nervous processes, should be traced back 
in the case of man to the activity of an immaterial psychical sub 
stance. From another side, Spinoza s parallelism of the attributes 
worked in the same direction (cf. above, 31, 9). According to 
this view a process in the bodily life corresponds to every process of 
the psychical life, without either process being the cause of the 
other, or one process being the original and the other the derived. 
(Such, at least, was the thought of the philosopher himself.) This 
had now been conceived of at first by its opponents as materialism, 
as if Spinoza meant that the fundamental process was the bodily, 
and the psychical process only its accompanying phenomenon. But 
among its adherents also, both physicians and natural scientists, 
such as the influential Boerhave of Leyden, a mode of thought in 
clining strongly toward materialism soon substituted itself for the 
master s doctrine. This took place in connection with the expe 
riences of experimental physiology which, following Descartes 
stimulus, employed itself largely with a study of reflex movements. 

It is interesting that the consequences of these combinations of 
thought appeared in literary form first in Germany. Here as early 
as 1697 a physician named Pancratius Wolff taught in his Cogita- 
tiones Medico-leg ales that thoughts are mechanical activities of the 
human body, especially of the brain, and in the year 1713 appeared 
the anonymous Correspondence concerning the Nature of the Soul 
(Briefwechsel vom Wesen der /Seele), 1 in which, screened by .pious 
refutations, the doctrines of Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes are car 
ried out to an anthropological materialism. A distinction of degree 
only is recognised between the psychical life of the animal and that 
of man ; ideas and activities of the will are without exception re 
garded as functions of excited nerve-fibres, and practice and educa 
tion are given as the means by which the higher position of man 
is reached and maintained. 

In England the procedure was more cautious. In a way similar 
to that in which Locke had carried out the Baconian programme, men 
now studied primarily the internal mechanism of the psychical activ 
ities, and the development of the higher out of the elementary states 
according to purely psychological laws : such was the work of Peter 
Brown in the epistemological field, and that of others upon the 
domain of the activities of the will. In the same manner proceeded 

1 Of which Lange gives an account, Gesch. des Mat., I. 319 ff. (2d ed. [Eng. 
tr., History of Materialism, II. 37 ff.] ). 

CHAP. 1, 33.] Innate Ideas : Hartley, Lamettrie. 455 

David Hartley also, who brought into common use the expression 
association 1 (which had already been used before this) for the com 
binations and relations which arise between the elements. He wished 
to conceive these relations, which he analysed with all the care of a 
natural scientist, solely as psychical processes, and held fast to their 
complete incomparableness with material processes, even with the 
most delicate forms of corporeal motion. But he was also a physi 
cian, and the connection of the mental life with the states of the 
body was so clear to him that he made the constant correspondence 
of the two and the mutual relationship of ;the psychical functions 
and the nervous excitations, which, at that time, were termed " vibra 
tions," 2 the main subject-matter of his psychology of association. 
In this work he held fast to the qualitative difference between the 
two parallel series of phenomena and left the metaphysical question, 
as to the substance lying at their basis, undecided: but with refer 
ence to causality he fell insensibly into materialism, in that he con 
ceived of the mechanism of the nervous states as ultimately the 
primary event, and that of the psychical activities as only the phe 
nomenon accompanying this event. To simple nervous excitations 
correspond simple sensations or desires ; to complex, complex. This 
scientific theory, to be sure, involved him in serious contradictions 
with his pious faith, and the "Observations" show how earnestly 
and fruitlessly he struggled between the two. Quite the same is 
true of Priestley, who even made the farther concession to material 
ism of letting fall the heterogeneity between the psychical and 
bodily processes, and desiring to replace psychology completely by 
nerve physiology. On this account he also abandoned entirely the 
standpoint of inner experience defended by the Scots, but at the 
same time desired to unite with his system the warmly supported 
conviction of a teleological deism. 

Anthropological materialism was worked out in its baldest form 
by the Frenchman, Lamettrie. Convinced by medical observations 
upon himself and others of the complete dependence of the mind 
upon the body, he studied the mechanism of life in animals and men, 
following Boerhave s suggestions, and Descartes conception of the 
former seemed to him completely applicable to the latter also. The 
distinction between the two, which is only one of degree, permits 
for human psychical activities also no other explanation than that 
they are mechanical functions of the brain. On this account it is 

1 In the later, especially the Scottish literature, and in particular with Thomas 
Brown, the expression "association" is often replaced by suggestion. 

2 Instead of this term Erasmus Darwin introduced the expression, " motions 
of the sensorium." 

456 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PART V. 

an encroachment of metaphysics to ascribe to the "mind" a sub 
stantiality of its own in addition to that of matter. The conception 
of matter as that of a body which is in itself dead and needs mind 
or spirit as its moving principle, is an arbitrary and false abstrac 
tion : experience shows that matter moves itself and lives. It is 
just Descartes mechanics which has proved this, says Lamettrie, 
and therefore the inevitable consequence of this mechanics is mate 
rialism. And that all psychical life is only one of the functions of 
the body, is evident from the fact that not a single content is found 
in the mental life which is not due to the excitation of some one of 
the senses. If we think of a man as the Church Father Arnobius 
proposed, so writes Lamettrie, 1 to establish his sensualism which 
had developed from Locke, who from his birth on had been excluded 
from all connection with his kind, and restricted to the experience 
of a few senses, we should find in him no other ideational contents 
than those brought to him through just these senses. 

6. Less important in principle, but all the more widely extended 
in the literary world, were the other re-shapings which Locke s 
doctrine experienced in France. Voltaire, who domesticated it 
among his countrymen by his Lettres sur les Anglais, gave it a com 
pletely sensualistic stamp, and even showed himself though with 
sceptical reserve not disinclined to entrust to the Creator the 
power of providing the I, which is a corporeal body, with the 
capacity of thinking also. This sceptical sensualism became 
the fundamental note of the French Enlightenment. 2 Condillac, 
who at the beginning had only expounded Locke s doctrine and 
defended it against other systems, professed his adherence to this 
sceptical sensualism in his influential Traite des Sensations. 
Whatever the mind may be, the content of its conscious activities 
is derived solely from sense-perception. Condillac develops the 
theory of associational psychology in connection with the fiction 
of a statue, which, equipped only with capacity of sensation, receives 
one after another the excitations of the different senses which are 
added to it, and by this means gradually unfolds an intellectual 
life like that of man. Here the fundamental idea is that the mere 
co-existence of different sensations in the same consciousness brings 
with it of itself the sensation of their relation to each other and to the 

1 At the close of the Histoire Naturelle de VAme. Cf. also above, p. 225, 
note 1. 

2 The same mode of thought asserts itself also in the beginnings of aesthetic 
criticism in the form of the principle that the essence of all art consists in the 
"imitation of beautiful Nature." The type of this conception was E. Batteux 
(171:5-1780) with his treatise, Les Beaux Arts rcduits a un meme Principe 
(1740). 

CHAP. 1, 33.] Innate Ideas : Condillac, Diderot. 457 

object or the self. In accordance with this principle the process is 
depicted by which all the manifold psychical activities become 
unfolded out of perception : in the theoretical series, by virtue of the 
differences in intensity and in repetition of sensations, there grow 
successively attention, recognising recollection, distinction, com 
parison, judgment, inference, imagination, and expectation of the 
future ; and finally with the help of signs, especially those of 
language, arise abstraction and the grasping of general principles. 
But in addition to sensation, perception has also the feeling-element 
of pleasure and pain, and out of this, in connection with the move 
ment of ideas, develop desire, love and hate, hope, fear, 1 and as 
the result of all such changes of the practical consciousness 
finally, the moral will. So knowledge and morality grow upon the 
soil of the sensibility. 

This systematic construction had great success. The systematic 
impulse, which was repressed in the metaphysical field (cf. 34, 7), 
threw itself with all the greater energy upon this "analysis of the 
human mind " as a substitute ; and as Condillac himself had already 
woven many acute observations into his exposition of the develop 
ment process, so a whole throng of adherents found opportunity to 
take part in the completion of this structure by slight changes and 
shiftings of the phases, by innovations in nomenclature and by 
more or less valuable deductions. The Government of the Revolu 
tion recognised as philosophy only this study of the empirical 
development of intelligence, and Destutt de Tracy gave it later the 
name "Ideology." 2 So it came about that at the beginning of our 
century philosophers were in France usually called ideologists. 

7. With reference to the nature of the mind in which these trans 
formations of sensation (sentir) were held to take place, a great part 
of the ideologists remained by Condillac s positivistic reserve ; others 
went on from Voltaire s problematical to Lamettrie s assertive mate 
rialism, at first, in Hartley s fashion emphasising the thorough 
going dependence of combinations of ideas upon nervous processes, 
then with express maintenance of the materiality of the psychical 
activities. This development is most clearly to be seen in the case 
of Diderot. He set out from the position of Shaftesbury and Locke, 
but the sensualistic literature became more potent from step to step 

1 In the development of the practical series of conscious acts, the influence of 
I)psc;irt. s and Spinoza s theory of the emotions and passions asserted itself 
with Condillac and his disciples, as also in part among the English associa- 
tional psychologists. 

2 It is not impossible that this nomenclature in case of de Tracy was intended 
to be the counterpart to Fichte s " VVissenschaftslehre," Science of Knowl 
edge (cf. below, Tart VI. ch. 2). 

458 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PART V. 

in the Editor of the Encyclopaedia ; he followed up the hypotheses 
of hylozoism 1 (cf. below, 34, 9), and finally took part in the com 
position of the Systeme de la Nature. This work set forth the 
human psychical activities within the framework of its metaphysics 
as the fine invisible motions of the nerves, and treated their genetic 
process just as Lamettrie had done. Among the later ideologists 
Cabanis is prominent in this respect by the newness of his physio 
logical point of view ; he takes account of the progress of natural 
science in so far as to seek the conditions of the nerves, to which 
man s psychical states (le moral) must be referred, no longer merely 
in mechanical motions, but in chemical changes. Ideation is the 
secretion of the brain, just as other secretions are produced by other 
organs. 

In opposition to this, another line of ideology held fast to Locke s 
principle that all content of ideas may indeed be due to the senses, 
but that in the functions directed toward combining such content 
the peculiar character of the mind s nature shows itself. The leader 
of this line of thought was Bonnet. He, too, in a manner similar to 
that of Condillac, adopts the mode of consideration commended by 
Lamettrie, adverting to Arnobius, but he is much too well-schooled 
as an investigator of Nature to fail to see that sensation can never 
be resolved into elements of motion, that its relation to physical 
states is synthetic, but not analytic. Hence he sees in the mechanism 
of the nervous system only the causa occasionalis for the spontaneous 
reaction of the mind, and the substantiality of the mind seems to him 
to be proved by the unity of consciousness. He connects with this 
theory all sorts of fantastic hypotheses. 2 Keligious ideas speak in 
his assumption of the immaterial mind-substance, but sensualism 
admits an activity of this substance only in connection with the 
body ; for this reason, in order to explain immortality and the un 
interrupted activity of the mind, Bonnet helps himself by the 
hypothesis of an sethereal body which is joined essentially with the 
soul and takes on a coarser material external organism, according to 
its dwelling-place in each particular case. 

This union of sensualism with the maintenance of self-subsistent 
substantiality and capacity of reaction on the part of the mind 
passed over to Bonnet s countryman, Rousseau, who combated with 
its aid the psychological theories of the Encyclopaedists. He found 
that this characteristic quality of the mind, the unity of its function, 
evinces itself in feeling (sentiment), and opposed this original natu- 

1 The decisive transition-writing is d Alemberf s Dream. 

2 In the Palingenesies Philosophiques. 

CHAP. 1, 33.] Innate Ideas : Bonnet, Rousseau, Reid. 459 

ralness of its essence to the cold and indifferent mechanism of ideas, 
which would debase the mind to an unconditional dependence upon 
the outer world. The feeling of individuality rebelled with him 
against a doctrine according to which there is nothing in man s 
consciousness but the play, as if upon an indifferent stage, of a mass 
of foreign contents accidentally coming together, which unite and 
then separate again. He wished to bring out the thought that it is 
not the case that the mental life merely takes place within us, but 
that it is rather true that we are ourselves present as actively deter 
mining personalities. This conviction dictated Rousseau s opposi 
tion to the intellectualistic Enlightenment, which in the sensualism 
of Condillac and of the Encyclopaedists wished to regard man s inner 
life as only a mechanical product of sensational elements excited 
from without : to psychological atomism Rousseau opposes the 
principle of the Monadology. 

In the same manner, and perhaps not without influence from 
Rousseau in his arguments, St. Martin raised his voice against the 
prevailing system of Condillac ; he even came out of his mystical 
retreat to protest in the sessions of the Ecoles Normales 1 against 
the superficiality of sensualism. The ideologists, he says, talk a 
great deal about human nature ; but instead of observing it they 
devote their energies to put it together (composer). 

8. The Scottish philosophers are the psychological opponents of 
sensualism in all its forms. The common ground on which this 
contrast developed is that of psychology regarded as philosophy. 
For Reid, also, and his disciples seek the task of philosophy in the 
investigation of man and his mental capacities ; indeed, they fixed 
still more energetically and one-sidedly than the various schools of 
their opponents the methodical point of view that all philosophy 
must be empirical psychology. But this view of the human physi 
cal activity and its development is diametrically opposed to that 
of the sensualists. The latter hold the simple, the former the com 
plex, the latter the individual ideas, the former the judgments, the 
latter the sensuous, the former the internal, the latter the particular, 
the former the general, to be the original content of the mind s 
activity. Reid acknowledges that Berkeley s idealism and Hume s 
scepticism are as correct consequences from Locke s principle as is 
Hartley s materialism ; but just the absurdity of these consequences 
refutes the principle. 

In opposition to this, Reid will now apply the Baconian method 
of induction to the facts of inner perception in order to attain by an 

* Seances des tic. Norm., III. 61 ff. 

460 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PART V. 

analysis of these to the original truths, which are given from the 
beginning in connection with the nature of the human mind, and 
which assert themselves in the development of its activities as 
determining principles. Thus, putting aside all help of physiology, 
the fundamental science psychology shall be perfected as a kind of 
natural science of inner observation. In the solution of this task, 
Reid himself, and after him especially Dugald Stewart, develop a 
considerable breadth and comprehensiveness of vision in the appre 
hension of the inner processes and a great acuteness in the analysis 
of their essential content : a multitude of valuable observations on 
the genetic processes of the mental life is contained in their exten 
sive investigations. And yet these investigations lack in fruitful- 
ness of ideas as well as in energetically comprehensive cogency. 
For they everywhere confuse the demonstration of that which can 
be discovered as universally valid content in the psychical func 
tions, with the assumption that this is also genetically the original 
and determining : and since this philosophy has no other principle 
than that of psychological fact, it regards without criticism all that 
can in this manner be demonstrated to be actual content of mental 
activity, as self-evident truth. The sum-total of these principles is 
designated as common sense, and as such is held to form the supreme 
rule for all philosophical knowledge. 

9. In the philosophy of the German Enlightenment all these 
tendencies mingle with the after- workings of the Cartesian and 
Leibnizian rationalism. The twofold tendency in the method of 
this latter system had taken on a fixed systematic form through 
the agency of Christian Wolff". According to him, all subjects 
should be regarded both from the point of view of the eternal 
truths and from that of the contingent truths : for every province 
of reality there is a knowledge through conceptions and another 
through facts, an a priori science proceeding from the intellect and 
an a posteriori science arising from perception. These two sciences 
were to combine in the result in such a way that, for example, em 
pirical psychology must show the actual existence in fact of all 
those activities which, in rational psychology, were deduced from 
the metaphysical conception of the soul, and from the " faculties " 
resulting from this conception. On the other hand, following Leib 
niz s precedent, the distinction in value of the two modes of knowl 
edge was so far retained as to regard only the intellectual knowledge 
as clear and distinct insight, while empirical (or, as they said at 
that time, historical) knowledge was regarded as a more or less 
obscure and confused idea of things. 

Psychologically, the two kinds of knowledge were divided, in 

CHAP. 1, 33.] Innate Ideas: Wolff, Lambert. 461 

accordance with the Cartesian model, into the idem innatce and the 
idece adventitice. Yet Wolff himself, agreeably to the metaphysical 
direction of his thought, laid less weight upon the genetic element. 
But the opposite was the case with his adherents and opponents, 
who were already standing under the influence of the French and 
English theories. The general course of the development was that 
the importance which Leibniz and Wolff had conceded to empiricism 
was increased more and more by the penetration of the Lockian 
principles. The psychological method gained the preponderance 
over the metaphysico-ontological step by step, and within the psy 
chological method increasing concessions were made to sensualism, 
of such a nature that ultimately not only earnest men of science 
like liiidiger and Lossius, but especially a great part of the "popu 
lar philosophers " supported completely the doctrine that all human 
ideas arise from sense-perception. The motley and irregular series 
of stages in which this process completed itself has only a literary- 
historical interest, 1 because no new arguments came to light in con 
nection with it. 

Only one of these men used the psychologico-epistemological 
dualism which prevailed in the German philosophy of the Enlight 
enment, to make an original and fruitful turn. Heinrich Lambert, 
who was fully abreast of the natural science of his time, had 
grown into intelligent sympathy with the mathematico-logical 
method as completely as he had into an insight into the worth of 
experience : and in the phenomenology of his New Organon, in 
attempting to fix the limits for the psychological significance of 
these two elements of knowledge, he disposed the mixture of the 
a priori and a posteriori constituents requisite for knowing reality, 
in a way that led to the distinction of form and content in ideas. The 
content-elements of thought, he taught, can be given only by per 
ception : but their mode of connection, the form of relation which 
is thought between them, is not given from without, but is a proper 
activity of the mind. This distinction could be read out of Locke s 
ambiguous exposition : - but no one had conceived it so sharply and 
precisely from this point of view as Lambert. And this point of 
view was of great importance for the genetic consideration of the 
ideas of the human mind. It followed from it, that it was neither 
possible to derive the content from the mere form, nor the form of 
knowledge from the content. The first refuted the logical rational- 

1 Cf. W. Windelband, Gesch. d. neueren 1 hiloxophie, I. 53-55. 

2 Cf. the demonstration in G. Hartenstein, Locke s Lehre von der mensch- 
lichen Erkenntniss in Ve.rgle.ic.hung mit Leibniz 1 Krttik derselben (Leips. 
1861, Abhandl. d. sticks. Ges. d. Wissensch.). 

462 The Enlightenment: Theoretical Questions. [TAUT V. 

ism with which Wolff would spin all ontology and metaphysics out 
from the most general principles of logic, and ultimately from the 
one principle- of contradiction ; the other took the basis away from 
sensualism, which thought that with the contents of perception the 
knowledge also of their relations was immediately given. Out of 
this grew for the " improvement of metaphysics " the task of dis 
solving out these relating forms from the total mass of experience, 
and of making clear their relation to content. But Lambert sought 
in vain for a single unifying principle for this purpose, 1 and his 
" Architektonik " finally contented itself with making a collection 
of them not based on any internal principle. 

10. While all these theories as to the origin of human ideas were 
flying about in the literary market, the reconciling word upon the 
problem of innate ideas had been long spoken, but was waiting in a 
manuscript in the Hanoverian library for the powerful effect which 
its publication was to produce. Leibniz, in his Nouveaux Essais, 
had provided the Lockian ideology with a critical commentary in 
detail, and had embodied within it the deepest thoughts of his phi 
losophy and the finest conclusions of his Monadology. 

Among the arguments with which Locke combated the doctrine 
that ideas were innate, had been that with which he maintained 
that there could be nothing in the mind of which the mind knew 
nothing. This principle had also been pronounced by him 2 in the 
form that the soul thinks not always. By this principle the Car 
tesian definition of the soul as a res cogitans was brought into ques 
tion : for the essential characteristic of a substance cannot be denied 
it at any moment. In this sense the question had been often dis 
cussed between the schools. Leibniz, however, was pointed by his 
Monadology to a peculiar intermediate position. Since, in his view, 
the soul, like every monad, is a " representing " power, it must have 
perceptions at every moment : but since all monads, even those 
which constitute matter, are souls, these perceptions cannot pos 
sibly all be clear and distinct. The solution of the problem lies, 
therefore, again in the conception of unconscious representations or 
petites perceptions (cf. above, 31). The soul (as every monad) 
always has ideas or representations, but not always conscious, not 
always clear and distinct ideas ; its life consists in the development 
of the unconscious to conscious, of the obscure and confused to clear 
and distinct ideas or representations. 

In this aspect Leibniz now introduced an extremely significant 

1 This is best seen in his interesting correspondence with Kant, printed in 
the works of the latter. 

2 Essay II. 1, 10 f. 

CHAP. 1, 33.] Innate Ideas : Leibniz. 463 

conception into psychology and epistemology. He distinguished 
between the states in which the soul merely has ideas, and those in 
which it is conscious of them. The former he designated as percep 
tion, the latter as apperception. 1 He understood, therefore, by 
apperception the process by which unconscious, obscure, and con 
fused representations are raised into clear and distinct consciousness, 
and thereby recognised by the soul as its own and appropriated by 
self-consciousness. The genetic process of the psychical life consists 
in the changing of unconscious into conscious representations or ideas, 
in taking up perceptions into the clearness and distinctness of self- 
consciousness. In the light of the Monadology Leibniz s methodo 
logical view of the empirical or contingent truths (cf. 30, 7) took 
on a peculiar colouring. The fact that the monads have no windows 
makes it impossible to conceive of perception metaphysically as a 
working of things upon the soul : 2 the ideas of sense, or sense-pres 
entations, must rather be thought as activities which the soul, by 
virtue of the pre-established harmony, develops in an obscure and 
confused manner (as petites perceptions ), and the transformation 
which takes place in them can be regarded only as a process of 
making them distinct and of clearing them up, as a taking up into 
self-consciousness, as apperception. 

Sensibility and understanding, the distinction between which with 
Leibniz coincides with that of different degrees of clearness and 
distinctness, have, therefore, in his view, the same content, only 
that the former has in obscure and confused representation 
what the latter possesses as clear and distinct. Nothing comes 
into the soul from without; that which it consciously represents 
has been already unconsciously contained within it : and on the 
other hand, the soul cannot bring forth anything in its conscious 
ideas which has not been within it from the beginning. Hence 
Leibniz must decide that in a certain sense, that is, unconsciously, 
all ideas are innate ; and that in another sense, that is, consciously, no 
idea is innate in the human soul. He designates this relation, which 
had been previously sketched in the principles of the Monadology, 
by the name virtual innnteness of ideas. 

This thought, which is at once treated as the controlling point of 
view at the opening of the New Essays, is carried out especially 
with reference to the universal or eternal truths. This was indeed 
the burning question : here the one party (the Neo-Platonists, and 
in part the Cartesians) maintained that these were innate "actu- 

1 Princ. de la Nat. et de la Grace, 4, where the relationship with the Lockian 
reflection comes out strongly : ^o?^. Ess. II. 9, 4. 

2 N. E. IV. 4, 5. 

464 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PART V. 

ally," as fully formed (fertige) truths ; the others (Hobbes, and 
in part Locke) would explain them from the co-operation of sensa 
tional elements. Leibniz, however, carries out the thought that 
such principles are contained already in perception, as petites percep 
tions, that is, as the involuntary forms of relating thought, but that 
after this unconscious employment of them they are apperceived, 
that is, raised to clear and distinct consciousness and so recognised 
in connection with experience. The form of the soul s activity 
which is afterwards brought to clearness and distinctness of intel 
lectual apprehension as a universal principle, an eternal truth, 
inheres already in the sensuous representation, though unclear and 
confused. Hence while Locke had appropriated for his own use the 
scholastic principle niliil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, 
Leibniz adds thereto nisi intellectus ipse. 1 

11. When the Nouveaux Essais were printed in 1765, they excited 
great attention. Lessing was translating them. That the life of 
the soul transcends all that is clear and distinctly conscious, and is 
rooted in obscurely presaged depths, was an insight of the highest 
value for the literature which was just struggling out of the intel 
lectual dryness of the Enlightenment, and out of insipid correctness 
to an unfolding full of genius, and an insight all the more valua 
ble as coming from the same thinker that Germany honoured as the 
father and hero of its Enlightenment. In this direction Leibniz 
worked especially upon Herder : we see it not only in his aesthetic 
views, 2 but still more in his prize essay "On the Knowing and Feel 
ing of the Human Soul." 

Under the preponderance of the methodological point of view, the 
Leibnizo-Wolffian school had strained the opposition between rational 
and empirical knowledge as far as possible, and had treated under 
standing and sensibility as two separate faculties. The Berlin 
Academy had wished to see the mutual relation of these two sepa 
rated powers, and the share which each has in human knowledge, 
investigated : Herder played the true Leibniz as the latter had 
developed himself in the Nouveaux Essais against the prevailing 
system of the schools when he emphasised in his treatise the living 
unity of man s psychical life, and showed that sensibility and under 
standing are not two different sources of knowledge, but only the 
different stages of one and the same living activity with which the 
monad comprehends the universe within itself. All the ideas with 
which the soul raises itself in its development, step by step, from the 
consciousness of its immediate environment to the knowledge of 

1 Nouv. Ess. II. 1, 2. 2 Cf. principally the fourth Kritische Wdldclien. 

CHAP. 1, 33.] Innate Ideas : Herder, Kant. 465 

the harmony of the universe, are innate within the soul as internal 
powers. This deeper unity of sensibility and understanding, Herder 
called feeling ; and in this also in his inquiry as to the "Origin of 
Language," he found the function which embraces all senses like a 
unity, and by means of which the psycho-physical mechanism of 
producing and hearing sounds (Tonens and Horens) is raised to 
become the expression of thought. 

12. More important still was another effect of the work of Leib 
niz. It was no less a thinker than Kant who undertook to build up 
the doctrine of the Nouveaux Essais into a system of epistemology 
(of. 34, 12). The Konigsberg philosopher was stimulated by that 
work to one of the most important turns in his development, and 
completed it in his Inaugural Dissertation. 1 He had already grown 
out of the Wolffian school-metaphysics and had been long employed 
with the examination of the empirical theories, and yet could not 
satisfy himself with them. 2 On the contrary, he was proceeding in 
the direction of establishing metaphysics upon a new basis, and was 
following Lambert s attempts to make a beginning at the work in 
connection with the distinction of form and content in knowledge. 
Now Leibniz showed with reference to the " eternal truths " that 
they inhered already as involuntary relating forms within sense 
experience itself, to be raised and brought to clear and distinct con 
sciousness by the reflection of the understanding. This principle of 
virtual innateness is the nerve of Kant s Inaugural Dissertation : the 
metaphysical truths lie in the soul as laws of its activity, 3 to enter 
into active function on occasion of experience, and then to become 
object and content of the knowledge of the understanding. 

Kant now applies this point of view in a new and fruitful manner 
to sensuous knowledge. From methodical reasons he opposed this to 
intellectual knowledge much more sharply even than the Wolffians : 
but on this account the question for him was, whether there are 
perhaps in the world of the senses just such original form-relations 
as had been pointed out in the intellectual world by Leibniz and 
recognised by Kant himself (cf. 8, and the whole Sectio IV. of the 
treatise De mundi sensibilis et intelligibilis forma et principiis) : and 
thus he discovered the " pure Forms of the sensibility " space and 
time. They are not innate in the ordinary sense, but acquired, yet 
not abstracted from the data of sensibility, but ab ipsa mentis 

1 The dependence of this essay upon the Nouveaux Essais has been shown by 
W. Windelband, Vierteljakrschr. f. wissensch. Philos., I., 1876, pp. 234 ff. 

- This is best proved by the essay which apparently stands farthest removed 
from metaphysics, The Dreams of a Ghost Seer. Cf. also Part VI. ch. 1. 

8 De Mundi Sens, et Int., 6: dantur per ipsam naturam intellectus. Cf. 
8, also the corollary to 3. 

466 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PART V. 

action? secundum perpetuas leges sensa sua coordinante [from the 
very action of the mind co-ordinating its sensations according to 
perpetual laws], and like the intellectual Forms they are recognised 
by attending to the mind s activity on occasion of experience, the 
business of mathematics. 

Another formulation was given to the principle of virtual innate- 
ness by Teteits. He wrote his essays on human nature and its 
development under the impression received from Kant s Inaugural 
Dissertation. He, too, declares that the " acts of thought " are the 
first original relation-thoughts ( Verhdltnissgedanken) : we learn 
them by applying them when we think; and thus they prove 
themselves to be the natural laws of thought. The universal prin 
ciples which lie at the basis of all philosophical knowledge are, 
accordingly, " subjective necessities " in which the essential nature 
of the thinking soul itself comes to consciousness. 

34. Knowledge of the Outer World. 

The background of all these theories is their epistemological pur 
pose. This, however, assumes from the beginning a somewhat 
narrower place under the presupposition of the nai ve realism which 
became attached to the Cartesian metaphysics. The principle of 
the cogito ergo sum made the self-knowledge of the mind s nature 
appear as the original certainty, as that which was self-evident and 
immediately free from doubt ; but the greater the difference in kind 
which was conceived to exist between the world of consciousness 
and that of space and bodies, the greater the difficulties that pre 
sented themselves with reference to the possibility of knowing this 
latter world. This fact was taught at once by the metaphysical 
development immediately after Descartes (cf. 31), and the same 
was now repeated in the most various forms in connection with the 
translation of these same thoughts into the language of empirical 
psychology and sensualism. 

There is thus in the epistemology of modern philosophy from its 
beginning a superiority attributed to inner experience, by virtue of 
which knowledge of the outer world becomes problematical. In this an 
after-working of the Termiuism, with which the Middle Ages had 
ended, asserts itself throughout the whole extent of modern thought 
as a determining mode of view : the heterogeneity of the outer 
and inner worlds gives the mind a proud feeling of a substantial 
quality peculiar to itself as contrasted with things, but at the same 
time a certain degree of uncertainty and doubtfulness in orienting 
itself in this world which is to it strange and foreign. In this way 

CHAP. 1, 34.] Knowledge of the Outer World : Locke. 467 

the very statement of the fundamental problem in the philosophy of 
the Enlightenment shows itself to be an echo of that deepening 
of the mind within itself, that placing of consciousness upon an inde 
pendent basis over against the outer world, with which the ancient 
philosophy ended its course. In this was rooted the power of the 
Augustinian spirit over modern philosophy. 

1. The preponderance of the inner experience asserts itself very 
strongly also with Locke, although in principle he placed sensation 
and reflection upon an equality psychologically, and in his genetic 
theory even made the latter dependent upon the former. But in 
assigning the epistemological values this relation is at once reversed 
in the spirit of the Cartesian principles. For the dualism of finite 
substances which the great French metaphysician had propounded is 
quietly introduced by Locke in conjunction with the dualism of the 
sources of experience : sensation is designed to furnish knowledge of 
the corporeal outer world, reflection to give knowledge of the activities 
of the mind itself: and in this consideration it is naturally found 
that the latter is much more suited to its task than the former. 
Our knowledge of our own states is intuitive and the most certain of 
all; and with a knowledge of our states we are at the same time 
perfectly and undoubtedly sure of our own existence also. Locke 
presents this doctrine of the certainty of knowledge of self with 
an almost verbal adherence to Descartes. 1 With reference to our 
knowledge of the corporeal world, on the other hand, his attitude 
is much more reserved. Such a knowledge is possible only through 
sensation ; and although it still deserves the name knowledge, it yet 
lacks complete certainty and adequacy. Primarily, it is only the 
presence of the idea in the mind that is intuitively certain ; that a - 
thing corresponds to the idea is not intuitively certain, and demon 
stration can at most teach that there is a thing there, but can 
predicate nothing concerning this thing. 

To be sure, Locke is not at all in agreement with himself on this 
point. In connection with his theory of the ideas of sensation, he 
adopts the doctrine of the intellectual nature of the sense qualities 
quite in the form worked out by Descartes (cf. 31, 2), designates 
them happily by the distinction of primary and secondary qualities, 
adds, as tertiary qualities, such powers as express the relation of one 
body to another, declares primary qualities to be those which really 
belong to bodies in themselves, and reckons, also, impenetrability 
in this class, in addition to those assigned to it by Descartes. As 
compared with the doctrine of Hobbes, this is in its essence a 

i Essay IV. 0, 3. 

468 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PART V. 

decided relapse into the mode of thought of Democritus and Epicurus, 
as is shown, also, in the fact that Locke follows the theory of 
images in tracing stimulations to the affection of the nerves by 
minute particles streaming out from objects. 1 On the whole, there 
fore, the fundamental Cartesian basis of mathematical knowledge 
of Nature is here reaffirmed and even more widely extended. 

But Locke s decision in connection with his analysis of the idea 
of substance has an entirely different purport. Like Occam, he 
distinguishes from intuitive knowledge and knowledge given by 
sensation, demonstrative knowledge : this has to do, not with the 
relation of ideas to the outer world, but with the relation of ideas 
to one another. In its value as knowledge it stands after the intui 
tive, but superior to the sensitive. 2 Demonstrative thinking is then 
conceived of entirely terministically, something as in the case of 
Hobbes, as a reckoning with concept signs. The necessity attach 
ing to the demonstration holds only within the world of ideas ; it 
concerns, as one class, general or abstract ideas to which no proper 
reality corresponds in natura rerum. If ideas are once present, 
judgments may be formed concerning the relations which exist 
between them, quite apart from any reference to the things them 
selves ; and it is with such judgments alone that demonstrative 
knowledge has to do. Such "complex" ideas are thought-things, 
which, after they have been fixed by definition, can enter into the 
union with others determined in each case by the respective con 
tents, without thereby acquiring any relation to the outside world. 
Among these modes of union, that which is expressed by the idea 
of substance (the category of inherence) is conspicuous in an especial 
manner. For all other contents and relations can be thought only 
as belonging to some substance. This relation, therefore, has Keality, 

the idea of substance is, according to Locke s expression, ectypal, 

but only in the sense that we are forced to assume a real substrate 
for the modes given in particular ideas, without being able to make 
any assertion as to what this substrate itself is. Substance is the 
supporter, itself unknown, of known qualities, which we have occa 
sion to assume belong together. 

This view that substances are unknowable does not, indeed, 
hinder Locke from taking in hand at another passage, 3 in an entirely 
Cartesian fashion, a division of all substances into "cogitative and 
incogitative." On the other hand, he applies the view to his treat- 

1 Essay, II. 8, 7 ff. Cf. also B. Ruttenauer, Zur VorgeschicMe des Idealismus 
und Kriticismus (Freiburg, 1882), and Geil, op. cit., pp. 66 ff. 
* Ib. IV. 2. 
3 Ib. II. 23, 29 ; IV. 10, 9. 

CHAP. 1, 34.] Knowledge of the Outer World : Berkeley. 469 

ment of the cogito ergo sum. This principle he carries over entirely 
from the metaphysical realm into that of empirical psychology. 
Self-certainty is for him that of the " internal sense " ; intuition in 
this case refers only to our states and activities, not to our essence ; 
it shows us, indeed, immediately and without doubt, that we are, 
but not what we are. The question as to the substance of the soul 
(and accordingly the question also as to its relation to the body) is 
as incapable of an answer as the question as to the "what" of any 
substance whatever. 

Nevertheless, Locke holds it to be possible to gain a demonstrative 
certainty of the existence of God. For this purpose he adopts the 
first of the Cartesian proofs (cf. 30, 5) in a somewhat modified 
form, and adds the ordinary cosmological argument. An infinite, 
eternal, and perfect being must be thought, an ultimate cause of 
finite substances of which man intuitively knows himself to be one. 

So manifold and full of contradictions are the motifs which cross 
in Locke s doctrine of knowledge. The exposition, apparently so 
easy and transparent, to which he diluted Cartesianism, glides over 
and away from the eddies which come up out of the dark depths of 
its historical presuppositions. But as the ambiguous, indeterminate 
nature of his psychology unfolded itself in the antithesis in the fol 
lowing developments, so, too, this epistemological metaphysics offered 
points of departure for the most varied transformations. 

2. The very first of these shows an audacious energy of one-sided- 
ness in contrast with the indecisiveness of Locke. Berkeley brought 
the ascendency of inner experience to complete dominance by putting 
an end to the wavering position which Locke had taken upon the 
question as to the knowledge of bodies. This he did with the aid 
of his extreme Nominalism and with a return to the doctrines of 
Hobbes. He demolished the conception of corporeal substance. Ac 
cording to the distinction of primary and secondary qualities, it was 
held that a part of that complex of ideas which perception presents 
us as a body should be separated out, and another part retained as 
alone real ; but this distinction, as Hobbes had already taught 
(cf. 31, 2), is in the nature of the case erroneous. The "mathe 
matical " qualities of bodies are as truly ideas within us as the 
sense qualities, and Berkeley had demonstrated exactly this point 
with analogous arguments in his Theory of Vision. He attacks the 
warrant of the distinction of Descartes (and of Democritus). But 
while, according to this view, all qualities of bodies without excep 
tion are ideas in us, Locke has retained as their real supporter a 
superfluous unknowable "substance" ; in a similar way others speak 
of matter as the substrate of sensible qualities. 

470 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PART V. 

But in all these cases, says Berkeley, it is demanded of us to 
regard an abstraction as the only actual reality. Abstract ideas, 
however, do not exist, they do not exist even in the mind, to say 
nothing of existing in natura rerum. Locke was then quite right in 
saying that no one could know this substance ": no one can even 
think it; it is a fiction of the schools. For the nai ve consciousness, 
for "common sense," whose cause Berkeley professes to maintain 
against the artificial subtlety of philosophers, bodies are just exactly 
what is perceived, no more and no less ; it is only the philosophers 
who seek for something else behind what is perceived, something 
mysterious, abstract, of which they themselves cannot say what it 
is. For the unperverted mind, body is what one sees, touches, 
tastes, smells, and hears : its esse is percipi. 

Body is then nothing but a complex of ideas. If we abstract from 
a cherry all the qualities which can be perceived through any of the 
senses, what is left ? Nothing. The idealism which sees in a body 
nothing farther than a bundle of ideas is the view of the common 
man ; it should be that of philosophers also. Bodies possess no 
other reality than that of being perceived. It is false to suppose 
that there is in addition to this a substance inherent within them, 
which "appears" in their qualities. They are nothing but the sum 
of these qualities. 

In reply to the question that lies close at hand, in what the differ 
ence consists between the "real" or actual body and that which is 
only imagined or dreamed of, if all bodies are only perceived, 
Berkeley answers with a spiritualistic metaphysics. The ideas 
which constitute the existence of the outer world are activities of 
spirits. Of the two Cartesian worlds only one has substantial 
existence ; only the res cogitantes are real substances, the res extensce 
are their ideas. But to finite spirits the ideas are given, and the 
origin of all ideas is to be sought only in the infinite Spirit, in God. 
The reality of bodies consists, therefore, in this, that their ideas are 
communicated by God to finite spirits, and the order of succession 
in which God habitually does this we call laws of Nature. Hence 
Bishop Berkeley finds no metaphysical difficulty in supposing that 
God under certain circumstances departs from the usual order for 
some especial end, and in this case man speaks of miracles. On the 
other hand, a body is unreal which is presented only in the indi 
vidual mind according to the mechanism of memory or imagination, 
and without being at the same time communicated to the mind by 
God. And finally, since the actual corporeal world is thus changed 
into a system of ideas willed by God, the purposiveness which its 
arrangement and the order of its changes exhibit gives rise to no 
further problem. 

CHAP. 1, 34.] Knowledge of the Outer World : Collier. 471 

The parallelism between this inference from Locke and that 
which Malebranche had drawn from Descartes is unmistakable ; and 
Malebranche and Berkeley are also at one in holding that God alone 
is the active force in the world, and that no individual thing is 
efficiently operative (cf. 31, 8). It is extremely interesting to see 
how the extreme Realism of the Frenchman and the extreme 
Nominalism of the Englishman amount to the same thing. The 
grounds on which the views are based could not be more different : 
the result is the same. For what still separated the two could be 
easily removed out of the way. This was proved by a contemporary 
and countryman of Berkeley s, Arthur Collier (1680-1732) in his 
interesting treatise Clavis Universalis. 1 Malebranche, 2 indeed, as a 
Cartesian, had not directly demurred to the reality of the corporeal 
world, but had held that we could understand the knowledge of this 
world by man, only on the hypothesis that the ideas of bodies in 
God are the common original, in accordance with which God pro 
duces, on the one hand, the actual bodies, and, on the other, the 
ideas of these bodies in finite minds. Collier showed now that in 
this theory the reality of the corporeal world played a completely 
superfluous role: since no actual relation between the corporeal 
world and human ideas is assumed, the value of human ideas for 
knowledge remains quite the same if we posit only an ideal cor 
poreal world in God, and regard this as the real object of human 
knowledge. 

The idealism, which proceeded in this way from the cogito ergo 
sum along several paths, was attended by still another paradox as 
a by-product, which is occasionally mentioned in the literature of 
the eighteenth century without any definite name or form. Each 
individual mind has certain, intuitive knowledge only of itself and 
of its states, nor does it know anything of other minds except 
through ideas, which refer primarily to bodies and by an argument 
from analogy are interpreted to indicate minds. If, however, the 
whole corporeal world is only an idea in the mind, every individual 
is ultimately certain only of his own existence ; the reality of all 
else, all other minds not excluded, is problematical and cannot be 
demonstrated. This doctrine was at that time designated as 
Egoism, now it is usually called Solipsism. It is a metaphysical 

1 The alternative title of the book reads, A New Inquiry after Truth, being 
a Demonstration of the. Non-Existence or Impossibility of an External World 
(Lond. 112:5). It was edited together with Berkeley s treatise in the German 
" Collection of the Principal Writin&lt;/x n /&gt;i&lt;-}, deny the Reality of their own 
Body ( !!) &gt;nl of the whole Corporeal World," by Eschenbach (Rostock, 1750). 

2 Whose doctrine had become known in England by the agency especially of 
John Norris (Essai d un Theorie du Monde Ideal, Loud. 1704). 

472 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PART V. 

sport which must be left to the taste of the individual; for the 
solipsist refutes himself by beginning to prove his doctrine to 
others. 

Thus, following in the train of the Meditations, in which Descartes 
recognised self-consciousness as the rescuing rock in the sea of 
doubt, the result was finally reached which Kant later characterised 
as a scandal to philosophy ; namely, that a proof was demanded for 
the reality of the outer world, and none adequate could be found. 
The French materialists declared that Berkeley s doctrine was an 
insane delusion, but was irrefutable. 

3. The transformation of Locke s doctrine by Berkeley leads 
farther in a direct line to Hume s theory of knowledge. To the 
nominalistic denial of abstract ideas the penetrative and profound 
Scot attached his distinction of all intellectual functions into im 
pressions, and ideas which are copies of impressions; and coincident 
with his distinction is that of intuitive and demonstrative knowl 
edge. Each kind of knowledge has its own kind of certainty. 
Intuitive knowledge consists simply in the affirmation of actually 
present impressions. What impressions I have, I can declare with 
absolute certainty. I can make no mistake in this, in so far as I 
keep within the bounds of simply stating that I have a perception 
possessing this or that simple or complex content, without adding 
any conceptions which would put any interpretation upon this 
content. 

As among the most important of these impressions which have 
immediate intuitive certainty Hume reckons the relations in space 
and time of the contents of sensation, the fixing of the co-exist 
ence or succession of elementary impressions. The spatial order in 
which the contents of perception present themselves is undoubtedly 
given immediately with the contents themselves, and we likewise 
possess a sure impression as to whether the different contents are 
perceived at the same time or in succession. Contiguity in space 
and time is therefore intuitively given together with the impres 
sions, and of these facts the human mind possesses a knowledge 
which is perfectly certain and in nowise to be questioned. Only, 
in characterising Hume s doctrine, it must not be forgotten that 
this absolutely certain matter-of-fact quality, which belongs to 
impressions, is solely that of their presence as mental states. In 
this meaning and restriction intuitive knowledge embraces not only 
the facts of inner experience, but also those of outer experience, but 
at the price of recognising that the latter are properly only species 
of the former, a knowledge, that is, of mental states. 

Contiguity in space and time is, however, but the most elementary 

CHAI&gt;. 1, 34.] Knowledge of the Outer World : Hume. 473 

form of association between perceptions ; besides this Hume reckons 
two other laws, those of resemblance (or contrast, respectively) and 
causality. As regards the former of these two forms of relation, 
we have a clear and distinct impression of the likeness or unlike- 
ness of sensations, and of the different degrees of these ; it consists 
in the knowledge of the degree of resemblance in our own (sensi 
tive) action, and belongs therefore to the impressions of the inner 
sense, which Locke called reflection. On this is based, consequently, 
a demonstrative knowledge of complete certainty; it concerns the 
forms of that comparison between magnitudes which we perform 
upon the given contents of our ideas, and is nothing but an analysis 
of the regularity with which this takes place. This demonstrative 
science is mathematics ; it develops the laws of equality and propor 
tion with reference to numbers and space, and Hume is inclined to 
concede a still higher epistemological value to arithmetic than to 
geometry. 1 

4. But mathematics is also the sole demonstrative science; and is 
that just because it relates to nothing else than the possible rela 
tions between contents of ideas, and asserts nothing whatever as to 
any relation of these to a real world. In this way the terministic 
principle of Hobbes (cf. 30, 3) is in complete control with Hume, 
but the latter proceeds still more consistently with his limitation of 
this theory to pure mathematics. For Hume declares that no asser 
tion respecting the external world is capable of demonstration ; all 
our knowledge is limited to the ascertaining and verifying of 
impressions, and to the relations of these mental states to each 
other. 

Hence it seems to Hume an unauthorised trenching of thought 
beyond its own territory, when the resemblance between ideas is . 
interpreted as meaning metaphysical identity ; this is the case in 
every employment of the conception of substajice. Whence is this 
conception ? It is not perceived, it is not found as a content either 
in particular sensations or in their relations ; substance is the 
unknown, indescribable support of the known contents of ideas. 
Whence this idea for which no impression is to be found in the 
whole circuit of sensations as its necessary original ? Its origin is 
to be sought in reflection. It is the copy of . a f requer tly repeated 
conjunction of ideas. By the repeated being together of impres 
sions, by the custom of the like ideational process there arises by 
virtue of the law of association of ideas the necessity of the idea of 
their co-existence, and the feeling of this associative necessity of the 

i Treat. I. 2, 1 ; I. 3, 1. 

474 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PART V. 

ideational process is thought as a real belonging together of the 
elements of association, i.e. as substance. 

The thought-form of inherence is thus psychologically explained, 
and at the same time epistemologically rejected ; nothing corre 
sponds to it further than the feeling of a likeness in the ideational 
conjunction ; and since we can never know anything of existence 
except by immediate sense-perception, the Reality of the idea of 
substance is incapable of proof. It is clear that Hume thus makes 
Berkeley s doctrine his own, so far as it concerns corporeal things. 
But Berkeley had but half done his work upon the idea of substance. 
He found that bodies are only complexes of sensations ; that their 
being is identical with their being perceived ; that there is no sense 
or meaning in hypostatising their belonging together, as an unknown 
substance : but he let the psychical substances, spirits, the res cogi- 
tantes, stand ; he regarded them as the supports or agents in which 
all these ideational activities inhere. Hume s argument applies to 
this latter class also. What Berkeley showed of the cherry is true 
also of the " self." Inner perception, also (such was the form which 
it had actually taken on already with Locke; cf. above, No. 1), 
shows only activities, states, qualities. Take these away, and noth 
ing remains of Descartes res cog Mans either : only the " custom " of 
constant conjunction of ideas in imagination is at the basis of the 
conception of a "mind"; the self is only a " bundle of perceptions." 1 

The same consideration holds also, mutatis mutandis, for causality, 
that form under which the necessary conn &gt;ction between contents 
of ideas is usually thought : but this is neither intuitively nor de 
monstratively certain. The relation of cause and effect is not per 
ceived ; all that we can perceive by the senses is the relation in 
time, according to which one regularly follows the other. If, now, 
thought interprets this sequence into a consequence, this post hoc 
into a propter hoc, 2 this too has no basis in the content of the ideas 
causally related to each other. From a " cause " it is not possible 
to deduce logically its " effect " ; the idea of an effect does not con 
tain within it that of its cause. It is not possible to understand 
the causal relation analytically. 3 Its explanation is, according to 

1 Treat. I., Part IV. The objectionable consequences which resulted from 
this for religious metaphysics perhaps occasioned Hume, when working over 
his Treatise into the Essays, to let drop this which cut most deeply of all his 
investigations. 

2 In this respect Hume had a forerunner in his countryman Joseph Glanvil 
(1(530-1080), who combated the mechanical natural philosophy from the stand 
point of orthodox scepticism in his Scepsis Scientific^, 1005. 

3 The same thought lay already at the basis of the Occasionalistic meta 
physics (cf. 31, 7); for the essential reason for its taking refuge in mediation 
by the will of God was the logical incomprehensibility of the causal relation. 

CHAP. 1, 34.] Knowledge of the Outer World : Hume. 475 

Hume, to be gained by means of association of ideas. Through the 
repetition of the same succession of ideas, and the custom of finding 
them follow each other, an inner necessity or compulsion arises of 
imagining and expecting the second after the first ; and the feeling 
of this inner necessity with which one idea calls up another is inter 
preted as a real objective necessity, as if the object corresponding 
to the first idea forced that corresponding to the other to a real 
existence in nalura rerum. The impression in this case [of which 
the idea of cause and effect is a copy] is the necessary relation 
between the ideational activities [activities of the " imagination"], 
and from this arises, in the idea of causality, the idea of a neces 
sary relation between the ideational contents [i.e. that A. causes B ; 
whereas the case really is that the idea of A causes the idea of B, 
i.e. recalls it by the law of association]. 

[In view of the extreme condensation of the above statement, a fuller outline 
of Hume s discussion of causality may be useful. As found in the Treatise it 
is briefly as follows: All knowledge as to matters of fact ("probability"), if 
it goes beyond the bare present sensation, depends on causation. This contains 
three essential elements, contiguity, succession, and necessary connection. We 
can explain the first two .(i.e. can find the impression from which they come), 
but no impression of sensation can be found for the third and most impor 
tant. To aid in the search for its origin we examine the principle both in its 
general form and in its particular application, asking (1), why we say that 
whatever begins to exist must have a cause, and (2), why we conclude that 
a particular cause must necessarily have a particular effect. 

(1) Examination of the first gives the negative result that the principle is not 
intuitively or demonstratively certain (the opposite is not inconceivable), hence 
it is not derived purely a priori, i.e. by analysing relations between ideas ; 
therefore it must be from experience. (2) But hoio from experience? Taking 
for convenience the second question stated above, the particular instead of the 
general, it is evident (a) that the senses cannot tell that a particular effect will 
follow a given cause ; they are limited to the present. Nor (b) can such knowl 
edge as to future events be gained by reasoning on experience, as this would 
involve knowing that instances of which we have had no experience must 
resemble those of which we had experience (would assume the uniformity of 
Nature), (c) Therefore the principle apparently must come from the only 
remaining faculty, imagination. This seems at first impossible, in view of the 
strong belief which attaches to these ideas (e.g. that fire will burn), in contra 
distinction from ordinary ideas of fancy. The question as thus shifted now 
becomes: (3) How explain the fact that we believe that a particular effect will 
follow a given cause ? The only difference between the ideas of the senses and 
memory (in which we believe) and those of fancy (in which we do not) is that 
of the feeling joined with them. The ideas of memory are more strong and 

The same was also recognised by Kant in his Attempt to introduce the Concep 
tion of Negative Quantities into Philosophy " (cf. the general remark at the close) 
in a manner essentially in agreement with Hume. And finally, Thomas Brown 
(On Cause and Effect), who also is not disinclined to Occasionalism (cf. op. cit., 
pp. 108 ff.), in a very interesting way deduces psychologically, and at the same 
time rejects epistemologically (ib. 184 ff.), the demand for an "explaining" or 
"understanding" of the actual succession of facts in time. Perception shows 
causes and effects roughly. The explanation of the process consists, then, in its 
analysis into particular, simple and elementary causal relations. By this means 
the illusion arises as if these latter must be yet again made analytically com 
prehensible. 

476 The Enlightenment: Theoretical Questions. [PART V- 

lively. Hence the problem is, What makes the idea (e.g. that fire will burn) so 
"lively" that I believe in it? and the solution is, that as I find this belief 
arising not from a single instance, but only from the constant conjunction of 
the two impressions, the liveliness must be due to custom, i.e. to the habitual 
association of the ideas. " All probable reasoning is nothing but a species of 
sensation."" 

This same doctrine explains the origin of the idea of necessary connection. 
For this does not arise from one instance, but from several. Repetition dis 
covers nothing new, nor does it produce anything new in the objects, but it does 
produce something in the mind, viz. a determination to pass from one object to 
its usual attendant. The idea of necessity must arise from some impression. 
There is no external impression that can give rise to it, hence it must be an im 
pression of reflection, and the only one available is that propensity which custom 
produces to pass from an object to the idea of its usual attendant. Necessity is 
something that exists in the mind, not in objects. This is confirmed by compar 
ative psychology (animals infer from experience through custom), by the theory 
of probabilities, and (in the Inquiry) by the freedom of the will, since belief 
may be reached in all these without necessarily holding to any objective neces 
sary connection. TV.] 

In this way, Hume s theory of knowledge disintegrates the two 
fundamental conceptions about which the metaphysical movement 
of the seventeenth century had revolved. Substance and causality 
are relations between ideas, and cannot be proved or substantiated 
either by experience or by logical thought : they rest upon the 
fictitious substitution of impressions derived from reflection, for 
those of sensation. But with this, the ground is completely taken 
from under the feet of the ordinary metaphysics, and in its place 
appears only epistemology. The metaphysics of things gives place 
to a metaphysics of knowledge. 

6. Hume s contemporaries characterised this result of his investi 
gations especially out of regard for its consequences with respect 
to religious metaphysics (cf. 35, 6) as Scepticism : yet it is 
essentially different from those doctrines to which this name his 
torically belongs. The settling of facts by sense-experience is, for 
Hume, intuitive certainty ; mathematical relations pass for demon 
strative certainty : but, as for all alleged assertions by means of 
conceptions ["by abstract reasoning"] with reference to a reality 
other than that belonging to ideas [" concerning matter of fact and 
existence"], Hume cries, "Into the fire with it!" There is no 
knowledge of what things are and how they work : we can say only 
what we perceive by sensation, what arrangement in space and time 
and what relations of resemblance we experience between them. 
This doctrine is absolutely consistent and honest empiricism : it 
demands that if the only source of knowledge is perception, nothing 
further shall be mingled with this than what it actually contains. 
With this, all theory, all examination of cause, all doctrine of the 
" true Being" behind "phenomena" is excluded. 1 If we characterise 

1 Berkeley is, therefore, correctly understood only from the point of view of 

CHAI&gt;. 1, 34.] Knowledge of the Outer World : Hume. 477 

this standpoint as Positivism, in accordance with the terminology of 
our century, we may say that its systematic basis was established 
by Hume. 

But England s deepest thinker gave to this radical theory of 
knowledge a characteristic supplement. The associations of ideas 
which lie at the basis of the conceptions of substance and causality 
are, indeed, attended by neither intuitive nor demonstrative certainty; 
instead of this, however, they are accompanied by a conviction which 
has its roots in feeling, a natural belief, which, unperverted by any 
theoretical reflections, asserts itself victoriously in man s practical 
procedures, and is completely adequate for the attainable ends of 
life and for the knowledge relating to these. On this rests the 
experience of daily life. To question this never came into Hume s 
mind : he only wishes to prevent this from playing the role of an 
experimental science, for which it is inadequate. With the entire 
earnestness of philosophical depth he unites an open vision for the 
needs of practical life. 

7. For the reception of this positivism the intellectual temper 
was less favourable in England than in France. Here the renuncia 
tion of any attempt at a metaphysics of things lay already prepared 
in the fundamental sceptical tendency which had made its appear 
ance so repeatedly from the Cartesian philosophy ; and the preva 
lence of this temper had been especially furthered by Bayle, whose 
criticism was, indeed, in principle directed chiefly against the rational 
grounding of religious truths ; but at the same time applied to all 
knowledge reaching beyond the sensuous, and therefore to all meta 
physics. Besides this, there was in the French literature a freer 
tendency that belongs to men of the world, which had likewise been 
furthered by Bayle, and at the same time by the influence of Eng 
lishmen, a tendency which would strip off the fetters of the system 
of the schools, and demanded the immediate reality of life instead of 
abstract conceptions. Thus Bacon s doctrine, with its limitation 
of science to physical and anthropological experience, became more 
efficacious in France than in his own home. The " point de systeme " 
meets us here at every step ; no one any longer wishes to know 
anything of the " causes premieres," and this Baconian platform 
with all its encyclopaedic and programmatic extension was laid down 
by d Alembert as the philosophical basis of the Encyclopedia. 1 

Hume : his idealism is half positivism. He lays especial weight upon the point 
that behind the ideas of bodies we are not still to seek for something abstract, 
something existent in itself. If this principle be extended to minds, we have 
Hume s doctrine ; for with the fall of Berkeley s spiritualistic metaphysics, the 
order of phenomena willed by God, to which he had reduced causality, falls also. 
1 In the Discourse Préliminaire 

478 

The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PART V. 

In Germany the Wolffian system was opposed with the "point de 
systeme " by men like Crousaz and Maupertuis on grounds of taste, 
and, in fact, the pedantry of this text-book philosophy offered many 
points of attack. In contrast with this the German Popular Philos 
ophy prided itself upon its absence of system ; as developed by 
Mendelssohn it would refrain from all subtleties as to that which 
cannot be experienced, and employ itself the more with that which 
is useful for men. And, lastly, we find a fine example of harmony 
with this temper in Kant s Dreams of a Ghost-Seer, where he lashes 
the architects of various artificial worlds of thought with sharp 
irony, and pours out copious scorn upon metaphysical endeavour 
with a gallows-humour which touches his own inclination in a 
most sensitive point. Among the German poets Wieland is in this 
same spirit the witty anti-metaphysician. 

8. A very peculiar turn was taken by positivism, finally, in the 
later doctrine of Condillac. In him converge the lines of the French 
and the English Enlightenment, and he finds a positivistic synthesis 
of sensualism and rationalism, which may be regarded as the most 
perfect expression of modern terminism. His Logic 1 and his post 
humous Langue des Calculs developed this doctrine. It is built up 
essentially upon a theory of "signs" (signes). 2 Human ideas are all 
of them sensations, or transformations of such, and for these no 
especial powers of the soul are needed. 3 All knowledge consists in 
the consciousness of the relations of ideas, and the fundamental 
relation is that of equality. The business of thinking is only to 
bring out the relations of equality between ideas. 4 This is done by 
analysing the complexes of ideas into their constituent elements 
and then putting them together again : decomposition des pheno- 
menes and composition des idees. The isolation of the constituent 
elements which is requisite for this can, however, be effected only 
with the aid of signs or language. All language is a method for 
the analysis of phenomena, and every such method is a "language." 
The different kinds of signs give different " dialects " of the human 
language: as such Condillac distinguishes five, the fingers (ges 
tures), sound-language, numbers, letters, and the signs of the infini 
tesimal calculus. Logic, as the universal grammar of all these 

1 A text-book for " Polish professors." 

2 After the Langue des Calculs became known, the Institute of Paris and the 
Berlin Academy gave out, almost at the same time, the theory of signs as the 
subject for their prizes. At both places a great number of elaborations were 
presented, mostly of very inferior value. 

3 This Condillac maintains against Locke, and indeed already in his Traite 
des Sensations, and his school do the same against the Scots. 

4 In these determinations lie suggestions from Hobbes as well as from Hume. 

CHAP. 1, 34.] Knowledge of the Outer World : Condillac. 479 

languages, determines, therefore, mathematics also, and indeed the 
higher as well as the elementary, as special cases. 

All science thus contains only transformations. The thing to be 
done is always to make out that the unknown, which one is seeking, 
is really something already known; that is, to find the equation 
which shall put the unknown x equal to a composition of ideas : it 
is just for this end that the structures of perception must be 
previously decomposed. It is evident that this is but a new 
generalising mode of expression for Galileo s doctrine of the method 
of resolution and composition; but it rises here upon a purely 
sensualistic basis ; it denies the constructive element which Hobbes 
had so sharply emphasised and makes of thinking a reckoning with 
only given quantities. In doing this it rejects all thought of a 
relation of these data to metaphysical reality, and sees in scientific 
knowledge only a structure built up of equations between contents 
of ideas in accordance with the principle le meme est le mme. The 
human world of ideas is completely isolated within itself, and truth 
consists only in the equations that can be expressed within this 
world by " signs." 

9. Indifferent as this Ideology professed to be metaphysically, its 
sensualistic basis, nevertheless, involved a materialistic metaphysics. 
Even though nothing was to be said as to the reality corresponding 
to sensations, there still remained in the background the popular 
idea that sensations are produced by bodies. On this account the 
cautious restraint that belonged to these positivistic consequences 
of sensualism needed only to be neglected to convert the anthropo 
logical materialism, which had developed in the psychological 
theories, into a metaphysical and dogmatic materialism. And so 
Lamettrie spoke out with coquettish recklessness what many others 
did not dare to confess to themselves, to say nothing of confessing 
or defending it openly. 

But other lines of thought in natural science, independently of 
ideology, were also driving toward materialism. Lamettrie had 
very rightly seen that the principle of the mechanical explanation 
of Nature would ultimately tolerate nothing in addition to matter 
moved by its own forces : long before Laplace gave the well-known 
answer that he did not need the " hypothesis of the deity " French 
natural philosophy had attained this standpoint. That the world 
of gravitation lives in itself was Newton s opinion also; but he 
believed that the first impulse for its motions must be sought in an 
action of God. Kant went a step farther when he cried in his 
Natural History of the Heavens. " Give me matter, and I will build 
you a world." He pledged himself to explain the whole universe 

480 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PART V. 

of the fixed stars after the analogy of the planetary system, 1 and 
traced the origination of the individual heavenly bodies out of a 
fiery-fluid primitive condition solely to the opposed working of the 
two fundamental forces of matter, attraction and repulsion. But 
Kant was convinced that the explanation which is sufficient for solar 
systems shatters when applied to the blade of grass and the 
caterpillar; the organism seems to him to be a miracle ( Wunder) in 
the world of mechanics. 

The French philosophy of Nature sought to overcome this obstacle 
also, and to put the problem of organisation out of the world. Among 
the countless atom-complexes, it taught, there are also those which 
possess the capacity of preserving and propagating themselves. 
Buffon, who pronounced and carried through with full energy this 
frequently expressed thought, gave to such atom-complexes the name 
organic molecules, and by assuming this conception all organic life 
might be regarded in principle as an activity of such molecules, which 
develops according to mechanical laws, in contact with the external 
world. 2 This had been already done by Spinoza, of whose theory of 
Nature Buffon frequently reminds us ; the latter, also, speaks of God 
and " Nature " as synonyms. This naturalism found in mechanics, 
accordingly, the common principle for all corporeal occurrence. 
But if now ideology taught that ideas and their transformations 
should be regarded as functions of organisms, if it no longer was 
regarded as impossible, but more and more seemed probable, that 
the thing which thinks is the same that is extended and moves, 
if Hartley and Priestley in England and Lamettrie in France 
showed that a change in consciousness is a function of the nervous 
system, it was but a step from this to teach that ideas with all 
their transformations form only a special case of the mechanical 
activity of matter, only a particular kind of its forms of motion. 
While Voltaire had expressed the opinion that motion and sensation 
might perhaps be attributes of the same unknown substance, this 
hylozoism changed suddenly into decided materialism as soon as 
the dependence of the psychical upon the physical was given the 
new interpretation of a likeness in kind between the two, and it is 
often only by soft and fine shades of expression that the one is 

1 The suggestion for this brilliant astro-physical hypothesis, to which Lam 
bert also came very near in his Kosmologischen Briefen, and which was devel 
oped later in a similar manner by Laplace, was due perhaps to a remark by 
Buffon. Cf. O. Liebmann, Zur Analysis der Wirklichke.it, 2d ed., p. 376. 

2 This principle of Buffon was further developed later by Lamarck (Philoso 
phic Zoologique, Paris, 1809), who attempted to explain the transformation 
of organisms from the lower to the higher forms by a mechanical influence of 
the outer world, by adaptation to the environment. 

CHAP. 1, 34.] Knowledge of the Outer World : Materialism. 481 

converted into the other. This transition is presented in the 
writings of Hobinet. He gives a metaphysical flight to the philos 
ophy of Nature. Finding support in the development system of the 
Leibnizian Monadology, he regards the graded scale of things as an 
infinite multiplicity of forms of existence, in which the two factors 
of corporeality and psychical function are mixed in all the different 
relations possible, so that the more the nature of a particular thing 
unfolds in the one direction, the less is its activity in the other. 
This holds true, also, according to Robinet, in the case of the vital 
movements of individual creatures ; the force which they use men 
tally is lost physically, and conversely. Regarded as a whole, 
however, the psychical life appears as a special form which the 
fundamental material activity of things is able to assume, to be later 
translated back again into its original form. Robinet thus regards 
ideas and activities of the will as mechanical transformations of the 
nervous activity which can be changed back again into that. Noth 
ing takes place psychically which was not predisposed in the physi 
cal form ; and the body, accordingly, receives in psychical impulses 
only the reaction of its own motion. 

In the Systeme de la Nature materialism appears at last undis 
guised as a purely dogmatic metaphysics. It introduces itself with 
the Epicurean motive of wishing to free man from fear of the super- 
sensuous. It shall be shown that the supersensuous is only the 
invisible form of activity of the sensuous. No one has ever been 
able to think out anything of a supersensuous character that was 
not a faded after-image of the material. He who talks of idea and 
will, of soul and God, thinks of nervous activity, of his body and 
the world over again in an abstract form. For the rest, this "Bible 
of Materialism" presents no new doctrines or arguments in its pain 
fully instructive and systematically tedious exposition : yet a certain 
weight in its conception taken as a whole, a greatness of stroke in 
drawing the lines of its Weltanschauung, a harsh earnestness of pre 
sentation, is not to be mistaken. This is no longer a piquant play 
of thoughts, but a heavy armed attack upon all belief in the imma 
terial world. 

10. In spite of psycho-genetic opposition, the problem of knowl 
edge as conceived by the supporters of " innate ideas " was not all 
too unlike the view which obtained with the sensualists. The dual- 
istic presupposition assumed by both classes made it difficult for 
the latter to understand the conformity which the ideas called out 
in the mind by bodies bear to the bodies themselves. But it seemed 
almost more difficult still to understand that the mind should cog 
nise a world independent of it, by means of the development of the 

482 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PART V. 

thought-forms which are grounded in its own nature. And yet 
exactly this is an assumption so deeply rooted in human thought, 
that it passes for the most part as self-evident and a matter of 
course, not only for the na ive consciousness, but also for philo 
sophical reflection. It was the mission of the Terminism, whose 
after-workings were active in modern philosophy, to shake this fun 
damental dogmatic conviction, and push forward for consideration 
the question as to the ground of that conformity between necessity 
of thought, on the one hand, and reality on the other. Even Des 
cartes had found it necessary to support the knowing power of the 
lumen naturale by the veracitas dei, and thereby had shown the only 
way which the metaphysical solution of the problem could take. 

To be sure, where that philosophical impulse was lacking which 
directs its dav^a^uv its wonder upon just that which is appar 
ently self-evident and a matter of course, the difficulty just men 
tioned weighed less heavily. This was the case with Wolff, in spite 
of all his power of logical clearness and systematic care, and with 
the Scots, in spite of all their fineness of psychological analysis. 
The former proceeds to deduce, more yeometrico, an extensive ontol 
ogy, and a metaphysics with its parts relating to God, to the world, 
and to the soul, all from the most general formal laws of logic, 
from the principle of contradiction and that of sufficient reason (and 
this second principle is even to be reduced to the first). Wolff, 
indeed, stands so completely within the bounds of this logical 
schematism that the question never seems to occur to him at all, 
whether his whole undertaking namely, that of spinning "a sci 
ence of all that is possible, in so far as it is possible " out of logical 
propositions is authorised in the nature of the case. This problem 
was concealed for him the more as he confirmed every rational 
science by an empirical science [e.g. Rational by Empirical Psychol 
ogy, etc.], an agreement, indeed, which was possible only because 
his a priori construction of metaphysical disciplines borrowed from 
experience step by step, though the loan was unnoticed. Neverthe 
less, this system, which was blessed with so many disciples, had the 
great didactic value of setting up and naturalising strictness in 
thought, clearness of conceptions, and thoroughness in proof, as the 
supreme rules for science, and the pedantry which unavoidably stole 
in with these found a sufficient counterpoise in other intellectual 
forces. 

The Scottish philosophy contented itself with seeking out the 
principles of sound common sense. Every sensation is the sign 
Reid too, thinks as terministically as this of the presence of an 
object; thinking guarantees the reality of the subject; whatever 

CHAP. 1, 34.] Knoivledge of the Outer World: Leibniz. 483 

actually comes into being must have a cause, etc. Such principles 
are absolutely certain ; to deny them or even to doubt them is 
absurd. This is especially true, also, of the principle that what the 
understanding recognises clearly and distinctly is necessarily so. 
In this is formulated the general principle of a philosophical atti 
tude which is called dogmatism (after Kant), unconditional confi 
dence in the agreement of thought with reality. The above examples 
of the particular principles show how eclectically this common sense 
sought to gather its fundamental truths from the different systems 
of philosophy. In this respect the " gesunde Menschenverstand " 
[sound common sense] of the German popular philosophers was 
entirely in accord with it. Mendelssohn, like Reid, was of the 
opinion that all extremes in philosophy were errors, and that the 
truth lay in the mean position : every radical view has a germ of 
truth which has been forced artificially to a one-sided and diseased 
development. A sound, healthy thinking (Nicolai, especially, lays 
weight on this predicate) does justice to all the different motives 
and so finds as its philosophy the opinion of the average man. 

11. In the mind of Leibniz the problem was solved by the 
hypothesis of the pre-established harmony. The monad knows the 
world because it is the world : the content which it represents is 
from the beginning the universe, and the law of the monad s activity 
is the law of the world. On account of its " having no windows " 
it has no experience at all in the proper sense : nevertheless the 
possibility of knowing the world is so established in its very essence 
that all its states must be regarded as just such a knowledge. There 
is, accordingly, no difference between intellect and sensibility, either 
as regards the objects to which they refer, or as regards the way in 
which consciousness relates itself to these objects : the only differ 
ence is that sensibility cognises the indistinct phenomenal form, 
while intellect cognises the true essence of things. From a scientific 
point of view, therefore, knowledge by the senses was treated partly 
as the imperfect, preliminary stage, partly as the indistinct anti-type 
for the intellect s insight : the " historical " sciences were regarded 
either as preparations for the philosophical, or as lower appendages. 

From this relation a peculiar consequence resulted. The sensuous 
mode of representation, too, has a certain peculiar perfection of its 
own, which differs from the clearness and distinctness of intellectual 
knowledge in apprehending the phenomenal form of its object with 
out any consciousness of grounds or reasons : and in this perfection, 
characteristic of sensuous knowledge, Leibniz 1 had set the feeling oj 

1 Cf. esp. Princ. de la Nat. et de Ic Grace, 17. 

484 The Enlightenment: Theoretical Questions. [PART V. 

the beautiful. When, now, one of Wolff s disciples, Alexander Baum- 
garten, in whom the architectonic impulse toward systematisation 
was developed to a particularly high degree, wished to place by the 
side of logic as the science of the perfect use of the intellect, a corre 
sponding science of the perfection of sensation, an (Esthetics, this dis 
cipline took on the form of a science of the beautiful. 1 Thus aesthetics, 2 
as a branch of philosophical knowledge, grew up, not out of interest 
in its subject-matter, but with a decided depreciation of it ; and as a 
" step-sister " [lit. posthumous : nachgeborene Schivester ] of logic she 
was treated by the latter with very little understanding for her own 
peculiar nature, and with a cool intellectual pedantry. Moreover, 
this last-named rationalist, who followed Leibniz in regarding the 
actual world as the best, and therefore, as the most beautiful among 
all possible worlds, could set up no other principle for the theory of 
art than the sensualistic one of imitating Nature, and developed 
this principle essentially into a tedious poetics. But in spite of this, 
it remains Baumgarten s great service to have treated the beautiful 
again, and for the first time in modern philosophy, in a systematic 
way from the general conceptions of philosophy, and by so doing to 
have founded a discipline that was destined to play so important a 
part in the further development of philosophy, especially in that of 
Germany. 

12. The Leibnizo-Wolffian conception of the relation between 
sense and understanding, and especially the geometrical method 
introduced for rational knowledge, encountered numerous opponents 
in the German philosophy of the eighteenth century, whose opposi 
tion proceeded not only from the incitements of English and French 
sensualism and empiricism, but from independent investigations as to 
the methodical and epistemological relation between mathematics and 
philosophy. 

In this latter line Itudiger, and, stimulated by him, Crusius, con 
tended most successfully against the Wolffian doctrine. In opposi 
tion to Wolff s definition of philosophy as the science of the possible, 
Rudiger asserted that its task is to know the actual. Mathematics, 
and, therefore, also a philosophy which imitates the methods of 
mathematics, have to do only with the possible, with the contradic- 
tionless agreement of ideas with one another ; a true philosophy 
needs the real relation of its conceptions to the actual, and such a 

1 Cf. H. Lotze, Gesch. der Aesthetik in DeutKchland (Munich, 1888). 

2 The name "aesthetics" was then adopted at a later time by Kant, after 
some resistance at first, for the designation of the philosophical doctrine of the 
beautiful and of art, and from him passed over to Schiller, and through the 
latter s writings into general use. 

CHAP. 1, 34.] Knowledge of the Outer World: Kant. 485 

relation is to be gained only by perception. Crusius made this 
point of view his own ; and although he thought in a less sensual- 
istic manner than his predecessor, he yet criticised in a quite similar 
manner from that point of view the effort of the geometrical method 
to know reality by employing only logical forms. He rejected the 
ontological proof for the existence of God, since out of conceptions 
alone existence can never be inferred ; existence (as Kant expressed 
it) cannot be dug out of ideas. In the same line, also, was the 
exact distinguishing between the real relation of causes and effects 
and the logical relation of ground and consequent, which Crusius 
urged iu his treatment of the principle of ground or reason. For 
his own part he used this difference between real and ideal grounds 
to oppose the Leibnizo-Wolffian determinism, and especially to set 
up the Scotist conception of the unrestricted free will of the 
Creator, in opposition to the Thomist conception of the relation 
between the divine will and the divine intellect, which the rational 
ists maintained. The turning away from natural religion, which 
lay in all these inferences, made the stricter Protestant orthodoxy 
favourably disposed toward the doctrine of Crusius. 

The investigation as to the fundamental difference in method 
between philosophy and mathematics, that cut deepest and was 
most important in results, was that undertaken by Kant, whose 
writings very early refer to Crusius. But in his prize treatise On 
the Clearness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals he 
brings a decisive statement. The two sciences are related as oppo 
site in every respect. Philosophy is an analytic science of concep 
tions, mathematics a synthetic science of magnitudes: the former 
receives its conceptions, the latter constructs its magnitudes ; the 
former seeks definitions, the latter sets out from definitions ; the 
former needs experience, the latter does not ; the former rests upon 
the activity of the understanding, the latter upon that of the sensibil 
ity. Philosophy, therefore, in order to know the real, must proceed 
zetetically: it must not try to imitate the constructive method of 
mathematics. 

With this fundamental insight into the sensuous character of the 
cognitive foundations of mathematics, Kant exploded the system of 
the geometrical method. For, according to his view, sensibility and 
understanding can no longer be distinguished as lower and higher 
grades of clearness and distinctness in knowledge. Mathematics 
proves that sensuous knowledge can be very clear and distinct, and 
many a system of metaphysics proves that intellectual knowledge 
may be very obscure and confused. The old distinction must there 
fore be exchanged for another, and Kant attempts a substitute by 

486 

The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PART V. 

defining sensibility as the faculty of receptivity, understanding as 
that of spontaneity. He does this in his Inaugural Dissertation, and 
upon this builds a new system of epistemology, 1 leaning upon the 
psychological principle of virtual innateness (of. 33, 12). 

The main outlines of the system are the following : the Forms of 
the sensibility are space and time ; those of the understanding are 
the most general conceptions. Out of reflection upon the one class 
arises mathematics ; upon the other class, metaphysics ; both a priori 
sciences of unconditional certainty. But Forms of (receptive) sen 
sibility give only the necessary knowledge of the appearance of 
things in the human mind (mundus sensibilis phenomenon) ; the 
Forms of the understanding, on the contrary, give adequate knowl 
edge of the true essential nature of things (mundus intelligibilis nou- 
menon). That these Forms of the understanding are able to do this 
is due to the fact, that the understanding, as well as things them 
selves, has its origin in the divine mind ; that we, therefore, by 
means of it, see things to a certain extent " in God." 2 

35. Natural Religion. 

The epistemological motives which ruled the eighteenth century 
were not in general favourable to metaphysics : if, in spite of this, 
they brought their sceptical and positivistic tendency to complete 
expression in but few instances, this was due to the religious inter 
est which expected from philosophy a decision as to its problems. 
The religious unrest and wars from which Germany, France, and 
England had suffered, and the quarreling over dogmas which had 
been connected with them, had been followed already in the seven 
teenth century by a feeling of surfeit and disgust for the distinc 
tions in creeds : the " wretched century of strife," as Herder called 
it, longed for peace. In England the temper of the Latitudinarians 
extended itself, and on the continent efforts toward union were taken 
up again and again in spite of frequent failure. Bossuet and Spinola 
on one side, and Leibniz on the other, worked long in this direction : 
the latter projected a sy sterna theologicum, which should contain the 
fundamental doctrines of Christianity common to all three Confes 
sions, and when the negotiations with the Catholics no longer 

1 The system of the Inaugural Dissertation is only one stage in Kant s 
development ; he gave it up again forthwith ; hence it belongs in his pre-critical 
time and in this period. 

2 This doctrine, presented with an appeal to Malebranche (Sectio IV.), is 
accordingly just the system of the pre-established harmony between knowledge 
and reality which Kant later rejected so energetically (Letter to M. Herz, 
Feb. 21, 1772). 

CHAP. 1, 35.] Natural Religion : Locke, Deism. 487 

offered any hope, he attempted, at least, to employ his relations to 
the courts of Hanover and Berlin to bring about a union between 
the Lutherans and the Reformed body, this, too, indeed without 
any immediate result. 

Locke, on the other hand, in his three Letters concerning Tolera 
tion, brought together the thoughts of the toleration movement into 
the theory of the " free church in the free state," into the demand 
that the modern state, raised above all Church tutelage, should tol 
erate and protect every religious belief as personal opinion, and 
every religious society as a free association, in so far as it does not 
threaten to disturb political order. 

But the more the union was thwarted by the resistance of theo 
logians, the more nourishment came to the life of the Mystic sects, 
whose supra-confessional tendencies were in harmony with the efforts 
toward union, and which spread in the eighteenth century with a 
multitude of interesting manifestations. The Pietism founded by 
Spener and Francke kept nearest to the Church life, and was there 
fore most successful. This, nevertheless, allows a certain indif 
ference toward dogmatic faith to appear, but in compensation lays 
all the more weight upon the increase of personal piety and upon 
the purity and religious colouring of conduct. 

1. In connection with all these movements stands the tendency 
of the Enlightenment philosophy toward establishing the universal, 
" true " Christianity by means of philosophy. True Christianity is in 
this sense identified with the religion of reason, or natural religion, 
and is to be dissolved out from the different forms of positive, 
historical Christianity. At first, such a universal Christianity was 
still allowed the character of a revealed religion, but the complete 
agreement of this revelation with reason was maintained. This 
was the position taken by Locke and Leibniz, and also by the 
latter s disciple, Wolff. They conceive the relation between natural 
and revealed religion quite in accordance with the example of 
Albert and Thomas (cf. p. 321) : revelation is above reason, but in 
harmony with reason ; it is the necessary supplement to natural 
knowledge. That is revealed which the reason cannot find out of 
itself, but can understand as in harmony with itself after the revela 
tion has taken place. 

Proceeding from this idea, the Socinians had already taken a step 
further. They, too, recognised very vigorously the necessity of 
revelation; but they emphasised, on the other hand, that nothing 
can be revealed that does not prove accessible to rational knowledge. 
Hence only what is rational in the religious documents is to be 
regarded as revealed truth ; i.e. reason decides what shall be held to 

488 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PART V. 

be revelation. From this standpoint the Sociriians separated the 
Trinity and the Incarnation from the content of revelation, and 
in general transferred revelation from the realm of theoretical 
truths to an entirely different field. They comprehend religion 
under the characteristic of law, and this constitutes their peculiar 
position. What God reveals to man is not a metaphysics, but a law. 
This he did in Moses, and so in Christ he gave a new law. But if 
religion objectively is law-giving, subjectively it is fulfilling the 
law, not an acceptance of theoretical doctrines, nor even merely a 
moral disposition, but subjection to the law revealed by God and 
a keeping of all its prescriptions. This alone has been made by 
God the condition of eternal blessedness a juridical conception of 
religion, which, with its resort to the principle of the boundless 
authority of what is determined by divine power, seems to contain 
strongly Scotist elements. 

2. If, however, the criterion of revelation is ultimately to lie 
solely in the rationality of the same, the completely consistent 
result of this theory is, that historical revelation should be set aside 
as superfluous, and natural religion alone retained. This was done 
by the English Deists; and Toland is their leader in so far as he 
first undertook to strip Christianity, i.e. the universal religion of 
reason, of all mysteries, and reduce it, as regards the knowledge 
which it contains, to the truths of the "natural light," i.e. to a 
philosophical theory of the world. But the content which the 
Enlightenment philosophy sought to give to this, its religion of 
Nature, had two sources, theoretical and practical reason. As 
regards the first, Deism contains a metaphysics based upon natural 
philosophy ; in the second aspect it involves a theory of the world 
from the point of view of moral philosophy. In this way the natural 
religion of the Enlightenment was involved in the movement of 
theoretical, and also in that of practical problems : these its two 
elements stood in close connection, but found each a particular 
development, so that they could diverge and become mutually 
isolated. The relation between these two constituents was as 
determining in its influence for the history of natural religion as 
was the common relation which they sustained to the positive 
religions. 

The complete union of the two elements is found in the most 
important thinker of this movement, Shaftesbury. The centre of 
his doctrine and of his own nature is formed by what he himself 
called enthusiasm, enthusiasm for all that is true, good, and beau 
tiful, the elevation of the soul above itself to more universal values, 
the living out of the whole peculiar power of the individual by the 

CHAP. 1, 35.] Natural Religion : Toland, Shaftesbury. 489 

devotion to something higher. Nor is religion anything else : a 
life of increased and enhanced personality, a knowing one s self to 
be one with the great connected all of reality. But this noble pas 
sion, like every other, grows from admiration and strong emotion to 
love. The source of religion is, therefore, objectively as well as 
subjectively, the harmony and beauty and perfection of the universe ; 
the unavoidable impression received from this perfection awakens 
enthusiasm. With a warm heart Shaftsbury portrays the order of 
things, the purposiveness of their inter-play, the beauty of their 
formation, the harmony of their life, and shows that there is noth 
ing in itself evil nothing which entirely misses its mark. What 
ever appears an evil in one system of individuals, proves itself in 
another, or in a higher connection, to be still a good, as a necessary 
member in the purposeful structure of the whole. All imperfection 
of the particular vanishes in the perfection of the universe ; every 
discord is lost in the harmony of the world. 

This universal optimism, whose theodicy is in its conceptions com 
pletely Neo-Platonic in character, knows therefore but one proof 
for the existence of God, the physico-theological. Nature bears 
everywhere the marks of the artist, who has unfolded the loveli 
ness of his own nature in the charm of phenomena with the highest 
intelligence and sensitiveness. Beauty is the fundamental concep 
tion of this Weltanschauung. Its admiration of the universe is 
essentially aesthetic, and the taste of the cultivated man is, for 
Shaftsbury, the basis of both religious and moral feeling. For 
this reason his teleology also is the tasteful one of artistic apprehen 
sion ; like Giordano Bruno he seeks the purposiveness of the uni 
verse in the harmonious beauty of each of its individual structures. 
All that is petty and utilitarian in teleological thought is here 
stripped off, and a wave of poetic world-glorification that carries all 
before it goes through Shaftesbury s writings. It was on this 
account that they worked so powerfully upon the German poets, 
upon Herder, 1 and upon Schiller. 2 

3. Few, indeed, of the philosophers of the Enlightenment stand 
upon this height. Voltaire and Diderot 3 allowed themselves at 
first to be swept along to such an enthusiastic view of the world. 
Maupertuis and Robinet had also something of the universalistic 
tendency ; in Germany, Reimarus in his reflections concerning the 
mechanical instincts of animals, shows at least a sensibility for the 
artistically delicate detailed work of Nature and for the internal 

1 Herder, Vom Erkennen rind Empfinden. 

2 Schiller, Philisophische Briefe (Julius). 

3 Particularly in the Pensees Philosophiqites. 

490 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PAHT V. 

end which she realises in her organic structures. But the great 
mass of the philosophical writers of the eighteenth century is so 
controlled by the anthropological interest and the practical aims of 
philosophy that it investigates rather the uses which the arrangement 
of the universe and the activities of its parts yield for the wants of 
man; and if those of higher temper have in view principally the 
furthering and perfecting of the moral nature, they still do not 
despise the point of view of usefulness and every-day " happiness." 

Thus aesthetic teleology is cut off by the Stoic doctrine of utility, 
and the technical analogy, with which men like Leibniz, Newton, 
and Clarke had thought of the subordination of mechanism to teleol 
ogy, could not but be favourable to this utilitarian conception. For 
the purposiveness of machines consists just in yielding an advan 
tage, just in the fact that their product is something else, something 
in addition to their own working. And this analogy was quite 
welcome also to the " Enlighteners," who frequently praised the 
harmony of their philosophy with natural science ; they employed 
this mode of view as against the conception of miracle found in 
positive religion. Reimarus, too, held that only bunglers need to 
assist their machines afterwards, and that it is unworthy of perfect 
intelligence to come into such a position. But if it was asked what 
the end of the world-machine is, the answer of the Enlightenment 
was, the happiness of man, or perhaps at most, that of created beings 
in general. This trade in the small wares of usefulness (Nutzlich- 
keitskramerei) was carried out in the most tasteless manner in the 
German Enlightenment. Wolff s empirical teleology (Designs of 
Natural Things) excites one s mirth by the petty points of view 
which he assigns to the creative intelligence, and the Popular Phil 
osophers vied with each other in portraying in broad and pleasing 
pictures the neat and comfortable way in which this universe is 
fitted up for the homo sapiens, and how well one may live in it if 
he bears himself well. 

A nobler thought, even at that time, was that of Kant, when in 
his Natural History of the Heavens he adopted the Leibnizo-New- 
tonian conception, but left behind all that talk about the use of the 
world for man, and directed his look toward the perfection which 
displays itself in the infinite multiplicity of the heavenly bodies, 
and in the harmony of their systematic constitution; and with him, 
by the side of the happiness of creatures, appears always their 
ethical perfecting and elevation. But he, too, esteems the physico- 
theological * proof for the existence of God as that which is the most 

1 This term points back into the seventeenth century, and seems to have 

CHAP. 1, 35. J Natural Religion : Kant, Leibniz. 491 

impressive for man, though he grants strict cogency as little to this 
as to the cosmological and ontological. The popular philosophy, on 
the contrary, had its favourite just in this proof, and it forms a gen 
eral characteristic of natural religion. 

4. The presupposition of this course of thought was the convic 
tion that the world is really so perfect and purposive as to support 
the proof in question. Believing souls brought this conviction with 
them, and the literature of the eighteenth century proves that it was 
assumed without question in wide circles as a valid premise of the 
argument; sceptical minds demanded that this also should be dem 
onstrated, and so roused the problems of theodicy. In most cases 
the Enlightenment philosophy resorted here to the same (ancient) 
arguments which Shaftesbury brought into the field, but the scep 
tical-orthodox method, of pointing to the limited nature of human 
knowledge and to the darkness in the ways of Providence, was not 
despised. 

A new turn was given to theodicy by Leibniz. He had been 
brought by Bayle s incisive criticism to the necessity of adding 
experimental proof to his system of Monadology by showing the 
perfection of the universe. Setting in motion to this end the high 
est conceptions of his metaphysics, he attempted to show that the 
actual presence of evil in the world does not make out a case against 
its having originated from an all-good and all-powerful creative 
activity. Physical evil, he maintains, is a necessary consequence 
of moral evil in the ethical world order ; it is the natural punish 
ment of sin. Moral evil, however, has its ground in the finiteness 
and limitation of creatures, and this latter is metaphysical evil. As 
a finite thing the monad has obscure and confused sensuous repre 
sentations or ideas, and from these follow necessarily the obscure 
and confused sensuous impulses, which are the motives to sin. The 
problem of theodicy is thus reduced to the question, Why did God 
create or permit metaphysical evil ? 

The answer to this question is very simple. Finiteness belongs 
to the conception of a created being; limitation is the essential 
nature of all creatures. It is a logical necessity that a world can 
exist only out of finite beings which reciprocally limit each other 
and are determined by their creator himself. But finite beings are 
imperfect. A world that should consist of nothing but perfect 
beings is a contradiction in terms. And since it is also an " eter 
nal," that is, a conceptional or rational truth, that out of metaphysi- 

aris.-n from the Neo-Platonic circles in England. Samuel Parker published in 
Kit! .) Tentamina Physico-theologica de Deo, and William Derham, in 1713, a 
Physico-theology. 

492 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PART V. 

cal evil follows first moral and further physical evil, that out of 
iiniteness follows sin, and out of sin sorrow, it is then a logical 
necessity that a world without evil is unthinkable. However much, 
therefore, the goodness of God might desire to avoid evil, the 
divine wisdom, the " region des verites eternelles" makes a world 
without evil an impossibility. Metaphysical truths are independ 
ent of the divine will; the latter in its creative activity is bound 
to them. 

But, on the other hand, the goodness, which belongs to the con 
ception of God as truly as does his wisdom, is a guarantee that the 
evils are as few as possible. The world is contingent, i.e. it may be 
thought as being other than it is. There is an infinite number of 
possible worlds, none of them entirely without evil, but some 
affected with much more numerous and heavy evils than others. 
If now from among all these possible worlds, which God s wisdom 
spread out before him, he created this actual world, it can only have 
been the choice of the best that guided him iu so doing; he has 
made real the one which contains the least and the fewest evils. 
The contingency of the world consists in the fact that it exists, not 
with metaphysical necessity, but through a choice exercised among 
many possibilities ; and since this choice proceeds from the all-good 
will of God, it is unthinkable that the world is any other than the 
best. Theodicy cannot proceed to deny the evil in the world, for 
evil belongs to the very idea of the world ; but it can prove that this 
world contains as little evil as is in any way possible in accordance 
with metaphysical law. God s goodness would gladly have pro 
duced a world without evil, but his wisdom permitted him only the 
best among possible worlds. 

Hence arises the common expression, optimism. Whether this 
experimental proof of the physico-theological view of the world 
succeeds, may be left undecided. The eighteenth century con 
ceived of the matter as though it was the essential aim of Leibniz 
to prove that the world is the most perfect that can be thought; 
that he did this only under the presupposition of the metaphysical 
necessity of evil, was, in characteristic fashion, scarcely noted in 
the literature of that time, which itself was through and through 
" optimistic " in its thought. In a historical aspect the most note 
worthy thing in this theodicy is the peculiar mixture of Thomist 
and Scotist metaphysics. The world is such as it is only because 
God has so willed it ; by virtue of his omnipotence he might have 
chosen another ; but in the choice of the possibilities before him 
the divine will is bound to the divine intellect as the "eternal 
truths." Above all reality hovers the fate prescribed by logic. 

CHAP. 1, ;$-&gt;.] Natural Religion: Voltaire, Diderot. 493 

5. In the forms hitherto developed the teachers of natural religion 
believed that they could attain along the physico-theological path to 
the conception of the deity as creative intelligence, and for this 
phase of the development the name Deism is customarily employed. 
The conception of God as personality, which survived in this pro 
cedure as the last remnant from positive religion, offered a hold for 
the moral side also of natural religion, and in turn found in that its 
support. But where only the theoretical element was pursued, nat 
ural religion found itself involved in the course of development 
taken by naturalistic metaphysics, and found in this finally its 
downfall. Toland already gave a completely pantheistic turn to the 
admiration of Nature, which for him constituted the essential con 
tent of religious feeling, and with the hylozoism which developed 
among the French natural scientists (of. 34, 9) the transcendence 
of God, as well as his personality, was at an end ; and when then 
the complete dominance of the mechanical explanation of Nature 
was proclaimed, when the organic world also was recognised as in 
principle the product of the universal mechanism of Nature, the 
physico-theological proof lost its power over the mind. In addition 
to this the premises of the argument were questioned. The Lisbon 
earthquake (1755) which shocked all Europe made many waver in 
their ideas of the perfection and adaptedness of the world s ar 
rangement ; the indifference with which Nature destroys human life 
and all its content of ends and worth seemed to speak much more 
for a blind necessity in all that takes place than for a teleological 
disposition of the world-process. Voltaire, in whom this revolution 
in point of view became complete, began in Candide to make sport 
of the " best of possible worlds," and the element of natural philos 
ophy in natural religion crumbled to pieces. 

The Sy steme de la Nature drew the last consequences with its 
atheism and materialism. All adaptation, all order of Nature, is only 
a phenomenon in the human mind. Nature itself knows only the 
necessity of atomic motion, and in it there are no icorth-determina- 
tions, which are dependent upon ends or norms of value. Nature s 
conformity to law is active with the same rigour in those things 
which appear to us aimless or unpurposive, irregular or anomalous, 
as in the things which we judge with reference to their agreement 
with our designs or customs, and approve as purposeful. The wise 
man should make this indifference of Nature his own ; he should see 
through the relativity of all conceptions of ends; there is no real 
norm or order. This principle was applied by Diderot to aesthetics. 
The correctness of Nature is accordingly the only thing that art 
should display, the only thing that it should grasp and give back ; 

494 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PAKT V. 

beauty is one of those valuations which have no objective validity. 
Materialism knows only an art void of ideals, only the indifferent 
copy of any reality whatever. 

6. While the foundations of Deism based on natural philosophy 
were thus crumbling from within, its epistemological basis began 
also to waver ; for all attacks upon the possibility of a metaphysics 
struck also at that of a natural religion, which indeed in its contents 
exhibited but a survival of religious metaphysics. In this respect 
the Baconian system was the most dangerous foe of the deistic doc 
trine. It allowed religion to stand only as revelation and combated 
the possibility of knowing its doctrines by the aid of reason, or even 
of merely bringing them into accord with reason. No one supported 
this standpoint more energetically than Pierre Bayle. He worked 
systematically to show that all dogmatic doctrines were contrary to 
reason ; he laid bare their contradictions with penetrating keenness ; 
he sought to .prove that they were absurd for the natural reason. 
But he uncovered, also, the weak points in Deism ; he denied the 
cogency of the philosophical arguments for the existence of God and 
the immortality of the soul, and took special occasion in connection 
with the problems of theodicy to prove the inadequacy of the "nat 
ural light " : even in controversy with Leibniz he was not worsted. 
Religion is, therefore, possible for him only as positive revelation 
in contradiction with philosophical knowledge. He defends with 
all keenness the twofold truth. And therefore, although perhaps 
for himself he might have credit for a faith contrary to reason, 
his writings and especially the articles of his much read Dictionnaire 
were not less dangerous to the theoretical doctrines of positive relig 
ion than to those of Deism. 

Finally Hume, also, on epistemological grounds dissolved the 
union which the other English empiricists and nominalists, and 
indeed, even the materialists, like Hartley and Priestley, sought to 
maintain with natural religion. If there is no metaphysics of things 
at all, philosophical religion falls also. Hume, indeed (as Cleanthes 
in the dialogue), acknowledges in the spirit of his practical prob- 
abilism that the world on the whole makes the incontestable impres 
sion of purposiveness and rational order, and finds, therefore, that 
that belief, on which all our experience rests, is applicable also to 
the (physico-theological) assumption of a unity in creation and in 
the direction of the whole. But from the standpoint of science 
(as Philo) he cannot regard this belief as capable of being estab 
lished by reason. In particular he asserts, in accordance with the 
principles of the theory of probability, that it is quite explicable, 
even on the hypothesis of a purely mechanical theory, that amid 

CHAP. 1, 35.] Natural Religion : Bayle, Hume. 495 

the countless combinations of atoms, one which was durable, pur- 
posive, and well ordered should at last come about and become fixed. 
So the case remains with a problematical decision. Natural religion 
is a reasonable mode of view for the practical man, but it should 
not profess to be a scientific doctrine. 

7. The more the metaphysical factor in Deism retreated for these 
or other reasons, the more the " true Christianity," which Deism 
professed to be, became restricted to a moral conviction. This had 
been already prepared by Herbert of Cherbury, who stood farther 
removed from natural philosophy, and had been quite definitely 
expressed by Spinoza. According to this view the essence of 
religion consists in moral action, and the religious life has for its 
true content, deliberation upon duty, and the seriousness of a con 
duct of life determined by this. This in itself alone gave but very 
pale and vanishing lines for a Weltanschauung. There remained an 
indefinite idea of an all-good God, who created man for happiness, 
who should be worshipped by a virtuous life, and who will exercise 
an equalising justice in an eternal life, so that such virtue will 
receive the reward which is lacking to it here. No one will fail to 
notice the pure, noble thought which lived in this moralising Deism, 
or the high value which belongs to it historically, because in opposi 
tion to the one-sidedness and strife of confessional zeal it brought 
the ideals of toleration and philanthropy, respect for the purely 
human appreciation of the ethical disposition, and modesty in per 
sonal opinion, to a position of honour in literature and social life. 
But, on the other hand, it is also true that there has never been a 
more meagre form of religious life than this. Its religion has no 
taste of earth, and with the mysteries which the Enlightenment 
would not tolerate, understanding for the depths of religious life 
was lost also. There is nothing more of anxiety for the soul s salva 
tion, of the struggle for redemption, of the ardent feeling of deliver 
ance. Deism, therefore, failed in vital religious power; it was an 
artificial product of cultured society, and when the German En- 
lighteners wrote books to preach the deistic morals to children, 
they only proved how little they understood of real religion. 

Among the great mass of the supporters of this standpoint in 
the "popidar philosophy " all possible degrees of uncertainty prevail 
as to how far those moral remnants of the religious view of the 
world are still capable of a theoretical grounding, and how far they 
are to be regarded as merely constituents of the ethical conscious 
ness. Full clearness on this point rules in Voltaire s later thought. 
Here he has been so far seized upon by Bayle s scepticism as to 
acknowledge no longer any metaphysical authorisation : the deity 

496 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PART V. 

and immortality are now for him only valid as postulates of the 
moral feeling ; i aith in them is regarded as only the condition for 
moral action. If this belief should perish, the motives for honest 
conduct, and thus the foundations of social order, would, he thinks, 
perish with it: si Dieu n exista.it pas, il faudrait I inventer. 

8. Different as are these individual forms in which natural relig 
ion developed, they all agree on one point, in their depreciatory 
criticism of positive religions. Only that is regarded as true in 
these religions, in which they all agree with each other and with 
natural religion ; all that is taught beyond this, with an appeal to a 
special revelation, the deists turn from the door, and it was pre 
cisely in this respect that they called themselves /ree thinkers. The 
claims made by the revelational doctrine encountered, therefore, an 
especially vigorous contradiction. Collins refuted the proof from 
prophecy, Woolston the proof from miracles, both by seeking to 
give for the corresponding accounts in the religious documents a 
natural explanation so far as possible. This attempt, which aimed 
not to involve in doubt the credibility of the biblical narratives, but 
to explain them by purely natural causes, frequently in a very fan 
tastic fashion and excluding all that is mysterious and supernatural, 
has been characterised and employed in Germany especially as 
rationalistic interpretation. It was here, too, that Reimarus, in his 
Schutzschrift, proceeded in the sharpest manner against the possi 
bility of revelation, which he declared to be superfluous, unthinkable, 
and untrue. Others directed their criticism against individual doc 
trines of dogmatics. Diderot attacked the moral attributes in the 
Christian conception of God, and Voltaire exercised his wit in un 
sparing derision of the dogmas and ceremonies of all religions and 
Confessions. 

But in his case also there was at bottom the earnest thought, 
that all these additions of the positive religions were so many 
obscurations and corruptions of the true religion, for which, like 
the other deists, he felt called to contend. They were filled with 
the conviction that natural religion is an inheritance of all men, a 
conviction set within the nature of man himself, and that it was, 
therefore, the original state of the religious life. From this point 
of view all positive religions appear as depraved forms which have 
entered in the course of history, and a progress in the history of 
religion consists, therefore, in every case in nothing but a return 
to the primitive, pure, and uncorrupted religion. Hence according 
to Tindal the true Christianity, which coincides with Deism, is as 
old as creation. Jesus did not bring a revelation, he only rehabili 
tated the true worship of God in the face of the decay of the 

CHAP. 1, 35.] Natural Religion : Deists, Hume. 497 

ancient religions ; but the Christian churches have again corrupted 
his work, and free-thinking desires to return to him. So, too, Lessing 
distinguished between Christianity and the religion of Christ. 

If now it was asked, what were the causes that brought about 
this distortion of true religion, the Enlighteners were entirely 
devoid of any historical comprehension for these : what they held 
to be false seemed to them possible only through voluntary inven 
tion. They were so strongly convinced of the evidence that their 
Deism was the only true system, that all other teachings seemed to 
them explicable only by lying and deceit, and that the proclaimed 
of these seemed to have acted only in their own interests. It is 
then the general doctrine of the deists that the historical basis of 
positive religions is invention and deceit. Even Shaftesbury knew 
no other way of explaining how enthusiasm, which constitutes true 
religion, could be distorted to the fanaticism of superstition. The 
hatred of priests felt by the Enlighteners was most sharply ex 
pressed on this point also in the Schutzschrift of Reimarus. 

9. Such incapacity to do justice to the historical nature of posi 
tive religions agreed well with the universal lack in historical sense 
and understanding which was peculiar to the whole philosophy of 
the Enlightenment. This had its ground in the fact that modern 
thought had made its growth, hand in hand with natural science, 
in investigating that which is either tunelessly or always valid. 
Only in a few instances was this ban broken through. 

This was done first and with clearest consciousness by David 
Hume. While he found that religion cannot be based upon demon 
strative rational knowledge, he showed also that the question as 
to the origin of religion in the human mind must be completely 
separated from the speculative investigation. This new question 
he treated solely in accordance with psychological principles, as a 
"Natural History of Religion." He shows how in the primitive 
apprehension of Nature and in the feelings of fear and hope, of 
terror and of blessing, which are associated with it, and in the com 
parison of the course of Nature with the vicissitudes of human life, 
there lay the incitements to the formation of ideas of higher beings, 
and to worship designed to appease or to flatter. The natural, 
primitive form of religion is, therefore, polytheism, which thinks 
and treats these higher powers in a completely anthropomorphic 
manner. But the manifold forms assumed by myth fuse in accord 
ance with the laws of the association of ideas ; myths pass over into 
each other, and ultimately the whole body of religious ideas becomes 
condensed into the belief in a single divine being, to whom the pur 
poseful order of the universe is due, a faith, to be sure, which 

498 The Enlightenment : Theoretical Questions. [PART V. 

cannot preserve itself in a pure form, but is associated in various 
ways with its original presuppositions. The history of religion is 
the gradual transformation of polytheism into monotheism, and its 
result coincides with that teleological view of the world which 
Hume had developed as the view of the intelligent man, not, indeed, 
capable of scientific proof, but bound up with the natural feeling of 
belief. 

This mode of apprehending the subject from the point of view of 
psychology and the history of civilisation was reinforced by that 
from the point of view of philology and the history of literature, 
which found expression in the historical biblical criticism founded by 
Salomon Semler. This began to carry out the thought formulated 
by Spinoza, 1 that the biblical books must be treated just as other 
writings as regards their theoretical contents, their origin, and their 
history ; that they must be understood from the point of view of 
their time and the character of their authors. Semler directed par 
ticular attention to the point that the different parties of the early 
Christians find expression in the books of the New Testament. 
While it may be that the hypotheses to which he came in this 
respect have been left behind by later science, it is nevertheless true 
that a scientific way out of the radicalism into which the deistic 
movement had run was here shown, and Semler therefore raised his 
voice against the spokesmen of the Enlightenment. 

Lessing took part in these questions from still another side. He 
was certainly not the man to make his conviction bend to a tenet; 
he saw through and rejected, as few others, the limitation which 
will find its sole truth in that which has been transmitted histori 
cally ; but he guarded himself well from playing the judge, who 
now, after thousands of years, shall decide as to the genuine 
ness of the three rings. But it is not merely this that separates 
him from the great mass of the Enlighteners ; he is himself a deep, 
religious nature, and, like Herder, 2 sees in religion a living relation 
of man to God, and God to man. Hence religion is not possible with 
out revelation, and the history of religions is the series of the revela 
tions of God, is the education of the human race by God. Lessing 
assumes the well-planned succession of these revelations to be such, 

1 In what degree Spinoza s writings were known to the religious Enlighteners 
in Germany appears, among other tilings, from the interesting fact that Lorenz 
Schmidt, the leader of the Wertheim translation of the Bible, is the anonymous 
editor of a book in which, under the mask of a "Refutation of the Doctrine of 
Spinoza by the Famous Philosopher Christian Wolff," an excellent translation 
of Spinoza s Ethics is offered, and finally only a few paragraphs from Wolff s 
German writings are appended (printed Frankfort and Leips. 1744). 

2 Cf. Herder s treatise on the Adteste Urkunde de.s MenschengescMechts. 

CHAP. 1, 35.] Natural Religion : Lessiwj, Herder. 499 

that the deeper meaning of each is unfolded more clearly and dis 
tinctly in that which follows. So even the New Testament, the 
second elementary book, over which the more advanced scholar now 
" stamps and glows," gives us a premonition of an eternal gospel. 
In carrying out this thought of Origen s, 1 Lessing indicates in but 
a tentative manner indefinite lines which lie in the direction of a 
mystico-speculative interpretation of dogmas. 

1 Education of the Human Bace, 72 ff. 

CHAPTER II. 

PRACTICAL QUESTIONS. 

THE natural religion of the eighteenth century sought in morals 
the support which a metaphysics of the natural-science sort could 
not permanently afford it. This was possible by reason of the fact, 
that in the meantime this branch also of philosophical investigation 
had won its complete independence of positive religion. And in 
fact, this freeing process, which had already begun in the train of 
the religiously indifferent metaphysics of the seventeenth century, 
had completed itself in a relatively speedy and simple manner. But 
the peculiar character of the new age asserted itself here also, in the 
very early transfer of the point of interest in these investigations to 
the psychological domain ; and here philosophy encountered the lit 
erary inclination of the age, which was directed toward a profounder 
employment of man with himself, toward an overhauling of his feel 
ings and an analysing of his motives, and toward the "sentimental" 
fostering of personal relations. The individual revelling in his own 
inner life, the monad enjoying self, is the characteristic phenomenon 
of the age of the Enlightenment. The individualism of the Renais 
sance, which in the seventeenth century had been repressed by exter 
nal forces, now broke forth again with a more inward power from 
the stiff dignity of ceremonious, formal life : bounds were to be 
broken through, externalities cast away, and the pure, natural life 
of man brought out. 

But the more important the individual thus became to himself, and 
the more many-sided his view in weighing questions regarding the 
import of his true happiness, the more morality, society, and the 
state became to him a problem. How comes the individual so 
runs the fundamental practical question of the Enlightenment phil 
osophy to a life connected with others, which extends in influence 
and authority beyond the individual himself ? Through all the ani 
mated discussions of these problems goes, as a tacit assumption, the 
view that the individual in his natural (as it was always conceived) 
determinate character is the original datum, is that which is self- 

500 

CHAP. 2.] Practical Questions. 501 

intelligible, and that all the relations which go beyond the individual 
are to be explained from him as a starting-point. In so far the natu 
ralistic metaphysics of the seventeenth century thought here more 
after the analogy of atomism, there more after that of the Monad- 
ology forms the background for the morals of the eighteenth. 

The constantly progressing process in which these presuppositions 
became more clear and distinct brought with it the result, that the 
principles of ethics found a valuable clearing up in the discussions 
of this period. For inasmuch as the ethical life was regarded 
as something added to the natural essence of the individual, as some 
thing that must first be explained, it was necessary, on the one hand, 
to establish by an exact discrimination what the thing to be ex 
plained really is, and on the other hand, to investigate on what the 
worth and validity of the ethical life rests : and the more morality 
appeared to be something foreign to the natural essence of the indi 
vidual, the more the question as to the motives which induce man 
to follow ethical commands asserted itself, side by side with the 
question as to the ground of the validity of those commands. And 
so three main questions appeared, at the beginning much involved, 
and then becoming complicated anew : what is the content of 
morality ? on what rests the validity of the moral laws ? what 
brings man to moral action ? The principles of morals are set forth 
according to the three points of view of the criterion, the sanction, 
and the motive. This analysis and explanation, however, showed 
that the various answers to these separate questions were capable of 
being combined with each other in the most various ways : so the 
clearing and separating process above named results precisely from 
the motley variety and changing hues exhibited by the doctrines of 
moral philosophy in the eighteenth century. Shaflesbury stands in 
the centre of the movement as the mind that stimulates in all direc 
tions and controls in many lines ; while, on the other hand, the move 
ment reaches no definite conclusion in this period, on account of the 
differences in the statements of the question (cf. 39) . 

A typical feature of the fundamental individualistic tendency of 
this ethics was the repeatedly renewed consideration of the relation 
of virtue and happiness : the final outcome, expressed more or less 
sharply, was that the satisfaction of the individual s impulses was 
raised to be the standard of value for the ethical functions. The 
system of practical philosophy built up upon this principle is 
Utilitarianism, the varied development of which forms the centre in 
the complicated courses of these reflections. 

But out of this arose the much more burning question, as regards 
the political and social order, the question, namely, as to the value 

502 The Enlightenment : Practical Questions. [PART V. 

for happiness of the social union, of public institutions and their 
historical development. That which exists and has come into being 
historically has lost once more its immediate validity and naive 
valuation : it should justify itself before the critical consciousness, 
and prove its right to existence by the advantages which it yields 
for the happiness of individuals. From this point of view was 
developed the political and social philosophy of the eighteenth cen 
tury ; upon this standpoint this philosophy assumed its critical 
attitude toward historical reality, and in accordance with this 
standard, finally, it examined the results of the historical progress of 
human civilisation. The worth of civilisation itself and the relation 
of Nature and history became thus a problem which received its most 
impressive formulation from Rousseau, and which, in opposition to 
the movements excited by him, and in conjunction with the con 
vulsions of the Revolution, gave form to the beginnings of the 
Philosophy of History. 

36. The Principles of Morals. 

Fr. Schleiermacher, Grundlinien einer Kritik der bisherigen Sittenlehre (1803), 

W. W. III. Vol. 1. 

H. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (4th ed., Lond. and N.Y. 1890). 
[J. Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, Vol. II.] 
[W. L. Courtney, Constructive Ethics (Lond. 1886).] 

THE most fruitful incitements to the discussion of ethical prob 
lems proceeded in both positive and negative directions from Hobbes. 
The "selfish system" propounded by him extended its influence 
throughout the entire eighteenth century. It was carried out into 
all of its consequences, and was an ever-powerful stimulus to draw 
out opposing theories, which just for this reason were also dependent 
upon it. In a certain sense this is true of Cumberland, who indeed 
defended the validity of ethical laws as eternal truths in opposition 
to psychological relativity, and yet at the same time would have the 
universal welfare regarded as their essential and determining con 
tent. 

1. The position of Locke with reference to these questions is still 
less definitely formulated than his attitude with regard to theoreti 
cal questions. No doubt the treatment of practical principles 
occupies almost the larger space in his attack upon "innate ideas," 
as is natural from the fact that his opposition is there directed 
against the Platonism of the Cambridge school. But the positive 
indications upon ethical subjects (and indeed there is nothing that 
goes beyond indications), which are found scattered through his 

CHAP. 2, 36.] Principles of Morals : Locke. 503 

writings, do not in any important degree transcend mere psycholo- 
gism. Locke regards the moral judgment as demonstrative knowl 
edge, because it has for its object a relation, namely, the agreement 
or non-agreement of a man s action with a law [" conformity or 
disagreement men s voluntary actions have to a rule, to which they 
are referred, and by which they are judged of"]. 1 Accordingly the 
imperative character seems essential for ethics. The existence of 
such norms, however, presupposes not only a law-giver, but also his 
power to visit obedience to his laws with a reward, and disregard of 
them with punishment ; for only through the expectation of these 
consequences, Locke holds, can a law work upon the will. 

If the philosopher was certain of not deviating from the "com 
mon sense " of the average man with such principles, he was equally 
secure in the three instances which he adduces of the law-giving 
authority, public opinion, the state, and God. And in the high 
est of these instances he found again the point of attachment for 
the remnant of Cartesian metaphysics which his empiricism had 
preserved. For identically the same will of God is known by reve 
lation and by the " natural light " (according to Locke s philosophy 
of religion; cf. 35, 1). The law of God is the law of Nature. But 
its content is, that the order of Nature fixed by God attaches inju 
rious consequences to certain actions, and useful consequences to 
others, and that therefore the former are forbidden, the latter com 
manded. Thus the moral law gains a metaphysical root without 
losing its utilitarian content. 

2. The need of a metaphysical basis of morals asserted itself also 
in other forms, and in part in a still stronger degree, though it was 
common to the whole Cartesian school to regard right will as the 
necessary and inevitable consequences of right insight. In this 
respect Cartesianism was seconded by the whole throng of Platonists, 
who were so hostile to it in natural philosophy at first, Henry 
More 2 and Cudworth, 3 later, especially, Richard Price. 4 They all 
proceeded from the thought that the moral law is given with the 
inmost nature of reality which has proceeded forth from God, and 
that it is therefore written with eternal and unchangeable letters in 
every reasonable being. With much enthusiasm but with few new 
arguments, they defended the Stoic-Platonic doctrine in its Christian- 
theistic transformation. 

1 Cf. Essay cone. Hum. Un., II. 28, 4 ff. 

2 Encheiri dion Ethicum (16t&gt;7). 

3 Whose Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality was first pub 
lished by Chandler, in 1731. 

4 Questions and Difficulties in Morals (Lond. 1758). 

504 The Enlightenment : Practical Questions. [PART V. 

This intellectualism, in connection with rationalistic metaphysics, 
took a direction that was widely removed from the Scotist recourse 
to the divine will which had been revived by Descartes and still 
more by Locke, and instead of this proceeded to determine the 
content of the moral law solely by metaphysical relations, and, 
accordingly, in the last instance, by logical criteria. Just in this 
appeared its contrast to all the psychologically influenced theories, 
which, in some form or other, always returned to feelings of pleas 
ure and pain as the central nerve of ethical determinations. This 
is clearest in the case of Clarke, who professed to find the objective 
principle of morals in the " fitness " of an action to its determining 
relations, and who claimed for the knowledge of this fitness a self- 
evidence analogous to the knowledge of mathematical truth, and in 
the Cartesian spirit was convinced that the feeling of obligation, 
by which the will is determined to the appropriate action, develops 
inevitably from such an insight into the fitness of things./ Ethical 
inferiority, accordingly, appeared quite in the ancient fashion (cf. 
7, 6) to be the result of ignorance or of erroneous opinion. Wol- 
laston, stimulated by Clarke, gave to the same thought the turn, 
that since every action involves a (theoretical) judgment as to its 
underlying relations, the decision as to whether the act is right or 
wrong in the ethical sense depends upon the Tightness (correctness) 
or wrongness of this judgment. 

3. Pierre Bayle takes a peculiar position with reference to these 
questions : he supports a rationalism without any metaphysical back 
ground. In his case the interest of fixing morals upon a firm basis, 
as opposed to all dependence upon dogmatic doctrines, was active in 
the strongest and most radical manner. While in declaring meta 
physical knowledge in general to be impossible he opposed the 
rational grounding of natural religion as well as that of positive 
dogma, he yet gave back with full hands to the " reason " in the 
practical domain what he had taken from it in the theoretical realm. 
Incapable of knowing the essence of things, the human reason is, 
according to him, completely furnished with the consciousness of 
its duty : powerless without, it is complete master of itself.^ What 
it lacks in science it has in conscience : a knowledge of eternal and 
unchangeable truth. 

The ethical reason, Bayle holds therefore, remains everywhere 
the same, however different men, peoples, and times may be in their 
theoretical insight. He teaches for the first time with clear con 
sciousness the practical reason s complete independence of the theo 
retical; but this, too, he is glad to bring to its sharpest point with 
reference to theology. Revelation and faith are regarded by him in 

CHAP. 2, 36.] Principles of Morals : Clarke, Bayle. 505 

the Catholic manner as essentially theoretical illumination, and just 
on this account they seem to him to be indifferent for morality. He 
admired the ethical excellence of ancient heathenism, and believed 
in the possibility of a morally well-ordered community of atheists. 
While, therefore, his theoretical scepticism might seem favourable 
to the Church, his moral philosophy was necessarily attacked as her 
most dangerous foe. 

If the ethical principles were in this discussion proclaimed by 
Bayle also as " eternal truths," he did it in the original Cartesian 
sense, where interest centered not so much about the psychological 
question of innateness, as rather about the epistemological point of 
view of immediate evidence not brought about through the medium 
of logic. In this sense the virtual innateness of ethical truths was 
held of course by Leibniz, and it was in the spirit of both that Vol 
taire, who approached Bayle s standpoint the more in proportion as 
his attitude toward metaphysics became more sceptical (cf. 35, 5), 
said of the ethical principles that they were innate in man just as 
his limbs were : he must learn to use both by experience. 

4. Bayle very likely had the support of general opinion when he 
ascribed to the ethical convictions a worth exalted above all change 
and all difference of theoretical opinions; but he was successful, 
perhaps, just because he treated those convictions as something 
known to all, and did not enter upon the work of bringing their 
content into a system, or of expressing them as a unity. Whoever 
attempted this seemed hardly able to dispense with a principle 
taken either from metaphysics or from psychology. 

Such a determination of the conceptions of morality by a principle 
was made possible by the metaphysics of Leibniz, though it was only 
prepared by him incidentally and by way of indications, and was 
first carried out by Wolff in systematic, but also in cruder forms. 
The Monadology regards the universe as a system of living beings, 
whose restless activity consists in unfolding and realising their 
original content. In connection with this Aristotelian conception 
the Spinozistic fundamental idea of the " suum esse conservare" (cf. 
32, 6) becomes transformed into that of a purposeful vocation 
or destiny, which Leibniz and his German disciples designated as 
perfection. 1 The "law of Nature," which for this ontology also is 
coincident with the moral law, is the striving of all beings toward 
perfection. Since now every process of perfecting, as such, is con 
nected with pleasure, and every retrogression in life s development 
with pain, there follows from this the ancient identification of the 
ethically good with well-being or happiness. 

1 Leibniz, Monad. 41 ff. 

506 The Enlightenment : Practical Questions. [PART V. 

Natural law, therefore, demands of man that he should do all 
that serves his perfection, and forbids all that threatens to bring 
him loss in his perfection. From this thought Wolff develops the 
whole system of duties, bringing to his aid especially the principle 
of mutual furtherance : man needs for his own perfecting other 
men, and works toward his own perfection in helping them toward 
the fulfilment of their vocation. In particular, however, it followed 
from these premises that man must know what truly conduces to 
his perfecting ; for not all that is momentarily felt to be a further 
ance of life proves truly and permanently a step toward perfection. 
Hence morality is throughout in need of ethical knowledge, of 
right insight into the nature of man and things. From this point of 
view the enlightenment or "clearing up" of the understanding appears 
the pre-eminent ethical task. With Leibniz this follows immediately 
from the conception of the monad. 1 The monad is the more perfect, 
and perfection Leibniz defines in genuine scholastic fashion as 
grandeur de la realite positive, the more it shows its activity in 
clear and distinct representations ; the natural law of its develop 
ment is the clearing up of its original obscure representative content 
(cf. 31, 11). Wolff s circumstantial deduction takes rather the 
form of pointing out in experience the useful consequences of 
knowledge. It remains thus quite within the setting of the homely 
aim which the German teacher-philosopher (Kathederphilosoph) set 
before his scientific work, viz. to make philosophy usable and prac 
tically efficient, by clearness of conceptions and plainness of proofs. 

5. This tendency Wolff had adopted from his teacher Thomasius, 
the father of the Enlighteners, a man who was indeed wanting in 
the pre-eminence that characterised the mind of Leibniz, but was 
given all the more an understanding for the wants of his time, a 
capacity for agitation, and a spirit for efforts toward the public 
good. Intellectual movements of the Renaissance that had been 
checked in the seventeenth century revived again at its close. 
Thomasius would transplant philosophy from the lecture hall into 
real life, put it into the service of the general weal; and since he 
understood little of natural science, his interest turned toward 
criticism of public institutions. Eeason only should rule in the life 
of the whole, as well as in that of the individual : so he fought honour 
ably and victoriously against superstition and narrowness, against 
torture and witch-trials. Enlightenment in the sense of Thomasius 
is hence far from having the metaphysical dignity which Leibniz 
gave it. It gains its value for individuals and for society first by 
the uses which it yields and which can be expected from it alone. 

Cf. Leibniz, Monad. 48 ff. 

CHAP. 2, 36.] Principles of Morals : Wolff, Thomasius. 507 

Perfection and utility are accordingly the two characteristics which 
with Wolff make Enlightenment an ethical principle. The former 
conies out more strongly in connection with the general metaphysical 
basis ; the latter in the particular building out of the system. And 
in the same way this duality of criteria goes through Wolff s school 
and the whole popular philosophy, only, the more superficial the 
doctrines become, the broader the space taken by utility. Even 
Mendelssohn gives as the reason for turning aside from all deeper 
and more refined subtilty, that philosophy has to treat only just so 
much as is necessary for man s happiness. But because this eudae- 
monism of the Enlightenment had from the outset no higher point 
of view than that of the education and welfare of the average man, 
it fell into another limitation, the most jejune philistinism and sen 
sible, prosaic commonplace. This might be in place and most 
beneficial in effect in a certain stratum of popular literature, not 
high, indeed, but broad; but when such a success on the part of the 
Enlighteners "went to their heads," when they applied the same 
measuring rod to the great phenomena of society and history, when 
this excessive pride of the empirical understanding would allow 
nothing to stand except what it had known "clearly and distinctly," 
then the noble features of the Enlightenment became distorted to 
that well-intentioned lack of comprehension, as type of which 
Friedrich Nicolai, with all his restless concern for the public good, 
became a comic figure. 1 

6. The great mass of the German Enlighteners did not suspect 
how far they were wandering from the living spirit of the great 
Leibniz with this dry* utility of abstract rules. Wolff, indeed, had 
already let the pre-established harmony fall metaphysically also, 
and so proved that the finest meaning of the Monadology had re 
mained hidden from him. Hence he and his successors had no 
comprehension for the fact, that Leibniz s principle of perfection 
made the unfolding of the content of the individual life and the shap 
ing out of its dimly felt originality, the task of the ethical life, in 
the same degree as his metaphysics asserted the peculiar nature of 
each individual being in the face of all others. This side of the 
matter first came into power in Germany, when the period of genius 
dawned in literature, and the passionate feeling of strongly indi 
vidual minds sought its own theory. The form which it then found 
in Herder s treatises, and likewise in Schiller s Philosophical Letters, 
was, however, much more strongly determined by another doctrine 

1 Cf. Fichte, Fr. Nicolafs Leben und sonderbare Meinungen (1801), W. W. 
VIII. 1 ff. 

508 The Enlightenment : Practical Questions. [PART V. 

than it was by Leibniz, by a doctrine which, in spite of the dif 
ference in the conceptions in which it was carried out, had in its 
ethical temper the closest relationship with that of the German 
metaphysician. 

Shoftesbury had given to the idea of perfection a form that was 
less systematic but all the more impressive and clear to the imagi 
nation. The ancient conception of life, in accordance with which 
morality coincides with the undisturbed unfolding of man s true and 
natural essence, and therefore with his true fortune, was directly 
congenial to him and became the living basis of his thought. Hence, 
with Shaftesbury, the ethical appears as the truly human, as the 
flower of man s life, as the complete development of his natural 
endowments. In this is fixed at the outset Shaftesbury s attitude 
toward Cumberland and Hobbes. He cannot, like the latter, regard 
egoism as the sole fundamental characteristic of the natural man ; 
he rather agrees with the former in recognising the altruistic incli 
nations as an original inborn endowment. But neither can he see 
in these inclinations the sole root of morality ; to him morality is 
the completion of the entire man, and therefore he seeks its principle 
in symmetrical development and in the harmonious interaction of the 
two systems of impulses. This theory of morals does not demand 
the suppression of one s own weal in favour of that of others ; such 
a suppression appears to it to be necessary only in the lower stages 
of development : the fully cultivated man lives as truly for himself 
as for the whole, 1 and just by unfolding his own individual charac 
ter does he set himself as a perfect member in the system of the 
universe. Here Shaftesbury s optimism expresses itself most fully 
in his belief, that the conflict between the egoistic and the altruistic 
motives, which plays so large a part in the lower strata of humanity, 
must be completely adjusted in the ripe, mature man. 

But for this reason the ethical ideal of life is with this thinker 
an entirely personal one. Morality consists for him, not in the 
control of general maxims, not in the subordination of the individ 
ual s will to norms or standards, but in the rich and full living out 
of an entire individuality. It is the sovereign personality which 
asserts its ethical right, and the highest manifestation in the ethical 
realm is the virtuosoship, which allows none of the forces and none 
of the lines of impulse in the individual s endowment to be stunted, 

1 Pope compared this relation with the double motion of the planets about the 
sun and their own axes (Essay on Man, III. 314 ff.). Moreover, it was through 
tlie same poet that Shaftesbury s theory of life worked on Voltaire, while 
Diderot (in his work upon the Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit) attached 
himself directly to Shaftesbury. 

CHAP. 2, 36.] Principles of Morals : Shaftesbury, Hutcheson. 509 

but brings all the manifold relations into harmony in a perfect con 
duct of life, and thus brings about both the individual s happiness 
and his most efficient working for the welfare of the whole. Thus 
the Greek ideal of the kalokagathia finds a new expression in the 
Weltanschauung of the Monadology (cf. 7, 5). 

7. While the moral principle has thus with Shaftesbury already 
received an aesthetical colouring in its contents, this colouring ap 
pears consistently in a yet stronger degree when he deals with the 
question as to the source of knowledge for ethical tasks. This source, 
by metaphysicians and sensualists alike, was found in rational knowl 
edge either of the nature of things or of the empirically useful : in 
both cases principles resulted that were capable of demonstration 
and universally valid. The morals of virtuosoship, on the contrary, 
must take its individual life-ideal from the depths of the individual 
nature ; for it morality was grounded upon feeling. The ethical 
judgments by which man approves those impulses which Nature has 
implanted within him to further his own and others weal, or, on the 
other hand, disapproves the "unnatural " impulses that work against 
those ends, these judgments rest on man s ability to make his 
own functions the object of study, i.e. upon "reflection" (Locke); 
they are not merely, however, a knowledge of one s own states, but 
are emotions of reflection, and as such they form within the " inner 
sense " the moral sense. 

Thus the psychological root of the ethical was transplanted from 
the field of intellectual cognition to the feeling-side of the soul, and 
set in the immediate vicinity of the aesthetic. The good appeared 
as the beautiful in the world of will and action : it consists, like the 
beautiful, in a harmonious unity of the manifold, in a perfect devel 
opment of the natural endowments ; it satisfies and blesses as does 
the beautiful ; it is, like the beautiful, the object of an original 
approval fixed in man s deepest nature. This parallel ruled the 
literature of the eighteenth century from Shaftesbury on : " taste " 
is the fundamental faculty ethically as aesthetically. This was 
perhaps most distinctly expressed by Hutcheson, but with a turn 
which to some degree led away again from Shaftesbury s individual 
ism. For he understood by the "moral sense" in the purely 
psychological meaning of "innateness" an original faculty, essen 
tially alike in all men, and with the function of judging what 
is ethically to be approved. The metaphysical accessories of the 
Platonists and Cartesians were gladly thrown overboard, and in 
their stead he held fast the more eagerly especially in opposition 
to the "selfish system" to the principle that man possesses a 
natural feeling for the good as for the beautiful, and declared the 
analysis of this feeling to be the business of philosophy. 

510 The Enlightenment : Practical Questions. [PART V. 

The carrying over of this principle into the theoretical domain 
led in the Scottish School (cf . 33, 8) to making the True parallel with 
the Good and the Beautiful, as the object of original approval, and 
thus assuming in " common sense " a kind of " logical sense." But 
the principle of feeling as source of knowledge was proclaimed in a far 
more pronounced manner by Rousseau, who based his deism upon 
the uncorrupted, natural feeling l of man, in opposition to the cool 
intellectual analysis with which the purely theoretical Enlighten 
ment treated the religious life. This feeling-philosophy was carried 
out in a very indefinitely eclectic manner by the Dutch philosopher, 
Franz Hemsterhuys (of Groeningen, 1720-1790), and with quaint 
singularity by the talented enthusiast, Hamann, the " Wizard of the 
North." 2 

8. It was, however, in the fusion of ethical and cesthetic investiga 
tions that the above theory of the feelings, prepared by Shaftesbury 
and Hutcheson, made its influence most felt. The more the eudae- 
monistic morals was treated in a manner intelligible to the common 
mind, the more convenient it was for it to be able to invest the 
moral commands, as the object of a natural pleasure, with the garb 
of grace and attractiveness, and to be permitted to commend the 
good to the taste as something akin to the beautiful. The Scottish 
School, also, was not far from this mode of view, and Ferguson 
developed Shaftesbury s ideas in this manner with especial reference 
to the Leibnizian fundamental conception of perfection. The effect 
of this complication of thought for aesthetics, however, was that the 
beginnings toward a metaphysical treatment, which Shaftesbury 
had brought to the problems of the beautiful from the system of 
Plotinus, became completely overshadowed by the psychological 
method. The question asked was not, what the beautiful is, but 
how the feeling of the beautiful arises ; and in the solution of this 
question the explanation of the aesthetic was brought into more or 
less close connection with ethical relations. This shows itself, too, 
in the case of those writers upon aesthetics who stood closer to 
the sensualistic psychology than did the Scots. Thus Henry Home 
conceives of the enjoyment of the beautiful as a transition from the 
purely sensuous pacification of desires to the moral and intellectual 
joys, and holds that the arts have been " invented " for that refine 
ment of man s sensuous disposition which is requisite for his higher 

1 Cf. the creed of the Savoyard Vicar in tfmile, IV. 201 ff. 

2 Johann Georg Hamann (of Konigsberg, 1780-1788 ; collected writings ed. 
by Gildemeister, Gotha, 1857-73) combines this line of thought with a pietism 
not far removed from orthodoxy in his thoughtful, but illogical and unclear 
form of expression. 

CHAP. 2, 36.] Principles of Morals : Home, Burke. 511 

destiny. He seeks, therefore, the realm of the beautiful in the 
higher senses, hearing and especially sight, and finds as the basis, 
a taste common to all men for order, regularity, and combination of 
the manifold into a unity. When he then further distinguishes 
between the "intrinsic" beauty which is immediately an "object 
of sense," and the beauty of " relation," these relations look essen 
tially toward what is for the common good ethically, in the ser 
vice of which beauty is thus placed. 1 Even Edmund Burke, in his 
effort to derive the aesthetic from elementary states of sensation 
in accordance with the method of associational psychology, is very 
strongly dependent upon the form given to the problems by contem 
porary moral philosophy. His attempt to determine the relation 
of the beautiful to the sublime a task at which Home, also, had 
laboured, though with very little success 2 proceeds from the 
antithesis of the selfish and the social impulses. That is held to 
be sublime which fills us with terror in an agreeable shudder, "a 
sort of delightful horror," while we are ourselves so far away that 
we feel removed from the danger of immediate pain : that is beau 
tiful, on the contrary, which is adapted to call forth in an agreeable 
manner the feelings either of sexual love or of human love in 
general. 

In a manner similar to that of Home, Sulzer placed the feeling of 
the beautiful midway between that of the sensuously agreeable and 
that of the good, forming thus a transition from the one to the other. 
The possibility of this transfer he found in the intellectual factor 
which co-operates in our apprehension of the beautiful : it appeared 
to him following the view of Leibniz (cf. 34, 11) as the 
feeling of harmonious unity in the manifold perceived by the senses. 
But just by reason of these presuppositions, the beautiful was for 
him valuable and perfect only when it was able to further the 
moral sense. Art, also, is thus drawn into the service of the morals 
of the Enlightenment, and the writer on aesthetics, who was so long 
celebrated in Germany, shows himself but a mechanical handicrafts 
man of Philistine moralising in his conception of art and its task. 
How infinitely freer and richer in esprit are the " Observations " 
which Kant instituted "concerning the Feeling of the Beautiful and 
the Sublime," at the time when he, too, pursued, from the psycho 
logical standpoint, and with admirable knowledge of the world, the 

1 For more detailed treatment, see the art. Home (Kames) by W. Windel- 
band in Ersch und Gruber" 1 * Enc., Vol. II. 32, 213 f. 

2 According to Home the beautiful is sublime if it is great. The antithesis 
between the qualitatively and the quantitatively pleasing seems to lie at the 
basis of his unclear and wavering characterisations. 

512 The Enlightenment : Practical Questions. [PART V. 

fine ramifications of the ethical and aesthetic life in individuals, 
families, and peoples ! 

Finally these thoughts gave occasion in Germany to a change in 
psychological theory that was rich in results. Before this it had 
been the custom to divide the psychical activities according to the 
Aristotelian example into theoretical and practical. But now the 
feelings, which became thus recognised in their various significance, 
seemed incapable of being brought either into the group of knowing, 
or into that of willing, without disadvantage ; it seemed rather that 
the feelings, as a peculiar mode of expression, in part lay at the 
basis, and in part followed, both of the above functions of the soul. 
Here, too, the suggestion came from the Leibnizian Monadology. 
Sulzer, in his Berlin lectures, 1 seems first to have pointed out that 
the obscure, primitive states of the monad should be separated from 
the developed forms of life seen in completely conscious knowing 
and willing, and he already found the distinguishing characteristic 
of these obscure states to be the conditions of pleasure and pain given 
with them. This was done also, in a similar way, from Leibnizian 
presuppositions by Jacob Friedrich Weiss. 2 Mendelssohn (1755) 
first named these states Empfindungen* [sensations], and later the 
same author designated the psychical power, which lies at their 
common basis, as the faculty of approval (Billigungsvermogen}. 4 But 
the decisive influence on terminology was exercised by Tetens and 
Kant. The former substituted for sensations (Empfindungen) the 
expression feelings (Fuhlungen or Gefuhle), 5 and Kant used the latter 
almost exclusively. It was he, too, who later made the triple divis 
ion of the psychical functions into ideation, feeling, and willing ( Vor- 
stellen, Fiihlen, und Wollen) the systematic basis of his philosophy, 6 
and since then this has remained authoritative, especially for 
psychology. 

9. The counter-current, which proceeded from Ifobbes and declared 
the profit or injury of the individual to be the sole possible content 
of the human will, maintained itself in the face of all these develop 
ments. In this theory, the criterion of ethical action was sought in 
a purely psychological manner in the consequences of such action 

1 1751 f. Printed in the Vermischten Schriften (Berlin, 1773). 

2 J. F. Weiss, De Natura Animi et potiss imum Cordis Humani (Stuttgart, 
1761). 

3 In this Mendelssohn, with his Letters concerning the Sensations, refers 
directly to Shaftesbury. 

* Cf. Mendelssohn, Morgenstunden, 1785, ch. 7 (W. I. 352). 

5 Cf. Tetens, Versuche, X. pp. 625 ff. 

6 In the article written between 1780 and 1790 designed at first as an intro 
duction to the Critique of Judgment which has passed over into his writings 
under the title Ueber Philosophie iiberhaiipt. Cf. Pt. VI. ch. 1. 

CHAP. 2, 36.] Principles of Morals : Utilitarianism. 513 

for the advantage of our fellow-men. Morality exists only within 
the social body. The individual, if by himself and alone, knows 
only his own weal and woe ; but in society his actions are judged 
from the point of view of whether they profit or injure others, and 
this alone is regarded as the standpoint of ethical judgment. This 
conception of the ethical criterion corresponded not only to the 
common view, but also to the felt need of finding for ethics a basis 
that should be destitute of metaphysics, and rest purely on empiri 
cal psychology. Cumberland and Locke even acceded to it in the 
last resort, and not only the theological moralists like Butler and 
Paley, but also the associational psychologists like Priestley and 
Hartley, attached themselves to it. The classical formula of this 
tendency was gradually worked out. An action is ethically the 
more pleasing in proportion as it produces more happiness, and in 
proportion as the number of men who can share this happiness 
becomes greater : the ethical ideal is the greatest happiness of the 
greatest number. This became the watch-word of Utilitarianism. 

This formula, however, suggested the thought of determining 
quantitatively the ethical values for individual cases and relations. 
The thought of Hobbes and Locke, of grounding a knowledge of a 
strictly demonstrative ethics upon the utilitarian principle, seemed 
thereby to have found a definite form, welcome to the natural-science 
mode of thinking. This enticement was pursued by Bentham, and 
in this consists the peculiar element of utilitarian thought as carried 
out by him, a work which he performed with a warm feeling for 
the public good, and which was later much referred to. The point 
is to find exact, definite points of view, according to which the value 
of every mode of action for the weal of the actor himself and of the 
community to which he belongs, can be determined, partly in itself, 
partly in its relation to other modes of conduct; and Bentham in 
this table of values and their opposites, with an extensive consid 
eration of both individual and social relations and needs, sketches a 
scheme of a pleasure and pain balance for reckoning the useful and 
injurious consequences of human activities and institutions. As 
with Hume (cf. below, No. 12), the reckoning of the ethically val 
uable falls to the province of the measuring intellect ; but the factors 
with which it operates in this process are solely the feelings of 
pleasure and pain. 

10. The close connexion in which this utilitarianism stood his 
torically after Hobbes VitlTthe selfish system that i% ^ith the 
assumption of the essentially egoistic character of human nature 
led necessarily to the separation of the question as to the criterion 
of morality and the kind of knowledge by which it is apprehended, 

514 The Enlightenment : Practical Questions. [PAKT V. 

from that as to the sanction of the moral commands and the motives 
for obeying them. For the metaphysical theories, the sanction of 
the ethical commands lay in the eternal truths of the law of Nature : 
and psychologically, also, there seemed to be no further and especial 
motive needed for the effort toward perfection, for the living out of 
the personality, for the following of innate ethical inclinations ; 
morality was self-explaining under such presuppositions. But he 
who thought more pessimistically of man, he who held him to be a 
being determined originally and in his own nature solely by regard 
to his own weal or woe, he must ask with what right an altruistic 
way of acting is required of such a being, and by what means such 
a being can be determined to obedience to this requirement. If 
morality was not of itself inherent in man s nature, it must be 
declared how it comes into him from without. 

Here, now, the principle of authority, already adduced by Hobbes 
and Locke, performed its service. Its most palpable form was the 
theological; it was carried out with more finely wrought conceptions 
by Butler, and in a crude manner, intelligible to the common mind, 
by Paley. Utility is for both the criterion of ethical action, and the 
divine command is for both the ground of the ethical requirements. 
But while Butler still seeks the knowledge of this divine will in the 
natural conscience his re-interpretation of Shaftesbury s emotions 
of reflection, for which he himself uses also the term " reflection " 
for Paley, it is rather the positive revelation of the divine will that 
is authoritative ; and obedience to this command seems to him explic 
able only because the authoritative power has connected its com 
mandment with promises of reward and threatenings of punishment. 
This is the sharpest separation of ethical principles, and that perhaps 
which corresponds most to the " common sense " of the Christian 
world. The criterion of the moral is the weal of one s neighbour; 
the ground of our knowledge of the moral is the revealed will of 
God ; the real ground which supplies the sanction is the will of the 
Supreme Being ; and the ethical motive in man is the hope of the 
reward, and the fear of the punishment, which God has fixed for 
obedience and disobedience. 

11. Paley thus explained the fact of ethical action by the hypoth 
esis that man, in himself egoistic, is brought at last by the agency 
of the equally egoistic motives of hope and fear, and by the round 
about way of a theological motivation, to the altruistic mode of 
action commanded by God. The sensiialistic psychology substituted 
for the theological agency the authority of the state and the con 
straining forces of social life. If the will of man is in the last 
resort always determinable only by his own weal and woe, his altru- 

CHAP. 2, 30.] Principles of Morals : Sutler, Paley. 515 

istic action is comprehensible only on the supposition that he sees 
in it the surest, simplest, and most intelligent means under the 
given relations for bringing about his own happiness. While, there 
fore, the theological utilitarians held that the natural egoism should 
be tamed by the rewards of heaven and punishments of hell, it 
seemed to the empiricists that the order of life arranged by the 
state and society was sufficient for this purpose. Man finds himself 
in such relations that when he rightly reflects he sees that he will 
find his own advantage best by subordination to existing morals 
and laws. The sanction of ethical demands lies, accordingly, in the 
legislation of the state and of public morality which is dictated by 
the principle of utility, and the motive of obedience consists in 
the fact that each one thus finds his own advantage. Thus Man- 
deville, Lamettrie, and Helcetius developed the " selfish system " ; La- 
mettrie, especially, with tasteless cynicism that savoured of a 
desire for admiration, seeking to exhibit " hunger and love " in 
their lowest sensuous meaning as the fundamental motives of all 
human life a wretched, because artificial, imitation of ancient 
Hedonism. 

Morality, accordingly, appears to be only eudsemonistic shrewd 
ness, the polished egoism of society, the refined cunning of the man 
who is familiar with life, and has seen that to be happy he can 
pursue no better path than to act morally, even if not to be moral. 
This view frequently finds expression in the Enlightenment philos 
ophy as the governing principle of " the world " of that day : 
whether it be as the naive, cynical confession of a writer s own dis 
position, as in Lord Chesterfield s well-known letters to his son, 
or in the form of moralising reflections, as in Labruyere s " Charac- 
teres" (1680), and in La Rochefoucauld s "Reflections" (1690), 
where the mask is unsparingly torn off from man s ethical behaviour, 
and naked egoism is disclosed as the sole impelling motor every 
where, or finally as bitter satire, as with Swift, where the true 
nature of the human beast is finally discovered by Gulliver among 
the Yahoos. 

Hand in hand with this gloomy conception of the natural mean 
ness of man the view goes through the age of the Enlightenment 
that man s education to ethical action has to appeal to just this low 
system of impulses, working through pOAver and authority, with the 
aid of fear and hope. This shows itself characteristically even with 
those who claim for the mature and fully developed man, a pure 
morality raised above all egoism. So, for example, Shaftesbury 
finds positive religion with its preaching of rewards and punish 
ments quite good enough for the education of the great mass. So, 

516 The Enlightenment : Practical Questions. [PART V. 

too, Prussia s philosophical king Frederick the Great, 1 who for him 
self had a consciousness of duty so strict and pure and free from all 
selfish considerations, and declared such to be the highest ethical 
good, yet thought that in the case of the education which the state 
gives to men it should start with their closest interests, however 
low these might be ; for he granted to the Encyclopaedists that man 
as a genus is never to be determined by anything else than by his 
own personal interests. In this respect the French Enlighteners, 
especially, sought to analyse the motives, by awakening which the 
state can win the citizens to care for the interests of the whole. 
Montesquieu showed with fine psychology how different the forms 
are which this relation takes under different forms of constitution. 
Lamettrie pointed, as Mandeville had already done, to the sense of 
honour or repute as the most powerful factor in the social sentiment 
among civilised peoples, and Helvetius carried out this thought 
farther. 

But if the sensualistic psychology thus looked for man s ethical 
education from the state alone, the degree of success with which 
this was accomplished must serve as a standard for estimating the 
value of public institutions. This consequence was drawn by 
Holbach, and the most winning feature of this dry book is perhaps 
the honourableness and energy with which it tries to show how little 
the rotten conditions of the public life of that time were adapted to 
raise the citizen above the meanness of selfish endeavours. 

12. Hume s moral philosophy may be regarded as the most com 
plete embodiment of this movement, and as the most refined consid 
eration of the motives that contend within it. It, too, stands 
completely upon the basis of the psychological method : man s 
ethical life is to be understood by a genetic investigation of his 
passions, feelings, and volitions. The most significant element in 
Hume s teaching is the separation of utilitarianism from the selfish 
system. The criterion of ethical approval and disapproval is, for 
him, too, the effect which the quality or action to be judged is 
adapted to produce in the form of feelings of pleasure and pain, 
and, like the ancients and Shaftesbury, he interprets this in the 
widest sense, inasmuch as he regards as objects of ethical pleasure, 
not only the "social virtues," such as justice, benevolence, etc., but 
also the "natural abilities," 2 such as prudence or sagacity, fortitude, 
energy, etc. But we feel this approval, even when these qualities 

1 Cf. especially what is adduced by E. Zeller, F. d. G. als Philosoph, pp. 
67 ff., 105 ff., and also especially Frederick s "Antimacchiave.lli. 

2 Here, too, the old ambiguity of virtus (virtue) = moral virtue, and also 
ability or excellence, plays a part. 

CHAP. 2, 36.] Principles of Morals : Hume, Smith. 517 

are completely indifferent to our own welfare, or indeed even inju 
rious to the same ; and this cannot possibly be traced back to 
egoism through the medium of mere psychological association. On 
the other hand, the relation which these judgments sustain to the 
complicated relations of experience forbids the assumption of their 
innateness. They must rather be reduced to a simple, elementary 
form, and this is sympathy? i.e. primarily our capacity to feel 
with another his weal or woe as our own, at least in a weakened 
form. Such sympathetic feelings, however, are not only the 
impulsive grounds of moral judgments, but also the original motives 
of moral action, for the feelings are the causes of the decisions of 
the will. Still, these original impulses alone are not adequate to 
explain ethical judgment and action. For the more complicated 
relations of life, there is need of a clarification, ordering, and com 
parative valuation of the factors of feeling, and this is the business 
of reason. From the reflection of reason arise, therefore, in addition 
to the natural and original values, derivative " artificial " virtues, as 
the type of which Hume treats justice and the whole system of 
standards of rights and law in this, evidently, still dependent 
upon Hobbes. But in the last resort these principles, also, owe 
their ability to influence judgment and volition, not to rational 
reflection as such, but to the feelings of sympathy to which this 
appeals. 

Thus the crude conception of a " moral sense " is refined by 
Hume s investigation to a finely articulated system of moral psy 
chology with its carefully differentiated conceptions, as the centre 
of which we find the principle of sympathy. A farther step in 
carrying out this same theory was taken in the ethical work of 
Adam Smith. As against the externality with which ordinary 
utilitarianism had placed the criterion of ethical judgment in the 
pleasurable or painful consequences of the act, Hume had energet 
ically directed attention to the fact, that ethical approval or disap 
proval concerns rather the disposition manifesting itself in the 
action, in so far as this aims at the consequences in question. 
Hence Smith found the essence of sympathy, not only in the 
capacity of feeling these consequences with the one who experiences 
them, but also in the ability to transfer one s self into the disposi 
tion or sentiment of him who acts, and to feel his motives with him. 
And extending farther and farther the thought of transfer through 
sympathy, the judgment which the individual pronounces upon him 
self in the conscience is then conceived as a reflex, mediated through 

1 Cf. Treatise, II. 1, 11, and II. 2, 5. 

518 The Enlightenment : Practical Questions. [PART V. 

feelings of sympathy, of the judgment which he receives from 
others and exercises upon others. 

All phenomena of the ethical life are thus rooted, according to 
Hume and Smith, in the social life, whose psychological basis is 
sympathy, and the founder of political economy, with his great 
philosophical friend, sees in the mechanism of sympathetic transfers 
of feeling an adjustment of individual interests similar to that which 
he believed himself to have discovered in the realm of the exchange 
of external goods, which is conducted with reference to the strait- 
ness of the conditions of life, in the mechanism of supply and 
demand in connection with the competition of labour. 1 But with 
these insights into the thoroughgoing dependence of the individual 
upon a social body, which he does n*/t (Create, but in which he finds 
himself actually placed, the philosophy of the Enlightenment is 
already pointing beyond itself. 

37. The Problem of Civilisation. 

The fundamental thought, which the philosophy of the Enlight 
enment would hold as to the great institutions of human society and 
its historical movement, was prescribed for it in advance, partly by 
its dependence upon natural-science metaphysics, and partly by its 
own psychological tendency. This was to see in these institutions 
the products of the activities of individuals ; and from this followed 
the tendency to single out those interests whose satisfaction the 
individual may expect from such general social connections when 
once these exist, and to treat them in a genetic mode of explanation 
as the motives and sufficient causes for the origin of the institutions 
in question, while at the same time regarding them from a critical 
point of view, as the standard for estimating the value of the same. 
Whatever was regarded as having been intentionally created by 
men should show also whether it was then really fulfilling their 
purposes. 

1. This conception was guided into the political and juristic track 
primarily by Hobbes. The state appeared as the work of individuals, 
constructed by them under the stress of need, when in a condition 
of war with each other and in fear for life and goods. With its whole 
system of rights, it was regarded as resting upon the compact which 
the citizens entered into with each other from the above motives. 
The same Epicurean compact-theory, which had revived in the later 
Middle Ages, passed over with Nominalism into modern philosophy 

1 Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Lond. 1776). 

CHAP. 2, 37.] Problem of Civilisation : Compact-Theory. 519 

and extended its influence over the whole eighteenth century. But 
the artificial construction of absolutism, which Hobbes had erected 
upon it, gave place more and more in consequence of political events 
to the doctrines of popular sovereignty. This lay at the basis of the 
English Constitution of 1688, as well as at that of the theoretical shap 
ing which Locke gave the same in his doctrine of the separation and 
equilibrium of the three departments of the state, the legislative, 
executive, and federative. It controlled, also, as an ideal require 
ment, the writings of Montesquieu, who, in considering the rotten 
administration of law at his time, would have complete independ 
ence given to the judicial power, while he thought of the executive 
and federative departments (as administration within and without, 
respectively) as united in the one monarchical head. It was finally 
carried out to a complete system of democracy in Rousseau s Con- 
trat Social, in which the principle of transfer and representation 
was to be limited as much as possible, and the exercise of the sov 
ereignty also to be assigned directly to the whole body of the peo 
ple. In all these transformations of the doctrine of Hobbes, the 
influence of the realities of historical politics is obvious, but the 
antithesis between Hobbes and Rousseau has also its theoretical 
background. If man is regarded as by nature essentially egoistic, 
he must be compelled to keep the social compact by the strong arm 
of the state : if he is regarded as originally good and social in his 
feelings, as by Kousseau, it is to be expected of him that he will of 
himself always take part in carrying out, in the interest of the 
whole, the life prescribed by the compact. 

It is interesting now to see that the compact-theory in the 
eighteenth century communicated itself also to those theories of 
the philosophy of right which did not have a merely psychological 
basis. The " natural right " of this time proceeds also from the 
right of the individual, and seeks to derive from this the rights of 
individuals in their relation to each other. Yet in carrying out this 
principle two different tendencies show themselves in German phil 
osophy, leading to results that were extremely characteristic in 
their differences. Leibniz had derived the conceptions of right (or 
law) from the most general principles of practical philosophy, fol 
lowing the example of the ancients. 1 Wolff followed him in this 
respect also, but made it on this account the end of the political 
compact to secure the mutual furtherance of individuals in behalf 
of their mutual perfecting, enlightening, and happiness ; according 

1 Cf. his introduction to the Codex Juris Gentium Diplomaticus (1693), 
Works (Erd.), 118 ff. 

520 The Enlightenment : Practical Questions. [PART V. 

to him, therefore, the state has to care, not merely for external 
safety, but also for the general welfare in the broadest extent. 
The consequence of this is that Wolff assigns to the state the right 
and duty of a thorough tutelage of the great mass of unenlightened 
men who are controlled by error and passion, and of intermeddling 
even in their private relations in the way of education. Thus Wolff 
gave the theory for that " paternal " despotism of the benevolent 
police-state under which the Germans of his time lived with very 
mixed feelings. 

The exactly opposite result attached itself theoretically to the 
separation of the philosophy of right from morals, for which the 
way had already been prepared by Thomasius, with his sharp parting 
of the justum and the honestum. In this line the disciple of Tho- 
masius, Gundling (16711729), maintained that right or law was to be 
treated solely as the ordering of the external relations of individuals, 
that it has for its end the preservation of peace without, and there 
fore its decrees can be enforced only as to outward relations. This 
limitation of the state s activity to the external protection of law 
evidently corresponded most fully to the dualistic spirit of the 
Enlightenment. If the individual has conformed to the political 
compact only from need and want, he will evidently be inclined to 
make as few concessions to the state as possible, and will be willing 
to sacrifice to it of his original " rights " only so much as is uncondi- 
ditionally requisite for the end which it is to fulfil. This was not 
merely the thought of the Philistine citizen, who is indeed ready to 
call for the police at once when anything is the matter, but privately 
regards the order of the laws as an enemy that must be kept from 
his throat as much as possible ; it was also the feeling of the En- 
lightener of high intellectual development, who had for his rich 
inner life only the interest of being able to devote himself unmo 
lested to the enjoyments of art and science. In fact, the petty 
spirit of the small German states, with its lack of ideals, must 
necessarily produce the indifference toward public life which thus 
found its theoretical expression. The lowest stage which the de 
preciation of the state reached in this respect among the cultured 
classes is perhaps best characterised by William von HumboldCs 
" Ideas toward an Attempt to determine the Bounds of the Operation 
of the State." 1 Here every higher interest of man is carefully ex 
cluded from the province of the state s authority, and the task of 
public government is restricted to the lower service of protecting 
the life and property of the citizen. 

i Written 1792, published 1851 by E. Cauer. 

CHAP. 2, 37.] Problem of Civilisation : Voltaire. 521 

2. If in this respect German philosophy remained quite indif 
ferent toward the actual political condition, on the other hand 
there appeared in it also the general tendency of the Enlightenment 
to order the life of society, as that of the individual, according to 
the principles of philosophy. If it is glory enough for this period 
to have successfully cleared away much historical lumber that had 
accumulated in the house-keeping of European peoples, Thomasius 
and Wolff, Mendelssohn and Nicolai, certainly deserve credit for 
their share in the work (cf. 30, 5). But this side of the matter 
came forward in an incomparably more powerful and efficient 
degree with the French Enlighteners. It is enough here to recall 
Voltaire, who appeared as a literary power of the first rank, work 
ing unweariedly and victoriously for reason and justice. But the 
contest which he carried on to a certain extent before the bar of 
public opinion of all Europe was taken up in detail by his fellow- 
countrymen, in a criticism of social institutions and by proposals 
for their improvement : in a broad and often passionate discussion 
philosophical reflection proceeds to the task of reforming the state. 
And here the weakness of the Enlightenment at once appears side 
by side with its strength. As always, it takes the standards of its 
criticism for existing institutions, and of its proposals for their 
change, from the universal, eternal nature of man or of things; 
thus it loses from sight the authorisation and vital force of histori 
cal reality, and believes that it is only needed to make a tabula rasa 
of the existing conditions wherever they show themselves contrary 
to reason, in order to be able to build up society entire in accordance 
with the principles of philosophy. In this spirit the literature of 
the Enlightenment, especially in France, prepared for the actual 
break with history, the Revolution. Typical in this was the pro 
cedure of Deism which, because none of the positive religions with 
stood its " rational " criticism, would abolish them all and put in 
their place the. religion of Nature. 

So then the French Revolution, too, attempted to decree the 
abstract natural state of "liberty, equality, and fraternity," the 
realisation of " human rights " according to Rousseau s Social 
Contract. And numerous pens of very moderate quality hastened 
to justify and glorify the procedure. 1 It is for the most part a 
superficial Epicureanism standing upon the basis of Condillac s 
positivism that acts as spokesman. Thus Volney seeks, with the 
de la Nature, the source of all the evils of society in the 

1 The preference for the catechism, a form designed for education in the 
Church, is characteristic of this literature. 

522 The Enlightenment : Practical Questions. [PART V. 

ignorance and covetousness of man, whose capacity for perfection 
has hitherto been restrained by religions. When all "illusions" 
shall be frightened away with these religions, then the newly 
organised society will have as its supreme rule of conduct, that 
"good" is only what furthers the interests of man, and the cate 
chism for the citizen is comprehended in the rule "Conserve toi 
instruis toi modere toi vis pour tes semblables, afin qu ils vivent 
pour toi." 1 Still more materialistic is the form in which the theory 
of the Revolution appears with .St. Lambert, from whom the defini 
tion that was much discussed in later literature comes : " L homme 
est une masse organisee et sensible ; il re^oit 1 intelligence de ce qui 
1 environne et de ses besoins." 2 With the most superficial con 
sideration of history, he celebrates in the Revolution the final 
victory of reason in history, and at the same time this Epicurean 
deduces that the democratic beginnings of this great event will be 
completed in Caesardom ! The extreme pitch of self-complacent 
boasting in this aspect of parliamentary dilettantism was reached 
by Garat and Lancelin. 3 

In contrast with these glittering generalities and declamations 
over the welfare of the people and the reign of reason, the earnest 
reality with which Bentham sought to make the utilitarian principle 
useful for legislation, appears in an extremely favourable light. 
This work he sought to accomplish by teaching the application of 
the quantitative determination of pleasure and pain values (of. 
36, 9) to the consideration of the ends of particular statutes, with 
a careful regard to the existing conditions in every case. 4 Just in 
this he showed his insight into the fact that in the political move 
ment the question at issue is not merely that of political rights, but 
above all that of social interest, and along just this line an enthu 
siastic and successful champion of the Revolution arose in Godwin, 5 
who was not uninfluenced by Bentham. But along other lines, too, 

1 Volney, at the close of the Catechisme, CEuvr., I. 310. 

2 St. Lambert, Catech. Introd., CEuvr., I. 53. For the characterisation of 
this literature it should not remain unmentioned that in St. Lambert s cate 
chism the Analyse de Vhomme is followed in a second book by an Analyse de 
la femme. 

3 The organ of this movement most worthy of esteem was the Decade Philo- 
sophique, which saw and defended in the Revolution the triumph of the philoso 
phy of the eighteenth century. Cf. Picavet, Ideologues, 86 ff . 

4 It is the more to be lamented that Bentham later in his Deontology at 
tempted to give a kind of popular catechism of the utilitarian morals, which, 
in radical one-sidedness, in rancour and lack of understanding for other moral 
systems, equals the worst products of the time of the Revolution. 

6 William Godwin (1756-1836) published his Inquiry concerning Political 
Justice and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness in 1793. Cf. C. 
Kegan Paul, W. Godwin, his Friends and Contemporaries, Lond. 1876, and L. 
Stephen, English Thought, II. 264 ff. 

CHAP. 2, 37.] Problem of Civilisation : France. 523 

the social storm is heard in the literature of the Revolution, as dull 
thunder still dying away in the distance. The investigations con 
cerning the problems of political economy, which in France especially 
were chiefly promoted by the physiocratic school, became more and 
more comprehensive, and were grounded with increasing indepen 
dence upon empirical principles. But while the theory of the 
state demanded, above all, security of possessions, there rose, from 
the depth of society, the question as to the right of personal property ; 
and while the philosophers considered with more and more dissen 
sion the problem, how the interests of the community could be 
reconciled with those of the individual (of. below), the thought 
forced its way to the surface that the ground of all evil with the 
human race lies in the striving after individual possessions, and 
that a social morality and a moral society will begin with the denun 
ciation of this original sin, and not till then. Such communistic 
ideas were thrown to the world by Mably and Morelly, and a Babeuf 
made the first abortive conspiracy to carry out these ideas, under 
the Directory. 

3. But the social question had already before this cast up its 
waves from its lowest depth. The contrast between the classes 
representing luxurious wealth and most wretched poverty, which 
had so great importance among the causes of the Revolution, might 
indeed at first be more palpable and effective; but it first acquired 
its full sharpness by virtue of the antithesis between culture and 
non-culture, which was linked with it by the whole development of 
European life, and this separating chasm was deepest and baldest 
in the age of the Enlightenment. The more the age plumed itself 
upon its "culture," the more evident it became that this was in the 
main a privilege of the property-owning class. In this point, too, 
English Deism had led the way with typical frankness. The 
religion of reason should be reserved for the cultivated man, just 
as the free, beautiful morality should be : for the ordinary man, on 
the other hand, Shaftesbury held, the promises and threatenings of 
positive religion must remain standing as a wheel and gallows. 
Toland, too, had presented his cosmopolitan natural worship as an 
"esoteric" doctrine, and when the later Deists began to carry these 
ideas among the people in popular writings, Lord Bolingbroke, him 
self a free-thinker of the most pronounced kind, declared them to 
be a pest of society, against which the sharpest means were the best. 
Among the German Deists, also, men like Semler would have a very 
careful separation made between religion as a private matter and 
religion as a public order. 

The French Enlightenment, as the relation of Voltaire to Boling- 

524 The Enlightenment : Practical Questions. [PARTY. 

broke shows, was from the beginning decidedly more democratic. 
Indeed, it had the agitative tendency to play off the enlighten 
ment of the masses against the exclusive self-seeking of the upper 
ten thousand. But with this was completed a revolution, by virtue 
of which the Enlightenment necessarily turned against itself. For 
if in those strata in which it first took hold " culture " or civilisa 
tion had such consequences as appeared in the luxury of the "higher" 
classes, if it had been able to do so little in the way of yielding 
fruits that could be used for the needs of the masses also, its value 
must appear all the more doubtful the more philosophy regarded 
the "greatest happiness of the greatest number" as the proper 
standard for the estimation of things and actions. 

In this connection the problem of civilisation shaped itself out for 
modern philosophy : the question whether and how far civilisation, 
i.e. intellectual improvement (which is a historical fact), and the 
change in human impulses and in the relations of human life, which 
has been connected with it whether and in how far this civilisa 
tion has served to further the moral order and man s true happiness. 
The more proudly and self-complacently the average Enlightener 
praised the progress of the human mind, which had reached in him 
its summit of a clear and distinct rational life in theory and prac 
tice, the more burning and uncomfortable this question became. 

It is raised first, though not in a direct and square statement, by 
Mandeville. In his psychology an extreme adherent of the selfish 
system, he sought to show, as against Shaftesbury, that the whole 
life and charm of the social system rests solely upon the struggle 
which self-seeking individuals carry on in their own interests a 
principle which worked also upon Adam Smith in his doctrine of 
supply and demand. 1 If we should think of man as stripped bare 
of all egoistic impiilses (this is the meaning of the Fable of the Bees), 
and provided only with the "moral" qualities of altruism, the social 
mechanism would stand still from pure absence of regard for self. 
The motive power in civilisation is solely egoism, and, therefore, 
we must not be surprised if civilisation displays its activity, not 
by heightening the moral qualities, but only by refining and dis 
guising egoism. And the individual s happiness is as little enhanced 
by civilisation as his morality. If it were increased, the egoism, 
on which the progress of civilisation rests, would be thereby weak 
ened. In truth, it appears, rather, that every improvement of the 
material condition, brought about by intellectual advance, calls forth 
new and stronger wants in the individual, in consequence of which 

i Cf. Lange, Cesch. d. Mater., I. 285 [Eng. tr. I. 205J. 

CHAP. 2, 37.] Problem of Civilisation : Mandevilh, Rousseau. 525 

he becomes more and more discontented ; and so it turns out that 
the apparently so brilliant development of the whole is accomplished 
only at the cost of the morality and happiness of the individual. 

4. In Mandeville these thoughts appear in a mild suggestion, and 
at the same time, in the repelling form of a cynical commendation 
of the egoism, whose " private vices " are " public benefits." They 
attained an importance for world-literature through the brilliant 
turn given them by Rousseau. With him the question concerned 
nothing more and nothing less than the worth of all human 
history its worth for the morality and happiness of individuals. 
And he cast into the face of the Enlightenment the reproach that 
all growth in knowledge, and all refinement of life, had but made 
man more and more untrue to his true vocation and his true nature. 
History with its artificial structure of civilised society has deterio 
rated man : J he came forth from the hand of Nature good and pure, 
but his development has separated him from Nature step by step. 
The beginning of this " degeneration " Rousseau, in his second Dis 
course, found in the creation of property, which had for its result the 
division of labour, and with this the separation of the classes and, ulti 
mately, the awakening of all evil passions : this it was that enlisted 
the work of the intellect permanently in the service of self-seeking. 

In comparison with this unnatural condition of civilised barbarism 
the state of Nature appears at first as the lost paradise, and in this 
sense the sentimental yearning of a time intellectually and morally 
blase found its nourishment in Rousseau s writings, above all in the 
New Hdoise. The ladies of the salon were carried away with enthu 
siasm for the Gessnerian pastoral idyl; but on this account they 
mis-heard the admonition of the great Genevan. 

For he did not wish to lead back to that state of Nature which 
had no society. He was convinced that man is provided by his 
creator with a capacity for being perfected (perfectibilite) which 
makes the development of his natural endowment both a duty and 
a natural necessity. If this development has been guided into 
wrong paths by the historical process Avhich has hitherto prevailed, 
and, therefore, has led to demoralisation and wretchedness, history 
must be begun anew ; in order to find the right way toward his devel 
opment man must return from the unnatural condition of intellectual 
pride to the simple natural state of feeling, from the narrowness 
and falsehood of relations of society to his pure unstunted self. 
For this end, according to Rousseau, humanity as a whole needs a 

1 The English Deists conception of the history of religion (cf. 35, 8) is 
extended by Rousseau to all history. 

526 The Enlu/htenment : Practical Questions. [PART V. 

political constitution, which affords the individual full freedom of 
personal activity in connection with the life of the whole body, and 
in accordance with the principle of equality of rights ; and as indi 
viduals, humanity needs an education, 1 which allows the natural 
endowments of the individual to unfold from his own vitality 
without constraint. The optimism, which Rousseau finds in the 
constitution of the natural God-descended nature of man, makes 
him hope that our condition will be better, the more freely and 
naturally we can develop. 

5. While we thus find Rousseau in lively opposition to the his 
torical development, and in the zealous endeavour to put in its stead 
a new development " according to Nature," the last reconciling 
synthesis of the ideas of the Enlightenment is the endeavour to 
understand the previous course of human history itself as the 
natural development of human nature ; in this thought the phil 
osophy of the eighteenth century strips off all its one-sided- 
ness and reaches its highest consummation. The first stirring of 
this is found in an isolated appearance of Italian literature, with 
Vico. 2 Influenced by the Neo-Platonic metaphysics of the Renais 
sance, especially by Campanella, and educated by Bodin and Grotius, 
he had grasped the idea of a general natural law of the development 
of life, which manifests itself in the history of peoples as well as in 
that of individuals, and with great learning had sought to prove 
this principle of the identity of all natural development. But if in 
such a conception of the naturally necessary correspondences between 
the different historical systems and the fundamental biological 
scheme, the thought of a purposeful inter-relation of the destinies 
of nations had remained foreign to him, this had previously found 

1 In its details Rousseau s fimile frequently uses the "Thoughts," which 
Locke had advanced with a much more limited purpose for the education of a 
young man of higher station in society : there, too, the complete development 
of the individuality was the main thing, from which the turning away from 
learned one-sidedness, the direction of attention to the real and practical, the 
appeal to perception and the use of individual instead of general truths in 
instruction and education, followed as a matter of course. These principles, 
thought out for the Englishman of superior rank, Rousseau adopts as elements 
in an education which sought to develop in man, not the member of a definite 
class or of a future profession, but only "the man." In this spirit his peda 
gogical doctrines passed over to the school of German philanthropy, which, under 
the lead of Basedow (1723-179D), combined the principle of natural develop 
ment with that of utility, and thought out the appropriate forms of an education 
for a community by which the individual should be trained to become by the 
natural way a useful member of human society. 

2 Giov. Battista Vico (1&lt;&gt;68-1744) became influential chiefly through his 
Principj cV una scienza nuova (V intorno alia commune natura delle nazioni 
(1725). Cf. K. Werner, (riambattista V. als Fhiloxopli uud fjdchrter Forscher 
(Vienna, 1879) ; R. Flint, Vic.o (Kdin. and Lond. 1884); and likewise for the 
following, Flint, The Philosophy of History in Europe, Vol. I., new ed., 1893. , 

CHAP. 2, 37.] Problem of Civilisation: Vico, Herder. 527 

all the more forcible support in Bossuet. 1 The French prelate con 
tinues the patristic philosophy of history , which had pushed the 
Redemption into the centre of the world s events. He would have 
the christianising of modern nations through the empire of Charles 
the Great, regarded as the concluding and decisive epoch of uni- 
Versal history, the whole course of which is the work of divine 
providence, and the goal of which is the dominance of the one 
Catholic Church. Such a theological view of the world and of 
history had now, indeed, been energetically put aside by modern 
philosophy, but the meagreness of the results yielded for the con 
sideration of history by the treatment of human society from the 
point of view of individual psychology is seen in the trivial lucu 
brations of Iselin, 2 in spite of his leaning upon Rousseau. 

It was in a mind of Herder s universal receptiveness and fineness 
of feeling that Rousseau s ideas first found in this respect, also, a 
fruitful soil. But his optimism, which had matured in the atmos 
phere of Leibniz and Shaftesbury, did not allow him to believe in 
the possibility of that aberration which the Genevan would regard 
as the nature of previous history. He was rather convinced that the 
natural development of man is just that which has taken place in 
history. While Rousseau s conception of man s perfectibility was 
treated by the Genevan s French adherents, such as St. Lambert, 
and especially Condorcet, as the voucher for a better future, and as 
an infinite perspective toward the perfecting of the race, Herder 
used it against Rousseau as a principle of explanation for the 
past, also, of the human family. History is nothing but the unin 
terrupted progress of natural development. 

This concerned, above all, the beyinniiiy of history. The begin 
ning of the life of society is to be understood, not as an arbitrary 
act, whether of human reflection or of divine determination, but as a 
gradually formed result of the natural connection. It has neither 
been invented nor commanded, but has become. Characteristically 
enough, these opposing views as to the origin of history, asserted 
themselves earliest in theories of language. The individualism of 
associational psychology saw in language, as is manifest particularly 
in the case of Condillac, 3 an invention of man, supra-naturalism, 
defended in Germany by Silssmikh 4 saw a divine inspiration; here 

1 Jacques Beniirnr Iinxn(-t (1027-1704), the celebrated eloquent divine, wrote 
the Discours s\ir V Histoire Universelle (Paris, 1681) originally for the instruc 
tion of the Dauphin. 

a Isaak Iselin of Basle (1728-1782) published in 1764 his Philustophischen 
Muthmassunyen u!&gt;er die d eschichte des Menschheit, 2 vols. 

;i I.oijique and Lanrjuc des Calculs. 

4 Reweis, dass der Ursprung der menschlichen Sprache gottlich sei (Berlin, 
1766). 

528 The Enlightenment : Practical Questions. [PART V. 

.Rousseau had already spoken the word of solution when he saw in 
language a natural, involuntary unfolding of man s essential nature. 1 
Herder not only made this conception his own (cf. above, 33, 
11), but he extended it also consistently to all man s activities in 
civilisation. He proceeds, therefore, in his philosophy of history 
from the point of view of man s position in Nature, from that of 
the conditions of life which the planet affords him, and from that 
of his peculiar constitution, to understand from these sources the 
beginnings and the direction of his historical development: and in 
the progress of his exposition of universal history he makes, like 
wise, the peculiar character of each people and of its historical sig 
nificance proceed from its natural endowments and relations. But 
at the same time the developments of the various nations do not 
fall apart in his treatment, as was still the case with Vico: on the con 
trary, they are all arranged organically as a great chain of ascend 
ing perfection. And they all form in this connected whole the 
ever-maturer realisation of the general constitution of human nature. 
As man himself is the crown of creation, so his history is the 
unfolding of human nature. The Idea of Humanity explains the 
complicated movement of national destinies. 

In this consideration, the unhistorical mode of thinking which 
had characterised the Enlightenment was overcome : every form in 
this great course of development was valued as the natural product 
of its conditions, and the " voices of the peoples " united to form 
the harmony of the world s history, of which humanity is the theme. 
And out of this sprang also the task of the future, to bring to 
ever richer and fuller development all the stirrings of human 
nature, and to realise in living unity the ripe fruits of the historical 
development. In the consciousness of this task of the " world- 
literature," far from all the pride of the meaner Enlightenment, 
full of the presage and anticipation of a new epoch, Schiller could 
call out, in valedictory to the " philosophical century," the joyful 
words : 

" Wie schon, o Mensch, mit deinem Palmenzweige 

Stehst du an des Jahrhunderts Neige 

In edler, stolzer Mannlichkeit ! " 2 

1 With his arguments, though in part of another opinion, St. Martin the 
Mystic attacked the crude presentation of Condillac s doctrine by Garat ; cf. 
Stances de.s coles Normales, III. 61 ff. 

2 In rude paraphrase : 

How fair, man, with victory s palm, 
Thou standest at the century s wane 
In noble pride of manliness. 

PART VI. 

THE GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. 

To the literature cited on pp. 348 and 437, we add : 

H. M. Chalybaeus, Historische Entwicklung der speculativen Philosophic von 

Kant bis Hegel. Dresden, 1837. [Tr. Edin. and Andover, 1854.] 
F. K. Biedermann, Die deutsche Philosophic von Kant bis auf unsere Tage. 

Leips. 1842 f. 
K. L. Michelet, Entwic/celungsgeschichte der neuesten deutschen Philosophic. 
Berlin, 1843. 

C. Fortlage, Genetische Geschichte der Philosophic seit Kant. Leips. 1852. 
O. Liebinann, Kant und die Epigoncn. Stuttgart, 1865. 
Fr. Harms, Die Philosophic seit Kant. Berlin, 1876. 
A. S. Willm, Histoire de la Philosophic Allemande depuis Kant jusqu a Hegel. 
Paris, 1846 ff. 

H. Lotze, Geschichte der ^Esthetik in Deutschland. Munich, 1868. 
R. Flint, Philosophy of History in Europe, I. Edin. and Lond. 1874. 
R. Fester, Jtousseau und die deutsche Geschichtsphilosophie. Stuttgart, 1890. 
[J. Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy. Boston, 1892.] 

A fortunate union of various intellectual movements produced 
in Germany, during the close of the preceding and at the beginning 
of the present century, a bloom of philosophy, which in the history 
of European thought can be compared only with the great develop 
ment of Greek philosophy from Socrates to Aristotle. In a devel 
opment, powerful alike in its intensity and extent, the German 
mind during the short span of four decades (1780-1820) produced a 
wealth of systems of philosophical Weltanschauung, grandly pro 
jected on all sides, such as has at no other time been compressed 
within so narrow a space ; and in all of these the thoughts of pre 
ceding philosophy combine to form characteristic and impressive 
structures. They appear in their totality as the ripe fruit of a long 
growth, out of which germs of a new development, as yet scarcely 
recognisable, are to spring. 

This brilliant phenomenon had its general cause in the incompar 
able vigour and spirit with which the German nation at that time 
took up again with new strength, and carried to its completion, the 
movement of civilisation which began in the Renaissance and had 

530 The German Philosophy. [PART VI. 

been interrupted by external force. Germany attained the summit 
of its inner development at the same time that its outer history 
reached its lowest condition, a process that has no equal in history. 
When it lay politically powerless, it created its world-conquering 
thinkers and poets. Its victorious power, however, lay just in the 
league between philosophy and poetry. The contemperaneousness of 
Kant and Goethe, and the combination of their ideas by Schiller, 
these are the decisive characteristics of the time. 

The history of philosophy at this point is most intimately inter 
woven .with that of general literature, and the lines of mutual rela 
tion and stimulus run continuously back and forth. This appears 
characteristically in the heightened and finally decisive significance 
which fell in this connection to the problems and conceptions of 
aesthetics. Philosophy found thus opened before her a new world, 
into which she had hitherto had but occasional glimpses, and of 
which she now took possession as of the Promised Land. In their 
matter as well as their form, aesthetic principles gained the mastery, 
and the motives of scientific thought became interwoven with those 
of artistic vision to produce grand poetical creations in the sphere 
of abstract thought. 

The ensnaring magic which literature thus exercised upon philos 
ophy rested mainly upon its historical universality. With Herder 
and Goethe begins what we call, after them, world-literature ; the 
conscious working out of true culture from the appropriation 
of all the great thought-creations of all human history. The Ro 
mantic School appears in Germany as the representative of this 
work. And, in analogy to this, philosophy also developed out of a 
wealth of historical suggestions ; it resorted with conscious deep 
ening of thought to the ideas of antiquity and of the Renaissance, 
it plunged intelligently into what the Enlightenment had shown, 
and ended in Hegel by understanding itself as the systematically 
penetrating and formative comprehension of all that the human 
mind had hitherto thought. 

But for this mighty work it needed a new conceptional basis, 
without which all those suggestions from general literature would 
have remained without effect. This philosophical power to master 
the ideal material of history dwelt within the doctrine of Kant, and 
this is its incomparably high historical importance. Kant, by the 
newness and the greatness of his points of view, prescribed to the 
succeeding philosophy not only its problems, but also the means for 
their solution. His is the mind that determines and controls on all 
sides. The work of his immediate successors, in which his new 
principle unfolded itself in all directions and finished its life histor- 

The German Philosophy. 531 

ically with an assimilation of earlier systems, is best comprehended 
in accordance with its most important characteristic, under the name 
of Idealism. 

Hence we treat the history of the German Philosophy in two 
chapters, of which the first embraces Kant, and the second the de 
velopment of idealism. In the thought symphony of those forty 
years the Kantian doctrine forms the theme, and idealism its 
development. 

CHAPTER I. 

THE CRITIQUE OF REASON. 

C. L. Reinhold, Brief e uber die Kantische Philosophic (Deutsch. Merkur, 
1786 f.). Leips. 1790 ff. 
V. Cousin, Lemons sur la Philosophic de Kant. Paris, 1842. 
M. Desdouits, La Philosophic de Kant, d apres les Trots Critiques. Paris, 1876. 
E. Caird, The Philosophy of Kant. Lond. 1876. 
[E. Caird, The Critical Philosophy of I. Kant, Glasgow, Lond., and N.Y., 
2 vols., 1889.] 
C. Cantoni, Em. Kant (3 vols.). Milan, 1879-1884. 
W. Wallace, Kant. Oxford, Edin., and Lond. 1882. 
J. B. Meyer, Kant s Psychologic. Berlin, 1870. 

THE pre-eminent position of the Konigsberg philosopher rests 
upon the fact that he took up into himself the various motives of 
thought in the literature of the Enlightenment, and by their recipro 
cal supplementation matured a completely new conception of the 
problem and procedure of philosophy. He passed through the 
school of the Wolffian metaphysics and through an acquaintance 
with the German popular philosophers; he plunged into Hume s 
profound statement of problems, and was enthusiastic for Rousseau s 
gospel of Nature ; the mathematical rigour of the Newtonian natural 
philosophy, the fineness of the psychological analysis of the origin 
of human ideas and volitions found in English literature, Deism 
from Toland and Shaftesbury to Voltaire, the honourable spirit of 
freedom with which the French Enlightenment urged the improve 
ment of political and social conditions, all these had found in the 
young Kant a true co-worker, full of conviction, who with a rich 
knowledge of the world and admirable sagacity, and also, where it 
was in place, with taste and wit, though far from all self-compla 
cency and boasting, united typically within himself the best features 
of the Enlightenment. 

But it was in connection with the difficulties of the problem of 
knowledge that he wrought out from all these foundation elements 
the work which gave him his peculiar significance. The more he 

532 

CHAP. 1.] The Critique of Reason. 533 

had originally prized metaphysics just because it claimed to give scien 
tific certainty to moral and religious convictions, the more lasting 
was its working upon him when he was forced to become convinced 
by his own progressive criticism in his constant search for truth, 
how little the rationalistic school system satisfied that claim which 
it made. But the more, also, was his vision sharpened for the 
limitations of that philosophy which empiricism developed by the 
aid of psychological method. In studying David Hume this came 
to his consciousness in such a degree that he grasped eagerly for the 
aid which the Nouveaux Essais of Leibniz seemed to offer toward 
making a metaphysical science possible. But the epistemological 
system, which he erected upon the principle of virtual innateness 
extended to mathematics (cf. pp. 465 f. and 485 f.), very soon proved 
its untenability, and this led him to the tedious investigations 
which occupied him in the period from 1770 to 1780, and which 
found their conclusion in the Critique of Pure Reason. 

The essentially new and decisive in this was that Kant recog 
nised the inadequacy of the psychological method for the solution of 
philosophical problems, 1 and completely separated the questions 
which surround the origin and the actual development of man s 
rational activities, from those which relate to their value. He shared 
permanently with the Enlightenment the tendency to take the 
starting-point of his investigations, not in our apprehension of 
things, which is influenced by most various presuppositions, but 
in considering the reason itself; but he found in this latter 
point of view universal judgments which extend beyond all expe 
rience, whose validity can neither be made dependent upon the 
exhibition of their actual formation in consciousness, nor grounded 
upon any form of innateness. It is his task to fix upon these judg 
ments throughout the entire circuit of human rational activity, in 
order from their content itself and from their relations to the 
system of the rational life determined by them, to understand their 
authority or the limits of their claims. 

This task Kant designated as the Critique of Reason, and this 
method as the critical or transcendental method; the subject-matter 
to which this method was to be applied he considered to be the 
investigation as to the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori? 

1 Cf. the beginning of the transcendental deduction of the pure conceptions 
of the understanding in the Critique of I nre, Reason, II. 118 ff. 

2 This expression took form gradually in connection with the origination of 
the Kr. d. r. V. through the importance which the conception of synthesis 
acquired. Cf. 38. Kant develops the above general formula in his introduc 
tion to the Critique in the following way : judgments are analytical when the 
relation of the predicate to the subject, which is therein asserted, has its ground 

534 The German Philosophy. [TAUT VI. 

This rests upon the fundamental insight that the validity of the 
principles of reason is entirely independent of how they rise in the 
empirical consciousness (whether of the individual or of the race). 
All philosophy is dogmatic, which seeks to prove or even merely to 
judge of this validity by showing the genesis of those principles 
out of elements of sensation, or by their innateness, whatever the 
metaphysical assumptions in the case may be. The critical method, 
or transcendental philosophy, examines the form in which these 
principles actually make their appearance, in connection with the 
capacity which they possess of being employed universally and 
necessarily in experience. 

From this there followed for Kant the task of a systematic inves 
tigation of reason s functions in order to fix upon their principles, 
and to examine the validity of these ; for the critical method, which 
was first gained in epistemology, extended its significance of itself 
to the other spheres of the reason s activity. But here the newly 
acquired scheme of psychological division (cf. p. 512, note 6) proved 
authoritative for his analysis and treatment of philosophical problems. 
As thinking, feeling, and tv tiling were distinguished as the funda 
mental forms in which reason expresses itself, so the criticism of 
reason must keep to the division thus given ; it examined separately 
the principles of knowledge, of morality, and of the working of things 
upon the reason through the medium of feeling, a province inde 
pendent of the other two. 

Kant s doctrine is accordingly divided into a theoretical, a practi 
cal, and an cesthetical part, and his main works are the three Critiques, 
of the Pure Reason, of the Practical Reason, and of the Judgment. 

Immanuel Kant, born April 22, 1724, at Konigsberg, Prussia, the son of 
a saddler, was educated at the Pietistic Collegium Fridericianum, and attended 
in 1740 the University of his native city to study theology ; but subjects of 
natural science and philosophy gradually attracted him. After concluding his 
studies, he was a private teacher in various families in the vicinity of Konigs 
berg from 1746 to 1755, habilitated in the autumn of 1755 as Privatdocent in 

in the concept itself which forms the subject ("explicative judgments"); 
synthetical, when this is not the case, so that the addition of the predicate to 
the subject must have its ground in something else which is logically different 
from both ("ampliative judgments"). This ground is, in the case of syn 
thetical judgments a posteriori ("judgments of perception," cf. Prolegom 
ena, 18, III. 215 f.), the act of perception itself; in the case of synthetical 
judgments a priori, on the contrary, i.e. of the universal principles employed 
for the interpretation of experience, it is something else ; what it is is just that 
which is to be sought. A priori is, with Kant, not a psychological, but a purely 
epistemological mark ; it means not a chronological priority to experience, but 
a universality and necessity of validity in principles of reason which really tran 
scends all experience, and is not capable of being proved by any experience \i.e. 
a logical, not a chronological priority]. No one who does not make this clear 
to himself has any hope of understanding Kant. 

CHAP. 1.] The Critique of Reason. 535 

the philosophical faculty of Konigsberg University, and was made full Professor 
there in 1770. The cheerful, brilliant animation and versatility of his middle 
years gave place with time to an earnest, rigorous conception of life and to the 
control of a strict consciousness of duty, which manifested itself in his unremit 
ting labour upon his great philosophical task, in his masterful fulfilment of the 
duties of his academic profession, and in the inflexible rectitude of his life, which 
was not without a shade of the pedantic. The uniform course of his solitary and 
modest scholar s life was not disturbed by the brilliancy of the fame that fell upon 
his life s evening, and only transiently by the dark shadow, that the hatred of 
orthodoxy, which had obtained control under Frederick William II., threatened 
to cast upon his path by a prohibition upon his philosophy. He died from 
weakness of old age on the 12th of February, 1804. 

Kant s life and personality after his earlier works has been drawn most 
completely by Kuno Fischer ((tench, d. neueren Philos., III. and IV., 4th ed. 
Heidelb. 18i)9) ; E. Arnoldt has treated of his youth and the first part of his 
activity as a teacher (Konigsberg, 1882); [J. II. W. Stuckenberg, Life of Kant, 
Lond. 1882]. 

The change which was taking place in the philosopher toward the end of the 
seventh decade of the eighteenth century appears especially in his activity as 
a writer. His earlier " pre-critical " works (of which those most important 
philosophically have been already cied, p. 445) are distinguished by easy- 
flowing, graceful presentation, and present themselves as admirable occasional 
writings of a man of fine thought who is well versed in the world. His later 
works show the laboriousness of his thought and the pressure of the contending 
motifs, both in the form of the investigation with its circumstantial heaviness 
and artificial architectonic structure, and in the formation of his si ntt nces, 
which are highly involved, and frequently interrupted by restriction. Minerva 
frightened away the graces ; but instead, the devout tone of a deep thought and 
an earnest conviction which here and there rises to powerful pathos and weighty 
expression hovers over his later writings. 

For Kant s theoretical development, the antithesis between the Leibnizo- 
Wolffian metaphysics and the Newtonian natural philosophy was at the begin 
ning of decisive importance. The former had been brought to his attention at 
the University by Knutzen (cf. p. 444), the latter by Teske, and in his growing 
alienation from the philosophical school-system, his interest for natural science, 
to which for the time he seemed to desire to devote himself entirely, co-operated 
strongly. His first treatise, 1747, was entitled Thoughts upon the True Estima 
tion of the Vis Viva, a controverted question between Cartesian and Leibnizian 
physicists ; his great work upon the General Natural History and Theory of 
the Heavens was a natural science production of the first rank, and besides 
small articles, his promotion treatise, De Jgne (1755), which propoundid a 
hypothesis as to imponderables, belongs here. His activity as a teacher also 
showed, even on into his later period, a preference for the subjects of natural 
sciences, especially for physical geography and anthropology. 

In theoretical philosophy Kant passed through many reversals (mancherlei 
Umkippunt/en) of his standpoint (cf. 33 and 34). At the beginning (in the 
Physical Monadology} he had sought to adjust the opposition between Leibniz 
and Newton, in their doctrine of space, by the ordinary distinction of things-in- 
themselves (which are to be known metaphysically), and phenomena, or things 
as they appear (which are to be investigated physically) ; he then (in the writ 
ings after 1760) attained to the insight that a metaphysics in the sense of 
rationalism is impossible, that philosophy and mathematics must have diametri 
cally opposed methods, and that philosophy as the empirical knowledge of the 
given cannot step beyond the circle of experience. But while he allowed him- 
self to be comforted by Voltaire and Rousseau for this falling away of meta 
physical insight, through the instrumentality of the "natural feeling" for the 
right and holy, he was still working with Lambert at an improvement of the 
method of metaphysics, and when he found this, as he hoped, by the aid of 
Leibniz s Nouveaux Essais, he constructed in bold lines the mystico-dogmatic 
system of his Inaugural Dissertation. 

The progress from there on to the System of Criticism is obscure and contro 
verted. Cf. concerning this development, in which the time in which he was 
influenced by Hume and the direction which that influence took are especially 

536 Grerman Philosophy : Kant s Critique. [PART VI. 

in question, the following: Fr. Michelis, Kant vor rind nach 1770 (Braunsberg, 
1871) ; Fr. Paulsen, Versuch einer Entwicklungsgeschichte der kantischen 
Erkenntnisstheorie (Leips. 1875) ; A. Riehl, Geschichte und Methode des phi- 
losophischen Kritic.ismus (Leips. 1876) ; B. Erdmann, Kant s Kriticismus 
(Leips. 1878) ; W. Windelband, Die verschiedenen Phasen der kantischen 
Lehre vom Ding-an-sich ( Vierteljahrschr. f. wissensch. Philos., 1876). Cf. also 
the writings by K. Dieterich on Kant s relation to Newton and Rousseau under 
the title Die kantische Philosophic in ihrer inneren Entwicklungsgeschichte, 
Freiburg i. B. 1885. 

From the adjustment of the various tendencies of Kant s thought proceeded 
the "Doomsday-book" of German philosophy, the Critique of Pure Reason 
(Riga, 1781). It received a series of changes in the second edition (1787), and 
these became the object of very vigorous controversies after attention had been 
called to them by Schelling ( W., V. 196) and Jacobi (W., II. 291). Cf. concern 
ing this, the writings cited above. H. Vaihinger, Commentar zu K. K. d. r. V, 
(Vol. I., Stuttgart, 1887 [Vol. II., 1892]), has diligently collected the literature. 
Separate editions of the Kritik, by K. Kehrbach, upon the basis of the first edi 
tion, and by B. Krdmann [and E. Adickes] upon the basis of the second 
edition. [Eng. tr. of the Critique (2d ed.), by Meiklejohn, in the Bohn Library, 
and by Max Miiller (text of 1st ed. with supplements giving changes of 2d ed.), 
Lond. 1881 ; Paraphrase and Commentary by Mahaffy and Bernard, 2d ed., 
Loud, and N.Y. 1889 ; partial translations in J. II. Stirling s Text-book to Kant, 
and in Watson s Selections, Lond. and N.Y. 1888. This last contains also ex 
tracts from the ethical writings and from the Critique of Judgment. ,] 

The additional main writings of Kant in his critical period are : Prolegomena 
zu einer jrden kiinftigen Metapbysik, 1783 ; Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der 
Bitten, 1785; Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft, 1785; 
Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 1788 ; Kritik der Urtheilskraft, 1790 ; Die 
Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, 1793 ; Zum ewigen Frie- 
den, 1795 ; Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Rechts- und Tugendlehre, 1797 ; 
Der Streit der Fakultiiten, 1798 ; [Eng. tr. of the Prolegomena, by Mahaffy and 
Bernard, Lond. and N.Y. 1889; of the Prolegomena and Metaphysical Founda 
tions of Natural Science, by Bax, Bohn Library ; of the ethical writings, includ 
ing the first part of the Religion within the Bounds of Pure Reason, by T. K. 
Abbott, 4th ed., Lond. 1889 ; of the Critique of Judgment, by J. H. Bernard, 
Lond. and N.Y. 1892; of the Philosophy of Law, by W. Hastie, Edin. 1887; 
Principles of Politics, including the essay on Perpetual Peace, by W. Hastie, 
Edin. 1891. The contents of Kant s Essays and Treatises, 2 vols., Lond. 1798, 
is given in Ueberweg, II. 138 (Eng. tr.)]. 

Complete editions of his works have been prepared by K. Rosenkranz and 
F. W. Schubert (12 vols., Leips. 1833 ff.), G. Hartenstein (10 vols., Leips. 
1838 f., and recently 8 vols., Leips. 1867 ff.), and J. v. Kirchmann (in the 
Philos. Biblioth.}. 1 They contain, besides his smaller articles, etc., his lectures 
upon logic, pedagogy, etc., and his letters. A survey of all that has been 
written by Kant (including also the manuscript of the Transition from Meta 
physics to Physics, which is without value for the interpretation of his critical 
system) is found in Ueberweg- Heinze, III. 24 ; there, too, the voluminous 
literature is cited with great completeness. Of this we can give here only a 
choice of the best and most instructive ; a survey of the more valuable literature, 
arranged according to its material, is offered by the article Kant, by W. Windel 
band in Ersch und Gruber s Enc. [The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 
contains numerous articles upon Kant. We may mention also Adamson, The 
Philosophy of Kant, Edin. 1879 ; art. Kant, in Enc. Brit., by the same author ; 
arts, in Mind, Vol. VI., by J. Watson, and in Philos. Review, 1893, by J. G. 
Schurmann. E. Adickes has begun an exhaustive bibliography of the German 
literature in the Philos. Review, 1893.] 

1 The citations refer to the older Hartenstein edition In the case of many 
works the convenient editions by K. Kehrbach (Reclam. Bib. ) make easy the 
transfer of the citations to the other editions. 

CHAP. 1, 38.] Object of Knowledge. 537 

38. The Object of Knowledge. 

Erh. Schmid, Kritik der reinen Vernunft im Grtuidris.se. Jena, 1786. 
H. Cohen, Kant s Theorie der Erfahrung. Berlin, 1871. 
A. Holder, Darstellung der kantischen Erkenntnisstheorie. Tlibingen, 1873. 
A. Stadler, Die, Grundsiitze der reinen Erkenntnisstheorie in der kantischen 
Philosophic. Leips. 187(5. 
Job. Volkelt, /. Kant s Erkenntnisstheorie nach ihren Grundprincipien analysirt. Leips. 1879. 
E. Pfleiderer, Kantischer Kriticismus und englische Philosophic. Tiibingen, 
1881. 
J. Hutchinson Stirling, Text-Book to Kant. Edin. and Lond. 1881. 
Seb. Turbiglio, Analisi, Storia, Critica della llagione Pura. Rome, 1881. 
G. S. Morris, Kant s Critique of Pure Reason, Chicago, 1882. 
Fr. Staudinger, Jt oumena. Darmstadt, 1884. 
[K. Fischer s Criticism of Kant, trans, by Hough. Lond. 1888.] 
[J. Watson, Kant and his English Critics. Lond. 1880.] 
[H. Vaihinger, Commentar zu Kant s Kritik d. r. Vernunft, II. (on the 
Esthetic). Stuttgart, 1892.] 

Kant s theory of knowledge followed with tenacious consistency 
from the statement which modern Terminism had given to problems 
of knowledge (cf. pp. 466 and 482). The philosopher had grown up 
in the nai ve realism of the Wolffian school, which without close 
scrutiny regarded logical necessity and reality as identical ; and his 
liberation from the ban of this school consisted in his seeing the 
impossibility of determining out of "pure reason," i.e. through mere 
logical operations with conceptions, anything whatever as to the j 
existence l or the causal relation 2 of real things. The metaphysi 
cians are the architects of many a world of thought in the air; 3 but 
their structures have no relation to reality. Kant now sought this 
relation first in the conceptions given through experience, since the 
genetic connection of these with the reality to be known by science 
seemed immediately evident, but he was shaken from this "dog 
matic slumber" by Hume, 4 who demonstrated that precisely the 
constitutive Forms of the conceptional knowledge of reality, espec 
ially the Form of causality, are not given in perception, but are 

1 Cf. Kant s Sole Possible Proof for the Existence of God. 

2 Cf. the Essay on Negative Magnitudes, especially the conclusion (W., I. 
59 ff.). 

8 Dreams of a Ghost Seer, I. 3 ; W., III. 75. 

4 In connection with this frequently mentioned confession of Kant, it is for 
the most part disregarded that he characterised as "dogmatic" not only 
rationalism, but also the empiricism of the earlier theory of knowledge, and 
that the classical passage at which he uses this expression (in the preface to 
the Prolegomena, W.. III. 170 f.) does not contrast Hume with Wolff, but with 
Locke, Reid, and Beattie only. The dogmatism from which, therefore, 
Kant declared that he had been freed through Hume icas that of cin/iiricism. 

538 German Philosophy : KanCs Critique. [PART VI. 

products of the mechanism of association without any demonstrable 
relation to the real. Reality was not to be known from the "given" 
conceptions, either. And then Kant, prompted by Leibniz, deliber 
ated once more whether the purified conception of virtual innate- 
ness, with the aid of the " pre-established harmony " grounded in 
God between the monad which knows and the monad which is to be 
known, might not solve the mystery of the relation of thought and 
Being, and in his Inaugural Dissertation he had convinced himself 
that this was the solution of the problem. But cool reflection 
soon showed that this pre-established harmony was a metaphysical 
assumption, incapable of proof and unable to support a scientific 
system of philosophy. So it appeared that neither empiricism nor 
rationalism had solved the cardinal question, the relation of knowl 
edge to its object, in what does it consist and on what does it rest ? ] 

1. Kant s own, long-weighed answer to this question is the Critique 
of Pure Reason. In its final systematic form, which found an ana 
lytical explication in the Prolegomena, his criticism proceeds from 
the/ocf of the actual presence of synthetic judgments a priori in three 
theoretical sciences; viz. iu mathematics, in pure natural science, and 
in metaphysics; and the design is to examine their claims to universal 
and necessary validity. 

In this formulation of the problem the insight into the nature of 
reason s activity, which Kant had gained in the course of his critical 
development, came into play. This activity is synthesis, i.e. the 
uniting or unifying of a manifold. 2 This conception of synthesis* is 
a new element which separates the Critique from the Inaugural Dis 
sertation; in it Kant found the common element between the Forms 
of the sensibility and those of the understanding, which in his 
exposition of 1770 were regarded as entirely separate, in accordance 
with their characteristic attributes of receptivity and spontaneity 
respectively. 4 It now appeared -that the synthesis of the tfteoretical 

1 Kant s letter to Marcus Herz, Feb. 21, 1772. 

" This frequently repeated definition makes the fundamental conception of 
of the critical doctriue of knowledge appear in closest proximity to the funda 
mental metaphysical conception of the Monadology. Cf. 31, 11. 

8 Which is introduced in the Transcendental Analytic in connection with the 
doctrine of the iUfgffriff Sections 10 and 15 (of the first edition of the 
Critique). 

4 Hence the cocftk of synthesis in the present form of the CHfffM of 
Pure Beaton comes in \nWMnm with the psychological presuppositions which 
passed over to the Critique out of the German working-over of the Inaugural 
Dinertition. which forms the Transcendental ^Efttietic and the beginning of the 
Transcendental Lnyic this was originally to have appeared immediately after 
1770 under the title Limit* &lt; &lt; &lt;** and of the Understanding). In 

--:-. resuppositions became obliterated. 

Earlier, sensibility and und*-- over against each ot; 

receptivity and spontaneity ; but space and time, the pure Forms of the sensi- 

CHAP. 1, 38.] Object of Knowledge : Synthesis. 539 

reason completes itself in three stages : the combination of sensa 
tions into perceptions takes place in the Forms of space and time ; 
the combination of the perceptions into experience of the natural 
world of reality takes place by means of concepts of the understand 
ing; the combination of judgments of experience into metaphysical 
knowledge takes place by means of general principles, which Kant 
calls Ideas. These three stages of the knowing activity develop, 
therefore, as different Forms of synthesis, of which each higher 
stage has the lower for its content. The critique of reason has to 
investigate what the especial Forms of this synthesis are in each 
stage, and in what their universal and necessary validity consists. 

2. As regards mathematics, the conception of the Inaugural Dis 
sertation fits aptly, in the main, into the critique of reason. Mathe 
matical propositions are synthetic ; they rest in the last resort upon 
construction in pure perception, not upon the development of con 
ceptions. Their necessity and universal validity, which cannot be 
established by any experience, is, therefore, to be explained only if 
an a priori principle of perception lies at their basis. Kant, there 
fore, shows that the general ideas of space and time, to which all 
insights of geometry and arithmetic relate, are " pure Forms of per 
ception " or perceptions a priori. The ideas of the one infinite 
space and of the one infinite time do not rest upon the combination 
of empirical perceptions of finite spaces and times; but with the 
very attributes of limit in the " beside-of-one-another " and * after- 
one-another " (co-existence and succession), the whole of space and 
the whole of time respectively are already involved in the empirical 
perception of particular space and time magnitudes, which can accord 
ingly be presented to the mind only as parts of space in general 
and of time in general. Space and time cannot be "concepts," 
since they relate to an object which is only a single, unique object, 
and which is not thought as complete, but is involved in an infinite 
synthesis ; and further, they are related to the ideas of finite magni 
tudes, not as class -concepts are to their particular examples, but as 
the whole to the part. If they are, accordingly, pure perceptions 
(Anschauungen), i.e. perceptions not founded upon empirical percep 
tions ( Wahrnehj&ungen), but lying at the basis of all empirical per 
ceptions, 1 then they are, as such, necessary ; for we can indeed think 

bility, were indeed the principles of the synthetical ordering of the 
and thus belonged under the general conception of synthesis, i.e. spontaneous 
unity of the manifold. Thus the conception of synthesis burst the psychological 
schema of the Inaugural Dissertation. 

1 Here once more it must be recalled that it is but a perverted and completely 
err. iu-.nis conception of Kant to conceive of this lying at the basis of" or 
pn ceding," as referring to time. The natirism. which holds space and time 

540 German Philosophy : Kant s Critique. [PART VI. 

everything away from them, but cannot think them away. They 
are the given Forms of pure perception from which we cannot escape, 
the laws of relations, in which alone we can mentally represent with 
synthetic unity the manifold of sensations. And further, space is 
the form of the outer sense, time that of the inner sense ; all objects 
of the particular senses are perceived as spatial, all objects of self- 
perception as in time. 

If, then, space and time are the " unchangeable Form of our sensu 
ous receptivity," cognitions determined by these two kinds of per 
ception without any regard to the particular empirical content, 
possess universal and necessary validity for the entire compass of 
all that we can perceive and experience. In the realm of the sensi 
bility, so the " Transcendental .-Esthetic " teaches, the only 
object of a priori knowledge is the Form of the synthesis of the man 
ifold given through sensation, the law of arrangement in space and 
time. But the universality and necessity of this knowledge is intel 
ligible only if space and time are nothing but the necessary Forms of 
man s sensuous perception. If they possessed a reality independent 
of the functions of perception, the a priori character of mathematical 
knowledge would be impossible. Were space and time themselves 
things or real properties and relations of things, then we could know 
of them only through experience, and, therefore, never in a univer 
sal and necessary way. This last mode of knowledge is possible 
only if they are nothing but the Form under which all things in our 
perception must appear. 1 According to this principle the a priori 
and the phenomenal become for Kant interchangeable conceptions. 
The only universal and necessary element in man s knowledge is the 
Form under which things appear in it. Rationalism limits itself to 
the Form, and holds good even for this only at the price of the 
" subjectivity " of the same. 

3. While Kant would thus have the spatial and chronological re 
lations of objects of perception regarded as wholly a mode of mental 
representation, which does not coincide with the reality of things 
themselves, he distinguished this conception of their ideality very 
exactly from that " subjectivity of the qualities of sense " which was 
held by him, as by all philosophy after Descartes and Locke, to be 
self-evident. 2 And the point at issue here again is solely the ground 
of the phenomenality. As regards colour, taste, etc., the phenome- 
nality had been based, since the time of Protagoras and Democritus, 

to be inborn ideas, is un-Kantian throughout, and stands in contradiction tc 
express declarations of the philosopher (cf., e.g., above, p. 465 f.). 

1 This thought is developed with especial clearness in the Prolegomena, 9. 

2 Cf. Critique, 3, b. W., II. 68. 

CHAP. 1, 38.] Object of Knowledge : Space and Time. 541 

upon the difference and relativity of impressions ; for the Forms of 
space and time, Kant deduces their phenomenality precisely from 
their invariability. For him, therefore, the qualities of sense 
offered only an individual and contingent mode of representation ; 
while the Forms of space and time, on the other hand, present 
a universal and necessary mode in which things appear. All that 
perception contains, is, indeed, not the true essence of things, but 
an appearance or phenomenon ; but the contents of sensation are 
" phenomena " in quite another sense than that in which the Forms 
of space and time are such ; the former have worth only as the 
states of the individual subject, the latter as "objective" Forms of 
perception for all. Even on this ground, therefore, Kant, too, sees 
the task of natural science to lie in the reduction of the qualitative 
to the quantitative, in which alone necessity and universal validity 
can be found upon a mathematical basis, agreeing in this with 
Democritus and Galileo ; but he differed from his predecessors in 
holding that, philosophically considered, even the mathematical mode 
of representing Nature can be regarded only as an appearance and 
phenomenon, though in the deeper sense of the word. Sensation 
gives an individual idea, mathematical theory gives a necessary, 
universally valid perception of the actual world ; but both are 
merely different stages of the phenomenal appearance, behind which 
the true thing-in-itself remains unknown. Space and time hold 
without exception for all objects of perception, but for nothing 
beyond ; they have " empirical reality " and " transcendental ideality." 

4. The main advance of the Critique of Reason beyond the Inau 
gural Dissertation consists in the fact that these same principles are 
extended in a completely parallel investigation to the question as 
to the epistemological value which belongs to the synthetic Forms 
of the activity of the understanding. 1 

Natural science needs besides its mathematical basis a number of 
general principles as to the connection of things. These principles, 
such as that every change must have its cause, are of a synthetic 
nature, but, at the same time, are not capable of being established 
by experience, though they come to consciousness through experi 
ence, are applied to experience, and find there their confirmation. 
Of such principles a few have indeed been incidentally propounded 
and treated hitherto, and it remains for the Critique itself to dis 
cover the "system of principles," but it is clear that without this 
basis the knowledge of Nature would be deprived of its necessary 

1 This parallelism is seen most plainly by comparing 9 and 14 of the 
Prolegomena. 

542 German Philosophy : Kant s Critique. [PART VI. 

and universal validity. For "Nature" is not merely an aggregate 
of spatial and temporal Forms, of corporeal shapes and motions, 
but a connected system, which we perceive through our senses, but 
think at the same time through conceptions. Kant calls the faculty 
of thinking the manifold of perception in synthetic unity, the 
Understanding ; and the, categories or pure conceptions of Understand 
ing are the Forms of the synthesis of the Understanding, just as space 
and time are the Forms of the synthesis of perception. 

If now Nature, as object of our knowledge, were a real connected 
system of things, independent of the functions of our reason, we 
could know of it only through experience and never a priori; a uni 
versal and necessary knowledge of Nature is possible only if our 
conceptional Forms of synthesis determine Nature itself. If Nature 
prescribed laws to our understanding, we should have only an 
empirical, inadequate knowledge ; an a priori knowledge of Nature 
is therefore possible only if the case be reversed and our understanding 
prescribes laws to Nature. But our understanding cannot determine 
Nature in so far as it exists as a thing-in-itself, or as a system of 
things-in-themselves, but only in so far as it appears in our thought. 
A. priori knowledge of Nature is therefore possible only if the con 
nection which we think between perceptions is also nothing but our mode 
of ideation; the conceptional relations also, in which Nature is an 
object of our knowledge, must be only "phenomenon." 

5. In order to attain this result, the Critique of Reason proceeds 
first to assure itself of these synthetic Forms of the understanding 
in systematic completeness. Here it is clear from the outset that 
we have not to do with those analytic relations which are treated in 
formal logic, and grounded upon the principle of contradiction. For 
these contain only the rules for establishing relations between con 
ceptions according to the contents already given within them. But 
such modes of combination as are present when we affirm the rela 
tion of cause and effect, or of substance and accident, are not con 
tained in those analytical Forms just this had been shown by 
Hume. Kant discovers here the completely new task of transcendental 
logic. 1 Side by side with the (analytic) Forms of the understanding, 
in accordance with which the relations of conceptions which are 
given as to their contents are established, appear the synthetic Forms 
of understanding, through which perceptions are made objects of 
conceptional knowledge. Images of sensation, co-ordinate in space 
and changing in time, become " objective " only by being thought as 

6 Cf. M. Steckelmacher, Die formale Logik Kant s in ihren Beziehungen zur 
transscendentalcn (Breslau, 1878). 

CHAP. 1, 38.] Object of Knowledge : Categories. 543 

things with abiding qualities and changing states ; but this relation 
expressed by means of the category inheres analytically neither in the 
perceptions nor in their perceptional relations as such. In the ana 
lytic relations of formal logic thinking is dependent upon its objects, 
and appears ultimately with right as only a reckoning with given 
magnitudes. The synthetic Forms of transcendental logic, on the 
contrary, let us recognise the understanding in its creative function 
of producing out of perceptions the objects of thought itself. 

At this point, in the distinction between formal and transcen 
dental logic, appears for the first time the fundamental antithesis 
between Kant and the conceptions of the Greek theory of knowl 
edge which had prevailed up to his time. The Greek theory 
assumed "the objects" as "given" independently of thought, and 
regarded the intellectual processes as entirely dependent upon the 
objects; at the most it was the mission of the intellectual processes 
to reproduce these objects by way of copy, or allow themselves to 
be guided by them. Kant discovered that the objects of thought 
are none other than the products of thought itself. This spontaneity 
of reason forms the deepest kernel of his transcendental idealism. 

But while he thus with completely clear consciousness set a new 
epistemological logic of synthesis by the side of the analytical logic 
of Aristotle, which had as its essential content the relations involved 
in subsuming ready-made conceptions under each other (cf. 12), 
he yet held that both had a common element, viz: the science of 
judgment. In the judgment the relation thought between subject 
and predicate is asserted as holding objectively ; all objective think 
ing is judging. Hence if the categories or radical conceptions of the 
understanding are to be regarded as the relating forms of the 
synthesis by which objects arise, there must be as many categories 
as there are kinds of judgments, and every category is the mode of 
connecting subject and predicate which is operative in its own kind 
of judgment. 

Kant accordingly thought that he could deduce the table of the 
categories from that of the judgments. He distinguished from the 
four points of view of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Modality, 
three kinds of judgments for each: Universal, Particular, Singular, 
Affirmative, Negative, Infinite, Categorical, Hypothetical, Dis 
junctive, Problematic, Assertoric, Apodictic; and to these were 
to correspond the twelve categories : Unity, Plurality, Totality, 
Reality, Negation, Limitation, Inherence and Subsistence, Caus 
ality and Dependence, Community or Reciprocity, Possibility and 
Impossibility, Existence and Non-existence, Necessity and Con 
tingency. The artificiality of this construction, the looseness of 

544 German Philosophy : Kant s Critique. [PART VI. 

the relations between Forms of judgment and categories, the un 
equal value of the categories, all this is evident, but Kant 
unfortunately had so much confidence in this system that he treated 
it as the architectonic frame for a great number of his later 
investigations. 

6. The most difficult part of the task, however, was to demon 
strate in the "Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Conceptions 
of the Understanding" how the categories "make the objects of 
experience." The obscurity into which the profound investigation 
of the philosopher necessarily came here is best brightened up by 
a fortunate idea of the Prolegomena. Kant here distinguishes judg 
ments of perception, i.e. those in which only the relation of sensations 
in space and time for the individual consciousness is expressed, and 
judgments of experience, i.e. those in which such a relation is 
asserted as objectively valid, as given in the object; and he finds 
the difference in epistemological value between them to be, that 
in the judgment of experience the spatial or temporal relation is 
regulated and grounded by a category, a conceptional connection, 
whereas in the mere judgment of perception this is lacking. Thus, 
for example, the succession of two sensations becomes objective and 
universally valid when it is thought as having its ground in the 
fact that one phenomenon is the cause of the other. All particular 
constructions of the spatial and temporal synthesis of sensations 
become objects only by being combined according to a rule of the 
understanding. In contrast with the individual mechanism of 
ideation, in which individual sensations may order themselves, 
separate and unite in any way whatever, stands objective think 
ing, which is equally valid for all, and is bound to fixed, co 
herent, ordered wholes, in which the connections are governed by 
conceptions. 

This is especially true in the case of relations in time. For since 
phenomena of outer sense belong to the inner sense as "determina 
tions of our mind," all phenomena without exception stand under 
the Form of the inner sense, i.e. of time. Kant, therefore, sought 
to show that between the categories and the particular Form of 
perception in time a " schematism " obtains, which first makes it 
possible at all to apply the Forms of the understanding to the 
images of perception, and which consists in the possession by every 
individual category of a schematic similarity with a particular form of 
the time relation. In empirical knowledge we use this schematism 
to interpret the empirically perceived time relation by the correspond 
ing category [e.g. to apprehend regular succession as causality] ; 
transcendental philosophy, conversely, has to seek the justification 

CHAP. 1, 38.] Object of Knowledge : Experience. 546 

of this procedure in the fact that the category, as a rule of the 
understanding, gives the corresponding time relations a rational 
basis as object of experience. 

In fact, the individual consciousness finds in itself the contrast 
between a movement of ideas (say of the fancy), for which it claims 
no validity beyond its own sphere, and, on the other hand, an activ 
ity of experience, in the case of which it knows itself to be bound 
in a way that is likewise valid for all others. Only in this depend 
ence consists the reference of thought to an object. But if it was 
now recognised that the ground of the objective validity of the 
time (and space) relation can rest only in its determination by a 
rule of the understanding, it is on the other hand a fact that 
the consciousness of the individual knows nothing of this co-opera 
tion of the categories in experience, and that he rather accepts the 
result of this co-operation as the objective necessity of his appre 
hension of the synthesis of sensations in space and time. 

The production of the object, therefore, does not go on in the 
individual consciousness, but lies already at the basis of this con 
sciousness ; for this production, a higher common consciousness must 
therefore be assumed, which comes into the empirical consciousness 
of the individual, not with its functions, but only with their result. 
This Kant termed in the Prolegomena, consciousness in general; in 
the Critique, transcendental apperception, or the "/" [or "self," 
or " ego "]. 

Experience is accordingly the system of phenomena in which the 
spatial and temporal synthesis of sensation is determined by the rules 
of the understanding. Thus " Nature as phenomenon " is the object 
of an a priori knowledge ; for the categories hold for all experience, 
because experience is grounded only through them. 

7. The universal and necessary force and validity of the cate 
gories find expression in the Principles of the Pure Understanding, 
in which the conceptional Forms unfold themselves through the 
medium of the schematism. But here it is at once evident that the 
main weight of the Kantian doctrine of the categories falls upon 
the third group, and thus upon those problems in which he hoped 
"to solve Hume s doubt." From the categories of Quantity and 
Quality result only the " Axiom of Perception," that all phenomena 
are extensive magnitudes, and the " Anticipations of Empirical 
Perception " according to which the object of sensation is an inten 
sive magnitude ; in the case of Modality there result only definitions 
of the possible, actual, and necessary, under the name of the " Postu 
lates of Empirical Thought." On the other hand, the Analogies of 
Experience prove that in Nature substance is permanent, and that 

546 German Philosophy : Kant s Critique. [PART VI. 

its quantum can be neither increased nor diminished, that all 
changes take place according to the law of cause and effect, and that 
all substances are in thorough-going reciprocity or inter-action. 

These, therefore, are the universally and necessarily valid prin 
ciples and highest premises of all natural science, which are uni- 
\ versally and necessarily valid without any empirical proof; they 
^ contain what Kant calls the metapkysics of Nature. In order that 
they may be employed, however, upon the Nature given through 
our senses, they must pass through a mathematical formulation, 
because Nature is the system of sensations perceived in the Forms 
of space and time and ordered according to the categories. This 
transition is effected through the empirical conception of motion, to 
which all occurrence and change in Nature is theoretically to be 
reduced. At least, science of Nature, in the proper sense, reaches 
only so far as we can employ mathematics : hence Kant excluded 
psychology and chemistry from natural science as being merely 
descriptive disciplines. The "Metaphysical Elements of Natural 
Science " contain, accordingly, all that can be inferred universally 
and necessarily concerning the laws of motion, on the ground of the 
categories and of mathematics. The most important point in Kant s 
philosophy of Nature, as thus built up, is his dynamic theory of mat 
ter, in which he now deduces from the general principles of the 
Critique the doctrine already laid down in the " Natural History of 
tlie Heavens," that the substance of that which is movable in space 
is the product of two forces which maintain an equilibrium in a 
varying degree, those of attraction and repulsion. 

8. But in accordance with Kant s presuppositions, the above 
i metaphysics of Nature can be only a metaphysics of phenomena : 
and no other is possible, for the categories are Forms for relating, 
. and as such are in themselves empty ; they can refer to an object 
only through the medium of perceptions, which present a manifold 
content to be combined. This perception, however, is, in the case 
of us men, only the sensuous perception in the forms of space and 
time, and as a content for their synthetic function we have only 
tli at given in sensations. Accordingly, the only object of human 
knowledge is experience, i.e. phenomenal appearance ; and the divis 
ion of objects of knowledge into phenomena and rioumena, which 
has been usual since Plato, has no sense. A knowledge of things-in- 
themselves through " sheer reason," and extending beyond experi 
ence, is a nonentity, a chimera. 

But has, then, the conception of the thing-in-itself any rational 
meaning at all ? and is not, together with this, the designation of 
all objects of our knowledge as " phenomena," also without meaning ? 

CHAP. 1, 38.] Object of Knowledge ; Thiny-in^Itself. 547 

This question was the turning-point of Kant s reflections. Hitherto 
all that the nai ve conception of the world regards as " object " has 
been resolved partly into sensations, partly into synthetic Forms of 
perception and of the understanding ; nothing seems to remain 
besides the individual consciousness as truly existing, except the 
"consciousness in general, the transcendental apperception. But 
where, then, are the " things," of which Kant declared that it had 
never come into his mind to deny their reality ? 

The conception of the tldng-in-itself can, to be sure, no longer have 
a positive content in the Critique of Reason, as it had with Leibniz, 
or in Kant s Inaugural Dissertation; it can no longer be the object 
of purely rational knowledge, it can no longer be an " object " at all. 
But it is at least no contradiction, merely to think it. Primarily, 
purely hypothetically, and as something the reality of which is 
neither to be affirmed nor to be denied, a mere " problem." 
Human knowledge is limited to objects of experience, because the 
perception required for the use of the categories is in our case only 
the receptive sensuous perception in space and time. If we suppose 
that there is another kind of perception, there would be for this 
other objects, likewise, with the help of the categories. Such objects 
of a non-human perception, l:o\vcver. remain still only phenomena, 
though this perception again might be assumed as one which 
arranges the given contents of sensation in any manner whatever. 
Nevertheless, if one should think of a perception of a non-receptive 
kind, a perception which synthetically produced not only its Forms, 
but also its contents, a truly " productive imagination," its 
objects would necessarily be no longer phenomena, but things-in- 
themselves. Such a faculty would deserve the name of an intellect 
ual perception (or intuition), or intuitive intellect; it would be the 
unity of the two knowing faculties of sensibility and understand 
ing, which in man appear separated, although by their constant 
reference to each other they indicate a hidden common root. The 
possibility of such a faculty is as little to be denied as its reality 
is to be affirmed ; yet Kant here indicates that we should have to 
think a supreme spiritual Being in this way. Noumena, or tliings- 
in-themselves, are therefore thinkable in the negative sense as objects of 
a non-sensuous perception, of which, to be sure, our knowledge can 
predicate absolutely nothing, they are thinkable as limiting con 
ceptions of experience. 

And ultimately they do not remain so completely problematical 
as would at first appear. For if we should deny the reality of 
things-in-themselves, " all would be immediately resolved into 
phenomena*- and we should thus be venturing the assertion that 

548 German Philosophy : Kant s Critique. [PART VI. 

nothing is real except what appears to man, or to other sensuously 
receptive beings. But this assertion would be a presumption com 
pletely incapable of proof. Transcendental idealism must, therefore, 
not deny the reality of noumena ; it must only remain conscious 
that they cannot in any wise become objects of human knowledge. 
Things-in-themselves must be thought, but are not knowable. In 
this way Kant won back the right to designate the objects of human 
knowledge as "only phenomena." 

9. With this the way was marked out for the third part of the 
critique of the reason, the Transcendental Dialectic. 1 A metaphysics 
of that which cannot be experienced, or, as Kant prefers to say, of 
the supersensuous, is impossible. This must be shown by a criticism 
of the historical attempts which have been made with this in view, 
and Kant chose, as his actual example for this, the Leibnizo-Wolffian 
school-metaphysics, with its treatment of rational psychology, cos 
mology, and theology. But at the same time, it must be shown that 
that which is incapable of being experienced, which cannot be 
known, must yet necessarily be thought ; and the transcendental 
illusion must be discovered, by which even the great thinkers have 
at all times been seduced into regarding this, which must necessarily 
be thought, as an object of possible knowledge. 

To attain this end Kant proceeds from the antithesis between the 
activity of the understanding and the sensuous perception by the 
aid of which alone the former produces objective knowledge. 
The thinking, which is determined by the categories, puts the data 
of the sensibility into relation with one another in such a way, that 
every phenomenon is conditioned by other phenomena : but in this 
process the understanding, in order to v think the individual phenom 
enon completely, must needs grasp the totality of the conditions by 
which this particular phenomenon is determined in its connections 
with the whole experience. But, in view of the endlessness of the 
world of phenomena in its relation to space and time, this demand 
cannot be fulfilled. For the categories are principles of relation 
between phenomena ; they cognise the conditionality or conditional 
character of each phenomenon only by means of other phenomena, 
and demand for these again insight into their conditional nature as 
determined by others, and so on to infinity. 2 Out of this relation 

1 As regards the subject matter, the Transcendental Esthetic, Analytic, and 
Dialetic, as the Introduction shows, form the three main co-ordinate parts of 
the Critique ; the formal schematism of the division which Kant imitated from 
the arrangement of logical text-books usual at that time, is, on the contrary, 
entirely irrelevant. The "Doctrine of Method" is in fact only a supplement 
extremely rich in fine observations. 

2 Cf. the similar thoughts in Nicolaus disarms and Spinoza, though there 
metaphysically applied ; above, pp. 347 and 419. 

CHAP. 1, 38.] Object of Knowledge : Ideas. 549 

between understanding and sensibility result for human knowledge 
necessary and yet insoluble problems; these Kant calls Ideas, and 
the faculty requisite for this highest synthesis of the cognitions 
of the understanding he designates as Reason in the narrower 
sense. 

If now the reason will represent to itself as solved, a problem 
thus set, the sought totality of conditions must be thought as some 
thing unconditioned, which, indeed, contains in itself the conditions 
for the infinite series of phenomena, but which is itself no longer 
conditioned. This conclusion of an infinite series, which for the 
knowledge of the understanding is in itself a contradiction, must 
nevertheless be thought, if the task of the understanding, which 
aims at totality in connection with the infinite material of the data 
of the senses, is to be regarded as performed. The Ideas are hence 
ideas or mental representations of the unconditioned, which must 
necessarily be thought without ever becoming object of knowledge, 
and the transcendental illusion into which metaphysics falls con 
sists in regarding them as given, whereas they are only imposed or 
set as a task (aufgegebeii). In truth they are not constitutive prin 
ciples through which, as through the categories, objects of knowl 
edge are produced, but only regulative principles, by which the 
understanding is constrained to seek for farther and farther con 
necting links in the realm of the conditioned of experience. 

Of such Ideas Kant finds three ; the unconditioned for the totality 
of all phenomena of the inner sense, of all data of the outer sense, 
of all the conditioned in general, is thought respectively as the soul, 
the world, and God. 

10. The criticism of rational psychology in the "Paralogisms of 
Pure Reason" takes the form of pointing out in the usual proofs 
for the substantiality of the soul, the quaternio terminorum of a 
confusion of the logical subject with the real substrate ; it shows 
that the scientific conception of substance is bound to our perception 
of that which persists in space, and that it is therefore applicable 
only in the field of the external sense, and maintains that the Idea 
of the soul as an unconditioned real unity of all phenomena of the 
inner sense, is indeed as little capable of proof as it is of refutation, 
but is at the same time the heuristic principle for investigating the 
inter-connections of the psychical life. 

In a similar way, the section on the " Ideal of the Reason " treats 
the Idea of God. Carrying out with greater precision his earlier 
treatise on the same subject, Kant destroys the cogency of the 
arguments brought forward for the existence of God. He combats 
the right of the ontological proof to infer existence from the concep- 

550 German Philosophy : Kant s Critique. [PART VI. 

tion alone ; he shows that the cosmological proof involves a petitio 
principii when it seeks the "first cause" of all that is "contingent" 
in an "absolutely necessary" being; he proves that the teleological 
or physico-theological argument at the best granted the beauty, 
harmony, and purposiveness or adaptation of the universe leads 
to the ancient conception of a wise and good " Architect of the 
world." But he emphasises that the denial of God s existence is a 
claim which steps beyond the bounds of our experiential knowledge, 
and is as incapable of proof as the opposite, and that rather the 
belief in a living, Real unity of all reality constitutes the only 
powerful motive for empirical investigation of individual groups of 
phenomena. 

Most characteristic by far, however, is Kant s treatment of the 
Idea of the world in the Antinomies of Pure Reason. These 
antinomies express the fundamental thought of the transcendental 
dialectic in the sharpest manner, by showing that when the universe 
is treated as the object of knowledge, propositions which are 
mutually contradictory can be maintained with equal right, in so 
far as we follow, on the one hand, the demand of the understanding 
for a completion of the series of phenomena, and on the other, the 
demand of the sensuous perception for an endless continuance of 
the same. Kant proves hence, in the "thesis," that the world must 
have a beginning and end in space and time, that as regards its 
substance it presents a limit to its divisibility, that events in it 
must have free, i.e. no longer causally conditioned, beginnings, and 
that to it must belong an absolutely necessary being, God; and in 
the antithesis he proves the contradictory opposite for all four cases. 
At the same time the complication is increased by the fact that the 
proofs (with one exception) are indirect, so that the thesis is proved 
by a refutation of the antithesis, the antithesis by refutation of the 
thesis ; each assertion is therefore both proved and refuted. The 
solution of the antinomies in the case of the first two, the " mathe 
matical," takes the form of showing that the principle of excluded 
third loses its validity where something is made the object of knowl 
edge, which can never become such, as is the case with the universe. 
In the case of the third and fourth antinomies, the " dynamical," 
which concern freedom and God, Kant seeks to show (what, to be 
sure, is impossible in a purely theoretical way), that it is perhaps 
thinkable that the antitheses hold true for phenomena, and the 
theses, on the other hand, for the unknowable world of things-in- 
themselves. For this latter world, it is at least not a contradiction 
to think freedom and God, whereas neither is to be met with, it is 
certain, in our knowledge of phenomena. 

CHAP. 1, 39.] The Categorical Imperative. 551 

39. The Categorical Imperative. 

H. Cohen, Kant s Begrundung der Ethik. Brlin, 1877. 

E. Arnoldt, Kant s Idee vom hochsten Gut. Konigsberg, 1874. 

B. 1 iinjer, Die Religionsphilosophie Kant s. Jena, 1874. 

[N. Porter, Kant s Ethics. Chicago, 188f&gt;.] 

[J. G. Schurniann, Kantian Ethics and the. Ethics of Evolution. Lond. 1882.] 

The synthetic function in the theoretical reason is the combina 
tion of mental presentations into perceptions, judgments, and Ideas. 
The practical synthesis is the relating of the will to a presented con 
tent, by which this latter becomes an end. This relating Form Kant 
carefully excluded from the primary conceptions of the knowing 
understanding; it is instead the fundamental category of the practical 
use of the reason. It gives no objects of knowledge, but instead, 
objects of will. 

1. For the critique of the reason there rises from this the prob 
lem, whether there is a practical synthesis a priori, that is, whether 
there are necessary and universally valid objects of willing ; or whether 
anything is to be found which the reason makes its end or demands 
a priori, without any regard to empirical motives. This universal and 
necessary object of the practical reason we call the moral laiv. 

For it is clear for Kant from the outset, that the activity of pure 
reason in proposing ends to itself, if there is any such activity, must 
appear as a command, in the form of the imperative, as over against 
the empirical motives of will and action. The will directed toward 
the particular objects and relations of experience is determined by 
these and dependent upon them ; the pure rational will, on the con 
trary, can be determined only through itself. It is hence necessarily 
directed toward something else than the natural impulses, and this 
something else, which the moral law requires as over against our 
inclinations, is called duty. 

Hence the predicates of ethical judgment concern only this kind 
of determination of the will; they refer to the disposition, not to 
the act or to its external consequences. Nothing in the world, says 
Kant, 1 can be called good without qualification except a Good Will ; 
and this remains good even though its execution is completely 
restrained by external causes. Morality as a quality of man is a 
disposition conformable to duty. 

2. But it becomes all the more necessary to investigate as to 

1 Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, I. (W., IV. 10 ff.) ; Abbott, p. 9. 

552 German Philosophy : Kant s Critique. [PART VI. 

whether there is such an a priori command of duty, and in what 
consists a law, to which obedience is required by the reason quite 
independently of all empirical ends. To answer this question Kant 
proceeds from the teleological connections of the actual volitional 
life. Experience of natural causal connections brings with it the 
consequence, that we are forced to will according to the synthetic 
relation of end and means, one thing for the sake of another. From 
practical reflection on such relations arise (technical) rules of dex 
terity and (" practical ") counsels of prudence. They all assert, 
" If you will this or that, then you must proceed thus or so." They 
are on this account hypothetical imperatives. They presuppose a 
volition as actually present already, and demand on the ground of 
this the further act of will which is required to satisfy the first. 

But the moral law cannot be dependent upon any object of will 
already existing in experience, and moral action must not appear as 
means in service of other ends. The requirement of the moral 
command must be propounded and fulfilled solely for its own sake. 
It does not appeal to what the man already wishes on other grounds, 
but demands an act of will which has its worth in itself only, and 
the only truly moral action is one in which such a command is 
fulfilled without regard to any other consequences. The moral law 
is a command absolute, a categorical imperative. It holds uncondition 
ally and absolutely, while the hypothetical imperatives are only 
relative. 

If now it is asked, what is the content of the categorical impera 
tive, it is clear that it can contain no empirical element : the demand 
of the moral law does not stand in relation to the " matter of the 
act of will." For this reason happiness is not adapted to be the 
principle of morals, for the striving after happiness is already 
present empirically, it is not a demand of reason. Eudsemonistic 
morals leads, therefore, to merely hypothetical imperatives ; for it, 
the ethical laws are only " counsels of prudence or sagacity " advis 
ing the best method of going to work to satisfy the natural will. 
But the demand of the moral law is just for a will other than the 
natural will ; the moral law exists for a higher purpose than to 
make us happy. If Nature had wished to place our destiny and 
vocation in happiness, it would have done better to equip us with 
infallible instincts than with the practical reason of conscience, 
which is continually in conflict with our impulses. 1 The "happiness 
morals " is even, for Kant, the type of false morals, for in this the 
law always is that I should do something because I desire something 

1 Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, IV. 12 f . ; Abbott, p. 11. 

CHAP. 1, 39.] Categorical Imperative : Autonomy. 553 

else. Every such system of morals is heteronomous ; it makes the 
practical reason dependent upon some thing given outside of itself, 
and this reproach applies to all attempts to seek the principle of 
morality in metaphysical conceptions, such as that of perfection. 
The theological morals is completely rejected by Kant with the 
greatest energy, for it combines all kinds of heteronomy when it 
sees the sanction in the divine will, the criterion in utility, and the 
motive in the expectation of reward and punishment. 

3. The categorical imperative must be the expression of the 
autonomy of the practical reason, i.e. of the pure self-determination 
of the rational will. It concerns, therefore, solely the Form of 
willing, and requires that this should be a universally valid law. 
The will is heteronomous if it follows an empirically given impulse ; 
it is autonomous only where it carries out a law given it by itself. 
The categorical imperative demands, therefore, that instead of act 
ing according to impulses we should rather act according to maxims, 
and according to such as are adapted for a universal legislation for 
all beings who will rationally. "Act as if the maxim from ^lhich 
you act were to become through your will a universal law of 
nature." 

This purely formal principle of conformity to law gains a mate 
rial import by reflection upon the various kinds of worths. In the 
kingdom of ends that which is serviceable for some end, and can 
therefore be replaced by something else, has a price, but that only 
has worth or dignity, which is absolutely valuable in itself, and is 
the condition for the sake of which other things may become valu 
able. This worth belongs in the highest degree to the moral law 
itself, and, therefore, the motive which stimulates man to obey this 
law must be nothing but reverence for the law itself. It would be 
dishonoured if it were fulfilled for the sake of any external advan 
tage. The worth or dignity of the moral law, moreover, passes over 
to the man who is determined by this alone in the whole extent of 
his experience, and is able to determine himself by the law itself, 
to be its agent, and to identify himself with it. Hence reverence for 
the worth of man is for Kant the material principle of moral science. 
Man should do his duty not for the sake of advantage, but out of 
reverence for himself, and in his intercourse with his fellow-man he 
should make it his supreme maxim, never to treat him as a mere 
means for the attainment of his own ends, but always to honour in 
him the worth of personality. 

From this Kant deduces a proud and strict system of morals 1 in 

1 Metaphysische Anfangsyriinde der Tugendlehre, W., V. 221 ff. 

554 German Philosophy : Kant s Critique. [PART VI. 

which, as set forth in his old age, we cannot fail to discern the 
features of rigourism and of a certain pedantic stiffness. But the 
fundamental characteristic of the contrast between duty and inclina 
tion lies deeply rooted in his system. The principle of autonomy 
recognises as moral, only acts of will done in conformity to duty, 
and wholly out of regard for maxims ; it sees in all motivation of 
moral action by natural impulses a falsification of pure morality. 
Only that which is done solely from duty is moral. The empirical 
impulses of human nature are, therefore, in themselves, ethically 
indifferent ; but they become bad as soon as they oppose the demand 
of the moral law, and the moral life of man consists in realising the 
command of duty in the warfare against his inclinations. 

4. The self-determination of the rational will is, therefore, the 
supreme requirement and condition of all morality. But it is impos 
sible in the realm of the experience which is thought and known 
through the categories : for this experience knows only the deter 
mination of each individual phenomenon by others ; self-determina 
tion, as the power to begin a series of the conditioned, is impossible 
according to the principles of cognition. This power with reference 
to the will we call freedom, as being an action which is not conditioned 
by others according to the schema of causality, but which is deter 
mined only through itself, and is on its part the cause of an endless 
series of natural processes. Hence if the theoretical reason, whose 
knowledge is limited to experience, had to decide as to the reality 
of freedom, it would necessarily deny it, but would thereby reject 
also the possibility of the moral life. But the Critique of Pure 
Reason has shown that the theoretical reason cannot assert any 
thing whatever as to things-in-themselves, and that, accordingly, 
there is no contradiction in thinking the possibility of freedom for 
the supersensuous. But as it is evident that freedom must necessa 
rily be real if morality is to be possible, the reality of things-in-them 
selves and of the supersensuous, which for the theoretical reason must 
remain always merely problematical, is herewith guaranteed. 

This guarantee is, to be sure, not that of a proof, but that of a 
postulate. It rests upon the consciousness; thoti canst, for thou 
oughtest. Just so truly as thou feelest the moral law within thee, 
so truly as thou believest in the possibility of following it, so truly 
must thou also believe in the conditions for this, viz. autonomy and 
freedom. Freedom is not an object of knowledge, but an object of 
faith, but of a faith which holds as universally and necessarily in 
the realm of the supersensuous, as the principles of the understand 
ing hold in the realm of experience, an a priori faith. 

Thus the practical reason becomes completely independent of the 

CHAP. 1, 39.] Categorical Imperative : Freedom. 555 

theoretical. In previous philosophy " the primacy " of the theoreti 
cal over the practical reason had prevailed ; knowledge had been 
assigned the work of determining whether and how there is freedom, 
and accordingly of deciding as to the reality of morality. Accord 
ing to Kant, the reality of morality is the fact of the practical reason, 
and, therefore, we must believe in freedom as the condition of its 
possibility. From this relation results, for Kant, the primacy of the 
practical over the theoretical reason; for the former is not only capa 
ble of guaranteeing that which the latter must decline to vouch for, 
but it appears also that the theoretical reason in those Ideas of the 
unconditioned in which it points beyond itself ( 38, 9) is deter 
mined by the needs of the practical reason. 

Thus there appears with Kant, in a new and completely original 
form, the Platonic doctrine of the two tvorlds of the sensuous and the 
supersensuous, of phenomena and things-in-themselves. Knowledge 
controls the former, faith the latter; the former is the realm of 
necessity, the latter the realm of freedom. The relation of antithesis 
and yet of mutual reference, which exists between these two worlds, 
shows itself best in the nature of man, who alone belongs in like 
measure to both. So far as man is a member of the order of Nature 
he appears as empirical character i.e. in his abiding qualities as well 
as in his individual decisions as a necessary product in the causal 
connection of phenomena ; but as a member of the supersensuous 
world he is intelligible character, i.e. a being whose nature is decided 
by free self-determination within itself. The empirical character is 
only the manifestation, which for the theoretical consciousness is 
bound to the rule of causality, of the intelligible character, whose 
freedom is the only explanation of the feeling of responsibility as it 
appears in the conscience. 

5. But freedom is not the only postulate of a priori faith. The 
relations between the sensuous and the moral world demand yet 
a more general bond of connection, which Kant finds in the concep 
tion of the highest good. 1 The goal of the sensuous will is happiness; 
the goal of the ethical will is virtue ; these two cannot sustain to 
each other the relation of means to end. The striving after happi 
ness does not make an act virtuous ; and virtue is neither permitted 
to aim at making man happy, nor does it actually do so. Between 
the two no causal relation exists empirically, and ethically no teleo- 
logical connection can be permitted to enter. But since man belongs 
as well to the sensuous as to the ethical world, the " highest good " 
must consist for him in the union of virtue and happiness. This 

1 Critique of Prac. Reason, Dialectic, W., IX. 225 ff.; [Abbott, 202 ff.J. 

556 German Philosophy : Kant s Critique. [PART VL 

last synthesis of practical conception, however, can be morally 
thought only in the form that virtue alone is worthy of happiness. 

The demand of the moral consciousness, here expressed, is never 
theless not satisfied by the causal necessity of experience. Natural 
law is ethically indifferent, and affords no guarantee that virtue 
will necessarily lead to happiness ; on the contrary, experience 
teaches rather that virtue requires renunciation of empirical happi 
ness, and that want of virtue is capable of being united with tem 
poral happiness. If, therefore, the ethical consciousness requires 
the reality of the highest good, faith must reach beyond the empirical 
life of man, and beyond the order of Nature, on into the super- 
sensuous. It postulates a reality of personality which extends 
beyond the temporal existence the immortal life and a moral 
order of the universe, which is grounded in a Supreme Reason in 
God. 

Kant s moral proof for freedom, immortality, and God is, there 
fore, not a proof of knowledge, but of faith. Its postulates are the 
conditions of the moral life, and their reality must be believed in 
as fully as the reality of the latter. But with all this they remain 
knowable theoretically, as little as before. 

6. The dualism of Nature and morality appears with Kant in its 
baldest form in his Philosophy of Religion, the principles of which, 
agreeably to his theory of knowledge, he could seek only in the 
practical reason ; universality and necessity in relation to the super- 
sensuous are afforded only by the ethical consciousness. Only that 
can be a priori in religion, which is based upon morals. Kant s 
religion of reason is, therefore, not a natural religion, but " moral 
theology." Religion rests upon conceiving moral laws as divine 
commands. 

This religious form of morality Kant develops once more from 
the twofold nature of man. There are in him two systems of im 
pulses, the sensuous and the moral ; on account of the unity of the 
willing personality neither can be without relation to the other. 
Their relation should be, according to the moral demand, that of 
the subordination of the sensuous impulses to the moral; but as 
a matter of fact, according to Kant, the reverse relation naturally 
obtains with man, 1 and since the sensuous impulses are evil as soon 
as they even merely resist the moral, there is in man a natural bent 

1 The pessimistic conception of man s natural essence doubtless has with 
Kant its occasion in his religious education ; but he guards himself expressly 
against the identification of his doctrine of the radical evil with the theological 
conception of hereditary sin; cf. Rel. innerh. d. Grenze d. r. V., I. 4; W., VI. 
201 ff. ; [Abbott, p. 347]. 

CHAP. 1, 39.] Categorical Imperative : Religion, Law. 557 

to evil. This "radical evil" is not necessary; for otherwise there 
would be no responsibility for it. It is inexplicable, but it is a fact ; 
it is a deed of intelligible freedom. The task which follows from 
this for man is the reversal of the moving springs, which is to be 
brought about by the warfare between the good and evil principle 
within him. But in the above-described perverted condition, the 
brazen majesty of the moral law works upon man with a terror that 
dashes him down, and he needs, therefore, to support his moral 
motives, faith in a divine power, which imposes upon him the moral - 
law as its command, but also grants him the help of redeeming love to 
enable him to obey it. 

From this standpoint Kant interprets the essential portions of 
Christian doctrine into a "pure moral religion," viz. the ideal of 
the moral perfection of man in the Logos, redemption through 
vicarious love, and the mystery of the new birth. He thus restores 
to their rightful place, from which they had been displaced by the 
rationalism of the Enlightenment, the truly religious motives which 
are rooted in the felt need of a redemption, though he does this 
in a form which is free from the historical faith of orthodoxy. But 
the true Church, for him also, is only the invisible, the moral king 
dom of God. the ethical community of the redeemed. The historical 
manifestations of the moral community of men are the Churches ; 
they need the means of revelation and of "statutory" faith. But 
they have the task of putting this means into the service of the 
moral life, and if instead of this they lay the main weight upon the 
statutory, they fall into service for a reward, and into hypocrisy. 

7. It is connected with his restriction of ethical judgment by 
making it apply only to the disposition, that in his Philosophy of 
Right Kant pursued that direction which treats the same, so far 
as possible, independently of morals. Kant distinguished (even 
with regard to ethical valuation) between morality of disposition and 
legality of action, between voluntary obedience to the moral law 
and external conformity of action to what is demanded by posi 
tive law. Actions are subject to compulsion, dispositions never. 
While morals speaks of the duties of the disposition, law or right 
is employed with the external duties of action which can be en 
forced, and does not ask as to the disposition with which they are 
fulfilled or broken. 

And yet Kant makes freedom, which is the central conception of 
his whole practical philosophy, the basis also of his science of right. 
For right or law is also a demand of the practical reason, and has in 
this its a priori, valid principle : it cannot therefore be deduced as 
a product of empirical interest, but must be understood from the 

558 German Philosophy : KanCs Critique. [PART VI. 

general rational vocation or destiny of man. This latter is the 
vocation to freedom. The community of men consists of those 
beings that are destined for ethical freedom, but are yet in the 
natural state of caprice or arbitrary will, in which they mutually 
disturb and check each other in their spheres of activity. Law has 
for its task to establish the conditions under which the will of the 
one can be united with the will of another according to a universal 
law of freedom, and, by enforcing these conditions, to make sure 
the freedom of personality. 

From this principle follows analytically, according to Kant s 
deduction, all private law, public law, and international law. At 
the same time, it is interesting to observe how the principles of his 
theory of morals are everywhere authoritative in this construction. 
Thus, in private law it is a far-reaching principle corresponding 
to the categorical imperative that man must never be used as a 
thing. So, too, the penal law of the state is grounded not by the 
task of maintaining the state of right, but by the ethical necessity 
of retribution. 

Law in a state of nature is therefore valid only in a provisory 
way; it is completely, or, as Kant says, peremptorily, valid, only 
when it can be certainly enforced, that is, in the state. The supreme 
rule for justice in the state, Kant finds in this, that nothing should 
be decreed and carried out which might not have been resolved 
upon if the state had come into existence by a contract. The con 
tract theory is here not an explanation of the empirical origin of 
the state, but a norm for its task. This norm can be fulfilled with 
any kind of constitution, provided only law really rules, and not 
arbitrary caprice. Its realisation is surest if the three public 
functions of legislation, administration and judicial procedure are 
independent of each other, and if the legislative power is organised 
in the " republican " form of the representative system, a pro 
vision which is not excluded by a monarchical executive. It is only 
by this means, Kant thinks, that the freedom of the individual will 
be secured, so far as this can exist without detriment to the freedom 
of others ; and not until all states have adopted this constitution can 
the state of Nature in which they now find themselves in their rela 
tions to each other, give place to a state of law. Then, too, the law 
of nations, which is now only provisory, will become " peremptory." 

Upon foundations of philosophy of religion and philosophy of 
law is built up, finally, Kant s theory of history. 1 This took form 

1 Cf. besides the treatises cited on pp. 417-422. the treatises, Idea of a Uni 
versal History from a Cosmopolitical Point of View (1784) [tr. by Hastie in 

CHAP. 1, 40.] Natural Purposiveness. 559 

in dependence upon the theories of Rousseau and Herder, a depend 
ence which follows from the antithesis between those authors. 
Kant can see in history neither the aberration from an originally 
good condition of the human race, nor the necessary, self-intelligible 
development of man s original constitution. If there ever was a 
primitive paradisiacal state of humanity, it was the state of inno 
cence in which man, living entirely according to his natural impulses, 
was as yet entirely unconscious of his ethical task. The beginning 
of the work of civilisation, however, was possible only through a break 
with the state of Nature, since it was in connection with its trans 
gression that the moral law came to consciousness. This (theoret 
ically incomprehensible) "Fall" was the beginning of history. 
Natural impulse, previously ethically indifferent, now became evil, 
and was to be opposed. 

Since then the progress of history has consisted not in a growth of 
human happiness, but in approximation to ethical perfection, and in 
the extension of the rule of ethical freedom. With deep earnestness 
Kant takes up the thought that the development of civilisation suc 
ceeds only at the cost of individual happiness. He who takes this 
latter for his standard must speak only of a retrogression in history. 
The more complicated relations become, the more the vital energy 
of civilisation grows, by so much the more do individual wants 
increase, and the less is the prospect of satisfying them. But just 
this refutes the opinion of the Enlighteners, as if happiness were 
man s vocation. The ethical development of the whole, the control 
of practical reason, grows in an inverse ratio to the empirical satis 
faction of the individual. And since history represents the outer 
social life of humanity, its goal is the completion of right and law, 
the establishing of the best political constitution among all peoples, 
perpetual peace a goal whose attainment, as is the case with all 
ideals, lies at an infinite distance. 

40. Natural Purposiveness. 

A. Stadler, Kant s Teleologie. Berlin, 1874. 

H. Cohen, Kant s Begriindung der ^Esthetik. Berlin, 1889. 

[J. H. Tufts, The Sources and Development of Kant s Teleology. Chicago, 1892.] 

By his sharp formulation of the antithesis of Nature and Free 
dom, of necessity and purposiveness (or adaptation to ends), the 

Principles of Politics] ; Recension von Herder s Tdeen (1785); Muthmasslicher 
Anfaxg dtr Weltgeschichte (1786) ; Das Ende aller Dinge (1794). v 

560 German Philosophy : Kant s Critique. [PART VI. 

theoretical aud practical reason diverge so widely in Kant s system, 
that the unity of the reason seems endangered. The critical phil 
osophy needs, therefore, in a manner that prefigures the methodical 
development of its system, 1 a third principle that shall afford a defin 
itive mediation, and in which the synthesis of the above opposites 
shall be effected. 

1. Psychologically, the sphere in which this problem is to be 
solved can, in accordance with the triple division adopted by Kant 
(cf. 36, 8), be only the faculty of feeling or " approval." This, in fact, 
takes an intermediate position between ideation and desire. Feeling 
or approval presupposes a complete idea of the object, complete 
in the theoretical sense, and sustains a synthetic relation to this ; 
and this synthesis as a feeling of pleasure or pain, or as approval or 
disapproval, always expresses in some way that the object in ques 
tion is felt by the subject to be either purposive, i.e. adapted to its 
end, or not to the purpose. 

The standard of this valuation may have existed beforehand as a 
conscious design, forming thus a case of intentional volition, and in 
such cases the objects are termed useful or injurious ; but there are 
also feelings which, without being referred to any conscious purposes 
whatever, characterise their objects immediately as agreeable or dis 
agreeable, and in these also a determination with reference to an 
end must be somehow authoritative. 

The critique of the reason, accordingly, has to ask, Are there 
feelings a priori, or approvals that have universal and necessary valid 
ity? and it is clear that the decision upon this case is dependent 
upon the nature of the ends which determine the feelings and 
approvals in question. With regard to the purposes of the will, this 
question has been already decided by the Critique of the Practical 
Reason; the only end of the conscious will which has a priori 
validity is the fulfilling of the categorical imperative, and on this 
side, therefore, only the feelings of approval or disapproval in which 
we employ the ethical predicates " good " and " bad," can be regarded 
as necessary and universally valid. For this reason the new prob 
lem restricts itself to the a priori character of those feelings in 
which no conscious purpose or design precedes. But these, as may 
be seen from the beginning, are the feelings of the Beautiful and the 
Sublime. 

2. But the problem widens upon another side, when we take into 
consideration the logical functions which are concerned in all feel- 

1 Cf. note at the close of the Introduction of the Critique of Judgment, W., 
VII. 38 f. 

CHAP. 1, 40.] Natural Purposiveness : the Judgment. 561 

ings and approvals. The judgments in which these are expressed 
are evidently all synthetic. Predicates such as agreeable, useful, 
beautiful, and good, are not analytically contained in the subject, 
but express the worth of the object with reference to an end ; they 
are estimations of adaptation, and contain in all cases the subor 
dination of the object to its end. Now in the psychological scheme 
which lies at the basis of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant desig 
nates the faculty of subsuming the particular under the general by 
the name Judgment. And this, too, was regarded as playing among 
the theoretical functions, also, the mediating part between Reason 
and Understanding, in such a sort that the former gives principles, 
the latter objects, while the Judgment performs the task of applying 
the principles to the objects. 

But in its theoretical use the Judgment is analytical, since it 
determines its objects by general conceptions according to rules 
of formal logic ; the attainment of a correct conclusion depends only 
on finding the appropriate minor for a given major, or vice versa. 
In contrast with this determining Judgment, which thus needs no 
" Critique," Kant sets the reflecting Judgment, in the case of which 
the synthesis consists just in subordination to an end. And accord 
ingly the problem of the Critique of the Judgment takes this formu 
lation : Is it a priori possible to judge Nature to be adapted to an end f 
Evidently this is the highest synthesis of the critical philosophy ; 
the application of the category of the ftractical reason to the object of 
the theoretical. It is clear from the outset that this application itself 
can be neither theoretical nor practical, neither a knowing nor a 
willing : it is only a looking at Nature from the point of view of pur- 
posiveness or adaptation to ends. 

If the reflecting Judgment gives to this contemplation the direc 
tion of judging Nature with regard to her adaptation to the contem 
plating subject as such, it proceeds cesthetically, i.e. having regard to 
our mode of feeling or sensibility ; l if, on the contrary, it regards 
Nature as if she were purposive in herself, then it proceeds teleologi- 
cally in the narrower sense, and so the Critique of the Judgment is 
divided into the investigation of aesthetic and teleological prob 
lems. 

3. In the first part Kant is primarily concerned to separate the 
vesthetic judgment with exactness from the kinds of judgments of 
feeling or approval which border upon it on both sides, and to this 
end he proceeds from the point of view of the feeling of the beauti- 

1 Empfindungsweise ; thus Kant justifies his change in terminology, W., VII. 
28 ff. ; cf. II. 60 f. and above, p. 483 f. 

562 German Philosophy : Kant s Critique. [PART VI. 

fal. The beautiful shares with the good the a priori character, but 
the good is that which agrees with the end presented as a norm in 
the moral law, while the beautiful, on the contrary, pleases ivithout 
a conception. For this reason, also, it is impossible to set up a 
universal criterion which shall contain a content according to which 
beauty shall be judged with logical clearness. An aesthetic doctrine 
is impossible ; there is only a " Critique of the Taste," that is, an 
investigation as to the possibility of the a priori validity of aesthetic 
judgments. 

On the other hand, the beautiful shares with the agreeable its 
conceptionless quality, the absence of a conscious standard of 
judgment, and, therefore, the immediacy of the impression. But 
the distinction here lies in the fact that the agreeable is something 
individually and contingently gratifying, whereas the beautiful 
forms the object of universal and necessary pleasure. 1 The princi 
ple that there is no disputing over tastes, is true only in the sense 
that in matters of taste nothing is to be effected by proofs with con 
ceptions, but this does not exclude the possibility of an appeal to 
universally valid feelings. 

Finally, the beautiful distinguishes itself from both the good and 
the agreeable, in that it is the object of a completely disinterested 
pleasure. This appears in the circumstance that the empirical reality 
of its object is a matter of complete indifference for the aesthetic 
judgment. The hedonic feelings all presuppose the material presence 
of the phenomena which excite them ; ethical approval or disapproval 
concerns just the realisation of the moral end in willing and acting; 
the aesthetic feelings, on the contrary, require as their condition a 
pure delight in the mere represented image of the object, whether the 
same is objectively present for knowledge or not. The aesthetic life 
lacks the power of the feelings of personal weal and woe, just as it 
lacks the earnestness of a universally worthy work for ethical ends ; 
it is the mere play of ideas in the imagination. 

Such a delight which relates not to the object, but only to the 
image of the object, cannot concern the objective material of the object, 

for this always stands in relation to the interests of the subject, 

but only the form in which the object is presented to the mind; 
and in this, therefore, if anywhere, is to be sought the ground of the 
a priori synthesis which belongs to the aesthetic judgments. The 
purposiveness of aesthetic objects cannot consist in their adaptation 
to some interest or other ; it can be only in their adaptation to the 

1 Cf. F. Blencke, Kant s Unterscheidung des Schonen vom Angenehmen 
(Strassburg, 1889), where the analogy to the judgments of perception and of 
experience is emphasised. 

CHAP. 1, 40.] Natural Purposiveness : Beauty. 563 

knowing Forms, by the aid of which they are imaged in the mind. 
But the faculties which are active in presenting every object are 
sensibility arid understanding. The feeling of beauty arises, there 
fore, in connection with those objects in the apprehension of which 
in the imagination sensibility and understanding co-operate in 
harmonious manner. Such objects are purposive with regard to 
their working upon our ideational activity, and to this relates the 
disinterested delight which manifests itself in the feeling of their 
beauty. 1 

But this relation to the formal principles of objective ideation 
has its ground, not in merely individual activities, but in the 
"consciousness in general," in the " supersensuous substrate of 
humanity." On this account the feeling of a fitness or purposive- 
ness of objects with reference to this consciousness in general is 
universally communicable, though not capable of proof by concep 
tions, and from this is explained the a priori character of the 
aesthetic judgments. 

4. While the "undesigned fitness" or appropriateness of the 
beautiful is thus set in relation with the working of the object upon 
the cognitive functions, Kant conceives the nature of the sublime 
from the point of view of an adaptation of the working of the object 
to the relation between the sensuous and supersensuous parts of 
human nature. 

While the beautiful signifies a delightful rest in the play of the 
knowing faculties, the impression of the sublime is effected through 
the medium of a painful feeling of inadequacy. In the presence of 
the immeasurable greatness or overpowering might of objects, we 
feel the inability of our sensuous perception to master them, as an 
oppression and a casting down; but the supersensuous power of 
our reason raises itself above this our sensuous insufficiency. If 
here the imagination has to do only with extensive magnitudes, 
the mathematically sublime, then the firmly shaping activity of 
the theoretical reason gains the victory ; but if, on the contrary, it 
has to do with the relations of power, the dynamically sublime, 
then the superiority of our moral worth to all the power of Nature 
conies to consciousness. In both cases the discomfort over our sen 
suous inferiority is richly outweighed and overcome by the triumph 
of our higher rational character. And since this is the appropriate 

1 [A fragment published by Reicke in his Lose Blatter aus Kant s Nachlass 
(B. II. p. 112) shows that Kant at one time connected this adaptation with the 
psychological and physiological conception of a general furtherance of life, 
whether through the senses or through the play of intellectual faculties. Cf. 
J. H. Tufts, op. ctt., p. 35 f.J 

564 Grerman Philosophy : Kant s Critique. [PART VI. 

relation of the two sides of our being, these objects have an exalting, 
" subliming 1 effect, and produce the feeling of a delight of the reason, 
and this feeling, again, because it is based only upon the relation of 
our ideational Forms, is universally communicable and of a priori 
operation. 

5. Kant s aesthetic theory, accordingly, in spite of its "subjec 
tive " point of departure, takes essentially the course of an explana 
tion of the beautiful and the sublime in Nature; and determines the 
same through the relation of the ideational Forms. Hence the 
philosopher finds pure beauty only where the aesthetic judgment 
relates solely to forms that have no meaning. Where with the 
delight there is mingled a regard for the meaning of the forms for 
any norm whatever, however indefinite, there we have dependent 
beauty. This appears everywhere where the aesthetic judgment is 
directed toward objects in which our thought puts a reference to an 
end. Such norms of dependent beauty rise necessarily as soon as we 
contemplate in the individual phenomenon the relation to the class 
which it represents. There is no norm of beauty for landscapes, 
arabesques, or flowers, but there may be such perhaps for the higher 
types of the organic world. Such norms are aesthetic ideals, and the 
true ideal of the aesthetic judgment is man. 

The presentation of the ideal is art, the power of aesthetic produc 
tion. But while this is a function of man which is performed with 
reference to an end, its product will make the impression of the beau 
tiful only when it appears as undesigned, disinterested, and free 
from the attempt to represent a conception, as is the case with the 
beauty of Nature. Technical art produces structures corresponding 
to definite ends according to rules and designs, structures which 
are adapted to satisfy definite interests. Fine art must work upon 
the feeling as does a purposeless product of Nature; it must "be 
able to be regarded as Nature." 

This, therefore, is the secret of artistic creation, and the character 
istic element in it, viz. that the mind which builds with a purpose 
works, nevertheless, in the same way as Nature, which builds with 
out designs and disinterestedly. The great artist does not create 
according to general rules; he creates the rules themselves in his 
involuntary work ; he is original and prototypal. Genius is an in 
telligence that works like Nature. 

In the realm of man s rational activity the desired synthesis of 
freedom and nature, of purposiveness and necessity, of practical and 
theoretical function, is then represented by genius, which with 
undesigning purposiveness or appropriateness creates the work of 
fine art. 

CHAP. 1, 40.] Natural Purposiveness : Organisms. 565 

6. In the Critique of the Teleological Judgment the most promi 
nent task is to establish the relations which, from the points of view 
of transcendental idealism, exist between the scientific explanation 
of Nature and the consideration of the adaptation that dwells within 
her. The theory of natural science can in all lines be only mechanical. 
"End" (Zweck) is not a category or a constitutive principle of 
objective knowledge : all explanation of Nature consists in pointing 
out the causal necessity with which one phenomenon produces 
another; a phenomenon can never be made intelligible by emphasis 
ing its adaptation or fitness. Such " lazy " teleology is the death of 
all philosophy of Nature. The apprehension of purposiveness can, 
therefore, never profess to be an act of knowledge. 

But, on the other hand, the standpoint of the mechanical explana 
tion of Nature would give us the right to completely reject teleologi- 
cal consideration of Nature, only in case we were in a position to 
make intelligible with the aid of scientific conceptions the whole 
system of experience, even to the last remnant, in principle at least. 
But should points be found where scientific theory is inadequate for 
the explanation of the given material, not indeed on account of the 
limited nature of the material hitherto available in human experi 
ence, but on account of the permanent form of the principle which 
determines this material, then in these points the possibility of 
supplementing our knowledge by a teleological consideration must 
be conceded, if, at the same time, it appears that that which is 
mechanically inexplicable makes upon us the inevitable impression 
of the purposive. Critical teleology can, therefore, concern only the 
limiting conceptions of the mechanical explanation of Nature. 

The first of these is Life. A mechanical explanation of the organ 
ism has not only not yet succeeded, but it is, according to Kant, 
impossible in principle. All life can be explained only through 
other life. We are to understand the individual functions of organ 
isms through the mechanical connection of their parts with each 
other and with the environment ; but we shall always be obliged to 
bring into our account the peculiar nature of organised matter and 
its capacity of reaction, as a factor incapable of further reduction. 
An archaeologist of Nature may trace back the genealogy of life, the 
origination of one species from another according to mechanical prin 
ciples as far as possible ; * he will always be obliged to stop with an 
original organisation which he cannot explain through the mere 
mechanism of inorganic matter. 

1 The passages, in which Kant anticipated the latter theory of descent, are 
collected in Fr. Schultze, Kant und Darwin (Jena, 1874). 

566 G-erman Philosophy : KanCs Critique. [PART VI. 

This explanation is impossible because the essential nature of an 
organism is, that the whole is determined by the parts just as the 
part is determined by the whole, that every member is both cause 
and effect of the whole. This reciprocal causality is incomprehen 
sible mechanically : the organism is the miracle in the world of 
experience. 1 It is just this inter-related play of forms and forces 
which in the organism makes the impression of the purposive, or of 
adaptation to an end. Therefore the teleological view of organisms 
is necessary and universally valid. But it must never profess to be 
anything else than a mode of consideration. Thought must never 
be satisfied with this in an individual case ; but the insight into this 
purposeful -activity must rather serve as a heuristic principle for 
seeking out the mechanical connections by which this purposeful 
vitality realises itself in each particular case. 

7. A second limit of the knowledge of Nature Kant designates 
by the name of the Specification of Nature. From pure reason arise 
the general Forms of the uniformity of Nature [i.e. causality, etc.], 
but only these. The particular laws of Nature do indeed range 
themselves beneath those general laws, but do not follow from them. 
Their particular content is only empirical, i.e. from the standpoint 
of pure reason it is contingent, and has only the force and validity 
of an actual matter of fact, 2 [not that of a priori necessity]. It is 
never to be understood why there is just this and not some other 
content. But at the same time, this particular aspect of Nature 
proves completely purposive ; on the one hand, with reference to 
our knowledge, since the wealth of the matter of fact in our experi 
ence shows itself to be adapted to be ordered under the a priori 
Forms of experience, and on the other hand, as purposive in itself, 
also, inasmuch as the whole varied multiplicity of the given fits 
together to form a concrete world of reality, which is objectively 
unitary. 

In this lie the reasons a priori for regarding Nature as a whole 
from the point of view of purposiveness, and for seeing in the vast 
mechanism of her causal connections the realising of a supreme end 
of reason. But in accordance with the primacy of the practical 
reason, this end can be none other than the moral law, and thus the 
teleological consideration issues in the moral faith in the divine 
world-order. 

Finally, if we consider Nature as purposive, in the sense that in 

1 Cf. above, p. 480. 

2 Here Kant joins on in an extremely interesting manner to the latest specu 
lations of the Leibnizian Monadology ; cf. above, p. 425 [cf. further on this point 
Ueber eine Entdeckung, etc., and J. Dewey, Leibniz 1 s New Essays, last, chapter]. 

CHAP. 1, 40.] Natural Purposiveness. 567 

it the universal Forms and the particular contents completely har 
monise with each other, then the divine mind, as the reason .which 
creates the content at the same time with its Forms, appears as 
intellectual perception or intuitive understanding. 1 In this conception 
the ideas of the three Critiques run together. 

1 Critique, of Judg., 77. Of. G. Thiele, Kant s Intellectuelle Anschauung 
( Halle, 1876). 

CHAPTER II. 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF IDEALISM. 

R. Haym, Die romantische Schule. Berlin, 1870. 
[A. Seth, From Kant to Hegel. Lond. 1882.] 

THE development of the principles won by Kant, to the compre 
hensive systems of German philosophy, took place under the co 
operation of very different kinds of circumstances. Externally, it 
was of primary importance that the doctrine of criticism, after 
at first experiencing the fortune of being neglected and misunder 
stood, was first raised as a standard by the leading spirits of the 
University of Jena, and made the centre of a brilliant teaching 
activity. But in this lay the incitement to build out a unified and 
impressive system of instruction, the foundations of which Kant had 
laid by a careful separation and fine arrangement of philosophical 
problems. The systematic impulse ruled philosophical thought at 
no period so energetically as at this, and this was due in good part 
to the desires of an audience in a state of high and many-sided 
excitement, which demanded from the teacher a complete scientific 
Weltanschauung. 

But in Jena philosophy found itself close by Weimar, the resi 
dence of Goethe, and the main literary city of Germany. In constant 
personal contact, poetry and philosophy mutually stimulated each 
other, and after Schiller had joined the thoughts of the^two, their 
interaction became constantly more intimate and deep with their 
rapid forward movement. 

A third factor was of a purely philosophical nature. A coinci 
dence that was rich in results willed that just at the time when the 
Critique of Reason of the "all-crushing" Konigsberger began to 
break its path, the most firmly articulated and most influential of 
all metaphysical systems, the type of "dogmatism," became known 
in Germany Spinozism. Through the strife between Jacobi and 
Mendelssohn, which related to Lessing s attitude to Spinoza, the 
latter s doctrine was brought into the most lively interest, and thus, 

CHAP. 2.] The Development of Idealism. 569 

/ in spite of the deep opposition which prevails between the two, 
Kant and Spinoza became the two poles about which the thought 

of the following generation moved. 

The predominance of the Kantian influence may be chiefly recog 
nised in that the common character of all these systems is idealism; 1 
they all develop out of the antagonistic thoughts which were inter 
woven in Kant s treatment of the conception thing-in-itself. After 
a short time of critical hesitation, Fichte, Schelling, and Ilegd took 
the lead in the unresting effort to understand the world as a System 
of Reason. Over against the bold energy of metaphysical specula 
tion of these thinkers, which was extended by numerous disciples 
to a many-coloured variety, there appears in men like Schleiermacher 
and Herbart the Kantian reminder of the limits of human knowl 
edge ; while, on the other hand, the same motive unfolded in the 
construction of a Metaphysics of the Irrational in Schelling s later 
doctrine, and with Schopenhauer. 

Common to all these systems, however, is the all-sidedness of 
philosophical interest, the wealth of creative thoughts, the fineness 
of feeling for the needs of modern culture, and the victorious power 
of an elaboration from the point of view of a principle, of the his 
torical material of ideas. 

The Critique of the Pure Reason found little regard at first, and then later 
violent opposition. The most important impetus to this was given by Friedrich 
Ileinrich Jacob! (1743-1819, finally President of the Munich Academy). His 
main treatise bears the title, David Hume iiber den Glaube.n, oder Idealismus 
und Realismus (1787) ; in addition to this the treatise Ueber das Untenirhmen 
des Kriticismus die Vernunft zu Verstande zu bringen (1802). The treatise 
Von den gottlichen Ding en und ihrer Offenbarung (1811) was directed against 
Schelling. Cf. also his introduction to his philosophical writings in the second 
volume of the complete edition (6 vols., Leips. 1812-1825). His main disciple 
was Fr. Koppeii (1775-1858 ; Darstellung des \Vesens der Philosophic, Nurem 
berg, 1810 ; cf. on him the art. K. by W. Windelband in Ersch u. Gruber s Enc.). 

As further opponents of Kant are to be named Gottlob Ernst Schulze 
(1761-1823), the author of the anonymous writing, yEnesidemns oder iiber die 
Fundamente der Elementarphilosophie (1792), and of a Kritik der theoretischen 
Philosophic (Hamburg, 1801) ; J. G. Hamann (cf. above, p. 510), whose 
"review" of the Critique was first printed in 1801 in Reinhold s Beitragen, 

1 Let it be remarked here at the outset that not only the main series of the 
development from Reinhold to Fichte, Schelling, Krause, Schleiermacher, and 
Hegel is idealistic, but also the series which is usually opposed to this, Herbart 
and Schopenhauer, in so far, that is, as by "idealism" is understood the 
dissolution or resolution (Auflosung) of the world of experience in the process 
of consciousness. Herbart and Schopenhauer are "idealists" in the same 
degree as Kant ; they posit things-in-themselves, but the world of the senses 
is to them also a "phenomenon of consciousness." With Schopenhauer this 
is usually noted. With Herbart, on the contrary, the circumstance that he 
called the things-in-themselves "Keals" (Eealen*), in connection with the fact 
that for entirely other reasons he opposed the Fichte-Hegel line of thought, 
has led to the completely distorted and misleading mode of expression which 
has run through all previous text-books of the history of philosophy, of terming 
his doctrine " realism," and him in opposition to the " idealists " a " realist." 

570 German Philosophy. [PART VI. . 

and G. Herder in his treatise, Verstand und Vernunft, eine Metakritik zur 
Kritik der reinen Vernunfl (1799), also in tlv&gt; Knllifjone. 1800. 

Jac. Sig. Beck (1761-1842; Einzig moglicher Standpunkt, aus welchem die 
kritische Philosnphie beurtheilt werden muss, Riga, 1790) worked more posi 
tively in the development of the Kantian doctrine, as did also Salomon Maimoii 
(died 1800 ; Versuch einer Transscendentalphilosophie, 1790 ; Versuch einer 
neuen Logik, 1794; Die Kategorien des Aristoteles, 1794; cf. J. Witte, S. M., 
Berlin, 187G). 

In .Jena the Kantian philosophy was introduced by Professor Erh. Schmid ; 
its main organ was the Allgemeine, Litter at urzeitnng, which appeared there after 
1785, edited by Schiitz and Hufeland. The greatest success for extending the 
doctrine of Criticism was gained by K. L. Reinhold s Brief e iiber die kantische 
Philosophic, which first appeared in Wieland s Deutscher Merkur (1786). 

The same author begins also the series of re-shapings and transformations 
of the doctrine. Karl Leonh. Heinhold (1758-1828 ; fled from the cloister of 
the Barnabites in Vienna; 1788, Professor in Jena; from 1794 Professor in 
Kiel) wrote Versuch einer neiten TheoTie des menschlichen Vorstellungxvermo- 
gens (Jena, 1789) and Dux Fundament des philosophischen Wissens (1791). 
Later, after many changes in his standpoint, he fell into fantasticalness and was 
forgotten. His teaching presented in his Jena period gave in crude outlines 
a superficially systematic exposition, which soon became the school-system of 
I the "Kantians." To tear from forgetfulness the names of these numerous 
men is not for this place. 

Much finer, richer, and more independent was the work which Fr. Schiller 
gave to Kant s ideas. &lt; &gt;f his philosophical writings are here principally to be 
named On Grace a)id Dignity, 1793 ; On the Sublime, 1793 ; Letters upon the 
jEsthetical Education of Man, 1795 ; On Na ive and Sentimental Poetry, 1796 
[Eng. tr. Bohn Library]. In addition to these the philosophical poems such as 
Die Kunstler, Ideal und Leben, and the correspondence with Korner, Goethe, 
and W. v. Humboldt. Cf. K. Tomaschek, Sch. in seinem Verhaltniss zur 
Wissenschaft, Vienna, 1862 ; K. Twesten, Sch. in seinem Verhaltniss zur Win- 
senschaft, Berlin, 1863 ; Kuno Fischer, Sch. als Phitosoph, 2d ed., 1891 ; Fr. 
Ueberweg, Sch. als Historiker und Philosophy pub. by Brasch, Leips. 1884. 

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, born 1762, at Rammenau in Lusatia, educated in 
the " Princes School " at Pforta and at the University of Jena, after he had 
experienced many changes of fortune as a private teacher and had become 
famous by his Kritik aller Offenbarung, which appeared by chance anony 
mously, and was universally ascribed to Kant (1792), was called in 1794, while 
living in Zurich, to become Heinhold s successor as Professor at Jena. After a 
brilliant activity there, he was dismissed in 1799, on account of the "atheism 
controversy " (cf. his Appellation an das Publicum and the Gerichtliche Verant- 
wortungsschrift), and went to Berlin, where he came into connection with the 
Itomanticists. In 1805 he was for a time assigned to the University of Erlangen ; 
in 1806 he went to Konigsberg, and then returned to Berlin, where in the winter 
of 1807 to 1808 he delivered the Ileden an die deutsche Nation. At the newly 
founded Berlin University he acted as Professor and as the first Rector. He 
died, 1814, of hospital fever. His main writings are Grundlage dcr gesammten 
\Vissenschaftslehre, 1794 ; Grundriss des Eigenthiimlichen der Wissenschafts- 
lehre, 1795 [these two, together with other minor works, are translated by 
A. E. Kroeger, under the title The Science of Knowledge, Lond. 1889] ; Natur- 
recht, 1796 [tr. by A. E. Koeger, The Science of Eights, Lond. 1889] ; the 
two Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre, 1797 ; System der Sittenlehre, 1798; 
Die Bestimmuny des Menschen, 1800; Der geschlossene Hundelsstaat, 1801; 
Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrten, 1805 ; Grundziige des gegenwiirtigen Zeitalters, 
1806; Anweisung zum seligen Leben, 1806 [of the last five all but the second 
are trans, by W. Smith, Fichte s Popular Works, Lond. 1889. There are also 
translations and criticisms in Jour, of Spec. Phil.] ; Works, 8 vols., Berlin, 
1845 f. ; Post, works, 3 vols., Bonn, 1834 ; Life and Correspondence, Sulzbach, 
1830; Correspondence with Schelling, Leips. 1856; cf. J. II. Lowe, Die Philos. 
Fichte s, Stuttgart, 1862; R. Adamson, Fichte, Lond. 1881 ; [also art. in Enc. 
Brit. ; C. C. Everett, Fichte s Science of Knowledge, Chicago, 1883]. 

CHAI. ] Development of Idealism. 571 

Frirdrich Wilhehn Jose])!) Schelling, born, 1775, at Leonberg in Wtirtem- 
berg, came to Leipsic in 1700 after his education in Tubingen, was made Pro 
fessor in Jena in 1798, and in Wiirzburg in 1803. Called in 180(5 to the Munich 
Academy, and for a time (1820-182(5) active at the Erlangen University, he 
entered in 1827 the newly founded University of Munich. From here he ac 
cepted, in 1840, a call to Berlin, where he soon gave up his activity as a teacher. 
He died in 1854 in Uagaz. Cf. Aus Sch. s Leben in Briefen, ed. by Plitt, Leips. 
18(59 f. ; Caroline, Briefe, etc., ed. by G. Waitz, Leips. 1871. Schelling s devel 
opment as philosopher and author falls into live periods: (1) Philosophy of 
Nature, Ideen zu einer Philos. der Natur, 1797 ; Von der Weltseele, 1798 ; 
Erxter Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, 1799; (2) ^Esthetic Ideal 
ism, Der transcendentale Idealismus, 1800 ; Vorlesunyen iiber die Philosophic 
der Kunst ; (3) Absolute Idealism, Darxte.llnnij meines Systems der Philosophic, 
1801 ; Bruno, oder iiber das natiirliche nnd g dttliche Princip der Dinge, 1802 ; 
Vorlesungen iiber die Methode des akademischen Stuilinms, 1803; (4) his 
Doctrine of Freedom, Philosophic und Religion, 1804 ; Untersuchungen iiber 
das \Vesen der menschlichen Freihcit, 1809; Denkmal der Schrift Jacob? s von 
den goWichen Dingen, 1812 ; (5) Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation, 
Lectures in Part II. of the writings; Collected works, 14 vols., Stuttg. and 
Augsb. 185(5-18(51 ; [J. Watson, Spelling s Transcendental Idealism, Chicago, 
Griggs series]. 

Among the thinkers who stood in close relation to Schelling may be noticed, 
of the Romantic School, Fr. Schlegel (1772-1829; Characteristics and Criti 
cisms in the "Athenaeum," 1799 f. ; Lwinde, 1799; Philosophical Lectures, in 
the years 1804-6, ed. by Windischmann, 183(5 f. ; Complete writings, 15 vols., 
Vienna, 184(5 [Eng. tr. of the Philosophy of History and of the Philosophy of 
Life and of Language in Bohn Library]) and Novalis (Fr. v. Hardenbenj, 
1772-1801)," also K. \V. F. Solger (1780-1,*&gt;19; Erwin, 1815; Philosophische 
Gespmche, 1817 ; Vorlesungen iiber ^Hsthetik, ed. by Heyse, 1829) ; further, 
Lor. Oken (1779-1851 ; Lehrbuch der Xaturphilosophie, Jena, 1809 ; cf. A. 
Ecker, L. O., Stuttgart, 1880) ; II. Steffens (1773-1845; a Norwegian, Grund- 
ziige der philosophischen Naturwissenschaft, 1806), G. H. Schubert (178)- 
18IJO; Ahndungen einer allg. Geschichte des Lebens, 1806 f.), Franz Baader 
(17(55-1841 ; Fermenta Cognitionis, 1822 ff. ; Speculative Dogmatik, 1827 ff. 
Complete writings with a biography ed. by Fr. Hoffmann, Leips. 1851 ff.) ; 
and finally, K. Chr. Fr. Krause (1781-1832 ; Entwurf des Systems der Philoso- 
phie, 1804; Urbild der Menschheit, 1811 ; Abriss des Systems der Philosophic, 
1825 ; Vorlesungen iiber das System der Philosophic, 1828. Some years since an 
inexhaustible body of material has appeared from his literary remains, ed. by 
P. Hohlfeld and A. Wiinsche. Cf. R. Eucken, Zur Erinnerung an K., Leips. 
1881). 

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Schelling s older friend, was born, 1770, 
in Stuttgart, studied in Tubingen, was a private teacher in Berne and Frank 
fort, and began, in 1801, his activity as a teacher in Jena, where, in 1805, he 
became Professor Extraordinary. After 1806 he became editor of a review 
in Bamberg, and in 1808 Gymnasium Director in Nuremberg. In 1816 he went 
as Professor to Heidelberg ; in 1818 from there to Berlin, where he worked 
until his death in 1831 as the head of a school which extended with greater and 
greater brilliancy. Besides the articles published in the Kritische. Journal der 
Philosophie, which he edited in connection with Schelling, he published Phdno- 
menologie des Geistes (1807) [tr. of chs. 1, 2, and 3 in Jour. Spec. Phil., Vol. 
II.; tr. in prep, by J. Royce, Holt & Co., N.Y.]; \Vissenschaft der Logik 
(1812 ff.) [tr. of Vol. II. by W. T. Harris, Hegel s Doctrine of Reflection] ; 
Encyclopedic der philosophischen Wisscnschaften (1817) [of this the Logic is 
trans, with I rti g,n&gt; na by W. Wallace, Clar. Press, 1874, 2d ed., in 2 vols., 
1892] ; Grundlinien der Philosophie des Recht s (1821). After 1827 the Jahr- 
biicher fur tfffMeiMCAq/tlicfo Kritik was the organ of his school. His works, 
including his lectures edited by his students, were published in 18 vols. (Berlin, 
1832 ff.) [trans, of the Philosophy of History, by J. Sibree, Bohn Library ; of the 
Introd. tn / /&lt;//. ,&gt;f Art, by B. Bosanquet (Lond. 1886) ; of the Phil, of Art, abr. 
by W. Hastie (Edin.), and of the second part of the same in Jour. Spec. Phil., 
.Vols. V.-XIII. ; of the History of Philosophy, by E. S. Haldane, in 3 vols., 

572 German: Development of Idealism. [PART VI. 

Vol. I. (Lond. 1892) ; of the Phil, of Religion and of the State, in part in Jour. 
Spec. Phil., Vols. XV.-XXI.]. From the very extensive literature we may 
name C. Rosenkranz, H. s Leben (Berlin, 1844), and 11. als deutscher National- 
philoso/&gt;h (Berlin, 1870) [part, trans. G. S. Hall, St. Louis, 1876]; R. Haym, 
//. und Heine Zeit (Berlin, 1857) ; K. Kostlin, H. (Tubingen, 1870) ; J. Klaiber, 
Holder! in, Schilling und Heyel in ihren schwiibischen Juyendjahren (Stuttgart, 
1877) [The Secret of Heyel, by J. H. Stirling (Lond. 1805), 2 vols. ; Hegel, by 
E. Caird (Edin. and Lond. 1888) ; Hegelianism and Personality, by Seth (Edin. 
and Lond., 2d ed., 1898) ; Critical Expositions in Griggs series (Chicago) ; of 
the Esthetics, by J. S. Kedney (1885) ; of the Philosophy of the State and of 
History, by G. S. Morris (1887) ; and of the Logic, by W. T. Harris (1890) ; 
numerous articles in the Jour. Spec. Phil, cited in last-named work], 

Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher, born, 1768, in Breslau, educated at 
the Herrnhuter educational institutions in Niesky and Barby, and at the 
University of Halle, after private positions took a vicarship in Landsberg, and 
in 179(5 began his duties as preacher at the Berlin CharitS. In 1802 he went 
as court preacher to Stolpe ; in 1804 as Professor Extraordinary to Halle ; in 
1806 returned to Berlin, where in 1809 he became preacher at the Dreifaltigketts- 
kirche ; and in 1810 Professor at the University. He acquitted himself well 
in both offices, occupying at the time a successful position in the ecclesiastical 
movement (Union) until his death in 1884. His philosophical writings form 
the third part of his works collected after his death (Berlin, 1835 ff.). They 
contain his lectures on Dialectic, ^Esthetic, etc. ; among his writings are to 
be mentioned : Reden ubcr die Religion an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verdchtern 
(1799) ; Monologen (1800) ; (Irundlinien einer Kritik der bisheriyen Sittenlehre 
(1808). The most important work, the Ethik, is given in the coll. works, in 
ttie edition by Al. Schweizer; it is also published in an edition by A. Twesten 
(Berlin, 1841). Cf. Aus Sch:s Leben in Briefen, ed. by L. Jonas and W. Dil- 
they, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1858-1863) ; W. Dilthey, Leben Schleiermacher s, Vol. I. 
(Berlin, 1870) [art. S. in Knc. Brit., J. F. Smith]. 

Johann Kriedrich Herbart, born, 1776, at Oldenburg, educated there and at 
the Jena University, for a time private teacher in Berne and acquainted with 
Pestalozzi, became in 1802 Privatdocent in Gottingen, was from 1809 to 1833 
Professor in Konigsberg, and then returned to Gottingen as Professor, where 
he died, 1841. His main writings are: Hauptpunkte der Metaphysik (1806) ; 
Allyeme.ine praktische Philosophie (1808) ; Einleitung in die Philosophie (1813) ; 
Lehrbnch zur Psycholoyie (1816) [Kng. tr. by M. K. Smith, N.Y. 1891] ; Psycho 
logic als Wissenschaft (1824 f.). Complete edition by G. Hartenstein, 12 vols. 
(Leips. 1850 ff.) ; in process of appearance, ed. by K. Kehrbach, since 1882. The 
pedagogical writings have been edited by (). Willmann in 2 vols. (Leips. 1873 
and 1875). Cf. G. Hartenstein, Die Probleme und Grundlehren der allyemeinen 
Metaphysik (Leips. 1836) ; J. Kaftan, Sollen und Sein (Leips. 1872) ; J. Cape- 
sius, Die Metaphysik Herbart s (Leips. 1878) [Ward, art. Herbart, in Enc. 
Brit.]. 

Arthur Schopenhauer, b^m 1788 in Danzic, passed over somewhat late to 
philosophical life, studied in Gottintren and Berlin, received his degree in 1813 
at Jena witli his treatise on the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient 
Reason, lived for a time at Weimar and Dresden, habilitated as Privatdocent 
in Berlin in 1820, but withdrew after he had won no success in a work as 
teacher which was frequently interrupted by journeys, and spent the rest of his 
life in private, after 1831, in Frankfort on the Main, where he died in 1860. 
His main work is Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 1819 [7%e World as 
Will and as Idea, tr. by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, Lond. and Boston, 3 
vols., 1884-86]. To this were attached Ueber den Willen in der Natur, 1836; 
Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, 1841 ; finally, Parerya und Paralipomena, 
18-31. Complete edition in 6 vols. (Leips. 1873 f.), and since then frequently 
edited. [Tr. of the Fourfold Root and of On the Will in Nature, by K. Hille- 
brand, Bohn Library, 2d ed., 1891 ; of selected essays by Bax, Bohn Library, also 
by T. B. Saunders, 5 vols., Lond. and N.Y., 3d ed., 1892.] Cf. W. Gwinner, 
SchSs Leben, 2d ed. (Leips. 1878) ; J. Frauenstadt, Briefe iiber die Sch. sche 

CHAP. 2, 41.] Thing-in-Itself: Jacobi. 573 

Philosophic (Leips. 1854) ; R. Seydel, SchSs System (Leips. 1857) ; A. Hayin, 
A. Sch. (Berlin, 1864) ; G. Jellinek, Die Weltanschauung en Leibniz" 1 und 
Schopenhauer 1 s (Leips. 1872) [H. Zimmern, Schopenhauer, His Life and Phil., 
Loud. 1870; J. Sully, Pessimism, 2d ed., Lond. 1891 ; Adamson in Mind, 1870]. 
By the side of the main metaphysical development runs a psychological 
side-line, a series of schools which, in an eclectic way, frequently approached 
the doctrines of the great systems by the path of the psychological method. 
Such is the relation to Kant and Jacobi of J. Fr. Pries (1773-1843 ; Eeinhold, 
Fichte und Schelling, 1803 ; Wissen, Glaube und Ahndung, 1805 ; Neue Kritik 
der Vernunft, 1807 ; Psychische Anthropologie, 1820 f. Cf. Kuno Fischer, Die 
beiden kantischen Schnlen in Jena, Acad. Address, Stuttg. 1802), to Kant and 
Fichte of Wilh. Traug. Krug (1770-1842 ; Organon der Philosophie, 1801 ; 
HanduKorterbuch der philos. \\ issenschaften, 1827 ff.), to Fichte and Schelling 
of Fried. Bouterwek (170(5-1828; Apodiktik, 1799; sKsthetik, 1800), and 
finally, to Herbart of Fr. Beneke (1798-1854; Psychologische Skizzen, 1825 
and 1827 ; Lehrbuch der Psychologie, als Naturwissenschaft, 1832 ; Metaphysik 
und Religionsphilosophie, 1840 ; Die neue Psychologic, 1845). 

41. The Thing-in-Itself. 

The compelling power which Kant s philosophy gained over the 
minds and hearts of men was due chiefly to the earnestness and 
greatness of its ethical conception of the world ; 1 the progress of 
thought, however, attached itself primarily to the new form which 
had been given to the principles of the theory of knowledge in the 
Critique of the Pure Reason. Kant took the antithesis of phenom 
ena and noumena from earlier philosophy ; but by his transcen 
dental analytic he widened the realm of phenomena to include the 
whole compass of human knowledge, and the thing-in-itself survived 
only as a problematical conception, like a rudimentary organ, which 
might be indeed characteristic for the historical genesis of this 
theory of knowledge, but which performed no living function in it. 

1. This was first seen by Jacobi, when he confessed that without 
the presupposition of realism one could not enter the Kantian 
system, and with the same could not remain in it ; 2 for the concep- 
\ tion of the sensibility introduced at the beginning involves the 
! causal relation of being affected by things-in-themselves, a rela 
tion which, according to the doctrine of the analytic that categories 
must not be applied to things-in-themselves, it is forbidden to think. 
In this contradiction of professing to think things-in-themselves 
and yet of not being permitted to think them, the whole critique of 
the reason moves ; and at the same time this contradictory assump- 
jtion does not at all help to guarantee to our knowledge of phe- 
! nomena even the slightest relation to truth. For, according to 
Kant, the mind presents to itself in thought " neither itself nor 

1 This is especially to be recognised from Reinhold s Briefen uber die 
kant. Ph. 

2 Jacobi, W., II. 304. 

574 Germany : Development of Idealism. [PART VI. 

other things, but solely and alone that which is neither what the 
mind is itself, nor what other things are." 1 The faculty of cogni 
tion hovers between a problematical X of the subject and an equally 
problematical X of the object. The sensibility has nothing behind 
it, and the understanding nothing before it ; " in a twofold en 
chanter s smoke, called space and time, rise the ghostly forms of 
phenomena or appearances in which nothing appears." 2 If we 
assume things, Kant teaches that knowledge has not the least to do 
with them. The critical reason is a reason busy about pure noth 
ing, i.e. only about itself. If, therefore, criticism will not fall into 
nihilism or absolute scepticism, the transcendental idealist must 
have the courage to assert the " strongest " idealism ; 3 he must 
declare that only phenomena are. 

In the claim that what Kant calls the object of knowledge is in 
truth " nothing/ inheres as a presupposition the same naive realism, 
the destruction of which was the great service of the transcendental 
analytic ; and the same realism determines also the epistemology of 
Faith, which Jacobi opposes to "the transcendental uncertainty," 
not without being entirely dependent upon it. All truth is knowl 
edge of the actual ; but the actual asserts itself in 1 human con 
sciousness not through thought, but through feeling; just Kant s 
experiment proves that thought alone moves in a circle out of which 
there is no access to actuality, in an endless series of the condi 
tioned in which no unconditioned is to be found. The fundamental 
law of causality may indeed be formulated in exactly this manner, 
viz. there is nothing unconditioned. Knowledge, therefore, or thought 
that can be demonstrated, is in its very nature, as Jacobi says, 
Spinozism, a doctrine of the mechanical necessity of all that is 
finite : and it is the interest of science that there be no God, 
indeed, a God who could be known would be no God. 4 Even he 
who is in his heart a Christian must be in his head a heathen ; he 
who will bring into his intellect the light which is in his heart 
quenches it. fi But this knowledge is only a mediate knowing ; the 
true, immediate knowing is feeling; in this we are truly one with the 
object, 6 and possess it as we possess ourselves in the certainty of 
a faith that has no proof. 7 This feeling, however, as regards its 
objects, is of a twofold kind: the reality of the sensuous reveals 
itself to us in perception, that of the supersensuous in the "reason" 

i Allwill, XV. ; W., I. 121. 2 W., III. Ill f. 

8 W., II. 310. 4 W., III. 384. 

6 To Hamann, I. 367. 6 W., II. 175. 

7 Hume s conception of belief and his distinction of impressions and ideas 
(here called Vorstellungeri) experience in this a noteworthy transformation. 

CHAP. 2, 41.] Thing-in-Itself : Fries, Reinhold. 575 

For this supra-natural sensualism, therefore, "reason" signifies the 
immediate feeling of the reality of the supersensuous, of God, free 
dom, morality, and immortality. In this limitation Kant s dualism 
of theoretical and practical reason and of the primacy of the latter 
return in Jacobi, 1 to be placed in the service of a mystical extrava 
gance of feeling, which manifests itself also in the character of 
a style which is warm and full of spirit, but rhapsodical and more 
given to assertion than to proof. 

This same fundamental conception, brought somewhat nearer to 
Kant, appears with Fries. In demanding that the knowledge of the 
a priori forms to which the critical philosophy aspired must itself 
arise a posteriori, through inner experience, and therefore that Kant s 
results must be established or set right by an " anthropological " 
critique, he rested upon the conviction that the immediate, proper 
cognitions of the reason are given originally in an obscure form 
through the feeling, 2 and transformed into intellectual knowledge 
only by means of reflection. This Leibnizian body ends, however, 
in the critical tail, since the perceptional and conceptional Forms of 
this reflection are regarded as only an expression of the phenomenal 
mode in which the above original truth [as experienced in feeling] 
appears ; on the other hand, the body received a Kant-Jacobi head, 
when the limitation of knowledge to these phenomenal Forms had 
set over against it the immediate relation of moral faith to things- 
in-themselves, while at the same time with a decided attachment 
to the Critique of Judgment the aesthetic and religious feelings 
had ascribed to them the significance of a presage (Ahndung) 
that the Being which lies at the basis of phenomena is just that to 
which the practical reason relates. 

2. The untenability of the Kantian conception of the thing-in-itself, 
so keenly recognised by Jacobi, became palpable to a certain extent 
when Reinhold in his Elementary Philosophy made the attempt to 
present the critical doctrine in a systematic unity. He admired 
Kant and adopted entirely his solutions of the individual problems, 
but missed in him the formulation of a simple, fundamental princi 
ple from which all particular insights might be deduced. Through 
the fulfilment of this (Cartesian) demand, 3 opposing private opinions 
would be at last replaced by the philosophy, Philosophy without 
any surname. He himself believed that he had found this principle 
in the principle which he supposed to be quite free from presuppo 
sitions, that in consciousness every idea is distinguished by the 

i W., III. 351 ff. 2 Fr ies, Neue Kritik, I. 206. 

8 Reinhold, Beitrage, I. 91 ff. 

576 Germany: Development of Idealism. [PART VI. 

consciousness of subject and object, and is related to both (Principle 
of Consciousness). 1 Hence there inheres in every idea something 
that belongs to the subject and something that belongs to the 
object. From the object comes the manifold of the material, from 
the subject the synthetic unity of the Form. From this it follows 
that neither the object in itself, nor the subject in itself, is know- 
able, but only the world of consciousness which hovers between the 
two ; from this results further the opposition of the (sensuous) 
material impulse and of the (ethical) Form impulse; in the former 
the heteronomy of the dependence of the will upon things may be 
recognised ; in the latter the autonomy of the will directed toward 
the formal conformity to law. 

In this crude form the Kantian School propagated the doctrine of 
the master ; all the fineness and profound meaning of the analytic 
of the " object" had become lost, and the only substitute was Rein- 
hold s effort to find in the " ideational faculty " ( Vorstellungsver- 
mogen). or "consciousness, the deeper unity of all the different 
cognitive powers which Kant had separated from each other as 
Sensibility, Understanding, Judgment, and Reason. In so far the 
" fundamental philosophy " opposed with a positive hypothesis the 
objections which the sharp separation of the sensibility and the under 
standing in the Kantian doctrine encountered with many contempora 
ries. This separation presented itself in the exposition determined 
by the after-working of the Inaugural Dissertation (of. p. 538, note 
4), still more strongly than the spirit of the Critique of Reason 
required, and became at the same time still more palpable by the 
dualism of the practical philosophy. So the tendency was awak 
ened to replace the sensibility again in its rights as against Kant, 
and the Leibnizian doctrine of the gradual transition from the func 
tions of sense to those of reason proved the source of a powerful 
counter-current against Kant s "dissection" of the soul, a dissec 
tion more apparent than serious. Hamann in his review, and in 
conjunction with him, Herder in his Metakritik, urged this against 
the Critique of Pure Reason. Both lay chief emphasis upon lan 
guage as the fundamental, unitary, sensuous-intellectual work of 
the reason, and seek to show how from the first "splitting apart" 
of sensibility and understanding all the other chasms and dualisms 
of the critical philosophy necessarily followed. 2 

1 Neue Theorie des Vorst., pp. 201 ff. 

2 Herder, Metakritik, 14, 111. Works in 40 vols., XXXVII. 333 ff. Moreover, 
this thought as Herder presented it in the Metakritik, a silly composition of 
personal irritation, was for a long time a positively impelling moment in the 
development. Cf. 42. 

CHAP. 2, 41.] Thing-in-Itself : Schulze. 577 

3. The weak points in Reinhold s system could not escape the 
sceptics, but their attacks applied at the same time to Kant himself. 
They were united most effectively in Schulze s ^Enesidemus. He 
shows that the critical method ensnares itself by setting for itself 
a task, the solution of which is according to its own results im 
possible. For if the Critique seeks the conditions which lie at the 
basis of experience, these conditions are yet not themselves objects 
of experience (a conception which certainly corresponded better 
with Kant s meaning than did Fries attempt at a psychological 
discovery of the a priori) : the critical method demands, therefore, 
that philosophical knowledge, at all events a thinking in categories, 
shall go beyond experience ; and just this the Analytic declares 
impermissible. In fact, the " reason " and each of the knowing 
faculties, as sensibility, understanding, etc., is a thing-in-itself, an 
imperceptible ground of the empirical activities of the kind of 
cognition in question; and of all these things-in-themselves and 
their relations to each other and to experience, the critical philoso 
phy the metaphysics of knowledge offers a very circumstantial 
body of information. To be sure, this information is, if closely 
examined, very slight; for such a "faculty" is ultimately thought 
only as an unknown common cause of empirical functions, and is 
to be characterised only through these its workings. 

"^nesidemus" develops this criticism in connection with Rein- 
hold s conception of the "ideational faculty"; 1 he shows that we 
explain nothing at all, when we postulate over again the content 
of that which is to be explained, provided with the problematical 
s mark " power " or " faculty." Schulze thus turned against the 
I " faculty theory," which was employed by the empirical psycholo- 
gists of the Enlightenment in rather a thoughtless manner. It is 
only descriptively that there is any sense in comprehending like 
phenomena of the psychical life under one generic conception ; but 
to hypostatise this conception to a metaphysical power this is 
a mythological treatment of psychology. With this watch-word 
Herbart " extended the criticism of Schulze to the whole earlier 
psychological theory, and Beneke also saw in the bringing into 
prominence of this conception the essential progress towards a 
natural science of the soul ; i.e. the associational psychology. 3 

For Schulze, this is only one of the elements in a proof that the 
critical philosophy, while aiming to prove the authority of the 
causal conception as against Hume, professes to limit the same 

L, p. 98. 
t, Lehrb. 
8 Beneke, Neue Psych. , pp. 34 ff. 

2 Herbart, Lehrb., z. Psych., 3 ; W., V. 8 and elsewhere. 
j. 34 

578 Germany: Development of Idealism. [PART VI. 

to experience, and yet everywhere makes the assumption of a 
causal relation between experience and that which "lies at its 
basis." Here, too, belongs of course the contradiction, already 
exhibited by Jacobi, in the conception of the thing-in-itself by 
which the "sensibility" is said to be affected. Every attempt of 
the Critique of Pare Reason to go beyond the circuit of experience, 
even merely problematically, is judged in advance by itself. 1 

4. The first attempt to transform the conception of the thing-in- 
itself, untenable in its Kantian shape, proceeded from Salomon 
Maimon. He saw that the assumption of a reality to be placed 
outside of consciousness involves a contradiction. What is thought 
is in consciousness ; to think of a something outside of consciousness 
is as imaginary as it would be mathematics to regard the require 
ment V a as a real quantity. The thing-in-itself is an impossible 
conception. But what was the inducement to form it ? it lay in 
the need of explaining the given in consciousness. 2 It meets us, that 
is to say, in our ideas of the antithesis between the Form which we 
ourselves create and are conscious of creating, and the material 
which we only find present in us, without knowing how we come 
by it. Of the Forms we have, therefore, a complete consciousness ; of 
the matter, on the contrary, only an incomplete consciousness; it is 
something that is in consciousness, without being produced with con 
sciousness. But since nothing outside of consciousness is thinkable, 
the given can be defined only by the lowest grade of the complete 
ness of consciousness. Consciousness can be thought as diminishing 
through an infinite number of intermediate stages down to nothing, 
and the idea of the limit of this infinite series (comparable to the 
V2) is that of the merely-given, the thing-in-itself. Things-in-them- 
selves are, therefore, as Maimon says with direct reference to Leibniz 
petites perceptions ; cf. p. 424 differentials of consciousness. 3 The 
thing-in-itself is the limiting conception for the infinite decreasing 
series from complete consciousness down an irrational quantity. 
The consequence of this fundamental assumption with Maimon is, 
that of the given there can always be only an incomplete knowledge, 
as there is only an incomplete consciousness, 4 and that complete 

1 The author of the sEnesidemus repeated the thoughts of his polemic in 
most concise and comprehensive manner in his Kritik der theorftischen Philoso 
phic (II. 549 ff.), a work, moreover, which contains not only an analysis of 
the Critique of Pure Reason (I. 172-582), which is one of the best even to the 
present day, but also a criticism of the same, supported by deep historical 
understanding (found II. 12(5-722). Cf. on the relation to Leibniz, II. 176 ff. 

2 Maimon, Transscendentalphilos., pp. 419 f. 
Ib. 27 ff. 

4 Cf. the contingency of the world with Leibniz and the specification of 
Nature with Kant, pp. 398 f., 566. 

rv(^ t^ryv^V^^^^*-^^ 1 

CHAP. 2, 41.] Thing-in-Itaelf : Maimon, Fichte. 579 

knowledge is limited to the knowledge of the autonomous Forms of 
the theoretical consciousness, to mathematics and logic. In his 
esteem for these two demonstrative sciences Maimon s critical scep 
ticism is in harmony with Hume ; with regard to their theories of 
the knowledge of that which is empirically given they diverge 
diametrically. 

With this, however, it had become clear that the investigations of 
the Critique of Pure Reason require a new conception of the relation 
of consciousness and Being. Being is to be thought only in conscious 
ness, only as a kind of consciousness. Thus the prophecy of Jacobi 
begins to be fulfilled; Kant s doctrine urges toward the "strongest 
idealism." 

This is seen in a disciple who stood in the closest relations to 
Kant himself: Sigismund Beck. He found 1 the "Only Possible 
Standpoint for Estimating the Critical Philosophy " in this, that 
the datum of the individual consciousness, given it as " object," is 
made the content of an "original," supra-individual 2 consciousness, 
which for this reason is authoritative for the truth of the empirical 
knowing process. In the place of the things-in-themselves he set 
Kant s " consciousness in general." But he explained to himself in 
this way the a priori character of the pure conceptions and catego 
ries : the given in the sensuous manifold remained for him also the 
unsolved remnant of the Kantian problem. 

5. The full idealistic disintegration of the conception of the 
thing-in-itself was the work of Fichte. We may best understand 
the matter by following the course of thought in his introductions 
to his Science of Knowledge, 3 which attaches itself directly, in a 
free reproduction, to the most difficult part of the Kantian doctrine, 
the transcendental deduction, and illumines with complete clear 
ness the culmination of the movement of thought here considered. 

The fundamental problem of philosophy or, as Fichte calls it, 
just on this account, of the Wissenschaftslehre [lit. "doctrine of 
science," where science has the twofold meaning of knowledge as 
a mental act, and knowledge as a body of truth = philosophy (of. 
p. 94, note 2,)] is given in the fact, that in contrast with the ideas of 
individual consciousness, which may come and go in a voluntary 
and contingent manner, another set of our ideas maintain them 
selves there, and these latter are characterised by a feeling of neces 
sity that can be distinguished with entire certainty. To make this 
necessity intelligible is the chief task of philosophy or the Science 

1 3d vol. of his Erlduterndcr Auszug, from Kant s writing (Leips. 1796). 

2 Ib. p. 120 ff. * Fichte s W., I. 419 ff. 

580 Germany: Development of Idealism. [PART VI. 

of Knowledge. We call the system of those ideas which emerge 
with the feeling of necessity experience; the problem runs, there 
fore, " What is the ground of experience ? " To its solution there 
are only two paths. Experience is an activity of consciousness 
directed toward objects ; it can therefore be derived only from 
things or from the consciousness. In the one case the explanation 
is dogmatic, in the other idealistic. Dogmatism regards conscious 
ness as a product of things ; it traces the activities of intelligence 
also back to mechanical necessity of the causal relations ; if con 
sistently thought, therefore, it cannot end otherwise than fatalisti 
cally and materialistically. Idealism, on the contrary, sees in 
things a product of consciousness, of a free function determined 
only by itself ; it is the system of freedom and of deed. These two 
modes of explanation, each of which is consistent in itself, are in 
such thorough-going contradiction to each other and so irreconcil 
able that Fichte regards the attempt of syncretism, to explain expe 
rience by dependence both upon things-in-themselves and upon the 
reason, as a failure from the outset. If one will not fall a victim to 
sceptical despair, he must choose between the two. 

This choice, since both present themselves logically as equally 
consistent systems, will primarily depend " on what sort of a man 
one is" 1 (" was fur ein Menscli man ist"); but while the ethical 
interest thus already speaks for idealism, there is still a theoretical 
consideration which comes to its aid. The fact of experience, in 
the constant reciprocal relation of " being " and " being conscious " 
(iSein und Bewusstsein), consists in this, that the "real series" of 
objects is perceived in the "ideal" series of mental representations. 2 
This " doubleness " dogmatism cannot explain ; for the causality of 
things is only a simple series (of "mere being posited"). The 
repetition of Being in consciousness (or in the being conscious) is 
incomprehensible, if the being is to serve as a ground of explanation 
for being conscious. On the contrary, it belongs to the very nature 
of intelligence "to see itself." Consciousness, in that it acts or func 
tions, knows also that it acts and what it does ; in conjunction with 
the real (primary) series of its own functions it produces always at 
the same time the ideal (secondary) series of the knowledge of 
these functions. If, therefore, consciousness yields the sole ground 
of explanation for experience, it does this only in so far as it is the 

1 Fichte s W., I. 434. 

2 If the antithesis of dogmatism and idealism points back to the Kantian 
antithesis of Nature and Freedom, in which connection, moreover, the system 
of the necessity of things already appears with a strong Spinozistic character, 
the systematic influence of Spinoza s doctrine concerning the two attributes 
asserts itself for the first time in this relation of the two series. 

CHAP. 2, 41.] Thing-in-Itself : Fichte, Krug. 581 

activity which perceives itself and is reflected back into itself, i.e. 
as self-consciousness. The science of knowledge has to show that all 
consciousness (of experience) which is directed toward something 
else toward a Being, toward objects, toward things has its root 
in the original relation of consciousness to itself. 

The principle of idealism is self-consciousness ; inTs subjective, 
methodical aspect, in so far as the science of knowledge aims to 
develop all of its insights from the intellectual perception alone, with 
which consciousness accompanies its own activities, from rejection 
upon that which consciousness knows of its own deed, in objec- 
tive, systematic aspect, in so far as in this way those functions of 
intelligence are to be pointed out, by means of which that which 
in common life is called thing and object, and in the dogmatic 
philosophy thing-in-itself, is produced. This last conception, that 
of the thing-in-itself, which is through and through contradictory, 
is thus resolved to its last remnant ; all Being is comprehensible 
only as product of reason, and the subject-matter of philosophical 
knowledge is the system of the reason (cf. 42). 

For Fichte and his successors, the conception of the thing-in- 
itself thus became indifferent, and the old antithesis between Being 
and consciousness sank to the secondary significance of an immanent 
relation within the activities of the reason. An object exists only 
for a subject; and the common ground of both is the reason, the / 
which perceives itself and its action. 1 

6. While the main development of German metaphysics followed 
this Fichtean tendency, the syncretism above mentioned did riot re 
main without supporters whom the Wissenschaftslehre had thrust from 
the threshold. Its metaphysical type had been stamped out by Rein- 
hold ; but it was likewise close at hand for all who took their point 
of departure from the individual consciousness with the psychological 
method, and believed that they found the individual consciousness 
equally dependent upon the Real and upon the universal essence of 
the intellect. The " transcendental synthetism," which Krug taught, 
may be conceived of as an example of this mode of view. For him, 
philosophy is an explanation of self by means of the reflection of 
the " I " upon the " facts of consciousness." But in this the primi 
tive fact proves to be the transcendental synthesis, that real and 
ideal are posited in consciousness as equally original and in relation 
to each other. 2 We know Being only in so far as it appears in con 
sciousness, and consciousness only in so far as it refers to Being ; 

1 Cf. also Schilling s youthful opuscule, Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophic, 
W., I. 151 ff. 

a Krug, Fundamentalphilosophie, pp. 10(5 ff. 

582 Germany : Development of Idealism. [PART VI. 

but both are objects of an immediate knowledge just as is the com 
munity existing between them in our world of ideas. 

These thoughts found a finer turn given them in Schleiermacher s 
dialectic. All knowledge has as its end to establish the identity of 
Being and thinking; for the two emerge in human consciousness 
separate, as its real and ideal factors, perception and conception, 
organic and intellectual functions. Only their complete adjustment 
would give knowledge, but they remain always in a state of differ 
ence. In consequence of this, science is divided with reference to 
its subject matter into physics and ethics, with reference to its 
methods into empirical and theoretical disciplines ; natural history 
and natural science, history of the world, and science of morals. In 
all these particular disciplines one or the other of the two factors 
has the predominance, 1 materially or formally, although the oppo- 
sites strive toward each other the empirical branches of knowledge 
toward rational articulation, the theoretical towards an understand 
ing of the facts, physics towards the genesis of the organism and 
of consciousness out of the corporeal world, ethics towards the 
control and inter-penetration of the sensuous by the will, which acts 
according to ends. But the complete adjustment of the real and the 
ideal is nowhere attained in actual cognition ; it forms rather the 
absolute, unconditioned, infinitely removed goal of the thinking 
which desires to become knowledge, but will never completely suc 
ceed. 2 Hence philosophy is the science not of knowledge, but of 
knowledge in a perpetual state of becoming, dialectic. 

But just for this reason it nresupposes the reality of this goal 
which is never to be attained in human knowledge ; the identity of 
thought and Being. This Schleiermacher, with Spinoza (and Schell- 
ing), calls God. It cannot be an object of the theoretical reason, 
and just as little can it be such of the practical reason. We do not 
know God, and therefore we cannot order our ethical life with refer 
ence to him. Religion is more than knowing and right-doing ; it is 
the community of life with the highest reality, in which Being and 
consciousness are identical. This communion, however, emerges 
only in the feeling, in the " pious " (frommen) feeling of an " abso 
lute " dependence upon the infinite world-ground which cannot be 
exhausted by thought (cf. 42, 6). Spinoza s God and Kant s 
thing-in-itself coincide in the infinite, but thus are raised above all 
human knowledge and will, and made the objects of a mystical feel 
ing whose delicate vibrations harmonise in Schleiermacher (as in 

1 This relation in Schleiermacher s Dialectic appears copied after the meta 
physical form of Schelling s System of Identity ; cf. 42, 8. 
2 Dialektik, W., III. 4 b 68 f. 

CHAP. 2, 41.] Thing-in-Itself : Schleiermacher. 583 

a somewhat different form in Fries, also) with the inwardness of 
the religious life among the Moravians. 

Thus the traditions of Mysticism pass through Pietism in 
which the orthodox tendency toward a coarser view became more 
and more prominent after Spener and Francke, and so called forth 
the opposition of the Brothers of the Common Life up to the 
summits of the idealistic development ; and indeed the doctrine of 
Eckhart and the transcendental philosophy are in close touch in the 
spirit which desires to transpose all the outer into the inner ; both 
have a genuinely Germanic savour, they seek the world in the 
" Gemuth " [the mind as the seat of the feeling and sentiments]. 

7. In putting aside the possibility of a scientific knowledge of 
the world-ground Schleiermacher remained nearer to Kant, but the 
intuition of religious feeling which he substituted was all the more 
dependent upon Spinoza and upon the influences which the latter 
had exercised upon the idealistic metaphysics after Fichte s Science 
of Knowledge. This monism of the reason (cf. the development in 
42) Herbart combated by an entirely different re-shaping of the 
Kantian conception of the thing-in-itself. He desired to oppose 
the dissolution of this conception, and found himself forced thereby 
to the paradox of a metaphysics of things-in-themselves, which yet 
should hold fast to their unknowableness. The contradictions of 
the transcendental analytic appear here grotesquely magnified. 

This is the more noteworthy as the retrogressive tendency which 
has been ascribed to Herbart s doctrine, perhaps in contrast with 
the idealistic innovations, developed itself in his attack upon Kant s 
transcendental logic (cf. 38, 5). Herbart saw in this with right 
the roots of idealism. It teaches, indeed, the Forms with which the 
"Understanding" produces the world of objects, and in Fichte s 
" I " we only have in a completely developed form that which in 
germ was in Kant s " consciousness in general " or "transcendental 
apperception." Herbart s inclination toward the earlier philosophy 
consists in this, that he denies the creative spontaneity of conscious 
ness, and, like the associational psychologists, &gt;finds it determined 
and dependent in both Form and content from without. He opposes 
also the virtual innateness which had propagated itself from Leibniz 
on through the Inaugural Dissertation into the Critique of Pure 
Reason: the forms of relation expressed in the categories are for 
him, like space and time, products of the ideational mechanism. As 
regards the psycho-genetic questions, he stands entirely upon the 
platform of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. For this reason 
he knows no other logic than the formal logic whose principle is the 
principle of contradiction, i.e. the prohibition to commit a contra- 

584 Germany : Development of Idealism, [PART VI. 

diction. The supreme principle of all thought is, that which con 
tradicts itself cannot be truly real or actual. 1 

Now it is evident that the conceptions in which we think experi 
ence are full of internal contradictions ; we assume things, which 
are to be identical with themselves and yet made equal to a variety 
of attributes ; we speak of alterations in which that which is equal 
to itself is successively different ; we trace all inner experience back 
to an " /" or " self" which as that " which mentally represents 
itself " (sick selbst Vorstellende) involves an infinite series in the 
subject as well as in the object, we trace all outer experience 
back to a matter, in the idea of which the attributes of the discrete 
and the continuous are at variance. This experience can be only 
phenomenon ; but this phenomenon must have at its basis something 
real which is free from contradictions, seeming things must have 
absolute "Reals" (Reale), seeming occurrence and change a real 
occurrence and change. Whatever seeming there is, there is just so 
much indication of Being. To discover this is the task of philoso 
phy ; it is a working over of the conceptions of experience which are 
given and which must be re-shaped according to the rules of formal 
logic, until we know the reality that has no internal contradictions. 

The general means to this end is the method of relation. The 
fundamental form of contradiction always is, that something simple 
is thought as having differences (the synthetic unity of the mani 
fold in Kant). This difficulty can be removed only by assuming a 
plurality of simple beings, through the relation of which to each 
other the "illusion" of the manifold or changeable is produced in 
any individual object. Thus the conception of substance can be 
maintained only if we suppose that the various qualities and chang 
ing states which substance is said to unite, concern not substance 
itself, but only the relation in which it successively stands to other 
substances. The things-in-themselves must be many ; from a single 
thing-in-itself the multiplicity of qualities and states could never be 
understood. But each of these metaphysical things must be thought 
as entirely simple and unchangeable; they are called by Herbart, 
11 Reals" (Realen). All qualities which form the characteristics of 
things in experience are relative, and make these characteristics 

1 Cf. Einleitung in die Philos., W., I. 72-82. The historical stimulus to this 
sharp presentation of the principle of contradiction was no doubt the deprecia 
tion which this principle found in the dialectic method (cf. 42, 1) ; logically, 
however, Herbart s doctrine (with the exception of his treatment of the "I" 
conception) is entirely independent of it. The Eleatic element in the Herbar- 
tian philosophy (cf. I. 225) is given with the postulate of Being void of contra 
dictions, and to this circumstance the philosopher, who otherwise had little 
historical disposition, owed his fineness of feeling for the metaphysical motive 
in the Platonic doctrine of Ideas. Cf. I. 237 ff. and XII. 61 ff. 

CHAP. 2, 41.] Thing -irtr Itself : Herlart. 585 

appear only in relation to other things ; the absolute qualities of the 
Reals are, therefore, unknowable. 

8. But they must be thought as the ground which determines 
the qualities that appear ; and likewise we must assume as ground 
of the seeming changes which the mutation of qualities exhibits in 
the case of empirical things, an actual process or occurrence, a change 
of relations between the Reals. Here, however, this whole artificial 
construction of that which lies beyond experience began to waver. 
For the Eleatic rigidity of these Reals in nowise permits us to form 
an idea of the kind of " actual relations " which are held to obtain 
between them. First of all, these cannot be spatial ; 1 space and 
time are products of the series formed by ideas, products of the 
psychical mechanism, and hence phenomenal for Herbart in almost 
a higher degree than for Kant. Only in a transferred sense can the 
changing relations of substances be termed a "coming and going in 
the intelligible space " ; what they are themselves the Herbartian 
doctrine has no term to express. Only, in a negative direction it is 
obliged to make a questionable concession. Every Real has only 
simple and unchangeable determinations : the relation, therefore, 
which exists or arises between two Reals is not essential to either, 
and has not its basis in either. A tertium quid, however, which this 
relation would postulate, is not to be discovered in this metaphys 
ics. 2 Hence the relations which the Reals sustain to each other, 
and from which the appearance of things and their relations are 
said to follow, are called " contingent views " (zufallige Ansicliten) 
of the Reals ; and Herbart s meaning in several passages is scarcely 
to be understood otherwise than that consciousness is the intelligible 
space in which the above relations between the Reals obtain, that 
the real process or occurrence, also, is some thing which itself only 
"takes place for the spectator" as "objective seeming." 3 If we 
add to this, that the " Being " of the Reals or absolute qualities is 

1 Not only in this point do Herbart s Reals distinguish themselves from the 
atoms of Democritus, with which they have the common basis of a pluralistic 
re-shaping of the Eleatic conception of Being, but also by the difference in 
(unknowable) quality, in the place of which atomism allows only quantitive 
differences. Just as little are the Reals to be confused with Leibniz s monads, 
with which indeed they share their absence of windows, but not the attribute 
of being a unity of the manifold. With the Platonic Idi as, they have in com 
mon the attributes of the Eleatic Being, but not the character of class-concepts. 

2 In this gap of his metaphysics Herbart inserted his philosophy of religion; 
for since there is no knowledge of the real ground of the relations between the 
Reals, from which the world of phenomena proceeds, the impression of pur- 
posiveness which the latter makes permits us to believe, in a manner which is 
theoretically unassailable, upon a supreme intelligence as the ground of these 
relations, a very pale revival of the old physico-theological proof. 

3 Cf. W., IV. 93 ff., 127-132, 233, 240 f., 248 ff. ; see also E. Zeller, Gesch. d. 
deutxch. Philos., 844. 

586 Germany : Development of Idealism. [PART VI. 

defined by Herbart as " absolute position" i.e. as a " Setzung" l a pos 
iting in which Being is at rest, and which is not taken back, we have 
opening before us the perspective into an " absolute " idealism. 

This was, indeed, carried out by Herbart still less than by Kant ; 
here, too, it would have led to absolute contradiction. For the 
theory of Reals aims to deduce consciousness also, as a consequence, 
emerging in the realm of phenomena, of the " co-existence of the 
Reals." The Reals are held to reciprocally "disturb" each other, 
and to call forth in each other as reactions against these disturb 
ances, inner states which have the significance of self-preserva 
tions." 2 Such self-preservations are immediately known to us as 
those by the aid of which the unknown Real of our soul maintains 
itself against disturbance by other Reals ; they are ideas (Vorstellun- 
gen). The soul as a simple substance is naturally unknowable; 
psychology is only the science of its self-preservations. These, the 
ideas, sustain within the soul, which simply furnishes the indiffer 
ent stage for their co-existence, once more the relations of Reals ; 
they disturb and inhibit each other, and the whole course of the 
psychical life is to be explained from this reciprocal tension of ideas. 
By their tension the ideas lose in intensity ; and the consciousness 
depends upon the degree of intensity. The lowest degree of 
strength, which the ideas can have and still be regarded as actual, 
is the threshold of consciousness. If the ideas are pressed by others 
below this threshold, they change into impulse. Hence the essential 
nature of those psychical states which are called feeling and will is 
to be sought in the inhibitory relations of ideas. All these relations 
must be developed as a " statics and mechanics of ideas," 3 and since 
we have to do here essentially with the determining of differences of 
force, this metaphysical psychology must take on the form of a mathe 
matical theory of the mechanism of ideas. 4 Herbart lays particular 

1 Cf. W., IV. 71 ff. 

2 The " sunm esse conservare," with Hobbes and Spinoza the fundamental in 
stinct of individuals, appears with Herbart as the metaphysical activity of the 
Reals, by virtue of which they produce the world of seeming, i.e. experience. 

3 On this metaphysical basis Herbart erected the structure of an immanent 
associational psychology. The assumption of a mechanical necessity of the 
ideational process, and the view that the volitions follow from this as likewise 
necessary relations, proved a fortunate basis for a scientific theory of pedagog 
ics, a discipline which Herbart made also dependent upon ethics, since the 
latter teaches the goal of education (the formation of ethical character), while 
psychology teaches the mechanism through which this is realised. In a similar 
way Beneke, who took the standpoint of associational psychology without Iler- 
bart s metaphysics, found the path to a systematic pedagogics. 

4 In carrying out this thought Herbart assumed that ideas in their reciprocal 
inhibitions lose in intensity as much as the weakest of them possesses, and that 
this inhibition-sum is divided among the individual ideas in inverse ratio to 
their original strength, so that if in the simplest case, a &gt; 6, a is reduced by 

CHAP. 2, 41.] Thin&lt;j-in-Itself : Herbart. 587 

weight upon the investigation of the process by which newly entering 
ideas are "assimilated," ordered, formed, and in part altered, by the 
ideas already present ; he employs for this the expression appercep 
tion (first coined by Leibniz ; cf. p. 463), and his theory of this takes 
the form of an explanation of the " I " or " self " by associational 
psychology. The " I " is thought as the moving point in which the 
apperceiving and apperceived ideas continually converge. 

While the self-preservation of the Real which constitutes the soul, 
against disturbance by other Reals thus produces the phenomena 
of the ideational life, the reciprocal self-preservation and " partial 
inter-penetration " of several Keals produce for the consciousness of 
the spectator the "objective seeming or illusion" of matter. The 
various physical and chemical phenomena are here tortured out of 
the metaphysical presuppositions with an unspeakably toilsome 
deduction, 1 an attempt forgotten to-day, which remained as desti 
tute of results in natural science as in philosophy. 

9. Another Gottingen professor, Bouterwek, attacked the thing-in- 
itself with other weapons. He showed in his Apodiktik, that if the 
doctrines of the Critique of Pure Reason are to be taken in earnest, 
nothing remains for the "object to which the subject necessarily 
relates" except a completely inconceivable X. We cannot talk of a 
thing-in-itself or of things-in-themselves; for in this are involved 
already the categories of Inherence, of Unity and Plurality, 2 and of 
Reality, which hold good only for phenomena. The transcendental 
philosophy must become " negative Spinozism." 3 It can teach only 
that to the "consciousness in general" a "something in general" 
corresponds, concerning which nothing whatever is to be affirmed in 
absolute knowledge. (Cf. with regard to Spinoza, above, pp. 408 f.). 
On the other hand, this absolutely real asserts itself in all relative 
knowledge through the consciousness of willing.* For this shows 
everywhere the living force of individuality. We know of the subject 
because it wills something, and of the object because it furnishes 

the inhibition to 2 + a& - 6 2 and 6 to 6 2 Cf&gt; on thls arbitrarily axiomatic 

a + b a + b 

assumption and on the mistaken nature of the whole "psychological calculus," 
A. Lange, Die Grundlegung der mathematisrhen Psychologic, Duisburg, 1865. 

1 Allgem. Metaphysik, 240 ff ., 331 ff. ; W., IV. 147 ff., 327 ff In Herbart s 
metaphysics the branching out of general ontology into the beginnings of psy 
chology and natural philosophy is designated by the names Eidology and 
Synechology. 

2 Cf. esp. Apodiktik, I. 261, 392 ff. 
Ib. 385 ff. 

4 Following the example of Kant and Fichte, Bouterwek ends his theoretical 
Apodiktik in scepticism or in completely abstract-formal, absolute knowledge ; 
it is the "practical" apodictic which tirst gains a relation of its content to 
reality. 

588 Germany : Development of Idealism. [PART VI 

resistance to this will. The antithesis of force and resistance thus 
furnishes a common basis to the knowledge of the reality of our 
selves, and to that of the reality of other things, of the I and the 
Not-I. 1 This doctrine Bouterwek would have called absolute Virtu- 
alism. We know our own reality in that we will, and the reality of 
other things in that our will finds in them a resisting force. The 
feeling of resistance refutes pure subjectivism or solipsism, but this 
relative knowledge of the particular forces of the real is supple 
mented by the consciousness of our own willing to form a merely 
empirical science. 2 

This thought of his Gottingen teacher was developed by Schopen 
hauer, under the influence of Fichte, to a metaphysics. With a bold 
leap he swings himself up from the position of Virtualism to the 
knowledge of the essential nature of all things. We recognise the 
will within us as the true reality, and the resistance from which we 
know the reality of other things must, therefore, be likewise will. 
This is demanded by the " metaphysical need " of a unitary explana 
tion for all experience. The world " as idea " can be only phenome 
non ; an object is possible only in the subject and determined by 
the Forms of the subject. Hence the world in man s idea or mental 
representation (as " phenomenon of the brain," as Schopenhauer has 
often said with a dangerously contradictory laxity of expression) 
appears as a manifold ordered in space and time, a manifold whose 
connection can be thought only in accordance with the principle of 
causality, the only one of the Kantian categories which Schopen 
hauer can admit to an originality of the same rank as that which 
belongs to the pure perceptions. Bound to these Forms, conceptional 
knowledge can have for its object only the necessity which prevails 
between individual phenomena : for causality is a relation of phe 
nomena to each other; science knows nothing absolute, nothing 
unconditioned; the guiding thread of causality, which leads from 
one condition to the other, never breaks off and must not be broken 
off arbitrarily. 3 The conceptional work of science can, therefore, in 
nowise raise itself above this infinite series of phenomena ; only an 
intuitive interpretation of the whole world of ideas, a look of genius 
over experience, an immediate apprehension, can penetrate to the 
true essence, which appears in our ideas as the world determined in 
space and time and by causality. This intuition, however, is that 
by which the knowing subject is given immediately through itself as 
will. This word solves, therefore, the mystery of the outer world 

i Apodiktik II. 62 ff. 2 Ib. II. 67 f. 

a In this Schopenhauer is in complete agreement with Jacobi (cf. above, 
p. 574). 

CHAP. 2, 41.] Thing-in-itself : Schopenhauer. 589 

also. For we must apprehend the significance of all that is given to 
us immediately in space and time as idea, 1 according to this analogy 
of the only thing which is immediately given. The thing-in-itself is 
the Will. 

The word " will " as here used must indeed be taken in an ex 
tended sense. In men and in animals the will appears as motiva 
tion determined through ideas, in the instinctive and vegetative life 
of the organism as susceptibility to stimulation, in the rest of the 
world of experience as mechanical processes. The meaning which 
is common to these different internal or external kinds of causality, 
should be designated a potiori as will, in accordance with that form 
in which alone it is immediately known to us. Accordingly the 
philosopher emphasises expressly the point, that the particular 
peculiarities with which the will is given in human self-perception, 
i.e. its motivation through ideas and conceptions, must be kept quite 
apart from our notion of the will as thing-in-itself, a requirement 
which it was, indeed, hard enough for Schopenhauer himself to 
fulfil. 

At the same time, however, the relation between thing-in-itself 
and phenomenon must not be thought according to the rule of the 
understanding, i.e. causally. The thing-in-itself is not the cause of 
phenomena. Even in the case of man the will is not the cause of 
his body or of the bodily activities ; but the same reality, which is 
given us mediately, through our ideas in space and time perception, 
as body, and which in cognition is conceived as something causally 
necessary and dependent upon other phenomena, this is im 
mediately given as will. Because the thing-in-itself is not subject 
to the principle of sufficient reason, we have the paradox, that man 
feels himself as will immediately free, and yet in idea knows him 
self to be necessarily determined. So Schopenhauer adopts Kant s 
doctrine of intelligible and empirical character. In the same way, 
however, phenomenal Nature must everywhere be regarded as 
obj edification ; that is, as the perceptional and conceptional mode of 
representation of the will or the immediately real, and must not 
be regarded as the product of the latter. The relation of essence 
to phenomenon is not that of cause and effect. 

Further, the will as thing-in-itself can be only the one, universal 
"world-ivill." All plurality and multiplicity belong to perception 
in space and time ; these latter are the principium individuationis. 
Hence things are different and separate from each other only as 
phenomena in idea and cognition; in their true essence they are 

1 Cf. World as Witt, etc., II. 18-23. 

590 Germany: Development of Idealism. [PART VI. 

all the same. The will is the ev KO.I TTO.V. Here lies for Schopen 
hauer the metaphysical root of morals. It is the deception of the 
phenomenal that makes the individual distinguish his own weal 
and woe from that of other individuals, and brings the two into 
opposition : in the fundamental moral feeling which feels another s 
sorrows as one s own in sympathy, the transcendental unity of will 
of all reality comes to light. 

Finally, the will can have for its object no particular content that 
can be empirically presented in consciousness ; for every such 
content belongs already to its "objectivity." The world-will has 
only itself for its object ; it wills only to will. It wills only to be 
actual ; for all that actually is, is itself only a willing. In this 
sense Schopenhauer calls it the will to live. It is the thing-in-itself 
which ever gives birth to itself in timeless, eternal process, and as 
such it is represented in the restless mutation of phenomena. 

42. The System of Reason. 

The direction which the main line of the idealistic development 
was to take was prescribed by the principle from which Fichte 
made bold to throw overboard the conception of the thing-in-itself. 
The relation of Being and consciousness can be explained only out 
of consciousness, and by the fact that consciousness "looks at its 
own action" and creates thereby at once the real and the ideal 
series of experience objects and the knowledge of them. The 
problem of the Wissenschaftslehre is, therefore, to comprehend the 
world as a necessary connected whole of rational activities, and 
the solution can proceed only by reflection on the part of the philos 
ophising reason upon its own action and upon that which is requi 
site therefor. The necessity, therefore, which prevails in this 
system of reason is not causal, but teleological. The dogmatic system 
understands the intelligence as a product of things, the idealistic 
develops intelligence as an inherently purposeful connection of acts, 
some of which serve to produce objects. The progress of philo 
sophical thought should not take the form, that because something 
is, therefore something else is also, but should rather shape itself 
after the guiding principle that in order that something may take 
place, something else must take place also. Every act of reason has 
a task; to perform this it needs other acts and thus other tasks; 
the connected series of all activities for the fulfilment of all tasks, 
taken as a purposeful unity, is the system of the reason, the 
" history of consciousness." The ground or reason of all Being lies 

CHAP. 2, 42.] System of Reason : Dialectic. 591 

in the ought ; that is, in the activity of self-consciousness directed 
toward an end. 

The schema for carrying out this thought is the dialectical method. 
If the world is to be comprehended as reason, the system of reason 
must be developed from an original task ; all particular acts of 
intelligence must be deduced as means to its performance. This 
act [lit. " deed-act," Thathandluny^ is self-consciousness. A begin 
ning without assumptions, such as philosophy needs, is not to be 
found by means of an assertion or proposition, but by means of a 
demand, which every one must be able to fulfil : " Think thyself! " 
And the whole business of philosophy consists in making clear 
what takes place in this act, and what is requisite for it. But this 
principle can lead on farther, only so long as it is shown that 
between that which should take place and that which does take 
place to this end, there is still a contradiction, out of which the new 
task results, and so on. The dialectical method is a system in 
which every problem or task creates a new one. There is in the 
reason itself a resistance to the result it seeks to achieve, and to 
overcome this resistance it unfolds a new function. These three 
momenta are designated as Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis. 

If Kant had maintained the necessity of insoluble problems of 
reason for his explanation and criticism of metaphysics, the idealis 
tic metaphysics now makes this thought a positive principle. By 
this means the reason s world becomes an infinity of self-production, 
and the contradiction between the task and the actual doing is 
declared to be the real nature of the reason itself. This contradic 
tion is necessary and cannot be abolished. It belongs to the essen 
tial nature of the reason ; and since only the reason is real, the con 
tradiction is thus declared to be real. Thus the dialectical method, 
this metaphysical transformation of Kant s transcendental logic, 
came into stronger and stronger opposition to formal logic. The 
rules of the understanding, which have their general principle in 
the principle of contradiction, are adequate, perhaps, for the ordi 
nary elaboration of perceptions into conceptions, judgments, and 
conclusions ; for the intellectual perception of the philosophising 
reason they do not suffice, before the problems of " speculative con 
struction " they sink to a relative importance. 

This doctrine asserts itself already in the first exposition which 
Fichte gave to his Science of Knowledge ; : it was then spoken out 
more and more boldly by disciples and associates like Fr. Schlegel, 
and, ultimately, the speculative reason affected a superiority to the 

1 Grundlage der ges. W.-L., 1 ; W., I. 92 ff. [Kroeger s tr., pp. 63 ff.]. 

592 Germany : Development of Idealism. [PART VI. 

"reflective philosophy of the understanding" hemmed in within 
the principle of contradiction. Schelling 1 appealed to the coinci- 
dentia oppositorum of Nicolaus Cusanus and Giordano Bruno, and 
Hegel 2 sees in the triumph of the "narrow understanding" over 
the reason the hereditary error of all earlier philosophy. 3 Meta 
physics, of which Kant has shown that it is not possible for the 
understanding, seeks an organ of its own in intellectual perception or 
intuition, and a form of its own in the dialectical method. The 
productive synthesis of the manifold must keep its unity above the 
antitheses into which it divides itself. It is the essential nature 
of mind or spirit to disunite itself, and from this state of being rent 
apart, to return back to its original unity. 

This triplicity rests entirely upon the above (Fichtean) funda 
mental characterisation of the mind as that which beholds itself. 
The reason is not only "in-itself" as a simple ideal reality, but also 
" for-itself " ; it appears to itself as "something other, alien"; it 
becomes for itself an object different from the subject, and this 
otherness is the principle of negation. The doing away with this 
difference, the negation of the negation, is the synthesis of the two 
moments above named. These are annulled or sublated [" aufge- 
hoben," which has no exact English equivalent ; Bosanquet suggests 
" put by " J in the threefold aspect that their one-sided force is 
overcome, their relative meaning is preserved, and their original 
sense transmuted into a higher truth. Following this scheme of 
the "in-itself," "for-itself," and " in-and-for-itself " (An-sich, Fur- 
sich, An-und-fur-sich) . Hegel developed his dialectical method with 
great virtuosoship by making each conception "turn into its oppo 
site," and from the contradiction of the two making the higher con 
ception proceed, which then experienced the same fortune of finding 
an antithesis which required a still higher synthesis, and so on. The 
Master himself, in his employment of this method, particularly in 
the Phcenomenology and in the Logic, worked in an astonishing 
wealth of knowledge, a quite unique fineness of feeling for concep- 
tional connections, and a victorious power of combining thought, 
while occasionally his profundity passed over into obscurity and 
schematic word-building. In the case of his disciples, a philosophical 
jargon grew out of this, which pressed all thought into the triple 
scheme, and by the thoughtless externality with which it was used, 

1 Sixth Vorl. iiber Meth. d. nk. St., W., V. 207 ff. 

2 Cf. esp. his article on Glauben und Wisse.n, W., I. 21 ff. 

8 It is from this point of view that we best can understand Herbart s polemic 
against absolute idealism. He, too, finds contradictions in the fundamental 
conceptions of experience, but just on this account they ought to be worked 
over until the contradictionless reality is recognised ; cf. above, 41, 7. 

CHAP. 2, 42.] System of Reason : Fichte. 593 

and used for a time in widely extended circles, it was all too well 
adapted to discredit philosophy as an empty bombast. 1 

2. The system of reason with Fichte, in the first period of his 
philosophical activity (about 1800), is, in its content also, in full 
accord with the above method. The original "act" (Thathandlung) 
of self-consciousness, which is determined by nothing except itself, 
is that the " /" or self can only be "posited" by being distinguished 
from a " Not-I" or "not-self." Since, however, the not-self is posited 
only in the self, i.e. historically expressed, the object posited only 
in consciousness, the self and the not-self (i.e. subject and object) 
must reciprocally determine each other within the " I " or self. From 
this results the theoretical or the practical series of self-conscious 
ness, according as the Not-I or the " I " is the determining part. 

The functions of the theoretical reason are now developed by 
Fichte in the following manner : The particular stages result from 
the reflection of consciousness upon its own previously determined 
action. By virtue of its own activity, which is limited by nothing 
external, it presses beyond every bound which the "I" has set for 
itself in the Not-I as object. The pure perceptions, space and 
time, the categories as rules of the understanding, and the principles 
of the reason, are treated as the several forms of this self-determin 
ing. In place of the antitheses which Kant had set up between 
these particular strata, Fichte set the principle, that in each higher 
stage the reason apprehends in purer form what it has accomplished 
in the lower stage. Knowing is a process of self-knowledge on the 
part of the reason, beginning with sense perception and ascending 
to complete knowledge. 2 But this whole series of the theoretical 
reason presupposes an original " self-limitation " of the I. If this 
is given, the entire series is comprehensible in accordance with the 
principle of self-perception ; for every activity has its object and* 
its reason in the preceding. The first self-limitation has its ground 
in no preceding act, and therefore, theoretically, no ground what 
ever. It is a groundless, free activity, but as such, the ground of all 
other activities. This groundless [undetermined] free act is sen 
sation. It falls into consciousness, therefore, only in its content, 
which is to be taken up into perception ; as act it is, like all that has 

1 Cf. the humorous portrayal in G. RUmelin, Eedcn und Aufsntze, pp. 47-50, 
Freiburg, 1888. 

2 Without any directly visible influence from Leibniz, his conception of the 
relation of the different knowing faculties asserts itself here in contrast with 
the Kantian separation. Only it is to be noted that this "history of the devel 
opment of reason" is, with Leibniz, determined causally, with Fichte teleologi- 
cally. What Hamann and Herder (cf. above, p. 576) demanded as a requirement 
of the unity of intelligence in the Leibnizian sense, Fichte and Schelling had 
meanwhile performed in quite another sense. 

594 Germany : Development of Idealism. [PART VI. 

no ground, unconscious. 1 In this consists its " givenness," by virtue 

of which it appears as foreign and coining " from without." In 

place of the thing-in-itself comes, therefore, the unconscious self- 

/ limitation of the I. Fichte calls this activity the productive imagina- 

v tion. It is the world-producing activity of the reason. 

For sensation there is then no ground which determines it; it 
is there with absolute freedom, and determines on its part all 
knowledge as regards content. Hence it can be comprehended only 
through its end in the practical Wissenschaftslehre, which has 
to investigate to what end the self limits itself. This is only to 
be understood if we regard the I or self, not as resting Being, but 
as in its nature infinite activity or impulse. For since all action is 
directed toward an object in connection with which it develops, 
so the self, which finds its object not given to it, as is the case 
with the empirical will, must, in order to remain impulse and action, 
set objects for itself. This takes place in sensation : sensation has 
no ground, but only the end of creating for the impulse of the self 
a limit beyond which the self passes in order to become object for 
itself. The actual world of experience, with all its things, and with 
the " Eeality " which it has for the theoretical consciousness, is 
only the material for the activity of the practical reason. 

The inmost essence of the ego, therefore, is its action, directed 
only toward itself, determined only by itself, the autonomy of the 
ethical reason. The system of reason culminates in the categorical 
imperative. The I is the ethical will, and the world is the material 
of duty put into sensuous form. It is there, to the end that we may 
be active in it. It is not that Being is the cause of doing, but 
Being is brought forth for the sake of the doing. All that is, is 
only to be understood or explained from the point of view of that 
which it ought to be (soil). 

The demand of the Wissenschaftslehre, so paradoxical for the 
ordinary .consciousness, 2 amounts, accordingly, to robbing the category 

1 The paradox of the "unconscious activities of consciousness" lies in the 
expression, not in the thing. German philosophers have frequently been very 
unfortunate in their terminology, most unfortunate precisely where they wished 
to give German words a new meaning. Fichte not only uses consciousness 
and self-consciousness promiscuously, but he understands by consciousness, 
on the one hand, the actual idea or mental presentation of the individual or the 
empirical ego (hence in this sense " unconscious," bcwusfttlos), and on the 
other hand, the functions of the "consciousness in general," of the transcen 
dental apperception or the "universal ego or self" (in this sense he speaks of 
" history of consciousness "). In these verbal relations rests a good part of the 
difficulty of Fichte s exposition and of the misunderstanding which it has 
called forth. 

2 Tn this spirit Fr. H. Jacobi protested against this knitting, not indeed of the 
stocking, but of the.knitting (W., III. 24 ff.). Cf., on the other hand, C. Fort- 
lage, Beitrdge zur Psychologic (Leips. 1875), pp. 40 f. 

CHAP. 2, 42.] System of Reason : Fichte. 595 

of substantiality of the fundamental significance which it has in the 
nai ve, sensuous view of the world. In this a something that " is," 
a "Being" (" Seiendes ") is always thought as support and cause of^ 
activities; in Fichte s thought the "doing" or action is conceived 
as the original, and Being is regarded as only the means posited for 
that end. This antithesis came sharply to light in the atheism 
controversy, which had so important consequences for Fichte per 
sonally. The Wissenschaftslehre could not allow God to be regarded 
as " substance " ; in this case he would necessarily be something 
derived ; it could seek the metaphysical conception of God only in. 
the "Universal Ego or Self" (allgemeinen 7c/t), in the absolutely 
free, world-creating action ; and in clear contrast to the natura 
naturans of dogmatism it calls God the Moral World-order, 1 the 
ordo ordinans. 

Accordingly, the chief philosophical discipline for Fichte is moral ~ 
science. Projected before Kant s Metaphysics of Morals, Fichte s 
system takes from the same the categorical imperative in the 
formula " act according to thy conscience," for the starting-point of 
a strictly carried out science of duties, which develops the general 
and particular tasks of man from the opposition appearing in the 
empirical self between the natural impulse and the moral impulse. 
At the same time, the Kantian rigour is softened by the fact, that 
man s sensibility, also, is permitted to assert its rights as product 
of reason. The dualism still survives, but it is already on the way 
toward being overcome, and in the thought that the purposeful 
connected whole of the reason assigns each of its members a voca 
tion prescribed by its natural manifestation, ethical theory is brought 
to an elaboration of the " material for the fulfilment of duty," which 
is much more penetrating and gives a deeper value to the data of 
experience. This shows itself in Fichte s exposition of professional 
duties, in his nobler conception of marriage and family life, in the 
finer penetration of his ethical investigations into the manifold 
relations of human life. 

The like is true, also, of Fichte s treatment of the problems of 
piiblic life. A youthful energy masters the Kantian fundamental 
thoughts here, and gives them a much more impressive formulation 
than they could receive from Kant himself, who undertook the 
systematic carrying out of these thoughts, only in his old age. The 
reciprocal limitation of spheres of freedom in the outer social life of 
individuals is, for Fichte also, the principle of Natural Right. As 
"primitive rights" he regarded the claims of the individual to 

1 Fichte, W., V. 182 ff., 210 ff. 

596 Germany : Development of Idealism. [! AKT VI. 

freedom of his body as the organ for performance of duty, of his 
property as being the external sphere of operation to this end, and 
finally of his self-preservation as personality. But these primitive 
rights become efficient as compulsory rights or laws only through 
the authority of (positive) laws in the state. The idea of the com 
pact which is at the basis of the state, Fichte analyses into the 
citizen, the property, and the defence contract. It is interesting in 
this connection to see how these thoughts culminate in his politics 
in the principle, that the state has to make provision that every one 
may be able to live by his work, the doctrine, named after him, of 
the so-called right to work. 1 Work is the duty of the moral person 
ality, the condition of existence of the physical ; it must uncondi 
tionally be furnished by the state. Hence the regulation of the 
relations of labour must not be left to the natural working of supply 
and demand (as according to Adam Smith), and the profits of labour 
must not be left to the mechanism of society s war of interests, but 
the rational law of the state must enter here. From the point of 
view of this thought, with a careful consideration of the conditions 
given by experience, 2 Fichte projected his ideal of the socialistic state 
as "the complete industrial state" (geschlossenen Handelsstaates) , 
which itself takes in hand all production and manufacturing, and all 
trade with foreign countries, in order to assign to each citizen his 
work and also the full revenue for his work. The powerful idealism 
of the philosopher did not shrink from a deep system of compulsion, 
if he could hope to assure to every individual thereby a sphere for 
the free fulfilment of duty. 

3. The problem of conceiving the universe as a system of reason 
was solved in the main in the Science of Knowledge by the method 
of deducing the external world of the senses as a product, appearing 
in the empirical ego, of the " consciousness in general " ; in this 
sense Fichte s doctrine, like Kant s, was later characterised as-" sub 
jective idealism." Fichte s meaning in this, however, was through 
out that " Nature," which it was his intention to have posited as an 
organic whole, 3 should possess the full significance of an objective 
product of reason, in contrast with the ideas of individuals ; to set 
this forth he lacked the penetrating knowledge of his subject which 
he possessed in the case of the relations of human life. Thus it was 
a supplementing of this work, that was welcome to Fichte also, 

1 Naturrecht, 18 ; W., III. 210 ff. ; Geschl. Handelsst., I. 1 ; W., III. 400 ff. 

2 Cf. G. Schmoller, Studie iiber J. G. Fichte in Hildebrand s Jahrb. f. Nat. 
u. Stat., 1865 ; also W. Windelband, Fichte s Idee des deutschen Staates (Frei 
burg, 1890). 

3 Fichte, W., IV. 115. 

CHAP. 2, 42.] System of Reason : Schelling. 597 

when Schelling undertook to solve the other part of the problem and 
took up in earnest the thought of constructing or deducing Nature 
as the objective system of reason. According to the Science of 
Knowledge and Kant s Philosophy of Nature this was possible only 
if Nature could be successfully comprehended as a connected whole 
of forces, having their ultimate end in a service toward the realisa 
tion of the reason s command. The starting-point for this construc 
tion was necessarily Kant s dynamic theory, which derived the 
existence of matter from the relation of the forces of attraction and 
repulsion (cf. 38, 7), and its goal was given by that manifestation 
of Nature in which alone the practical reason evinces itself the 
human organism. Between the two the whole wealth of Nature s 
forms and functions must be spread out as a life in unity, whose 
rational meaning was to be sought in the organic growth of the final 
goal out of the material beginnings. Nature is the ego, or self, in 
process of becoming this is the theme of Schelling s Philosophy 
of Nature. This task, which had its basis in philosophical premises, 
seemed at the same time set by the condition of natural science, 
which had once again reached the point where scattered detail-work 
craved a living conception of Nature as a whole. And this craving 
asserted itself the more vigorously, as the progress of empirical 
science gave little satisfaction to the highly pitched expectations 
which had been set upon the principle of the mechanical explanation 
of Nature after the seventeenth century. The derivation of the 
organic from the inorganic remained, as Kant stated, problematical, to 
say the least ; a genetic development of organisms on this basis 
was a vexed question; for the theory of medicine, which was then 
passing through a great movement, no key had as yet been found by 
which it could be fitted into the mechanical conception of the world ; 
now came, also, the discoveries of electric and magnetic phenomena, 
for which at that time it could not be anticipated that it would be 
possible to subsume their peculiar mysterious qualities under the 
point of view of the Galilean mechanics. In contrast with this, 
Spinoza had made his powerful impression upon the minds of men 
just because he thought all Nature, man not excluded, as a con 
nected unity, in which the divine Being manifests itself in all 
its fulness, and for the development of German thought it became 
of decisive importance that Goethe made this conception his own. 
The poet, indeed, as we find it best expressed in his splendid apho 
risms Die Natur, reinterpreted this view in his own way ; in the 
stead of the " mathematical consequence " and its mechanical neces 
sity he set the concrete idea of a living unity of Nature, in which the 
Weltanschauung of the Renaissance was revived, though without a 

598 Germany : Development of Idealism. [PART VI. 

formulation in abstract thought. This poetic Spinozism l became an 
essential link in the development of the idealistic systems. 

All these motives come into play in Schelling s Philosophy of 
Nature : as a result its central conception is life, and it makes the 
attempt to consider Nature from the point of view of the organism, 
and to understand the connection of its forces from the ultimate 
end of the production of organic life. Nature is not to be described 
and measured, but the meaning and significance which belong to its 
particular phenomena in the purposeful system of the whole are to 
be understood. The " categories of Nature " are the forms or shapes 
in which the reason sets itself as objective to itself; they form a 
system of development in which every particular phenomenon finds 
its logically determined place. In carrying out this idea Schelling 
was of course dependent upon the condition of the natural science 
of his time. Of the connection of forces, of their transformation 
into each other, which was the principal point of interest for his 
purpose, ideas at that time were still very imperfect, and the 
philosopher did not hesitate to fill out the gaps of knowledge by 
hypotheses, which he took from the a priori construction of the 
teleological system. In many cases these theories proved valuable 
heuristic principles (cf. above, p. 566), in others they proved false 
paths by which investigation could attain no useful results. 

The element in the Philosophy of Nature, which is of historical 
significance, is its opposition to the dominance of the Democritic- 
Galilean principle of the purely mechanical explanation of Nature. 
Quantitative determination is here again regarded as only external 
form and appearance, and the causal mechanical connection as only 
the mode of representation which conforms to the understanding. 
The meaning of the structures of Nature is the significance which 
they have in the system of the development of the whole. If, there 
fore, Schelling turned his look toward the relationship of forms in 
the organic world, if he used the beginnings of comparative mor 
phology, in which Goethe played so important a role, in order to ex 
hibit the unity of the plan which Nature follows in the succession of 
animate beings, yet this connected system was not for him, or for 
his disciples such as OJeen, properly a causal genesis in time, but the 
expression of a gradually succeeding fulfilment of the end. In the 
different orders of animate beings we see in separate forms, accord 
ing to Oken, what Nature intends with the organism, and what she 
first reaches completely in man. This teleological interpretation 

1 It took Herder prisoner also, as is proved by his conversations on Spinoza s 
system under the title Gott (1787). 

CHAP. 2, 42.] System of Reason : Schelling, Goethe. 599 

does not exclude a causal relation in time, but, with Schelling and 
Oken at least, it does not include it. It is not their point to ask 
whether one species has arisen from another; they only wish to 
show that one is the preliminary stage for that which the other 
accomplishes. 1 

From this we can understand why the mechanical explanation of 
Nature, which has again attained the victory in the nineteenth cen 
tury, is wont to see in the period of the Philosophy of Nature, only 
a fit of teleological excess, now happily overcome, which checked 
the quiet work of investigation. But the chronicles of the contro 
versy, which since the time of Democritus and Plato has filled the 
history of the mode of conceiving Nature, are not yet closed, even 
to-day. The reduction of the qualitative to the quantitative, which 
presses forward victoriously under the flag of mathematics, has 
repeatedly encountered the need which seeks behind motions in 
space a reality of rational meaning. This felt need of a living con 
tent of Nature Schelling s theory aimed to meet, and for this reason 
the great poet, who endeavoured to demonstrate as the true reality 
in the charming play of colours not a vibration of atoms, but a some 
thing that is originally qualitative, felt drawn toward it. This is 
the philosophical meaning of Goethe s " Theory of Colours." 

With Schelling the system of Nature is ruled by the- thought that 
in it the objective reason struggles upward from its material modes 
of manifestation, through the multitude of forms and transforma 
tions of forces, up to the organism in which it comes to conscious 
ness. 2 Sensitive beings form the termination of the life of Nature ; 
with sensation the system of the Science of Knowledge begins. 
The devious way which Nature pursues to this goal is frequently 
altered in details in the various remodellings which Schelling gave 
to his Philosophy of Nature, but in its main outlines it remained 
the same. In particular, it was the conception of duality, of the 
opposition of forces which negate each other in a higher unity, that 
formed the fundamental schema of his " construction of Nature," - 
a conception due to the Science of Knowledge, and from this 
point of view the polarity in electric and magnetic phenomena which 

1 The " interpretation " of phenomena was, to be sure, a dangerous principle 
from a scientific point of view ; it opened the gates of the Philosophy of Nature 
to poetic fancy and brilliant flashes. These guests forced their way in even 
with Schelling, but still more with his disciples, such as Novalis, Steffens, and 
Schubert. In the case of Novalis especially we have a magical, dreamy sym 
bolism of Nature in a play which is admirable in poetry but questionable in 
philosophy. 

2 The poetry of this fundamental thought was expressed in most character 
istic form by Rebelling himself in the beautiful verses which are printed in 
Sch^a Leben in Briefen, I. 28 2 ff. 

600 Germany : Development of Idealism. [PART VI. 

busied Schelling s contemporaries as a newly found enigma was 
particularly significant for him. 

4. When Schelling wished to place beside his Philosophy of 
Nature an elaboration of his own of the Science of Knowledge, 
under the name of " Transcendental Idealism," an important change 
had taken place in the common thought of the Jena idealists, to 
which he now gave the first systematic expression. The impetus 
to this came from Schiller, and from the development which he had 
given to the thoughts of the Critique of Judgment. It had become 
plainer step by step that the system of reason must become perfected 
for idealism in the aesthetic function, and in place of the ethical 
idealism which the Science of Knowledge taught, and the physical 
idealism which the Philosophy of Nature presented, appeared now 
aesthetic idealism. 

The re-shaping, so rich in results, which Kant s thoughts experi 
enced through Schiller, by no means concerned merely the aesthetic 
questions which lay nearest the poet, but likewise the ethical ques 
tions and those pertaining to the history of philosophy, and there 
with the whole system of reason. For Schiller s thoughts, even 
before his acquaintance with Kant, as is shown among other 
things by his poem, Die Kiinstler, had been turned to the prob 
lem of the significance of art and the beautiful in the whole con 
nected system of man s rational life and its historical development, 
and by solving this problem with Kantian conceptions he gave to 
the idealism of the Science of Knowledge a decisive turn. 

This began with the new Forms which Schiller found for Kant s 
conception of beauty. The synthesis of the theoretical and the 
practical in the aesthetic reason (cf. 40, 2) could perhaps find no 
more fortunate expression than in Schiller s definition of beauty as 
freedom in phenomenal appearance. 1 It asserts that aesthetic con 
templation apprehends its object without subjecting it to the rules 
of the cognising understanding ; it is not subsumed under concep 
tions, and we do not ask for the conditions which it has in other 
phenomena. It is perceived as if it were free. Schopenhauer after 
wards expressed this in the form that the enjoyment of the beautiful 
is the contemplation of the object in independence of the principle 
of sufficient reason. Schiller later laid still more weight upon the 
point that the aesthetic process is as independent of the practical 
reason as of the theoretical. The beautiful (in distinction from the 
agreeable and the good) is as little an object of the sensuous as it 

1 Cf. chiefly the letters to Korner of February, 1793, also the sketch on 
"The Beautiful in Art," printed with the letter of the 20th of June of that 
same year, all fragments of the dialogue Kallias which was not completed. 

CHAP. 2, 42.] System of Reason : Schiller. 601 

is of the moral impulse ; it lacks that quality of want or need which 
belongs to the life of empirical impulse, just as it lacks the earnest 
ness of the practical reason. In the aesthetic life the play impulse 
unfolds itself ; * every stirring of the will is silent in disinterested 
contemplation. In this, too, Schiller was followed by Schopenhauer, 
when the latter found the happiness of the aesthetic condition in the 
overcoming of the unhappy will to live, in the activity of the pure, 
willess subject of knowledge. 2 

From this Schiller concluded in the first place that wherever we 
have to do with educating man, subject to his sensuous nature, to a 
condition where he shall will morally, the aesthetic life offers the 
most effective means to this end. Kant had designated the " rever 
sal of motives " as the ethical task of man (cf. above, 39, 6) ; for 
the transition from the sensuous to the ethical determination of the 
will he offered man, as an aid, religion; Schiller offered art. 3 Faith 
and taste cause man to act legally, at least, when he is not yet ripe 
for morality. In intercourse with the beautiful the feelings become 
refined, so that natural rudeness vanishes, and man awakes to his 
higher vocation. Art is the fostering soil for science and morality. 
Such was the teaching of Schiller in the Artists ; his Letters 
on the Esthetic Education of the Human Race go deeper. The 
aesthetic condition, or state (Staat), because it is the completely 
disinterested state, destroys the sensuous will, also, and thus makes 
room for the possibility of the moral will ; it is the necessary point 
of transition from the physical state, ruled by needs, into the moral 
state. In the physical state man endures the power of Nature ; in 
the aesthetic state he frees himself from it ; and in the moral state 
he controls it. 

But already in the Artists the beautiful had been assigned a 
second higher task of ultimately giving also the culmination and 
completion to moral and intellectual cultivation, and in building this 
thought into the critical system the poet passes over from supple 
menting to transforming the Kantian doctrine. The two sides of 
human nature are not reconciled if the moral impulse is obliged to 
overcome the sensuous impulse. In the physical and in the "moral" 
state one side of human nature is always suppressed in favour of the 

1 The attempt which Schiller makes in his Letters concerning uEthestic 
Education (11 f.) to lay a basis for this in transcendental psychology remind 
us strongly of the Reinhold-Fichte time when "Jena whirred with the buzz 
of Form and Matter." 

2 World as Will, etc., I. 36-38. In this connection Schopenhauer no 
doubt claims the same value for scientific knowledge. Cf. 43, 4. 

8 Cf. the conclusion of the essay, Ueber den moralischen Nutzen asthetischer 
Sitten. 

602 Germany : Development of Idealism. [PART VI. 

other. We have a complete manhood only where neither of the two 
impulses prevails over the other. Man is truly man, only where he 
plays, where the war within him is silent, where his sensuous nature 
is exalted to so noble a sentiment or sensibility that it is no longer 
needful for him to will loftily. The Kantian rigorism holds where- 
ever sensuous inclination stands over against duty : but there is the 
higher ideal of the " schone Seele " the beautiful *oul which does 
not know this internal conflict because its nature is so ennobled that 
it fulfils the moral law from its own inclination. And just this 
ennobling is gained by man, only through aesthetic education. 
Through it alone is the sensuous-supersensuous discord in human 
nature abolished ; in it alone does complete, full manhood come to 
realisation. 

5. In the ideal of the " schone Seele " the " virtuosoship " of 
Shaftesbury overcomes the Kantian dualism. The completion of 
man is the aesthetic reconciliation of the two natures which dwell 
within him ; culture is to make the life of the individual a work of 
art, by ennobling what is given through the senses to full accord 
with the ethical vocation. In this direction Schiller gave expres 
sion to the ideal view of life characteristic of his time in antithesis 
to the rigorism of Kant, and the aesthetic Humanism which he thus 
wrested from abstract thought found besides his, a wealth of other 
characteristic manifestations. In them all, however, Goethe appeared 
as the mighty personality, who presented in living form this ideal 
height of humanity in the aesthetic perfection of his conduct of life, 
as well as in the great works of his poetic activity. 

In this conception of the genius Schiller was first joined by Wil 
liam von Humboldt. 1 He sought to understand the nature of great 
poems from this point of view; he found the ideal of man s life in 
the harmony of the sensuous and the moral nature, and in his treatise 
which laid the foundations for the science of language 2 he applied 
this principle by teaching that the nature of language is to be under 
stood from the organic interaction of the two elements. 

An attitude of sharper opposition to the Kantian rigorism had 
already been taken, in the Shaftesbury spirit, by Jacobi in his 
romance patterned after Goethe s personality, " Allw ill s Briefsamm- 
lung." The moral genius also is " exemplary " ; he does not subject 
himself to traditional rules and maxims, he lives himself out and 
thereby gives himself the laws of his morality. This "ethical 
Nature " is the highest that the circuit of humanity affords. 

iBorn 1767, died 1835. Works, 7 vols. (Berlin, 1841 if.). Aside from 

the correspondence, especially that with Schiller, cf. principally the ^Estheti- 

schen Versuche (Brunswick, 1709). Also Kud. Haym, W. v. II. (Berlin, 1856). 

2 Ueber die Kawi- Sprache (Berlin, 1836). 

CHAP. J, 42.] System of Reason: Romanticists. 603 

Among the Romantic School this ethical "geniality" in theory 
and practice came to its full pride of luxuriant efflorescence. Here 
it developed as an aesthetic aristocracy of culture in opposition to the 
democratic utility of the Enlightenment morals. The familiar word 
of Schiller s as to the nobility in the moral world was interpreted 
to mean, that the Philistine, with his work ruled by general prin 
ciples, has to perform his definite action determined by ends, while 
the man of genius, free from all external determination by purposes 
and rules, merely lives out his own important individuality as a 
something valuable in itself, lives it out in the disinterested play 
of his stirring inner life, and in the forms shaped out by his own 
ever-plastic imagination. In his morals of genius, the sensibility 
(Sinnlichlceit) in the narrowest significance of the word is to come 
to its full, unstunted right, and by aesthetic enhancement is to become 
equal in rank to the finest stirrings of the inner nature, a sublime 
thought, which did not prevent its carrying out in Schlegel s Lu- 
cinde from running out into sensual though polished vulgarity. 

Schleiermachers ethics brought back the Romantic morals to the 
purity of Schiller s intention. 1 It is the complete expression of the 
life-ideal of that great time. All ethical action seems to it to be 
directed toward the unity of Reason and Nature. By this is deter 
mined in general the moral law, which can be none other than the 
natural law of the reason s life ; by this is also determined in detail 
the task of every individual, who is to bring this unity to expression 
in a special way, proper only for him. In the systematic carrying- 
out of this thought, Schleiermacher distinguishes (according to the 
organic and the intellectual factors of intelligence, cf. 41, 6) the 
organising and the symbolising activities, according as the unity 
of Nature and Reason is procured by striving, or is presupposed, 
and thus result in all four fundamental ethical relations, to which 
correspond as goods, the state, society, the school, and the Church. 
From these the individual has to develop in self-activity to a 
harmonious life of his own. 

Finally, Hefbart, also, reduced ethical theory to the aesthetic reason 
in a completely independent manner; for him, morals is a branch 
of general aesthetics. Besides the theoretical reason, which contains 
the principles for knowledge of Being, he recognises as original only 
the judging or estimation of the existent in accordance with cesthetic 
Ideas. This estimation has to do with the will and the needs of 
the empirical self as little as has the knowing activity ; "Judgments 
of taste " hold necessarily and universally with direct self-evidence, 

1 Cf. also Schleiermacher s Vertraute Briefe iiber die Lucinde (1800). 

604 Germany: Development of Idealism. [PART VI. 

and always refer to the relations in the existent: these have an 
original pleasure or displeasure inherent in them. The application 
of these principles to the narrower field of the aesthetic is only 
indicated by Herbart : ethics, on the contrary, is regarded by him 
as the science of the judgments of taste pronounced upon the rela 
tions of human will. It has not to explain anything that is the 
business of psychology ; it has only to settle the norms by which 
the judgment mentioned above is passed. As such norms, Herbart 
finds the five ethical Ideas, Freedom, Affection, Benevolence, Right, 
and Equity, and according to these he seeks to arrange the sys 
tems of the moral life, while for his genetic investigation he always 
emplovs the principles of the associational psychology, and thus 
in the statics and mechanics of the state undertakes to set forth 
the mechanism of the movements of the will, by which the social 
life of man is maintained. 

6. From Schiller s aesthetic morals resulted, also, a philosophy of 
history, which made the points of view of Rousseau and Kant appear 
in a new combination. The poet unfolded this in an entirely char 
acteristic manner in his essays on Na ive and Sentimental Poetry, 
by gaining the fundamental aesthetic conceptions from bringing 
forward historical antitheses, and constructing a general plan of 
their movement. The different ages and the different kinds of poetry 
are characterised, in his view, by the different relations sustained 
by the spirit to the realm of Nature and the realm of Freedom. 
As the " Arcadian " state, we have that where man does what is in 
accordance with the moral order instinctively, without command 
ment, because the antithesis of his two natures has not yet unfolded 
in consciousness : as the Elysian goal, we have that full consumma 
tion in which his nature has become so ennobled that it has again 
taken up the moral law into its will. Between the two lies the 
struggle of the two natures, the actual life of history. 

Poetry, however, whose proper task it is to portray man, is every 
where determined by these fundamental relations. If it makes the 
sensuous, natural condition of man appear as still in harmonious 
unity with his spiritual nature, then it is natoe; if, on the contrary, 
it sets forth the contradiction between the two, if in any way it 
makes the inconsistency between the reality and the ideal in man 
appear, then it is sentimental, and may be either satirical or elegiac 
or, also, in the form of the idyl. The poet who is himself Nature 
presents Nature nai vely ; he who possesses her not has the senti 
mental interest in her of calling back, as Idea in poetry, the Nature 
that has vanished from life. The harmony of Nature and Reason 
is given in the former, set as a task in the latter there as reality, 

CHAP. 2, 4:2. ] Hyxtem of Reason : Schiller, Svhleyel. 005 

here as ideal. This distinction between the poetic modes of feeling 
is, according to Schiller, characteristic also for the contrast between 
the ancient and the modern. The Greek feels naturally, the modern 
man is sensible of Nature as a lost Paradise, as the sick man is 
sensible of convalescence. Hence the ancient and nai ve poet gives 
Nature as she is, without his own feelings ; the modern and senti 
mental only in relation to his own reflection : the former vanishes 
behind his object, as the Creator behind his works ; the latter shows 
in the shaping of his material the power of his own personality 
striving toward the ideal. There realism is dominant ; here ideal 
ism ; and the last summit of art would be the union in which the 
naive poet should set forth the sentimental material. So Schiller 
sketched the form of his great friend, the modern Greek. 

These principles were eagerly seized upon by the Romanticists. 
Virtuosos of the reviewer s art, such as were the Schleyels, rejoiced 
in this philosophical schema for criticism and characterisation, and 
introduced it into their comprehensive treatment of the history of 
literature. In this Frederick Schlegel gave Schiller s thoughts the 
specifically romantic flavour, for which he knew how to use Fichtean 
motifs with ready superficiality. While he designated the antithe 
sis propounded by Schiller with the new names classic and romantic, 
he remodelled it materially, also, by his doctrine of irony. The 
classic poet loses himself in his material; the romantic poet hovers 
as a sovereign personality above it ; he annuls matter by the form. 
In going with his free fancy beyond the material which he posits, 
he unfolds, in connection with it, merely the play of his genius, 
which he limits in none of its creation. Hence the romantic poet 
has a tendency to the infinite, toward the never complete: he him 
self is always more than any of his objects, and just in this the 
irony evinces itself. For the infinite doing of the ethical will, of 
which Fichte taught, the Romanticist substitutes the endless play 
of the fancy, which creates without purpose, and again destroys. 

The elements in Schiller s doctrine that concern the philosophy 
of history found their full development in Fichte, from whom they 
borrowed much. As the result of their influence he allowed the 
antitheses of his Wissenschaftslehre to become reconciled in the 
aesthetic reason. Already in his Jena lectures on the Nature of 
the Scholar, and in the treatment which the professional duties 
of the teacher and the artist found in the "System of Ethics" we 
hear these motifs ; in his Erlangen lectures they have become the 
ruling theme. When he proceeded to draw the " Characteristics of 
the Present Age, 1 he did it in the pithy lines of a construction of 
universal history. As the first (" Arcadian") state of mankind 

606 Germany : Development of Idealism. [PART VI. 

appears that of rational instinct or instinctive reason (" Vernunftin- 
stinct"), as the representatives of which a normal people is assumed. 
In this age the universal consciousness is dominant over and in 
individuals with immediate, uncontested certainty of natural neces 
sity ; but it is the vocation of the free individual ego to tear himself 
loose from this government of custom and tradition, and follow 
his own impulse and judgment. With this, however, begins the 
age of sinfulness. This sinfulness becomes complete in the intel 
lectual and moral crumbling of social life, in the anarchy of opin 
ions, in the atomism of private interests. With clear strokes this 
" complete sinfulness " is characterised as the theory and practice of 
the Enlightenment. The community of mankind has here sunk to 
the state based upon needs" ("Nothstaat"), which is limited to 
making it externally possible for men to exist together, and 
ought to be so limited, since it has nothing to do with any of man s 
higher interests, morality, science, art, and religion, and must 
leave them to the sphere of the individual s freedom. But for this 
reason the individual has no living interest in this "actual" state; 
his home is the world, and perhaps also at any moment the state 
which stands at the summit of civilisation. 1 This civilisation, how 
ever, consists in the subordination of individuals to the known law 
of reason. Out of the sinful, arbitrary free-will of individuals must 
rise the autonomy of the reason, the self-knowledge and self-legisla 
tion of the universally valid, which is now consciously dominant in 
the individual. With this the age of the rule of reason will begin, 
but it will not be complete until all the powers of the rationally 
matured individual are placed at the service of the whole in the 
"true state," and so the commandment of the common conscious 
ness is again fulfilled without resistance. This ("Elysian") final 
state is that of rational art or artistic reason ("Vernunftkunst"). 
It is the ideal of the " schone Seele " carried over to politics and 
history. To bring about this age, and in it to lead the community, 
the " kingdom," by reason, is the task of the " teacher," the scholar, 
and the artist. 2 

The " beginning of the rule of reason " Fichte s vigorous idealism 
saw just where sinfulness and need had risen to the highest point. 
In his "Addresses to the German Nation" he praised his people 

1 The classical passage for the cosmopolitanism of the culture of the eighteenth 
century is found in Fichte, W., VII. 212. 

2 In the religious turn which Fichte s thought takes at the close, this picture 
of the ideal civilised state of the future takes on more and more theocratic 
features : the scholar and artist have now become the priest and seer. Cf. W., 
IV. 453 ff., and Nachgel. Werke, III. 417 ff. 

CHAP. L&gt;, 42.] System of Reason: Fichte, Schelliny. 607 

as the only one that still preserves its originality and is destined 
to create the true civilised state. He cries to his people to bethink 
itself of this its vocation, on which the fate of Europe is hanging, 
to raise itself from within by a completely new education to the 
kingdom of reason, and to give back freedom to the world. 

7. The point of view of the aesthetic reason attained full mastery 
in the whole system of the idealistic philosophy through Schelling. 
In his working out of the " Transcendental Idealism " he developed 
the Fichtean antithesis of the theoretical and practical Wissen- 
schaftslehre by the relation between the conscious and unconscious 
activity of the self (of. above, No. 2). If the conscious is de 
termined by the unconscious, the self is theoretical ; in the reverse 
case it is practical. But the theoretical self, which looks on at the 
productiveness of the unconscious reason, manifested in feeling, 
perceiving, and thinking, never comes to an end with this, and the 
practical self, also, which re-shapes arid transforms the unconscious 
reality of the cosmos in the free work of individual morality, of 
political community, and of historical progress, has the goal of its 
activity in the infinite. In neither series does the whole essential 
nature of the reason ever come to its full realisation. This is 
possible only through the unconscious-conscious activity of the artistic 
genius, in which the above antitheses are abolished. In the un 
designed appropriateness of the creative activity, whose product 
is freedom in phenomenal appearance, the highest synthesis of all 
activities of reason must be sought. Kant had defined genius as 
the intelligence that works like Nature; Schiller had characterised 
the aesthetic condition of play as the truly human; Schelling 
declared the aesthetic reason to be the capstone of the idealistic 
system. The work of art is that phenomenon in which the reason 
attains purest and fullest development ; art is the true organon of 
philosophy. It is in art that the "spectator thought" has to learn 
what reason is. Science and philosophy are one-sided and never 
completed series of the development of the subjective reason ; only 
art is complete in all its works as entirely realised reason. 

After he had written the Transcendental Idealism Schelling 
delivered in Jena his lectures on the Philosophy of Art, which 
carried out this fundamental thought with an intelligent apprecia 
tion for artistic character and mode of production, that showed 
admirable fineness and acuteness especially in its treatment of 
poetry. These lectures, not printed at that time, determined the 
whole subsequent development of aesthetics by their influence upon 
the Jena circle. As published later they present that form which 
Schelling gave them some years after, when delivering them in 

608 G-ermany : Development of Idealism. [PART VL 

Wiirzburg. In this later form l the change in general point of view, 
to which the philosopher had meanwhile advanced, asserts itself 
still more. 

8. The aesthetic motif was active also, at least formally, in that 
a common systematic basis was sought for the Philosophy of Nature 
and the Transcendental Philosophy. The former treated the objec 
tive, the latter the subjective reason; the two, however, must be 
indentical in their ultimate essence; whence this phase of idealism 
is called the System of Identity (Identitdt- system). According to 
this, a common principle is required for Nature and the self. In 
the treatise which Schelling entitled - Exposition of my System 
of Philosophy," this common principle is called the "Absolute 
Reason" or the "Indifference of Nature and Spirit, of object and 
subject"; for the highest principle can be determined neither as 
real nor as ideal; in it all antitheses must be obliterated. The 
"Absolute" is here as undetermined in its content, 2 with Schelling, 
as in the old " negative theology," or as in Spinoza s " substance." 
With the latter conception it has in common the property, that its 
phenomenal manifestation diverges into two series, the real and the 
ideal, Nature and Spirit or Mind. This kinship with Spinoza as 
regards his thought, Schelling strengthened by formal relationship, 
imitating in his Exposition the schematism of the Ethics. 
Nevertheless this idealistic Spinozism is different throughout from 
the original in its conception of the world. Both desire to set forth 
the eternal transmutation of the Absolute into the universe; but 
in this Spinoza regards the two attributes of materiality and con 
sciousness as completely separate, and each finite phenomenon as 
belonging solely to one of the two spheres. Schelling, however, 
requires that "Reality" and "Ideality" must be contained in every 
phenomenon, and construes particular phenomena according to the 
degree in which the two elements are combined. The dialectical 
principle of absolute idealism is the quantitative difference between the 
real and the ideal factor -s ; the Absolute itself is just for this reason 
complete indifference. 3 The real series is that in which the objective 
factor predominates (" iiberwiegt"} ; it leads from matter through 
light, electricity, and chemism to the organism the relatively 
spiritual manifestation of Nature. In the ideal series the subjective 
factor predominates. In it the development proceeds from morality 

1 In the coll. works, V. 353 ff., first printed 1859. 

2 Schelling s disciple, Oken, expressed this very characteristically when he 
placed the Absolute, already called God by him, = 0. 

3 Schelling illustrates this schematically by the example of the magnet, in 
the different parts of which north and south magnetism are present with vary 
ing intensities. 

CHAP. 2, 42.] System of Reason : Schelling. 609 

and science to the work of art, the relatively most natural appear 
ance in the realm of Spirit. And the total manifestation of the 
Absolute, the universe, is, therefore, at once the most perfect organ 
ism and the most perfect work of art. 1 

9. In this system Schelling would comprehend the entire issue of 
the investigations which had previously diverged in various direc 
tions. The different stages of the self-differentiation of the Absolute 
he termed at first, " potencies," but soon introduced another name, 
and at the same time another conception of the matter. This was 
connected with the religious turn which the thinking of the Roman 
ticists took at about the close of the last and the beginning of the 
present century. The incitement to this came from Schleiennacher. 
He proved to the " Cultured Despisers of Religion," that the system 
of reason can become complete only in religion. In this, too, was a 
victory for the aesthetic reason. For what Schleiennacher then 
preached as religion (cf. 41, 6) was not a theoretical or practical 
behaviour of man, but an aesthetic relation to the World-ground, the 
feeling of absolute dependence. Therefore, religion, too, was in his 
view limited to pious feeling, to the complete permeation of the , 
individual by this inward relation to the universal, and put aside all 
theoretical form and practical organisation. For the same reason 
religion was held to be an individual matter, and positive religion 
was traced back to the "religious genius" of its founder. In view 
of this kinship we can understand the influence which Schleier- 
macher s " Reden " exercised upon Romanticism : to this is due the 
inclination of the latter to expect from religion the unitary solution 
of all problems of mankind, to desire to bring in it the separated 
spheres of the activity of civilisation into inner and intimate union 
again, and, finally, to seek the eternal welfare of all in that rule of 
religion over all spheres of life, which obtained in the Middle 
Ages. As Schiller created an idealised Greece, so the later Roman 
ticists created an idealised Middle Ages. 

Schelling followed this line of thought with great acuteness and 
fineness of feeling. Like Spinoza, he now named the Absolute " God " 
or the " Infinite," and likewise as Spinoza had inserted the attri 
butes and the "infinite modes" (cf. p. 409 f.) between "substance " and 
the particular finite realities, so the " potencies " are now regarded as 
the eternal forms of the phenomenal manifestation of God, while 
the empirical particular phenomena are the finite copies of these. 
But when in this sense they were also termed by Schelling 
Ideas (in his Bruno and in his Method of Academical Study) 

1 W., I. 4, 423. 

610 Germany: Development of Idealism. [PART VI. 

another influence still comes to light in this. Schleiermacher and 
Hegel, the latter of whom had exerted a personal influence upon 
Schelling since 1801, both pointed to Plato; but the philosophical 
knowledge of that time * still saw Plato s doctrine through the spec 
tacles of Neo-Platonism, which conceived of the Ideas as God s vision 
or intuition of himself (Selbstanschauung Gottes). And so Schelling s 
doctrine turned back into a Neo-Platonic Idealism, according to 
which the "Ideas" formed the intermediate link through which 
the Absolute became transformed into the world. 

This religious idealism of Schelling s doctrine of Ideas has a 
number of parallel and succeeding phenomena. The most interest 
ing of these personally is Fichtes later doctrine, in which he paid to 
the victory of Spinozism the tribute of making the infinite impulse 
of the I proceed forth from an "absolute Being " (Sein) and be di 
rected toward the same. For finite things, he held fast to his deduc 
tion of them as products of consciousness ; but the infinite activity 
of this consciousness he now deduced from the end of "imitating" 
an absolute Being, the deity, and hence the vocation and destiny of 
man appeared to him no longer the restless activity of categorical 
imperative, but the " blessed life " of sinking into a contemplation 
of the divine original, a mystical dying note of the mighty 
thinker s life, which makes the victory of the aesthetic reason 
appear in its full magnitude. 

The religious motif was followed still farther by Schelling s dis 
ciple Krause. He wished to combine the pantheistic Weltanschauung 
of idealism, which Schelling even at that time still defended (in 
Spinozistic fashion), with the conception of divine personality. He, 
too, regards the world as the development of the divine " essence," 
which is distinctly stamped out in the Ideas ; but these ideas are 
the intuition which the supreme personality has of himself. Essence 
( Wesen) this is Krause s term for God is not indifferent Rea 
son, but the personal, living ground of the world. In his farther 
carrying out of the system, which was characterised as "Panen- 
theisin," Krause has scarcely any other originality than the very 
objectionable one of presenting the thoughts common to the whole 
idealistic development in an unintelligible terminology, which he 
himself invented, but declared to be pure German. He carries 
out, especially, his conception of the entire life of reason from the 
point of view of the " Gliedbau" (in German, organism). He not 
only, like Schelling, regards the universe as a " Wesengliedbau " 

1 On Herbart s independent position, the importance of which becomes clear 
just in antithesis to that of Schelling and Hegel, see above, p. 584, note 1. 

CHAP. 2, 42.] System of Reason : Krause, HegeL 611 

(divine organism), but also regards the structures of society as 
continuations of the organic vital movement beyond the individual 
man ; every union (Band) is such a " Gliedbau," and inserts itself 
again into a higher organism as a member (Glied), and the course 
of history is the process of the production of more and more perfect 
and comprehensive unions. 

For the Romantic cesthetics, finally, Schelling s new doctrine gave 
rise to the result that the Neo-Platonic conception of beauty, as 
phenomenal manifestation of the Idea in the sensuous, became again 
recognised as authoritative. The relation of inadequacy between 
the finite appearance and the infinite Idea agreed with Schlegel s 
principle of irony, and these thoughts Solyer, especially, made the 
basis of his theory of art. 

10. The consummation of this whole rich and varied development 
is formed by Hegel s logical idealism. He signifies in the main 
a return from Schelling to Fichte, a giving up of the thought that 
the living wealth of the world can be derived or deduced from the 
"Nothing" 1 of absolute indifference, and the attempt to raise this 
empty substance again to spirit, 2 to the self-determined subject. 
Such knowledge, however, cannot have the form of intuition or 
immediate perception (Anschauuny) , which Fichte and Schelling 
had claimed for the Ego or the Absolute, but only that of the con 
ception or notion (Begrijf}. If all that is real or actual is the mani 
festation of spirit or mind, then metaphysics coincides with the 
logic 3 which has to develop the creative self-movement of spirit as 
a dialectical necessity. The conceptions into which mind or spirit 
takes apart and analyses its own content are the categories of reality, 
the forms of the cosmic life ; and the task of philosophy is not to 
describe this realm of forms as a given manifold, but to comprehend 
them as the moments of a single unitary development. The dialec 
tical method, therefore, serves, with Hegel, to determine the 
essential nature of particular phenomena by the significance which 
they have as members or links in the self-unfolding of spirit. 
Instead of Spirit (Geist) Hegel also uses Idea or God. It is the 
highest task that has ever been set philosophy, to comprehend the 
world as a development of those principles or determinations which 
form the content of the divine mind. 

1 Hegel, Phdnomen. Vorr., W., II. 14. 

2 [Geist, as in 20, has the connotation of both "mind" and spirit. " 
The former seems more appropriate where logical relations are under considera 
tion, though the latter is usually retained for the sake of uniformity.] 

8 This metaphysical logic is of course not formal logic, but in its determining 
principle is properly Kant s transcendental logic. The only difference is that 
tin- " phenomenon " is for Kant a human mode of representation, tor Hegel oil 
objective externalising of the Absolute Spirit. 

612 Germany : -Development of Idealism. [I AUT VI. 

In this, Hegel sustains not only to the German philosophy, but to 
the whole earlier intellectual movement, a relation similar to that 
of Proclus to Greek thought : ! in the "schema of trinities " of Posi 
tion, Negation, and Sublation or Reconciliation, all conceptions with 
which the human mind lias ever thought reality or its particular 
groups, are woven together into a unified system. Each retains its 
assigned place, in which its necessity, its relative justification, is said 
to become manifest : but each proves by this same treatment to be 
only a moment or factor which receives its true value only when it 
has been put in connection with the rest and introduced into the 
whole. It is to be shown that the antitheses and contradictions of 
conceptions belong to the nature of mind itself, and thus also to the 
essential nature of the reality which unfolds from it, and that their 
truth consists just in the systematic connection in which the cate 
gories follow from one another. "The phenomenon is the arising 
and passing away, which itself does not arise and pass away, but 
is in-itself, and constitutes the reality and movement of the life 
of truth." 2 

Hegel s philosophy is, therefore, essentially historical, a systematic 
elaboration of the entire material of history. He possessed both the 
necessary erudition and also the combining power and fineness of 
feeling for the discovery of those logical relations which were of 
importance for him. The interest in his philosophy lies less in the 
individual conceptions, which he took from the intellectual labours of 
two thousand years, than in the systematic combination which he 
brought about between them : and just by this means he knew how 
to portray in masterly manner the meaning and significance of indi 
vidual details, and to throw a surprising light upon long-standing 
structures of thought. He, indeed, displayed in connection with 
his data the arbitrariness (Willkiir) of [a priori ] constructive thought, 
which presents the actual reality, not as it offers itself empirically, but 
as it ought to be in the dialectical movement, and this violation of the 
actual matter of fact might be objectionable where the attempt was 
made to bring empirical material into a philosophical system, as in 
the philosophy of Nature, the history of philosophy, and history in 
general. All the more brilliant did the power of the thinking sat 
urated by the historical spirit prove in those fields where it is the 
express province of philosophical treatment, merely to reflect on 

* Cf. above, 20, 8. 

2 This Heracliteanism, which was inherent already in Fichte s doctrine of 
action (cf. above, p. 594 f.), found its most vigorous opponent in Herbart s 
Eleaticism (cf. 41, 7 f.)- This old antithesis constitutes the essential element 
in the relation of the two branches of German idealism (cf. above, p. 584, note). 

CHAP. 2, 42.] Syxtem of Reason : Heyel. (&gt;13 

undoubted data, but not to give any account of empirical reality. 
So Hegel gave as aesthetics a historical structure built up of the 
aesthetic ideals of mankind. Following Schiller s method, and attach 
ing himself also materially to Schiller s results, he displayed all the 
fundamental systematic conceptions of this science in the well- 
arranged series of the symbolic, the classic, and the romantic, and 
likewise divided the system of the arts into architecture, sculpture, 
painting, music, and poetry. So, too, from the fundamental concep 
tion of religion as being the relation of the finite to the absolute 
Spirit in the form of imaginative representation (Vorstellung) his 
philosophy of religion develops the stages of its positive realisation 
in the natural religion of magic, fire worship, and animal symbolism, 
in the religion of spiritual individuality of the sublime, the beautiful, 
and the intellectual, and finally in the absolute religion which repre 
sents God as what he is, the triune Spirit. Here, with a deep-going 
knowledge of his material, Hegel has everywhere drawn the main 
lines in which the empirical treatment of these same subjects later 
moved, and set up the philosophical categories for the general con 
sideration of historical facts as a whole. 

The same is true, also, of his treatment of universal history. 
Hegel understood by Objective Spirit the active and influential living 
body of individuals, which is not created by these, but rather forms 
the source from which they proceed as regards their spiritual life. 
The abstract form of this body is called Right; 1 it is the Objective 
Spirit " in itself." The subjection of the subjective disposition of 
the individual to the commands of the common consciousness the 
philosopher calls "morality," while he retains the name of " Sittlich- 
keit " [social morality or the moral order] for the realisation of the 
common consciousness in the State. In the immanent living activity 
of the human reason the state is the highest ; beyond this are only 
art, religion, and science, which press forward to the Absolute 
Spirit. The state is the realisation of the ethical Idea ; it is the 
spirit of the people become visible ; it is in its Idea the living work 
of art, in which the inwardness of the human reason comes forth 
into outer manifestation. But this Idea, from which the system of 
the forms and functions of political life derives, appears in the 
actual world only in the individual structures of the states which 
arise and pass away. Its only true and full realisation is universal 
history, in which the peoples enter successively, to live out their 
spirit in the work of state formation, and then retire from the stage. 

1 Hence Hegel treats the doctrine of Objective Spirit under the title Philoso 
phy of Right (Rechtuphilosophie}. 

614 Germany : Development of Idealism. [PART VI. 

So every epoch is characterised by the spiritual predominance of a 
definite people, which imprints the sign of its peculiar character 
upon all the activities of civilisation. And if it is the task of his 
tory as a whole to understand this connected order, then politics, too, 
must not suppose that it can construct and decree a political life 
from abstract requirements; it must, rather, seek in the quiet 
development of the national spirit the motives of its political move 
ment. So in Hegel, the "Philosopher of the Restoration," the 
historical Weltanschauung turns against the revolutionary doctrinair- 
ism of the Enlightenment. 

Hegel is less successful in the treatment of questions of natural 
philosophy and psychology ; the energy of his thought lies in the 
domain of history. The external scheme of his system, as a whole, 
is in large the following: the Spirit in itself (Geist an sich), i.e. in 
its absolute content, is the realm of the categories ; this is treated 
by the Logic as the doctrine of Being, of Essence, and of Concep 
tion or Notion. Spirit for itself (Geist fur sich), i.e. in its otherness 
and self-estrangement or externalisation, is Nature, the forms of 
which are treated in Mechanics, Physics, and Organics. The third 
main part treats, as Philosophy of Spirit, the Spirit in and for itself 
(an und fur sich), i.e. in its conscious life as returning to itself; 
here three stages are distinguished, viz. the Subjective (individual) 
Spirit ; the Objective Spirit as Right, Morality, State, and History ; 
finally, the Absolute Spirit as pure perception (Anschauung) in 
Art, as imaginative representation ( Vorstellung) in Religion, as 
conception (Begriff) in the History of Philosophy. 

He repeats, in all these parts of his philosophy, not only the 
formal dialectic of the construction of his conceptions, but also 
the material which constitutes the contents of the successive con 
ceptions. So the Logic in its second and third parts develops 
already the fundamental categories of the Philosophy of Nature 
and of Spirit ; so the development of the aesthetic ideals constantly 
points toward that of the religious Vorstellungen ; and so the whole 
course of the Logic is parallel to his History of Philosophy. Just 
this relation belongs to the essential nature of the system of reason, 
which here embraces not only, as with Kant, the Forms, but also 
the content, and aims to unfold before its view this content in the 
variety of the " forms of the actual world of reality," although this 
content is ultimately everywhere the same with itself. The course 
of development is always the same, viz. that the " Idea," by dif 
ferentiating and becoming at variance with itself, "comes to itself." 
Hence the categories progress from the Being which has no content 
to the inner Essence, and from there to the Idea which understands 

CIIAI-. -J, 43.] Metaphysics of the Irrational. 615 

itself ; hence the forms of the empirical world ascend from matter 
to the imponderables, then to the organism, consciousness, self- 
consciousness, reason, right, morality, and the social morality of the 
state, successively, to apprehend the Absolute Spirit in art, religion, 
and science; hence the history of philosophy begins with the cate 
gories of material existence, and becomes complete after all its 
fortunes in the doctrine of the self-comprehending Idea ; hence, 
finally, the entrance into this "system of the reason," also, will best 
be found by making it clear to one s self how the human mind 
begins with the sensuous consciousness, and by the contradictions 
of this is driven to an ever higher and deeper apprehension of itself, 
until it finds its rest in philosophical knowledge, in the science of 
the conception. The inter-relation of all these developments Hegel 
has set forth with obscure language and many mysterious and 
thoughtful intimations, in his Phenomenology. 

In this system of reason every particular has its truth and reality 
only in its being a moment in the development of the whole. Only 
as such is it real in concreto, and only as such is it comprehended 
by philosophy. But if we take it abstractly, if we think it in its 
isolation, in which it exists not realiter, but only according to the 
subjective apprehension of the understanding, then it loses that 
connection with the whole, in which its truth and actual reality 
consists : then it appears as accidental and without reason. But 
as such, it exists only in the limited thinking of the individual 
subject. For philosophical knowledge, the principle holds, that 
what is reasonable is real, and what is real is reasonable. 1 The 
System of Reason is the sole reality. 

43. The Metaphysics of the Irrational. 

The "dialectic of history" willed it that the System of Reason 
should also change into its opposite, and that the insight into the 
insurmountability of the barriers which the attempt to deduce all 
phenomena from one fundamental principle necessarily encounters, 
caused other theories to arise close beside the idealistic doctrines 
already treated ; and these other theories found themselves thereby 
forced to maintain the unreason of the World-ground. The first to 
pass through this process was the many-sided agent of the main 
development, the Proteus of idealism, Schelling. The new in this 
movement is not the knowledge that the rational consciousness 
always has ultimately something for its content, which it simply 

1 Vorrede zur Rechtsphilos., W., VIII. 17. 

616 Germany : Development of Idealism. [PART VL 

finds present within itself, without being able to give any account 
of it : such limiting conceptions were the transcendental X as thing- 
in-itself, with Kant ; as differential of consciousness, with Maimon ; 
as a free act without rational ground, in Fichte. The new was, 
that this which could not be comprehended by the reason, and 
which resisted its work, was now also to be thought as something 
irrational. 

1. Schelling was forced upon the path of irrationalism, remarka 
bly enough, by taking up the religious motif into his absolute ideal 
ism ( 42, 9). If "the Absolute" was thought no longer merely 
in Spinozistic fashion, as the universal, indifferent essence of all 
phenomena, if the divine and the natural principle of things were 
distinguished, so that the eternal Ideas as the Forms of the divine 
self-perception were assigned a separate existence beside finite things, 
then the transmutation of God into the world must again become a 
problem. This was really Hegel s problem also, and the latter was 
right when he taught later that, in his view, philosophy has the same 
task as theology. He aided himself with the dialectical method 
which aimed to show in the form of a higher logic, how the Idea 
agreeably to its own conceptional essence releases itself to " other 
ness" (Anderssein), i.e. to Nature, to finite phenomenal appearance. 

Schelling sought to solve the same problem by the method of 
theosopliy, i.e. by a mystico-speculative doctrine, which transposed 
philosophical conceptions into religious intuitions. His happening 
upon this method was due to the fact that the problem met him in 
the form of an attempt to limit philosophy by religion. He obligated 
himself, in a vigorous reaction against this in the name of philoso 
phy, to solve the religious problem also. This, indeed, could only 
be done if philosophy passed over into theosophical speculations. 

A disciple of the System of Identity, Eschenmayer, 1 showed that 
philosophical knowledge can indeed point out the reasonableness of 
the world, and its agreement with the divine reason, but cannot show 
how this world attains the self-subsistent existence with reference 
to the deity, which it has in finite things. Here philosophy ceases 
and religion begins. In order to vindicate this domain also for 
philosophy, and restore the old unity between philosophy and relig 
ion, Schelling lays claim to specifically religious intuitions as philo 
sophical conceptions, and so re-shapes them in accordance with this 
claim that they appear usable for both disciplines : in doing which 
he makes a copious use of Kant s philosophy of religion. 

1 Eschenmayer (1770-1852), Die Philosophic in ihrem Ueberganye zur Nicht- 
(1803). 

CHAP. 2, 43.] Metaphysics of the Irrational : Schelling. 617 

In fact, 1 there is no continuous transition from the Absolute to 
the concrete reality; the origin of the world of sense from God is 
thinkable only by a leap (Sprung), a breaking off from the condition 
of absoluteness. A ground for this Schelling still teaches here 
is to be found neither in the Absolute nor in the Ideas : but in the 
nature of the latter the possibility at least is given. For to the 
Ideas as the " antitype " or counterpart of the Absolute, in which it 
beholds itself, the self-subsistence of the archetype communicates 
itself, the freedom of that which is in itself ("Li-sich-selbst-seins"). 
In this lies the possibility of the falling away of the Ideas from God, 
of their assuming metaphysical independence, by which they become 
actual and empirical, i.e. finite. But this falling away is not neces 
sary and not comprehensible: it is a fact without rational ground; 
not, however, a single event, but as timeless and eternal as the Abso 
lute and the Ideas. We see that the religious colouring of this doc 
trine comes from Kant s theory of the radical evil as a deed of the 
intelligible character, while the philosophical, on the contrary, comes 
from Fichte s conception of the free acts of the ego, which have no 
rationale. On this apostasy, therefore, rests the actualisation of the 
Ideas in the world. Hence the content of the actual reality is rational 
and divine ; for it is God s Ideas that are actual in it : their being 
actual, however, is apostasy, sin, and unreason. This reality of the 
Ideas external to God is Nature. But its divine essence strives back 
to the original ground and archetype, and this return of things into 
God is history, the epic composed in the mind of God, whose Iliad 
is the farther and farther departure of man from God, and whose 
Odyssey is his return to God. Its final purpose is the reconciliation 
of the apostasy, the reuniting of the Ideas with God, the cessation of 
their self-subsistence. Individuality also experiences this change 
of fortunes : its self ness (Ichheit) is intelligible freedom, self-deter 
mination breaking loose from the Absolute: its deliverance is a 
submergence in the Absolute. 

In similar manner Frederick Schlegel 2 made the "triplicity" of 
the infinite, the finite, and the return of the finite to the infinite, 
the principle of his later theory, which professed to maintain the 
contradictions of the actual as a fact, to explain them from the 
fall, and to reconcile them through subjection to divine revelation ; 
but merely concealed, with great pains, the philosophical impotence 
of its author under the exposition employed. 

1 Rebelling, Religion und Philosophic, W., I. 6, pp. 38 ff. 

2 In the Philosophise/1 e Vorlesnngen, edited by Windischmann (1804-1806), 
and likewise later in the Philosophic des Lebens and the Philosophic der 
Geschichte (1828-1829). 

618 Germany : Development of Idealism. [PART VI. 

2. The subtlety of Schelling, on the contrary, could not free itself 
from the once-discovered problem. The monism, which had always 
controlled his thought, forced him to the question, whether the 
ground of the falling away was not ultimately to be found in the 
Absolute itself: and this could be affirmed only if the irrational 
was transferred to the essence of the Absolute itself. From the point 
of view of this thought, Schelling became friendly to the mysticism 
of Jacob Boehme (cf. p. 374 f.). This was brought near to him by 
his intercourse with Franz von Baader. The latter himself had 
received his stimulus both from Boehme and from Boehme s French 
prophet St. Martin, 1 and, holding fast to the Catholic faith, had 
elaborated his mysticism with obscure fantastic genius and un 
methodical appropriation of Kantian and Fichtean thoughts. The 
original idea that stirred within him was, that the course of the 
life of man, who is the image of God, and who can know of himself 
only so much as God knows of him, must be parallel to the self- 
development of God. Since, now, man s life is determined by the 
fall as its beginning and redemption as its goal, the eternal self- 
generation of God must consist in God s unfolding himself out of 
his dark, irrational, primitive essence, through self-revelation and 
self-knowledge, to absolute reason. 

Under such influences Schelling also began in his treatise 2 on 
freedom (1809) to speak of an Urgrund, Ungrund, or Abgrund [pri 
mordial ground, unreason, or abyss] in the divine nature, which is 
depicted as mere Being, and absolute primordial accident (" Urzu- 
fall"), as a dark striving, an infinite impulse. It is the uncon 
scious will, and all actual reality is in the last instance will. This 
will, directed only toward itself, creates as its self-revelation the 
Ideas, the image in which the will beholds itself the reason. 
Out of the interaction of the ever dark and blind urgency and its 
ideal self-beholding proceeds the world, which as Nature permits 
us to recognise the conflict between purposive formation and irra 
tional impulse, and as historical process has for its content the 
victory of the universal will revealed in reason, over the natural 

1 St. Martin (1743-1803), " Le philosophe inconnu," the stern opponent of 
the Enlightenment and of the Revolution, was seized through and through by 
Boehme s teachings, and translated his Aurora. Of his writings, the most 
important are L 1 Homme de Desir (1790), Le Nouvel Homme (179(5), and De 
V Esprit de.s Chases (1801) ; the most interesting perhaps is the strange work, 
Le Crocodile, on guerre, du bien et du mal arrive.e. sons la refine, de Louis XV., 
poeme epicomagique (1799). Cf. A. Franck, La Philoxophii- Mystique en France 
(Paris, 18(i6) ; also v. Osten-Sacken, Fr. Baader und St. Martin (Leips. 1800). 

2 This later doctrine of Schelling s is accordingly usually called the Doctrine 
of Freedom, as the earlier is called the System of Identity. Sclielliug, Unters. 
iiber die Freiheit, W., I. 7, 376. 

CHAP. L&gt;, 43.] Metaphysics of the Irrational : Schelling. 619 

unreason of the particular will. In this way the development of 
the actual leads from the unreason of the primordial will (deus 
implicit UK) to the self-knowledge and self-determination of reason 
( deus explicit us). 1 

3. Thus at last religion became for Schelling the "organon of phil 
osophy," as art had been earlier. Since the process of God s self- 
development goes on in the revelations, with which in the human 
mind he beholds himself, all momenta of the divine nature must 
appear in the succession of ideas which man in his historical 
development has had of God. Hence in the Philosophy of Mythol 
ogy and Revelation, the work of Schilling s old age, the knowledge 
of God is gained from the history of all religions: in the progress 
from the natural religions up to Christianity and its different forms 
the self-revelation of God makes its way from dark primordial will 
to the spirit of reason and of love. God develops or evolves in 
and by revealing himself to men. 2 

In its methodical form this principle reminds us strongly of 
Hegel s conception of the history of philosophy, in which "the Idea 
comes to itself," and the happy combination and fineness of feeling 
with which Schelling has grouped and mastered the bulky material 
of the history of religions in these lectures shows itself throughout 
akin and equal in rank to the Hegelian treatment. But the funda 
mental philosophical conception is yet entirely different. Schelling 
terms the standpoint of this his latest teaching, metaphysical em 
piricism. His own earlier system and that of Hegel he now calls 
negative philosophy : this philosophy may indeed show that if God 
once reveals himself, he does it in the forms of natural and historical 
reality which are capable of dialectical a priori construction. But 
that he reveals himself and thus transmutes himself into the world, 
dialectic is not able to deduce. This cannot be deduced at all ; it is 
only to be experienced, and experienced from the way in which God 
reveals himself in the religious life of mankind. To understand from 
this process God and his self-evolution into the world is the task of 
positive philosophy. 

Those who both immediately and later derided Schelling s Phil 
osophy of Mythology and Revelation as " Gnosticism " scarcely 
knew, perhaps, how well founded the comparison was. They had 
in mind only the fantastic amalgamation of mythical ideas with 
philosophical conceptions, and the arbitrariness of cosmogonic and 
theogonic constructions. The true resemblance, however, consists 

1 Cf. above, p. 2!&gt;o f. 

2 Cf. Constantin Frantz, Schelling s Positive Philosophic (Cothen, 1879 f.). 

620 Germany : Development of Idealism. [PAUT VL 

in this, that as the Gnostics gave to the warfare of religions, in the 
midst of which they were standing, the significance of a history of 
the universe and the divine powers ruling in it, so now Schelling 
set forth the development of human ideas of God as the develop 
ment of God himself. 

4. Irrationalism came to its full development in Schopenhauer by 
the removal of the religious element. The dark urgency or instinct 
directed only toward itself appears with him under the name of 
the will to live, as the essence of all things, as the thing-iu-itself 
(of. 41, 9). In its conception, this will, directed only towards 
itself, has a formal resemblance to Fichte s "infinite doing," just as 
was the case with Schlegel s irony (cf. 42, 5) : but in both cases 
the real difference is all the greater. The activity directed solely 
toward itself is with Fichte the autonomy of ethical self-determina 
tion, with Schlegel the arbitrary play of fancy, with Schopenhauer 
the absolute unreason of an objectless will. Since this will only 
creates itself perpetually, it is the never satisfied, the unhappy will : 
and since the world is nothing but the self-knowledge (self-revelation 
objectification) of this will, it must be a world of misery and 
suffering. 

Pessimism, thus grounded metaphysically, is now strengthened 
by Schopenhauer T by means of the hedonistic estimate of life itself. 
All human life flows on continually between willing and attaining. 
But to will is pain, is the ache of the "not-yet-satisfied." Hence 
pain is the positive feeling, and pleasure consists only in the removal 
of a pain. Hence pain must preponderate in the life of will under 
all circumstances, and actual life confirms this conclusion. Compare 
the pleasure of the beast that devours with the torture of the one 
that is being devoured and you will be able to estimate with 
approximate correctness the proportion of pleasure and pain in the 
world in general. Hence man s life always ends in the complaint, 
that the best lot is never to be born at all. 

If life is suffering, then only sympathy can be the fundamental 
ethical feeling (cf. 41, 9). The individual will is immoral if it 
increases the hurt of another, or also if it is merely indifferent 
toward it ; it is moral if it feels another s hurt as its own and seeks 
to alleviate it. From the standpoint of sympathy Schopenhauer 
gave his psychological explanation of the ethical life. But this 
alleviation of the hurt is only a palliative ; it does not abolish the 
will, and with the will its unhappiness persists. " The sun burns 
perpetual noon." The misery of life remains always the same ; 

i World as Will and Idea, I. 56 ff. ; II. ch. 46 ; Parerc/a, II. oh. 11 f. 

CHAP. 2, 4;}.] Metaphysics of the Irrational : Schopenhauer. 621 

only the form in which it is represented in idea alters. The special 
shapes change, but the content is always the same. Hence there 
can be no mention of a progress in history ; intellectual perfecting 
alters nothing in the will which constitutes the essential nature of 
man. History shows only the endless sorrow of the will to live, 
which with an ever-new cast of characters constantly presents the 
same tragi-comedy before itself. 1 On this ground the philosophy of 
Schopenhauer has no interest in history ; history teaches only indi 
vidual facts ; there is no rational science of it. 

A deliverance from the wretchedness of the will would be possible 
only through the negation or denial of the will itself. But this is 
a mystery. For the will, the tv KOL TTO.V the one and all the only 
Real, is indeed in its very nature self-affirmation ; how shall it deny 
itself ? But the Idea of this deliverance is present in the mystical 
asceticism, in the mortification of self, in the contempt of life and 
all its goods, and in the peace of soul that belongs to an absence 
of wishes. This, Schopenhauer held, is the import of the Indian 
religion and philosophy, which began to be known in Europe about 
his time. He greeted this identity of his teaching with the oldest 
wisdom of the human race as a welcome confirmation, and now 
called the world of idea the veil of Maia, and the negation of the 
will to live the entrance into Nirvana. But the unreasonable will 
to live would not let the philosopher go. At the close of his work 
he intimates that what would remain after the annihilation of the 
will, and with that, of the world also, would be for all those who 
are still full of will, certainly nothing ; but consideration of the life 
of the saints teaches, that while the world with all its suns and 
milky ways is nothing to them, they have attained blessedness and 
peace. " In thy nothing I hope to find the all." 

If an absolute deliverance is accordingly impossible, were it 
ever possible, then in view of the ideality of time there could be no 
world whatever of the affirmation of the will, there is yet a rela 
tive deliverance from sorrow in those intellectual states in which 
the pure willess subject of knowing is active, viz. in disinterested 
contemplation and disinterested thought. The object for both of 
these states he finds not in particular phenomena, but in the eternal 

1 Hence the thought of grafting the optimism of the Hegelian development 
system on this will-irrationalism of Schopenhauer s after the pattern of Schel- 
ling s Doctrine of Freedom was as mistaken as the hope of reaching speculative 
results by the method of inductive natural science. And with the organic 
combination of the two impossibilities, even a thinker so intelligent and so deep 
and many-sided in his subtle investigations as Edward von Hartmann, could 
have only the success of a meteor that dazzles for a brief period (Die Philoso 
phic, des Unbewussten, Berlin, 1869) [Eng. tr. The Philosophy of the. Unconscious, 
by E. C. Coupland, Loud. 1884]. 

622 Germany : Development of Idealism, [PART VI. 

Forms of the objectification of the will the Ideas. This Platonic 
(and Schellingian) element, however (as is the case also with the 
assumption of the intelligible character), fits with extreme difficulty 
into Schopenhauer s metaphysical system, according to which all 
particularising of the will is thought as only an idea in space and 
time ; but it gives the philosopher opportunity to employ Schiller s 
principle of disinterested contemplation in the happiest mariner to 
complete his theory of life. The will becomes free from itself 
when it is able to represent to itself in thought its objectification 
without any ulterior purpose. The misery of the irrational World- 
will is mitigated by morality ; in art and science it is overcome. 

PART VII. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

M. .1. Monrad, Dcnkrichtungen der neueren Zeit. Bonn, 1879. 
A. Franck, Philosophes Moderncs, Strangers et Fran^ais. Paris, 1873. 
R. Eucken, Geschichte und Kritik der Grundbcgriffe der Gegenwart. Leips. 
1878. 2d ed. 1892. 

E. v. Hartmann, Kritische Wanderung durch die Philosophic der Gegenwart. 
Leips. 1890. 

W. Dilthey, Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophic. Vol. XI. pp. 551 ff. 

H. Siebert, Geschichte der neueren deutschen Philosophic seit Hegel. Got- 

tingen, 1898. 
Ph. Damiron, Essai sur VHistoire de la Philosophic en France au 19* Siecle. 

Paris, 1834. 
H. Taine, Les Philosophes Classiques Fran^ais au 19 Siecle. Paris, 1857. 

F. Ravaisson, La Philosophic en France au 19* Siecle. Paris, 1868. 

L. Ferraz, Histoire de la Philosophic en France au 19 e Siecle, 3 vols. Paris, 

1880-1889. 

P. Janet, Les Maitrcs de la Pensee Moderne. Paris, 1883. 
E. De Roberty, La Philosophic du Siecle. Paris, 1891. 

Ch. Adam, La Philosophic en France, pr. Moitie du 19 e Siecle. Paris, 1894. 
L. Liard, Les Logiciens Anglais Contemporains. Paris, 1878. 
Th. Ribot, La Psychologic. Anglaise Contemporaine. Paris, 1870. 
I). Masson, llccent English Philosophy, 3d ed. Lond. 1877. 
Har. Hoffding, Einleitung in die enylischc Philosophic der Gegenwart. Leips. 

1890. 
L. Ferri, Essai sur I Histoire de la Philosophie en Italic au 19 Siecle. Paris, 

1869. 

K. Werner, Die italienische Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts. Vienna, 1884 ff. 
[O. Pfleiderer, The Development of national Theology since Kant. Lond. and 

N.Y. 1891.] 

[L. Stephen, The English Utilitarians, 3 vols. Lond. and N.Y. 1900.] 
[J. T. Merz, A History of European Thought in the 19th Century, Vol. I. 

1896.] 

The history of philosophical principles is closed with the develop 
ment of the German systems at the boundary between the eighteenth 
and the nineteenth centuries. A survey of the succeeding development 
in which we are still standing to-day has far more of literary -his 
torical than of properly philosophical interest. For nothing essen 
tially and valuably new has since appeared. The nineteenth century 
is far from being a philosophical one ; it is, in this respect perhaps, 

623 

624 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

to be compared with the third and second centuries B.C. or the four 
teenth and fifteenth A.D. To speak in Hegel s language, one might 
say that the Weltgeist of our time, so busy with the concrete reality 
and drawn toward the outer, is kept from turning inward and to 
itself, and from enjoying itself in its own peculiar home. 1 The 
philosophical literature of the nineteenth century is, indeed, exten 
sive enough, and gives a variegated play of all the colours ; the seed of 
Ideas, which has been wafted over to us from the days of the flower of 
the intellectual life, has grown luxuriantly in all spheres of science 
and public life, of poetry and of art ; the genniiiaiit thoughts of history 
have been combined in an almost immeasurable wealth of changing 
combinations into many structures of personally impressive detail, 
but even men like Hamilton and Comte, like Rosmini and Lotze, 
have their ultimate significance only in the energy of thought and 
fineness of feeling with which they have surveyed the typical con 
ceptions and principles of the past, and shaped them to new life and 
vigour. And the general course of thought, as indicated by the 
problems which interest and the conceptions that are formed in our 
century, 2 moves along the lines of antitheses that have been trans 
mitted to us through history, and have at most been given a new 
form in their empirical expression. 

For the decisive factor in the philosophical movement of the 
nineteenth century is doubtless the question as to the degree of 
importance which the natural-science conception of phenomena may 
claim for our view of the world and life as a whole. The influence 
which this special science had gained over philosophy and the 
intellectual life as a whole was checked and repressed at the begin 
ning of the nineteenth century, to grow again afterwards with all 
the greater power. The metaphysics of the seventeenth, and there 
fore the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, were in the main 
under the dominance of the thinking of natural science. The con 
ception of the universal conformity to law on the part of all the 
actual world, the search for the simplest elements and forms of 
occurrence and cosmic processes, the insight into the invariable 
necessity which lies at the basis of all change, these determined 
theoretical investigation. The "natural" was thus made a general 
standard for measuring the value of every particular event or expe- 

1 Hegel, Berliner Antrittsrede, W., VI., XXXV. 

2 To the literary-historical interest in this field, which is so hard to master 
on account of its multiplicity, the author has been devoting the labor of many 
years. The product of this he is now permitted to hope soon to present as 
special parts of the third (supplementary) volume of his Gfeschichte der neueren 
Philosophie (2d ed. Leips. 1899). In this can be carried out in detail and 
proved what here can only be briefly sketched. 

Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. 

25 

rience. The spread of this mechanical way of regarding the world 
was met by the German Philosophy with the fundamental thought, 
that all that is known in this way is but the phenomenal form and 
vehicle of a purposefully developing inner world, and that the true 
comprehension of the particular has to determine the significance 
that belongs to it in a purposeful connected whole of life. The 
historical Weltanschauung was the result of the work of thought 
which the System of Reason desired to trace out. 

These two forces contend with each other in the intellectual life 
of our century. And in the warfare between them all arguments 
from the earlier periods of the history of philosophy have been pre 
sented in the most manifold combinations, but without bringing any 
new principles into the field. If the victory seems gradually to 
incline toward the side of the principles of Democritus, there are 
two main motifs favourable to this in our decades. The first is of 
essentially intellectual nature, and is the same that was operative 
in the times of intellectual life of previous centuries : it is the 
simplicity and clearness to perception or imagination (anschauliche 
Einfachheif), the certainty and definiteness of the natural-science 
knowledge. Formulated mathematically and always demonstrable 
in experience, this promises to exclude all doubt and opinions, and 
all trouble of interpretative thought. But far more efficient in our 
day is the evident utility of natural science. The mighty trans 
formation in the external relations of life, which is taking place 
with rapid progress before our eyes, subjects the intellect of the 
average man irresistibly to the control of the forms of thought to 
which he owes such great things, and on this account we live under 
the sign of Baconianism (cf. above, p. 386 f.). 

On the other hand, the heightened culture of our day has kept 
alive and vital all questions relating to the value which the social 
and historical life has for the individual. The more the political 
and social development of European humanity has entered upon the 
epoch when the influences of masses make themselves felt in an 
increasing degree, and the more pronounced the power with which 
the collective body asserts its influence upon the individual, even 
in his mental and spiritual life, the more does the individual make 
his struggle against the supremacy of society, and this also finds 
expression in the philosophic reflections of the century. The con 
test between the views of the world and of life which spring respec 
tively from history and from natural science, has gone on most 
violently at the point where the question will ultimately be decided, 
in what degree the individual owes what makes his life worth living 
to himself, and in what degree he is indebted to the influences of the 

626 Philosoplty of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

environing whole. Uuiversalism and individualism, as in the time 
of the Renaissance, have once more clashed in violent opposition. 

If we are to bring out from the philosophical literature of this 
century and emphasise those movements in which the above charac 
teristic antithesis has found its most important manifestation, we 
have to do primarily with the question, in what sense the psychical 
life can be subjected to the methods and concepts of natural science; 
for it is in connection with this point that the question must first be 
decided of the right of these methods and concepts to absolute sov 
ereignty in philosophy. For this reason the question as to the task, 
the method, and the systematic significance of psychology has never 
been more vigorously contested than in the nineteenth century, and 
the limitation of this science to a purely empirical treatment has 
appeared to be the only possible way out of the difficulties. Thus 
psychology, as the latest among the special disciplines, has com 
pleted its separation from philosophy, at least as regards the funda 
mental principles of its problem and method. 

This procedure had more general presuppositions. In reaction 
against the highly strained idealism of the German philosophy, a 
broad stream of materialistic Weltanschauung flows through the nine 
teenth century. This spoke out about the middle of the period, not 
indeed with any new reasons or information, but with all the more 
passionate emphasis. Since then it has been much more modest in 
its claims to scientific value, but is all the more effective in the garb 
of sceptical and positivist caution. 

To the most significant ramifications of this line of thought 
belongs without doubt the endeavour to regard the social life, the 
historical development, and the relations of mental and spiritual exist 
ence, from the points of view of natural science. Introduced by the 
unfortunate name of Sociology, this tendency has sought to develop 
a peculiar kind of the philosophy of history, which aims to extend 
upon a broader basis of fact the thoughts which were suggested 
toward the close of the philosophy of the Enlightenment (see 37). 

But on the other hand, the historical view of the world has not 
failed to exercise its powerful influence upon natural science. The 
idea of a history of the organic world, which was postulated in the 
philosophy of nature, early in the century, has found a highly 
impressive realization in empirical investigation. The methodical 
principles, which had led to the philosophy of Nature, extended as 
if spontaneously to other fields, and in the theories of evolution the 
historical and the scientific views of the world seem to approximate 
as closely as is possible without a new philosophic idea, which shall 
reshape and reconstruct. 

Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. 627 

From the side of the individual, finally, the suggestions which 
were inherent in the problem of civilization as this was treated by 
the eighteenth century, temporarily brought the question as to the 
worth of life into the centre of philosophic interest. A pessimistic 
temper had to be overcome in order that from these discussions the 
deeper and clearer question as to the nature and content of values in 
general should be separated and brought to clear recognition. And 
so it was that philosophy, though by a remarkably devious path, was 
enabled to return to Kant s fundamental problem of values which 
are universally valid. 

From the philosophical literature of the nineteenth century the following 
main points may be emphasized : 

In France Ideology divided into a more physiological and a more psycho 
logical branch. In the line of Cabanis worked principally the Paris physicians, 
such as Ph. Pinel (1745-182(5; Nosographie Philosophique, 17!&gt;8), F. ,T. V. 
Broussais (1772-1838; Traite de Physiologic, 1822 f. ; Traite de, V Irritation 
et de, In Folie, 1828), and the founder of Phrenology, Fr. Jos. Gall (1758-1828 ; 
llecherches sur le. tiysteme Nerveux en general et snr celni (hi Cerveau en parti- 
culier, 180!), which was edited in conjunction with Spurzheim). The an- 
titliesis to tliis, physiologically, was formed by the school of Montpellier : 
Barthez (17:54-180(5 ; Nouveaux Elements de la Science de VHomme, 2d ed., 
180(5). Associated with this school were M. F. X. Bichat (1771-1802; 
Recherches Physiologiques sur la Vie et la Mort, 1800). Bertrand (179" ; -1831 ; 
Traite du Somnamlmlisme, 1823), and Buisson (170(i-1805 ; De la Division 
la plus Naturelle des Phenomenes 1 hysiologiqiies, 1802). Corresponding to 
this was the development of Ideology with Daube (Essai a" Ideologic, Ib03), 
and especially with Pierre Laromiguiere (175(5-1837 ; Lemons de Philosophic, 
1815-1818) and his disciples, Fr. Thurot (17(58-1832; De V Entendement et de, 
la liaison, 1830) and J. J. Cardaillac (1706-1845; Etudes Elementaires de 
Philosophic, 1830). Cf. Picavet, Lex Ideologues (Paris, 1891). 

A line of extensive historical study and of deeper psychology begins with 
M. J. Deg^rando (1772-1842; De la Generation des Connaissances Ihimaines, 
Berlin, 1802 ; Histoire Comparce des tft/xtemes de Philosophic, 1804) and has 
its head in Fr. P. Gonthicr Maine de Biran (170(5-1824 ; De la Decomposition 
di la Pensee, 1805 ; Les Rapports du Physique et du Moral de VHomme, printed 
1834 ; Kssaisur les Fondements de, la Psychologic, 1812 ; (Euvres Philosophiqiies, 
edited by V. Cousin, 1841 ; CEuvres Inedites, edited by E. Naville, 1859; Nou- 
velle.s CEuvres Inedites, edited by A. Bertrand, 1887). The influences of the 
Scottish and German philosophy discharge into this line (represented also by 
A. M. Ampere) through P. Provost (1751-1839), Ancillon (1766-1-837), 
Royer-Collard (17(53-1845), Jouffroy (1796-1842), and above all, Victor 
Cousin (1792-1867; Introduction a V Hixtnire Generale de la Philosophic, 7th 
ed., 1872 ; Du Vrai, du Beau et du Bien, 1845 ; complete works, Paris, 184(5 ff. ; 
cf. E. Fuchs, Die, Philos. V. C. s, Berlin, 1847 ; J. Elaux, La Philosophic de M. 
Cousin, Paris, 18(54). The numerous school, founded by Cousin, which was 
especially noted through its historical labours, is called the Spiritualistic or 
Eclectic, School. It was the official philosophy after the July Revolution, and is 
in part still such. To its adherents who have been active in the historical field, 
where their work has been characterised by thoroughness and literary taste, 
belong Ph. Damiron, Jul. Simon. E. Vacherot, H. Martin, A. Chaignet, Ad. 
Kranck, B. Haureau, Ch. Bartholmess, E. Saisset, P. Janet, E. Caro, etc. F. 
Ravaissou has risen from the school to a theoretical standpoint which is in a 
certain sense his own. (Morale et metaphusique, in the Revue de Met. et de Mor. 
1888). 

Its principal opponents were the philosophers of the Church party, whose 
theory is known as Traditionalism. Together with Chateaubriand (Le, Genie, 
du Christ ianisme, 1802), Jos. de Maistre (1753-1821 ; Essai sur le Principe 

628 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

Generateur des Constitutions Politiques, 1810 ; Soirees de St. Petersbourg, 1821 ; 
Du Pape, 1829; cf. on him Fr. Paulhan, Paris, 1893) and J. Frayssinons 
(17(55-1841; Defense du Christianisme, 1823), V. G. A. de Bonald (1753-1841; 
Theorie du Pouvoir Politique et Religieux, 179(5 ; Essai Analytique sur IKS Lois 
Naturelles de. V Ordre Social, 1800; Du Divorce, 1801; De la Philosophie 
Morale et Politique du l$ e siecle ; complete works, 15 vols., Paris, 1810 ft.) 
stands here in the foreground. The traditionalism of P. S. Ballanche is 
presented in a strangely fantastic fashion (177(5-1847 ; Essai sur les Institutions 
Sociales, 1817 ; La Palingenesie Sociale ; complete works, 5 vols., Paris, 1883). 
In the beginning II. F. R. de Lamennais (1782-1854) also supported this line in 
his Essai sur V Indifference en Matiere de Religion (1817) ; later, having fallen 
out with the Church (Parole d un Croyant, 1834), he presented in the Esquisse 
d une Philosophie (4 vols., 1841-1846) a comprehensive system of philosophy, 
which had for its prototype partly the Schellingian System of Identity and 
partly the Italian Ontologism. 

Among the philosophical supporters of Socialism (cf. L. Stein, Geschichte 
der socialen Beivegung in Frankreich, Leips. 1819 ff. ) the most important is 
Cl. H. de St. Simon (17(50-1825 ; Introduction aux Travaux Scientifiques du 
19 e siecle, 1807 ; Reorganisation de la Societe Europeenne, 1814 ; System? In 
dustrial, 1821 f. ; Nouveau Christinnisme, 1825 ; fEuvres choisies, 3 vols., 1859). 
Of his successors may be mentioned, Bazard (Doctrine de St. Simon, 1829), 
B. Enfantin (179(5-1864; La Religion St. Simonie.nne, 1831), Pierre Leroux 
(1798-1871 ; Refutation de, I Edccticisme, 1839; De V Humanite, 1840), and Ph. 
Bucbez (1796-1866; Essai d un Traite Complet de Philosophie au Point de 
Vue du Catholicisme et du Progres, 1840). 

Aug. Comte occupies a most interesting position apart. He was born in 
Montpellier in 1798 and died alone in Paris in 1857 : Cours du Philosophie 
Positive (6 vols., Paris, 1840-1842) [Eng. tr., or rather a condensation and repro 
duction by H. Martineau, The Positive Philosophy of A. Comte, 2 vols., Lond. 
1853] ; Systeme de Politique Positive (Paris, 1851-1854) ; The Positive Polity 
and certain earlier works, trans, by various authors, 4 vols., Lond. 1876-1878; 
Catechisme Positiviste (1853) ; cf. Littr^, C. et la Philosophie Positive, Paris, 
1868; J. S. Mill, C. and Positivism, Lond. 1865; J. liig, A. C. La Philosophie 
Positive Resumee, Paris, 1881 ; E. Caird, The Social Philosophy and Religion 
of C., Glasgow, 1885. 

In the following period Comte s position became more influential and in part 
controlling. E. Littr6 (1801-1881 ; La Science au Point de Vue, Philosophique, 
Paris, 1873) defended his positivism in systematic form. A freer adaptation of 
positivism was made by such writers as H. Taine (1828-1893 ; Philosophie de. 
VArt, 1865; De r Intelligence, 1870; cf. on him G. Barzellotti, Rome, Ib95) 
and Ernest Renan (1823-1892; Questions Contempor nines, 1868; L Avenir 
de la Science, 1890). Under Comte s influence, likewise, has been the develop 
ment of empirical psychology. Th. Ribot, editor of the Revue Philosophique, 
is to be regarded as the leader in this field. In addition to his historical works 
on English and German psychology, his investigations with regard to heredity 
and abnormal conditions of memory, will, personality, etc., may be noted. 

In part also Sociology stands under Comte s influence, as R. Worms, G. 
Tarde, E. Durkheim, and others have striven to work it out (cf. Annee Sociolo- 
gique, pub. since 1894). Finally, evolutionary theories belong in this connection, 
which have been especially carried out by J. M. Guyau (1854-1888 ; Esquisse 
d une Morale, 1885; L 1 irreligion de Vavenir, 1887; L^art, au point de vue 
sociologique, 1889) [Problemes de r Esthetique Contemporaine, 1897]. 

By far the most important among the present representatives of philosophy in 
France is Ch. Renouvier (born 1818; Essais de Critique Generale. 2d ed., 
1875-96; Esquisse d une Classification Syste.matique des Doctrines Philoso- 
phiques, 1885; La Philosophie Analytique de VHistoire, 1896; La Nouvelle 
Monadologie, 1899). The synthesis of Kant and Comte which he has sought to 
effect has its literary organ in the Annee Philosophique (published since 1889). 

In England the Associational Psychology continues through Thomas 
Brown to men like Thomas Belsham (1750-1829 ; Elements of the Philosophy 
of the Human Mind, 1801), John Fearn (First Lines of the Human Mind, 

Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. 629 

1820), and many others; finds support here also in physiological and phreno 
logical theories as with G. Combe (A System of Phrenology, Kdin. 1825), Sam. 
Bailey (Essays on the Pursuit of Truth, 1829 ; The Theory of Reasoning, 
1851 ; Letters on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 1855) and Harriet Mar- 
tineau (Letters on the Laws of Man s Nature and Development, 1851), and 
reaches its full development through James Mill (Analysis of the Phenomena 
of the Hitman Mind. 1829), and his sun, J. Stuart Mill (ltfdO-1873; System 
of Logic Itatioci native and Inductive, 184:}; Principles of Political Economy, 
1848; On Liberty, Ib5i ; Utilitarianism, Ib03; Examination of Sir W. 
Hamilton s Philosophy, 1805; Autobiography, 187:5; Posthumously, Essays on 
Religion, 1874 ; Collected Dissertations and Discussions, N. Y., 1882 ; Useful 
ed. of Ethical Writings by Douglas, Kdin. 1W)7. Cf. H. Taine, Le Positivisme 
Anglais, Paris, 1864 [Eng. tr. by Haye ; Courtney, Life of M., and Meta 
physics ofj. S. M. ; Bain, ,/. S. M. 1882], Douglas, J. S. M., A Study of his 
Philos., Kdin. 1895). Closely connected with this line of thought stands Alex. 
Bain (The. Senses and the Intellect, 185(5, 3d ed. 1808; Mental and Moral 
Science, 1808, 3d ed. 1872, Pt. II, 1872 ; The Emotions and the Will, 1859, 3d 
ed. 1875 ; Mind and Body, 3d ed. 1874. 

The related Utilitarianism is represented by T. Cogan ( Philosophical Treatise 
on the Passions, 1802; Ethical Questions, 1817), John Austin (1790-1859; 
The Philosophy of Positive Laic, 1832), G. Cornwall Lewis (^4 Treatise on the 
Methods of Observation and Reasoning in Politics, 1852). [As representatives 
of Utilitarianism, in addition to Mill, and Bain, op. cit. above, H. Sidgwick. 
Methods of Ethics, Lond. 1874, 6th ed. 1901, and T. Fowler, Principles of 
Morals, Lond. 1880 f., should also be mentioned. 

Scottish Philosophy, after Dugald Stewart and James Mackintosh (1704- 
1832 ; Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy, 1830), had at first 
unimportant supporters like Abercrombie (1781-1840 ; Inquiry concerning the. 
Intellectual Powers, 1830; Philosophy of the Moral Feelings, 1833) and 
Chalmers (1780-1847), and was especially as academical instruction brought 
into affiliation with the eclecticism of Cousin by Henry Calderwood (Philoso 
phy of the Infinite, 1854), S. Morell ( An Historical and Critical View of the 
Speculative. Philosophy of Europe in the 19th Century, 1840), also H. Wedg 
wood (On. the Development of the Understanding, 1848). 

The horizons of English thought were widened by acquaintance with the 
German literature, to which Sam. Tayl. Coleridge (1772-1834), W. Words 
worth (1770-1850), and especially Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881; Past and 
Present, 1843 [the articles on various German thinkers and the Sartor Resartiis 
belong here also]) contributed. In philosophy this influence made itself felt 
primarily through Kant, whose theory of cognition influenced J. Herschel (On 
the Study of Natural Philosophy, 1831), and especially W. Whewell (Phi 
losophy of the Inductive Sciences, 1840). 

In intelligent reaction against this influence, Scottish philosophy experienced 
a valuable re-shaping at the hands of Sir William Hamilton (1788-1850 ; Dis 
cussions on Philosophy and Literature, 1852 ; On Truth and Error, 1850 ; Lec 
tures on Metaphysics and Logic, 1859 ; Editions of Reid s and Stewart s Works ; 
cf. J. Veitch, S. W. H., The Man and his Philosophy, Edin. and Lond. 1883 
[Memoir in 2 vols , 1809, by same author]). In his school Agnosticism proper, 
supported principally by H. L. Mansel (1820-1871 ; Metaphysics or the Phi 
losophy of Consciousness, 1800), is separated from a tendency inclining toward 
eclectic metaphysics: J. Veitch. H. Lowndes (Introduction to the Philosophy 
of Primary Beliefs, 1805). Leechman. McCosh. and others. 

Following a suggestion from one aspect of Hamilton s thought, a movement 
arose which sought to develop formal logic PS a calculus of symbols. To this 
movement belong G. Boole (The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, 1847; An 
Analysis of the Laros of Thought, 1854) ; De Morgan (Formal Logic, 1847) ; 
Th. Spencer Baynes (An Essay on the Xeir Analytic of Logical Forms, 1850) ; 
\V. Stanley Jevons ( Pure Log ic, 1804 ; Principles of Science, 1874) ; J. Venn 
(Symbolic Logic, 1881; Log ic of Chance, 1870; Principles of Logic, 1889) 
[C. S. Peirce, Algebra of Logic, 1807 ; Ladd and Mitchell, in Studies in Logic, 
ed. by Peirce, Boston, 1883]. Compare on this A. Riehl (Vierteljahrsschr. f. 
icisK. Philos. 1877) and L. Liard (Les Lnyiciens Anglais Contemporains, 1878). 

The combined influence of Kant and the later German theism impressed the 

630 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

philosopher of religion, James Martineau (who is also the most prominent 
recent representative of intuitionist ethics [Types of Ethical Theory, 1885; A 
Study of Religion, 1888 ; Scat of Authority in Rel., 1800]; cf. A. W. Jackson, 
J. M., Boston, 1!H)0), and likewise F. W. Newman ( The Sou?, etc., 1849; The 
ism, 1858), A. C. Eraser and others. Since Hutcliiuson Stirling (The Secret 
of Hegel, 1865 ; What is Thought ? 1000) German idealism in its whole develop 
ment and in its metaphysical aspect, particularly in the Hegelian form, has called 
forth a vigorous idealistic movement, of which the leading representative was 
the late Thomas Hill Green (1838-1882), Professor at Oxford. [His Introd. 
to Hume was followed by criticisms on Lewes and Spencer and (posthumously) 
by the Prolegomena to Ethics, 1883, and complete works (except the Proleg.), 
3 vols., Lon d. and N. Y. 1885, 1886, 1888; cf. VV. H. Fairbrother, The Phi 
losophy of T. H. G., Lond. 1896.] In sympathy with this idealistic and more 
or less Hegelian interpretation of Kantian principles are F. H. Bradley (Logic, 
.Lond. 1883; Ethical Studies, 1876; Appearance and Reality, 1893), H. Bos an- 
quet (Logic, 2 vols., 1888 ; Hist, of Esthetics, 1892 ; Philos. of the State, 1899, 
etc.) ; J. Caird (Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 1880) ; E. Caird 
(Critical Phil, of Kant, 2 vols., 1889 ; Essays, 2 vols., 1892 ; Evolution of Religion, 
1893); Seth and Haldane (Essays in Phil. Criticism, 1883) ; J. Mackenzie 
(Social Philosophy, 1890). Cf. A. Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, 1887, 
and the review of this in Mind, by D. G. Ritchie. 

These movements above noted stand under the principle of Evolution; the 
same principle became authoritative for the investigation of organic nature 
through Charles Darwin. (Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 
1859; Descent of Man, 1871; The Expression of the Emotions, 1872). The 
same principle was .formulated in more general terms and made the basis of a 
comprehensive System of Synthetic Philosophy by Herbert Spencer (born 
1820), First Principles, 1862, 6th ed. 1901; Principles of Psychology, 1855, 5th ed. 
1890; Principles of Biology, 1864-1867, 4th ed. 1888; Principles of Sociology, 
1876-1896 ; Principles of Ethics, 1879-1893. Cf. on him O. Gaupp, Stuttgart, 
1897 [T. H. Green, in Works ; F. H. Collins, Epitome of the Synthetic Philoso 
phy, 1889.] Huxley, Wallace, Tyndall, G. H. Lewes (Problems of Life and 
Mind, 3d ed. 1874), belong in the main to this tendency. 

[Other works in evolutionary ethics are, L. Stephen, The Science of Ethics, 
Loud. 1882 ; S. Alexander, Moral Order and Progress, Lond. 1889 ; C. M. 
Williams, The Ethics of Evolution, Lond. and N.Y. 1893. This last contains 
useful summaries of the chief works.] 

[In America idealistic lines of thought were introduced (in opposition to the 
prevalent Scottish philosophy) through the medium of Coleridge s interpretation 
of Kant, by James Marsh (1829) and Henry s trans, of V. Cousin s Lectures on 
Locke (1834), more directly from Germany by L. P. Hickok (Rational Psy 
chology, 1848 ; Emp. Psych., 1854 (rev. ed. by J. H. Seelye, 1882) ; Moral 
Science, 1853 (rev. ed. by J. H. Seelye), etc.). VV. T. Harris, in the Jour. 
Spec. Philosophy, and elsewhere, has done an important work in the same line. 
&lt; )f more recent writers, J. Royce ( The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, 1 885 ; 
Spirit of Modern Philos., 1892; The World and the Individual, 1900), J. 
Dewey (Psychology, 1886 ; Outlines of Ethics, 1891), are closer to the school 
of Green, while G. T. Ladd (Phy*. Psychology. 1887 ; Introd. to Phil, 1891 ; 
Psychology Descriptive and Explanatory, 1894 ; Philos. of Mind, 1895 ; Philos. 
of Knowledge, 1897 ; A Theory of Reality, 1899) and B. P. Bowne (Meta 
physics, Psychological Theory, Ethical Theory, etc.) stand nearer to Lotze. 
Orinond (The Foundations of Knowledge, 1900) combines idealistic motives 
with those of Scottish thought. The extremely suggestive work of W. James 
(Psychology, 2 vols., 1890) should also be mentioned, and as representatives 
of the modern treatment of this science, in addition to the works of Ladd and 
Dewey cited above, J. M. Baldwin (Psychology, 2 vols., 1890 f. ; Mental Devel 
opment, 1895-1897) and G. S. Hall (in Am. Jour. Psychology) may be named 
as American writers, and Jas. Ward (art. Psychology in Enc. Brit.), S. II. 
Hodgson (Time and Space, 1865 ; The Philosophy of Reflection, 1878 ; Meta 
physics of Experience, 1898), James Sully (The Human Mind, 2 vols., 181)2), 
and G. F. Stout (Analytic Psychology, 1896) as Englishmen. Darwin, 
Romanes, and Lloyd Morgan have treated comparative psychology. The 
Dictionary of Psychology and Philosophy, ed. by J. M. Baldwin with coopera- 

Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. 631 

tion of British and American writers, will give historical material as well as 
definitions (in press).] 

The Italian philosophy of the nineteenth century has been determined still 
more than the French by political motives, and in the content of the thoughts 
that have been worked over for these ends, it has been dependent partly upon 
French, partly upon German, philosophy. At the beginning the Encyclopae 
dists view of the world, both in its practical and its theoretical aspects, was 
dominant in men like Gioja (176(5-1829) or his friend, Romagnosi (17(51- 
1835), while as early as Pasquale Galuppi (1771-184(5 ; Saggio Filosojico sulla 
Critica delle Conoscenze Umane, 1320 if. ; Filosofia della Vulonta, 1832 ff.) 
Kantian influences assert themselves, to be sure, under the psychologistic 
form of the Leibnizian virtual innateness. 

At a later period philosophy, which was mainly developed by the clergy, 

ntially b 
Liberalism, inasmuch as Rationalism wished to unite itself with revealed faith. 

influenced essentially by the political alliance of the Papacy with democratic 

The most characteristic representative of this tendency and the most attractive 
personally was Antonio Rosmini-Serbati (1797-1855; Nuovo Saggio suit Ori- 
gine delle Idee, 1830 ; Principii della Scienza Morale, 1831 ; Posthum, Teosofia, 
1859 ff. ; Saggio Storico-Critico sulle Categoric e la Dialettica, 1884) [Eng. tr. 
of the first, Origin of Ideas, 3 vols., Lond. 1883 f. ; also R. s Philos. System, by 
T. Davidson, with int. bibliog., etc., Lond. 1882 ; Psychology, 3 vols., Lond. and 
Boston, 1884-188!)]. Cf. on him F. X. Kraus (Dentsche Ilundschau, 1890). The 
combination of Platonic, Cartesian, and Schellingian ideas proceeds in still 
more pronounced lines to an Ontologism, i.e. an a priori science of Being, 
in Vincenzo Gioberti (1801-1852; Degli Erron Filosojico di Rosmini, 1842; 
Introduzione alia Filosniia, 1840 ; Protologia, 1857. Cf. B. Spaventa, La Filo- 
sojia di G., 18(i3). Teren/o Mamiani passed through this entire development 
(1800-1885; Confessioni di tin Metafisico, 1865); Luigi Ferri (1826-1895), 
Labanca, Bonatelli, and others followed it, though influenced also by German 
and French views. 

As opponents this tendency found, on the one hand, the rigid Orthodoxism 
of Ventura (1792-18(51), Tapparelli and Liberatore (Delia Conoscenza Intel- 
letuale, 1865), and, on the other hand, politically radical Scepticism, as repre 
sented by Giuseppe Ferrari (1811-1866; La Filosofia delle llevohizioni, 1851) 
and Antonio Francki (La Jtcligione del 1 ( J. Secolo, 1853). The Kantian 
philosophy was introduced by Alf. Testa (1784-18(50; Delia Critica della 
Kagione Pura, 1849 ff.), and more successfully by C. Cantoni (born 1F40 ; cf. 
above, p. 532), F. Tocco, S. Turbiglio, and others. Hegel s doctrine was intro 
duced by A. Vera (1813-1885), B. Spaventa (1817-188:5), and Fr. Florentine, 
and Comte s positivism by Cataneo, Ardigo, and Labriola. [Cf. for this Italian 
thought the App. in Ueberweg s Hist. Phil., Eng. tr., Vol. II. 461 ff.] 

In Germany (cf. .1. E. Erdmann, History of Phil. [Eng. tr. Vol. 111.] 
331 ff.) the first development was that of the gn at ] hilosuphic schools in il.e 
third and fourth decades of the century. Herbarf s following proved the most 
complete in itself and firmest in its adherence. In it were prominent : M. 
Drobisch (Religionsphttoaophie, 1840; Psychologic, 1842; Die nwralische 
Matistik und die. menschliche Willensfreiheit, 1867), R. Zimmermann (JE&- 
thctik, Vienna, 18(55), L. Strumpell (Haiintpiinkte der Metaphysik, 18-10; 
Einleitnng in die Pkilotopkie, 188(5), T. Zillei (Einleitung in die Allgemeine 
Pddagogik, 1856). A special divarication of the school is formed by the 
so-called Volkerpsychologie [Comparative or Folk-Psychology], as opened by 
M. Lazarus (Lebe.ii der Seele, !8"-6 f.) and H. Steinthal (Abriss der Sprach- 
wissenschaft, I. ; Einleitnng in die Psychologic itnd Sprachwissenschaft, 1871) ; 
cf. their common programme in Vol. I. of the Zeitschrift fiir Volkerpsychologie 
u nd Sprach triwit &gt;*// , iff . 

The Hegelian School had rich experience in its own life of the blessing of 
dialectic; it split even in the Thirties upon religions antitheses. The important 
historians of philosophy, Zeller and Prantl, Erdmann and Kuno Fischer, 
went their way, not confused by this. Between the two parties, with a consid 
erable degree of independent thinking, stand K. Rozenkranz (1805-1879; 
Wissenschaft der logischen Idee, 1858 f.) and Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807- 
1887 ; jEtthetik, 1846-1858 ; Auch Einer, 1879). 

632 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

The "right wing" of the Hegelian school, which resisted a pantheistic inter 
pretation of the master, and emphasised the metaphysical importance of per 
sonality, attracted those thinkers who stood in a freer relation to Hegel, and 
maintained Fichtean and Leibnizian motifs. Such were I. H. Fichte (son of 
the creator of the Wissenschaftslehre, 1797-1879 ; Beitriige zur Characteristik 
der neueren Philosophic, 1829 ; Ethik, 1850 ff. ; Anthropologie, 1850), C. Fort- 
lage (1800-1881; System der Psychologie, 1855), Christ. Weisse (1801-1866; 
System der ^Esthetik, 1830 and 1871; Grundziige der Metaphysik, 1835; Das 
philosophische Problem der Gegenwart, 1842 ; Philosophie des Christenthums, 
1855 ff.), 11. Ulrici (1800-1884; Dan Grundprincip der Philosophie, 1845 1. ; 
Gott und die Natur. 1861; Gott und der Mensch, 1866); further, E. Trahn- 
dorf (1782-1863; ^Esthetik, 1827), Mor. Carriere (1817-1895; sEsthetik, 1859, 
3d ed. 1885 ; Die Kunst im Zusammenhang der Kulturentwickelung, 5 vols.). 
IMated to these was, on the one side, K. Rothe (1797-1867; Theologische 
Kthik, 2d ed. 1867-1871 ; cf. on his speculative system, H. Holtzmann, 1899), 
who interwove many suggestions from the idealistic development into an origi 
nal mysticism, and on the other side A. Trendelenburg, who set the concep 
tion of " Motion " in the place of Hegel s dialectical principle, and thought 
thereby to combat Hegel s philosophy. His merit, however, lies in the stimulus 
which he gave to Aristotelian studies (1802-1872 ; Logische Untersuchunqen, 
1840; Naturrecht, 1860). 

To the " Left" among the Hegelians belong Arnold Ruge (1802-1880 ; joint 
editor with Echtermeyer of the Halle sche Jahrbiicher, 1838-1840, and of the 
Deutsche Jahrbiicher, 1841 f. ; coll. writings in 10 vols., Mannheim, 1846 ff.), 
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872 ; Gedanken iiber Tod und Unsterblichkeit, 1830; 
Philosophie und Christenthum, 1839 ; Wesen des Christenthums, 1841 ; Wesen 
der Religion, 1845 ; Theogonie, 1857 ; Works, 10 vols., Leips. 1846 ff.). Cf. K. 
Griin (L. F., Leips. 1874), David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874; Das Leben 
Jesu, 1835; Christliche Glaubenslehre, 1840 f.; Der Alte und der neue Glaube, 
1872 ; Works, 12 vols., Berlin, 1876 ff.). Cf. A. Hausrath, D. F. Str. und die 
Theologie seiner Zeit (Heidelberg, 1876 and 1878). 

From the Materialism controversy are to be mentioned : K. Moleschott 
(Kreislaitf des Lebens, 1852), Rudolph "Wagner (Ueber Wissen und Glauben, 
1854 ; Der Kampf um die Seele, 1857), C. Vogt (Kohlerglaube und Wissen- 
schaft, 1854 ; Vorlesungen iiber den Menschen, 1863), L. BUchner (Kraft und 
Stoff, 1855) [Force and Matter, Lond.]. 

Related to this materialism was the development of the extreme Sensualism 
in the form in which it was presented by H. Czolbe (1819-1873; Neue Dar- 
stellung des Sensualismus, 1855 ; Grundziige der extensionalen Erkenntniss- 
theorie, 1875), and by F. Ueberweg (1820-1871), who was originally more 
closely related to Beneke (cf. A. Lange, History of Materialism, II.). In a 
similar relation stood the so-called Monism which E. Haeckel (born 1834 ; 
Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte, 1868 ; Weltrathsel, 5th ed. 1900 : cf. Loofs, 
Anti-Haeckel, 1900, and Fr. Paulsen, E: H. als Philosoph. Preuss. Jahrb. 
1900) has attempted to develop, and finally the socialistic Philosophy of His 
tory, whose founders are Fr. Engels (Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der 
klassischen deutschen Philosophie, 1888 ; Der Ursprung der Familie, des Pri- 
vateigenthums und des Staates, 1884) and Karl Marx (Das Kapital, 1867 ff., 
Capital, 1891); cf. on Engels and Marx, R. Stammler, Wirthschaft und Becht, 
1896 ; L. Wolfmann, Der historische Materialismus, 1900. 

By far the most important among the epigones of the German Philosophy 
was Rudolph Herm. Lotze (1817-1881 ; Metaphysik, 1841 ; Logik, 1842 ; Mrdi- 
cinische Psychologie, 1842 ; Mikrokosmus, 1856 ff. ; System der Philosophic, I. 
Logik, 1874 ; II. Metaphysik, 1879) [Microcosmus, tr. by Hamilton and Jones, 
Kdin. and N. Y. 1885 ; Logic and Metaphysics, 2 vols. each, tr. ed. by B. Bosan- 
quet, Oxford, 1884, also 1888; Outlines, ed. by G. T. Ladd, Boston, 1885 ff.]. 
Cf. O. Caspar!, //. L. in seiner Stellung zur deutschen Philosophie (1883); 
E. v. Hartmann, Z. .s Philosophie (Berlin, 1888); H. Jones, Philos. of L., 1895. 

Interesting side phenomena are : G. T. Fechner (1801-1887 ; Nanna, 1848; 
Physical, und philos. Atomenlehre, 1855 ; Elemente der Psychophysik, 1860 ; 
Drei Motive des Glaubens, 1863 ; Vorschule der ^Esthetik, 1876 ; Die Tagesan- 
sicht gegenuber der Nachtansicht, 1879) and Eug. Duhring (born 1833 ; Xat ur- 
liche Dialektik, 1865 ; Werth des Lebens, 1865 ; Logik und Wissenschaftstheorie, 

Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. 633 

1878). The following from the Catholic side have taken part in the develop 
ment of philosophy : Fr. Hermes (1775-1831 ; Einleitiing in die christkatho- 
lische Theologie, 1819), Benin. Bolzano (1781-1848; Wissenschaftslehre, 
1837), Anton Giinther (1785-1803 ; Ges. Schriften, Vienna, 1881), and Wil- 
hehn Rosenkrantz (1821-1874; Wissenschaft des Wissens, 180&lt;&gt;). 

Philosophic interest in Germany, which was much crippled about the middle 
of the century, hits strongly revived, owing to the union of the study of Kant with 
the demands of natural science. The former, called forth by Kuno Fischer s 
work (1800). evoked a movement which has been characterized in various aspects 
as Neo-Kantianism. To it belong, as principal members, A. Lange (1828- 
1875; History of Materialism, 1800) and O. Liebmann (born 1840; Analysis 
der Wirklichkeit, 3 Aufl., 1000). In theology it was represented by Alb. 
Ritschl ( Theologie und Metaphysik, 1881). [A. T. Swing, Theol. of A. R. 1001.] 

Theoretical Physics became significant for philosophy through the work prin 
cipally of Rob. Mayer (Bemerkungen uber die Krilfte der unbelebten Natur, 
1845; Ueber das uiechanlsche ^Equivalent der Warme, 1850; cf. on him A. 
Riehl in the Sif/icart-Abhandlungcn, 1900) and II. Helmholtz (Physiologische 
Optik, 1880; Sensations of Tone, 1875; Thatsachen der Wahrnehmung, 1879). 

Beginning with physiology, Willhelm Wundt (born 1837) has developed a 
comprehensive system of philosophy. From his numerous writings may lie men 
tioned (rrundzuge der physiologischen Psychologic, 1873 f., 4th ed. 1893 [Outlines 
of Physiological Psychology, Eng. tr. in prep, by E. Titchenor] ; Logik, 18801; 
Ethik: 1880 [Eng. tr. by Titchenor, Washburn, and Gulliver] ; The Facts of 
the Moral Life, Ethical Systems, 1897 ; Principles of Morality, 1901 ; System 
der Philosophic, 1889; Grundriss der Psychologic, 1897 [Eng. tr. by Judd, Out 
lines of Psychology, 1897] ; Volkerpsychologie* 1900. 

The Kantian theory of knowledge was met by Realism in J. v. Kirchmann 
(Philosophic, des Wissens, 1804), and by Positivism in ( . Goring (System der 
kritischen Philosophic, 1874 f.), E. Laas (Idealismus und Positirismus, 1879ft .), 
and in part too in A. Riehl (Der philosophische Kriticismu*, 1870 ff. [Eng. 
tr. of Part III. by A. Fairbanks, 1894, Science and Metaphysics]). A similar 
tendency was followed by R. Avenarius (Kritik der reinen Erfahrung, 1888- 
1890; Der menschliche Weltbegriff, 1891). 

As in the first-named authors the concepts of natural science were especially 
authoritative, so on the other hand the interests of the historical view of the 
world have normative value for investigators such as Rudolf Eucken (Die. Ein- 
heit des Geisteslebens, 1888 ; De r Kampf urn einen geistigen Lebensinhalt, 189(5), 
II. Glogau (Abriss der philosophischen Grundwissenschaften, 1880), and \V. 
Dilthey (Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, 1883). 

A mediating standpoint is taken by Christian Sigwart (Logik, 2d ed. 1893; 
[Eng. tr. by Helen Dendy, 1895]). 

Two authors who occupy a position in closer relation to general literature 
are: 

E. v. Hartmann (born 1842), who excited general attention by his Philosophy 
of the Unconscious, 1809 [Eng. tr. by Coupland, 1884]. This was followed 
by a long series of writings, of which the most important are Das Unbewusste 
vom Standpunkt der Descendenztheoric, 1872 ; Phanomenologie des sittlichen 
Bewusstseins, 1879; Die Religion des Geistes, 1882 ; ^sthetik, 1880 f. ; Katego- 
rienlehre, 1897 ; Geschichte der Metaphysik, 1900. These works represent a 
more and more completely scientific standpoint. As representing a popular 
philosophy, in part pessimistic, in part mystical, may be named as typical, 
Mainlander (Philosophic der Erl dsung, 1874 f.) on the one hand, and on the 
other, Duprel (Philosophie der Mystik, 1884 f.). 

Fr. Wilh. Nietzsche (1844-1900), whose development in its changing stages 
is characterised by the following selection from his numerous writings, of which 
the complete edition is published in Leipsic, 1895 ff . : Die Geburt der Tragodie 
aus dem Geisti- &lt;/&lt;-r Musik. 1872; Unzeitf/emdsse Betrachtungen, 1873-1870; 
Menschlicln-* AIIznm&lt;-&gt;txrItlichcs, 1870-1880 ; Also sprach Zarathustra, 1883 f.; 
Jenseits run tint und Hose, 1H80 ; Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1887 ; Gotzendiim- 
merung, 1889. [Eng. tr. by A. Tille, 1890 ff., Thus spake Zarathustra ; Beyond 
Good and Bad ; Genealogy of Morals.] Cf. Al. Riehl, Nietzsche, Stuttgart, 
2d ed. 1897. [P. Cams in The Monist, IX. 572 ff. ; G. N. Dolson in Cornell 
Cont. to Phil., III.] 

634 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century [PART VII. 

44. The Controversy over the Soul. 

A characteristic change in the general scientific relations during 
the nineteenth century has been the constantly progressing loosening 
and separation of psychology from philosophy, 1 which may now be 
regarded as in principle complete. This followed from the rapid 
decline of metaphysical interest and metaphysical production, which 
appeared in Germany, especially, as a natural reaction from the high 
tension of speculative thought. Robbed thus of a more general base 
of support, in its effort to give itself a firm footing as purely empir 
ical science, psychology had at first but little power of resistance 
against the inroad of the method of natural science, according to 
which it should be treated as a special province of physiology or 
general biology. About this question a number of vigorous move 
ments grouped themselves. 

1. At the beginning of the century a brisk interchange of thought 
obtained between the French Ideology and the later developments 
of the English Enlightenment philosophy which had split into asso- 
ciational psychology and the common sense doctrine : in this inter 
change, however, France bore now the leading part. Here the 
antithesis which had existed in the French sensualism from the be 
ginning between Condillac and Bonnet (cf. p. 458), came out more 
sharply. With Destutt de Tracy, and even as yet with Laromiguiere, 
it does not come to a sharp decision. On the other hand, Cabanis is the 
leader of the materialistic line : his investigation as to the interconnec 
tion of the physical and the psychical (moral) nature of man, after con 
sidering the various influences of age, sex, temperament, climate, etc., 
comes to the result that the psychical life is everywhere determined by 
the body and its physical relations. With the organic functions thus 
reduced solely to mechanical and chemical processes, at least in prin 
ciple, it seemed that the soul, now superfluous as vital force, had also 
outlived its usefulness as the agent and supporter of consciousness. 

In carrying out these thoughts other physicians, for example 
Broussais, gave to materialism a still sharper expression: the intel 
lectual activity is "one of the results" of the brain functions. 
Hence men eagerly seized upon the strange hypothesis of phre 
nology, with which Gall professed to localise at definite places in 
the brain all the particular " faculties," which empirical psychology 
had provided up to that time. It was not merely an interesting 
diversion to hear in public that a more or less vigorous development 
of special psychical powers could be recognised in the skull ; the 

1 Cf. W. Windelband, Ueber den gegenv)i.irligen Stand der psychologischen 
Forschung (Leips. 1876). 

44.J Controversy over the Soul : Ideology, 635 

thought was connected with this, especially among physicians, that 
now the materiality of the so-called soul-life was discovered, with 
out doubt. In England especially, as is shown by the success of 
Combe s writings, the phrenological superstition called out very 
great interest and promoted a purely physiological psychology, in 
the line of that of Hartley. It was John Stuart Mill who first 
brought his countrymen back to Hume s conception of associational 
psychology. Without asking what matter and mind are in them 
selves, the student should proceed from the fact that the corporeal 
and mental states form two domains of experience, completely inca 
pable of comparison, and that psychology as the science of the laws of 
mental life must study the facts of the latter in themselves, and may 
not reduce them to the laws of another sphere of existence. Alex 
ander Bain, attaching himself to Mill s standpoint, developed the 
associational psychology farther. His especial contribution was to 
point out the significance of the muscular sensations, in which the 
fundamental facts of the mental life which correspond to spontane 
ous bodily motion are to be found. This associational psychology 
has thus nothing in common with a materialistic view of the soul ; 
nevertheless the mechanism of ideas and impulses is the only prin 
ciple recognised for the purpose of explaining the mental processes. 
2. The opposition to the materialistic psychology comes much 
more sharply to the fore in those lines of thought which emphasise 
the activity of consciousness as a unity. Following de Tracy s 
example Laromigutere s Ideology distinguished carefully between 
the " modifications," which are the mere consequence of bodily exci 
tations, and the " actions " of the soul, in which the soul proves its 
independent existence, even in perception. In the school of Mont- 
pellier they still believed in the " vital force." Barthez regarded 
this as separate from body and soul, as a something completely 
unknown : Bichat distinguished the " animal " from the " organic " 
life by the characteristic of spontaneous " reaction." This element 
in psychology came to full development through Maine de Biran. 
The acute, subtle mind of this philosopher received many suggestions 
from English and German philosophy ; with reference to the latter 
his acquaintance with Kant s and Fichte s doctrines though only 
a superficial one and with the virtualism of Bouterwek, who was 
named with remarkable frequency in Paris, is to be emphasised. 1 

1 The lines of communication were here not merely literary (Villers, 
Dege"rando, etc.), but in a strong degree personal. Of great importance among 
other things was the presence of the Schlegels in Paris, especially the lectures 
of Frederick Schlegel. In Paris itself the society of Auteuil, to which also the 
Svyiss embassador Stapfer, a prominent medium of influence, belonged, was of 
importance. 

636 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

The fundamental fact on which Maine de Biran bases his theory, 
later called spiritualism, is that in the will we immediately experi 
ence at once our own activity and the resistance of the " Non-Moi" 
(primarily our own body). The reflection of personality upon this 
its own activity forms the starting-point of all philosophy: inner 
experience furnishes the form, experience of that which resists fur 
nishes the matter. From this fundamental fact the conceptions 
force, substance, cause, unity, identity, freedom, and necessity are 
developed. Thus Maine de Biran builds upon psychology a meta 
physical system, which frequently reminds of Descartes and Male- 
branche, but replaces the cogito ergo .sum, by a volo ergo sum; just 
for this reason he exerts himself especially to fix securely the 
boundary lines between psychology and physiology, and particularly 
to exhibit the conception of inner experience (sens intime) as the 
clear and self-evident basis of all mental science, of which the self- 
consciousness of the willing and choosing personality appeared to 
him to be the fundamental principle. These significant thoughts, 
directed against the naturalistic one-sidedness of the eighteenth 
century, were supplemented by Maine de Biran for his own faith 
by a mystical turn, which finds the highest form of life in the 
giving up and losing of personality in the love of God. This sup 
plementation was made especially toward the close of his life. His 
scientific doctrine, on the contrary, found further points of contact, 
in part with the Scottish, and in part with the German philosophy, 
through his friends, such as Ampere, Jouffroy, and Cousin. In this 
process, much of the original character was lost in consequence of 
the eclectic appropriation of material. This was shown externally 
in the fact that his theory, as thus modified, especially in the in 
structional form which it received through Cousin, was freely called 
Spiritualism. In fact, the original character of the theory, which 
might better have been called Voluntarism, was changed by the 
intellectualistic additions which Cousin especially brought to it 
from the German philosophy of identity. At a later time, Ravais- 
son, and in a still more independent fashion, closely related to the 
Kantian criticism, Renouvier, sought to hark back from eclecticism 
to Maine de Biran. 1 

3. Voluntarism has been on the whole, perhaps, the most strongly 
marked tendency of the psychology of the nineteenth century. It is 
the form in which empirical science has appropriated Kant s and 

1 A similar position is occupied in Italy by Gallupi. Among the "facts of 
consciousness" which he makes the basis of philosophy, he regards the au 
tonomy of the ethical will as the determining factor, while Rosmini has retained 
the older intellectualism. 

44.] Controversy over the Soul : Voluntarism. 637 

Fichte s transfer of the standpoint of philosophy from the theoretical 
over to the practical reason. In Germany the principal influences on 
this side have been Fichte s and Schopenhauer s metaphysics. Both 
these authors make the essential nature of man to consist in the will, 
and the colouring which such a point of view gives to the whole the 
ory of the world could only be strengthened by the course of German 
history in our century, and by the transformation in the popular 
mind which has accompanied it. The importance of the practical, 
which has been enhanced to the highest degree, and the repression 
of the theoretical, which is not without its dangers, have appeared 
more and more as the characteristic features of the age. 

This tendency made its appearance in a scientific form with 
Beneke, who in spite of his dependence in part upon English philos 
ophy and in part upon Herbart, gave a peculiar turn to his exposi 
tion of the associational psychology (cf. above, p. 586) by conceiving 
the elements of the mental life as active processes or impulses 
(Triebe). He called them " elementary faculties" (Urvermogen), 
and maintained that these, originally set into activity by stimuli, 
bring about the apparently substantial unity of the psychical nature 
by their persistence as traces (Sjmren), and by their reciprocal adjust 
ment in connection with the continual production of new forces. The 
soul is accordingly a bundle not of ideas, as with Hume, but 
of impulses, forces, and " faculties." On the other hand, all real 
significance is denied to the faculties in the older sense of classifica 
tions of the mental activities (cf. above, p. 577). To establish this 
doctrine inductively by a methodical elaboration of the facts of inner 
perception is regarded by Beneke as the only possible presupposition 
for the philosophical disciplines, such as logic, ethics, metaphysics, 
and the philosophy of religion. In this procedure he passes on to a 
theory of the vahies which belong to stimuli (the so-called "things"), 
on account of the increase or diminution of the impulses. 

Fortlage gave metaphysical form to the psychological method and 
theory of Beneke, by incorporating it into Fichte s Science of Know 
ledge. He, too, conceives of the soul and all things in their relations 
as a system of impulses or forces, and perhaps no one has carried 
through so sharply as he the conception that the source of substantial 
existence is the activity of the will, an activity which is devoid of 
any substrate. 1 He regarded the essential nature of the psychical pro 
cesses as follows : From original functions arise contents which grow 
into synthetic union, remain, become established, and thus produce 
the forms of psychical reality. He thus pointed out once more the way 

1 Cf. C. Fortlage, Beitrage zur Psychologic (Leips. 1875), p. 40. 

638 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

by which alone metaphysics can be freed from the schema of material 
processes which are conceived as movements of unchangeable sub 
stances, such as atoms. But, at the same time, there were in these 
theories suggestions for the thought that the processes of ideation, 
of attention, and of evaluation in judgments, must be regarded as 
functions of the "impulse" which issues in question and assent or re 
jection. In the later development, indeed, the psychological analysis 
of the thinking process has penetrated even to the realm of logic, 
and here has often averted attention from the proper problems of 
that science. In the last decades especially, psychology as method 
and theory has had a luxurious development similar to that in the 
eighteenth century, and in its degenerate forms it has led to the 
same manifestations of the most superficial popular philosophy. 

4. In England, also, the traditional psychological method and 
standpoint remain in control ; nor was this dominance essentially 
affected by the transformation which Hamilton gave to the Scottish 
tradition under the influence of German philosophy and particularly 
of Kant. He, too, defends the standpoint of inner experience and 
regards it as affording the standard for all philosophical disciplines. 
Necessity and universality are to be found only in the simple, imme 
diately intelligible facts of consciousness which are present in every 
one. But in these facts and to these belong also all individual 
perceptions of the presence of an external thing it is only the 
finite, in finite relations and conditions, which comes to our knowl 
edge. It is in this sense, and without reference to the Kantian con 
ception of the phenomenal, that human knowledge is regarded by 
Hamilton as limited to experience of the finite. Of the Infinite and 
Absolute, i.e., of God, man has only a moral certainty of faith. Sci 
ence, on the contrary, has no knowledge of this " Unconditioned," 
because it can think only what it first distinguishes from another in 
order then to relate it to another (of. Kant s conception of synthesis). 
Mansel brought this " Agnosticism " into the service of revealed 
theology, making a still stronger and more sceptical employment of 
the Kantian theory of knowledge. He shows that religious dogmas 
are absolutely incomprehensible for human reason, and maintains 
that just on this account they are also incapable of attack. The 
unknowableness of the " Absolute " or the " Infinite," as Hamilton 
had taught it, still plays an important role in other philosophical 
tendencies in England ; e.g. in Herbert Spencer s system (cf. below, 
45). 

As set over against psychology, which has to do only with the 
facts of consciousness, Hamilton treats logic, aesthetics, and ethics, 
which correspond to the three classes of psychical phenomena, as the 

44.] Controversy over the Soul : Hamilton, 639 

theory of the laws under which facts stand ; yet he does not attain 
complete clearness as to the normative character of this legislation, 
and so the philosophical disciplines also remain entangled in the 
method of psychology. In working out his system, Hamilton s 
logical theory became one of the most clearly defined produc 
tions of formal logic. The problem of logic for him is to set forth 
systematically the relations which exist between concepts, and he 
limits the whole investigation to relations of quantity, going quite 
beyond the principle of the Aristotelian analysis (cf. above, pp. 135 f.). 
Every judgment is to be regarded as an equation, which declares 
what the relation is between what is comprised in the one concept, 
and what is comprised in the other. For example, a judgment of 
subordination, " the rose is a flower," must take the form : " All S 
= some V," " all roses = some flowers." The peculiarity of this is 
tMat the predicate is " quantified," whereas previous logical theory 
has quantified the subject only. When all judgments were thus 
reduced to the form of equations, obtaining between the contents of 
two concepts, inferences and conclusions appeared to be operations 
of reckoning, performed with given magnitudes. This seemed to 
be the complete carrying through of the principle of the terminis- 
tic logic, as it was formulated by Occam (cf. above, p. 342), Hobbes 
(p. 404), and Conclillac (p. 478). The new analysis or logical cal 
culus has spread since the time of Hamilton, and become a broad 
field for the intellectual gymnastics of fruitless subtlety and ingenu 
ity. For it is evident that such a logic proceeds from only a single 
one among the numerous relations which are possible between con 
cepts and form the object of judgments. Moreover, the relation in 
question is one of the least important; the most valuable relations 
of logical thought are precisely those which fall outside this kind of 
analysis. But the mathematical exactness with which this logic has 
seemed to develop its code of rules has enlisted in its behalf a series 
of vigorous investigators, and that not merely in England. They 
have, however, overlooked the fact that the living, actual thought 
of man knows nothing of this whole formal apparatus, so neatly 
elaborated. 

5. In the debates over these questions in France and England the 
religious or theological interest in the conception of the substance of 
the soul is naturally always a factor: the same interest stood in the 
foreground in the very violent controversies which led in Germany 
to the dissolution of the Hegelian school. They turned essentially 
about the personality of God and the immortality of the soul. Hegel- 
ianism could not continue as " Prussian state-philosophy " unless it 
maintained the " identity of philosophy with religion." The am- 

640 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART V1L 

biguous mode of expression of the master, who had no direct interest 
in these questions, enveloped as it was in the dialectical formalism, 
favoured this contest as to the orthodoxy of his teaching. In fact, 
the so-called "right wing" of the school, to which prominent 
theologians like Gabler, Goschel, and Hinrichs belonged, tried to 
keep this orthodoxy : but while it perhaps might remain doubtful 
how far the " coming-to-itself of the Idea " was to be interpreted as 
the personality of God, it became clear, on the other side, that in the 
system of perpetual Becoming and of the dialectical passing over 
of all forms into one another, the finite personality could scarcely 
raise a plausible claim to the character of a " substance " and to 
immortality in the religious sense. 

This motive forced some philosophers out of .the Hegelian school 
to a " theistic " view of the world, which, like that of Maine de Biran, 
had for its centre the conception of personality, and with regard to 
finite personalities inclined to the Leibnizian Monadology. The 
younger Fichte termed these mental or spiritual realities Urpositionen 
[prime-positions]. The most important carrying-out of the thought 
of this group was the philosophical system of Chr. Weisse, in which 
the conception of the possible is placed ontologically above that of 
Being, to the end of deriving all Being from freedom, as the self- 
production of personality (Fichte). 

In the relation between the possible and the actual, we have here 
repeated the antithesis set up by Leibniz, between the verites eter- 
nelles, and the verites de fait, and likewise the problems which Kant 
brought together in the conception of the " specification of Nature " 
(cf. above, p. 566). Within the " possibilities " which cannot be 
thought away, the actual is always ultimately such that it might be 
conceivably otherwise; i.e. it is not to be deduced, it must be re 
garded as given through freedom. Law and fact cannot be reduced 
to each other. 

Carrying out this view in a more psychological manner, Ulrici 
regarded the self as the presupposition for the distinguishing activ 
ity, with which he identified all consciousness, and out of which he 
developed his logical, as well as his psychological, theory. 

6. The orthodoxy, which at the time of the Restoration was grow 
ing in power and pretension, was attacked by the counter-party with 
the weapons of Hegelianism, and in this contest Huge served as 
leader in public support of both religious and political liberalism. 
How pantheistically and Spinozistically the idealistic system was 
apprehended by this wing is best seen from Feuerbach s Thoughts on 
Death and Immortality, where the divine infinitude is praised as the 
ultimate ground of man s life, and man s disappearance in the same 

44.] Controversy over the Soul: Materialism. 641 

as the true immortality and blessedness. From this ideal pantheism 
Feuer oach then rapidly advanced to the most radical changes of his 
doctrine. He felt that the panlogistic system could not explain 
the individual things of Nature : though Hegel had called Nature 
the realm of the accidental or contingent, which is incapable of 
keeping the conception pure. This inability, thought Feuerbach, 
inheres rather in the conception which man makes to himself oi 
things : the general conceptions in which philosophy thinks are no 
doubt incapable of understanding the real nature of the individual 
thing. Therefore Feuerbach now inverts the Hegelian system, and 
the result is a nominalistic materialism. The actual reality is the 
individual known to the senses ; everything universal, everything 
mental or spiritual, is but an illusion of the individual. Mind or 
spirit is " Nature in its otherness." In this way Feuerbach gives 
his purely anthropological explanation of religion. Man regards his 
own generic nature what he wishes to be himself as God. 

This theory of the wish," is to free humanity from all supersti 
tion and its evil consequences, after the same fashion as the theory 
of Epicurus (cf. above, p. 188). The epistemology of this " philoso 
phy of the future " can be only sensualism ; its ethics only eudae- 
mouism: the impulse to happiness is the principle of morals, and 
the sympathetic participation in the happiness of another is the 
fundamental ethical feeling. 

After materialism had shown so illustrious a metaphysical pedi 
gree, others employed for its advantage the anthropological mode of 
argument which had been in use in French literature since Lamettrie, 
and which seemed to become still stronger through the progress of 
physiology. Feuerbach had taught : man is what he eats (ist was er 
isst) ! And so once more the dependence of the mind upon the body 
was interpreted as a materialising of the psychical activity ; thinking 
and willing were to be regarded as secretions of the brain, similar to 
the secretions of other organs. A companion for this theory appeared 
in the guise of a purely sensualistic theory of knowledge, as it was 
developed by Czolbe independently of metaphysical assumptions; 
although at a later time Czolbe himself reached a view of the world 
which bordered closely upon materialism. For, since he regarded 
knowledge as a copy of the actual, he came ultimately to ascribe to 
ideas themselves spatial extension, and, in general, to regard space 
as the supporter of all attributes, giving it the place of Spinoza s 
substance. 

So the materialistic mode of thought began to spread in Germany 
also, among physicians and natural scientists, and this condition of 
affairs came to light at the convention of natural scientists at Got- 

642 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

tingen in 1854. The contradiction between the inferences of natural 
science and the " needs of the heart " (Gemuth) became the theme of 
a controversy which was continued in writing also, in which Carl 
Vogt championed the absolute sovereignty of the mechanical view of 
the world, while Rudolph Wagner, on the contrary, professed to gain 
at the bounds of human knowledge the possibility for a faith that 
rescued the soul and its immortality. This effort, 1 which with 
extreme unaptness was termed " book-keeping by double entry," had 
subsequently its chief effect in creating among natural scientists who 
saw through the one-sidedness of materialism, but could not befriend 
the teleology of idealism, a growing inclination toward Kant, into 
whose thing-in-itself they thought the needs of the heart and soul 
might be permitted to make their escape. When, then, in 1860, 
Kuno Fischer s brilliant exposition of the critical philosophy ap 
peared, then began the " return to Kant" which was afterwards 
destined to degenerate into literary-historical micrology. To the 
natural-science temper, out of which it arose, Albert Lange s History 
of Materialism gave expression. 

Many misunderstandings, to be sure, accompanied this move 
ment when even great natural scientists like Helmholtz 2 confused 
transcendental idealism with Locke s theory of signs and doctrine 
of primary and secondary qualities. Another misunderstanding 
appeared somewhat later, when a conspicuous school of theology, 
under the leadership of Ritschl, adopted the doctrine of the " thing- 
in-itself," in a form analogous to the position of English agnosticism. 

The philosophical revival of Kantianism, which has permeated 
the second half of the century, especially since Otto Liebmann s 
impressive book, Kant and the Epigones (1865), presents a great 
variety of views, in which we find repeated all shades of the oppos 
ing interpretations which Kant s theory met at its first appearance. 
The empirical and the rationalistic conceptions of knowledge and 
experience have come again into conflict, and their historical, as well 
as their systematic, adjustment has been the ultimate ground of the 
pragmatic necessity which has brought about gradually a return to 
Fichte. To-day there is once more an idealistic metaphysics in 
process of formation, as the chief representative of which we may 
regard Rudolf Eucken. 

1 It is not without interest to note the fact that this motif was not far removed 
from the French materialists. Of Cabanis and of Broussais we have expressions, 
made at the close of their life, which are in this spirit, and even of a mystical 
tendency. 

2 Cf. H. Helmholtz, Physiologische Optik, 25, and, especially, The Facts of 
Perception (Berlin, 1879). 

44.] Controversy over the Soul: Lotze. 643 

But in all these forms, this Neo-Kantian movement, with its 
earnest work upon the problem of knowledge, has had the result of 
rendering the superficial metaphysics of materialism evidently inad 
equate and impossible, and hence has led to its rejection. Even 
where Kant s doctrine was given an entirely empirical, and indeed 
positivistic turn, or even in the fantastic reasonings of so-called 
"solipsism," the thought of regarding consciousness as an accessory 
function of matter was rejected as an absurdity. Rather we find 
the opposite one-sided view that primary reality is to be ascribed 
only to inner perception, in contrast with outer perception. 

Materialism was thus overcome in science; it lives in popular expo 
sitions, such as Blichner s " Force and Matter " (Kraft und Stoff), or 
in the more refined form of Strauss s " Old and New Faith " * (Alter 
und neuer Glaube); it lives on also as theory of life in just those 
circles which love to enjoy the " results of science " from the most 
agreeable hand. For this superficial culture, materialism has found 
its characteristic exposition in Haeckel s works and his so-called 
" monism." 

For psychology as science, however, it became necessary to re 
nounce the conception of a soul-substance for the basis as well as 
for the goal of its investigation, and as a science of the laws of the 
psychical life to build only upon inner or outer experience. So we 
came by our " psychology without a soul," which is free from all 
metaphysical assumptions or means to be. 

7. A deeper reconciliation of the above antitheses was given by 
Lotze from the fundamental thoughts of German idealism. The 
vital and formative activity which constitutes the spiritual essence 
of all this real world has as its end, the good. The mechanism 
of nature is the regular form in which this activity works in the 
realisation of its end. Natural science has doubtless no other prin 
ciple than that of the mechanical, causal connection, and this principle 
is held to apply to organisms also; but the beginnings of metaphysics, 
like those of logic, lie only in ethics. In carrying out this teleological 
idealism, motifs from all the great systems of German philosophy 
accord to a new, harmonious work; every individual real entity has 
its essential nature only in the living relations in which it stands to 
other real entities ; and these relations which constitute the con 
nected whole of the universe are possible only if all that is, is 
grounded as a partial reality in a substantial unity, and if thus all 

1 The evidence of descent from the Hegelian dialectic is seen also in this, the 
most ingenious form which materialism can find, L. Knapp s Eechtsphiloso- 
phic (1857) might perhaps be classed with it, for all higher forms of mental 
life are treated as the striving of nature to go beyond herself. 

644 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

that takes place between individuals is to be apprehended as pur 
poseful realisation of a common life goal. By the powerful uni 
versality with which he mastered the material of facts and the forms 
of scientific elaboration in all the special disciplines Lotze was 
specially fitted to carry out fully this fundamental metaphysical 
thought, and in this respect, also, his personality as well as what he 
taught, joins worthily on to the preceding epoch. His own attitude 
is best characterised by its conception of knowledge as a vital and 
purposive interaction between the soul and the other " substances." 
The " reaction " of the soul is combined with the excitation which 
proceeds from " things." On the one side, the soul develops its own 
nature in the forms of perception, and in the general truths which 
come to consciousness with immediate clearness and evidence on the 
occasion of the stimulus from things; on the other hand, the partici 
pation of the subject makes the world of ideas a phenomenal appear 
ance. But this appearance or phenomenal manifestation, as the 
purposive inner life, is by no means mere illusion. It is rather a 
realm of worths or values, in which the good is realising itself. The 
coming to actual reality of this world of consciousness is the most 
important result of the interaction of substances. It is the ulti 
mate and truest meaning of the world-process. From these funda 
mental thoughts, Lotze, in his Logic, has conceived the series of 
forms of thought as a systematic whole, which develops out of the 
problems or tasks of thinking. In his Metaphysics, he has developed 
and defined his view of the world with fineness and acuteness in his 
treatment of conceptions, and with most careful consideration in all 
directions. The view is that of teleological idealism. The third 
part of the system, the ethics, has unfortunately not been completed 
in this more rigorous form. As a substitute, we have the convic 
tions of the philosopher and his mature comprehension of life and 
history presented in the fine and thoughtful expositions of the 
Microcosmus. 

8. Another way of escape from the difficulties of the natural- 
science treatment of the psychical life was chosen by Fechner. He 
would look upon body and soul as the modes of phenomenal mani 
festation completely separated and different in kind, but in constant 
correspondence with each other of one and the same unknown 
reality ; and follows out this thought in the direction, that every 
physical connection has a mental series or system of connections 
corresponding to it, although the latter are known through percep 
tion only in the case of our own selves. As the sensations which 
correspond to the excitation of particular parts of the nervous sys 
tem, present themselves as surface waves in the total wave of our 

44.] Controversy over the Houl : Fechner. 645 

individual consciousness, so we may conceive that the consciousness 
of a single person is in turn but the surface wave of a more general 
consciousness, say that of the planetary mind: and if we continue 
this line, we come ultimately to the assumption of a universal total- 
consciousness in God, to which the universal causal connection of the 
atoms corresponds. Moreover, according to Fechner, the connection 
of inner and outer experience in our consciousness makes it possible 
to investigate the laws of this correspondence. The science of this 
is psycho-physics. It is the first problem of this science to find out 
methods for measuring psychical quantities, in order to obtain laws 
that may be formulated mathematically. Fechner brings forward 
principally the method of just perceptible differences, which defines 
as the unit of mass the smallest difference that is still perceptible 
between intensities of sensation, and assumes this to be equal 
everywhere and in all cases. 

On the basis of this assumption, which to be sure is quite arbi 
trary, it seemed possible to give a mathematical formulation to the 
so-called " Weber-Fechner law." This was stated as follows : The 
intensities of different sensations are to each other as the logarithms 
of the intensities of their stimuli. The hope was thus awakened 
by Fechner that through the indirect measurement of psychical 
magnitudes a mathematical statement could be given by scientific 
methods for the psycho-physical, perhaps even for the psychological 
laws, and in spite of the numerous and serious objections which it 
encountered, this hope has had great success in promoting experi 
mental study during the past decades in many laboratories estab 
lished for this purpose. Yet it cannot be said that the outcome for 
a new and deeper comprehension of the mental life has kept pace 
with the activity of experimentation. 1 

The revival of the Spinozistic parallelism has likewise met greater 
and greater difficulties. With Fechner it was dogmatically intended 
since he claimed complete metaphysical reality for the contents of 
sense-perception. He called this view the " day view," and set it 
over against the "night view " of the phenomenalism which is found 
in natural science and philosophy. Others, on the contrary, con 
ceived the parallelism in a more critical fashion, assuming that 
mind and body, with all their states and activities, are only the 
different manifestations of one and the same real unity. But as 
a result of the vigorous discussions which this question has awak- 

1 With reference to controversies upon these points, it is simplest to refer to 
Fechner himself, Revision dcr Uuuptpunkle, dcr Paychophytik (Leips. 1882). 
In addition we may refer especially to H. Miinsterbere;, Ueber Aufgaben und 
Mcthiitlen der Psychologic (Leips. 1891) [PtycholOffte, 1900]. 

646 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

ened, 1 it has become increasingly evident that such a parallelism is 
untenable in any form. 

This is seen in the case of the investigator who has been most 
active in the extension of psycho-physical study, Wilhelm Wundt. 
He has gone on in the development of his thought from a " Physio 
logical Psychology " to a " System of Philosophy." This latter 
work regards the world as an interconnected whole of active indi 
vidualities which are to be conceived in terms of will. Wundt employs 
iu his metaphysics the conception of activity without a substrate, 
which we have met in Fichte and Fortlage, and limits the applica 
tion of the conception of substance to the theories of natural science. 
The interaction between the activities of these wills produces in 
organic beings higher unities of will, and at the same time, various 
stages of central consciousness ; but the idea of an absolute world- 
will and world-consciousness, which arises from these premises in 
accordance with a regulative principle of our thought, lies beyond 
the bounds of the capacity of human knowledge. 

9. Voluntarism has thus grown stronger and stronger, especially 
in its more general interpretation, and has combated the intel- 
lectualism which was regarded as a typical feature in the most 
brilliant period of German neo-humanism. As a result of this con 
flict we find emerging the same problem as to the relative primacy 
of the will or the intellect which occupied so vigorously the dia 
lectical acuteness of the scholastics (cf. above, 26). That this 
problem actually arose from the antagonistic development within 
the system of idealism was seen most clearly by Ednard von Hart- 
maun. His " Philosophy of the Unconscious " proceeds from a 
synthesis of Hegel, on the one hand, with Schopenhauer and the 
later thought of Schelling, on the other. Its purpose was to bring 
together once more the rational and irrational lines of idealism. 
Hartmann attempts by this means to ascribe to the one World-Spirit 
both will and idea (the logical element), as coordinated and inter 
related attributes. In calling the absolute spirit the "Unconscious," 
Hartmann attributes to the concept of consciousness an ambiguity 
like that which Schopenhauer ascribed to the will ; for the activities 
of the "Unconscious" are functions of will and ideation which are 
indeed not given in any empirical consciousness, but yet presuppose 
some other consciousness if we are to think of them at all. This 

1 A critical survey of the literature on the question is given by E. Busse in 
the Philos. Abhandlungen zur Sigwnrfs 70. Gr.bnrtstag (Tubingen, 1900). Cf. 
also especially the investigation by H. Rickert in the same volume. [Cf. also the 
arts, by Erhardt, Busse, Paulsen, Konig, and VVentscher, in Zeitschr. f. Philos., 
Vols. 114-117, and A. K. Rogers, in Univ. of Chicago Cont. to Phil., 1899.1 

44.] Controversy over the Soul : Hartmann. 647 

higher consciousness, which is called Unconscious, and is to form the 
common ground of life in all conscious individuals, Hart m an n seeks 
to exhibit as the active essence in all processes of the natural and 
psychical life ; it takes the place of Schopenhauer s and Schelling s 
Will in Nature, and likewise of the vital force of former physi 
ology and the " Entelechies " of the System of Development The 
Unconscious unfolds itself above all in the teleological inter-rela 
tions of organic life. In this respect Hartmann has controverted 
materialism very efficiently, since his theory everywhere points to 
the unitary mental or spiritual ground of things. To this end he 
employed a wealth of knowledge in the fields of natural science, 
and that too in the most fortunate manner, although it was an illu 
sion to suppose that he was winning his " speculative results by the 
inductive methods of natural science." At all events, the interest 
which he borrowed from the natural sciences in combination with 
an attractive and sometimes brilliant exposition, contributed much 
to the extraordinary, though transient, success of the " Philosophy 
of the Unconscious" ; its greatest attractiveness lay in the treatment 
of pessimism (cf. below, 46), and along this line it was followed 
by a train of popular philosophical literature which was for the 
most part of very inferior quality. 

Hartmann himself made extensive historical studies, and with 
their aid extended his fundamental metaphysical thoughts to the 
fields of ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of religion ; then he pro 
ceeded to work out a rigorous dialectic system in his Theory of the 
Categories. This is the most systematic work of a constructive char 
acter in the field of abstract concepts which has appeared during 
the last decades in Germany, a work which has been supplemented 
by a historical and critical basis in his History of Metaphysics. 1 

The Theory of the Categories, which is no doubt Hartmann s main 
work from a scientific standpoint, seeks to gain a common formal 
basis for the disciplines of philosophy by tracing all the relating 
principles employed by the intellect, whether in perception or in 
reflection, through the subjective ideal field of the theory of knowl 
edge, the objective real field of the philosophy of nature, and the 
metaphysical realm. In the fineness of its dialectical references, 
and in the wealth of interesting outlooks upon the fields of reality, 
it presents a unique counterpart to Hegel s Logic. As Hegel devel 
oped dialectically the whole process in which the Idea changes over 
into Nature, in which the concept leaves itself and becomes " other," 
so Hartmann shows, in the case of every category, the transforma- 

1 Oeschichte der Metaphysik (2 parts, Leips. 1899-1900). 

648 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century, [PART VII. 

tion which the " logical " experiences by its relation to the " non- 
logical " element of reality, which arises from the Will. Here, too, 
the world appears as divided within itself, as the conflict of Reason 
against will. 

45. Nature and History. 

The dualism of the Kantian Weltanschauung is reflected in the 
science of the nineteenth century by the peculiar tension in the rela 
tion between science of Nature and science of mind. At no earlier 
time has this antithesis been so current as respects both material 
and methods, as in ours; and from this circumstance a number of 
promising new shiftings have arisen. If from the domain of mental 
science we take, as has been shown, the contested province of psychol 
ogy, we then have remaining over against " Nature," what corre 
sponds still more to Kantian thought the social life and its historical 
development in its full extent in all directions. The thinking of 
natural science, pressing forward in its vigorous career of annex 
ation, from the nature of the case easily found points in the social 
phenomena as it had previously found in the psychological, where it 
might set the levers of its mode of consideration, so that a struggle 
became necessary upon this field, similar to that which had taken 
place on account of the soul ; and thus the earlier antithesis culmi 
nated in that between natural science and historical science. 

1. The first form in which the struggle between the natural science 
and the historical Weltanschauung was fought out, was the successful 
opposing of the Revolution Philosophy by the French Traditionalism. 
After St. Martin and de Maistre had set forth the Revolution as the 
judgment of God upon unbelieving mankind, de Bonald proceeded to 
oppose to the social theories of the eighteenth century, which he too 
held responsible for the horrors of the Reign of Terror, the theory of 
the clerical-legitimist Restoration. Unschooled in abstract thought, 
a dilettante, especially in his predilection for etymology, he was in 
fluential by the warmth of his presentation and by the weight of the 
principle which he defended. It was the mistake of the Enlighten 
ment, he taught, to suppose that the reason could from its own re 
sources find out truth and organise society, and to leave to the liking 
of individuals the shaping of their social life. But in truth all intellec 
tual and spiritual life of man is a product of historical tradition. For 
it is rooted in language. Language, however (and just here Condil- 
lacism is most vigorously opposed), was given man by God as the first 
revelation; the divine "Word" is the source of all truth. Human 
knowledge is always only a participating in this truth ; it grows out 
of conscience, in which we make that which holds universally, our 

45.] Nature and History : Traditionalism. 649 

own. But the bearer of the tradition of the divine word is the 
Church: her teaching is the God-given, universal reason, propagated 
on through the centuries as the great tree on which all the genuine 
fruits of human knowledge ripen. And therefore this revelation is 
the only possible foundation of society. The arrogance of the indi 
viduals who have rebelled against this has found its expiation in the 
dissolution of society, and it is now in point to build society once 
more upon the eternal basis : this was also the thought which held 
loosely together the obscure and strange fancies of BaUanche. 

2. The philosophical factor in this church-political theory was, 
that the generic reason realising itself in the historical development 
of society was recognised as the ground of the intellectual and spir 
itual life of individuals: if the theological views were distracted 
from this Traditionalism, the reader found himself hard by Hegel s 
conception of the Objective Spirit. Hence it was extremely humor 
ous when Victor Cousin, while adopting German philosophy on just 
this side, to a certain extent took from the Ultra-montanes the cream 
of their milk. Eclecticism also taught a universal reason, and was 
not disinclined to see in it something similar to the Scottish " com 
mon sense," to which, however, it still did not deny a metaphysical 
basis, fashioned according to Schelling and Hegel. When, there 
fore, Lamennais, who at the beginning had been a traditionalist and 
had then passed through the school of the German philosophy, treated 
the doctrine of Ideas in his Esquisse d une Philosophic, he could fully 
retain the above theory of the conscience, so far as its real content 
was concerned. 

Quite another form was assumed by the doctrine of Objective 
Spirit, where it was apprehended purely psychologically and empiri 
cally. In the mental life of. the individual, numerous processes go 
on, which rest solely upon the fact that the individual never exists 
at all except as member of a psychical interconnected whole. This 
interacting and overreaching life, into which each one grows, and 
by virtue of which he is what he is, evinces itself not by conformity 
to natural laws, as do the general forms of the psychical processes : 
it is rather of a historical character, and the general mind which lies 
at the basis of individual life expresses itself objectively in language, 
in customs and morals, and in public institutions. Individual psy 
chology must be broadened to a social psychology by a study of these. 
This principle has been propounded by Lazarus and Steintlial, and 
the eminently historical character which this must have when car 
ried out they have indicated by the otherwise less fortunate name 
of Volkerpsychologie [Folk or Comparative Psychology]. 

3. One must take into account the fundamental social thought of 

650 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

Traditionalism to understand the religious colouring which is char 
acteristic of French socialism since St. Simon, in contrast with the 
social-political theories of the last century. St. Simon s theory, 
however, stands not only under the pressure of the religious zeal 
which was growing to become a new social and political power, but 
also in lively relations to German philosophy, and indeed to its 
dialectic. All this passed over to his disciple, Auguste Comte, 
whose thought passed through an extremely peculiar course of 
development. 

He aims at nothing more or less than a complete reform of human 
society. He, too, regards it as an evident conclusion that with the 
Revolution, the Enlightenment, which was its cause, has become 
bankrupt. Like the Traditionalists, he fixes the responsibility for 
this upon the independence of individuals, upon free investigation 
and autonomy in the conduct of life. From these follow anarchy 
of opinions and anarchy of public life. The salvation of society is 
to be sought only in the dominance of scientific knowledge. We 
must find once more, and along securer lines, that subordination of 
all the activities of life beneath a universally valid principle which 
was approximately attained in the grand but premature catholic sys 
tem of the Middle Ages. In place of theology we must set positive 
science, which tolerates freedom of faith as little as theology toler 
ated it in the Middle Ages. This Horn an tic element determined 
Comte s theory throughout. It is shown not only in his philosophy 
of history by his enthusiastic portrayal of the mediaeval system of 
society, not only in his projected "Religion of Humanity" and its 
cultus, but above all in his demand for a concurrent spiritual and 
secular authority for the new social order. The new form of the 
social order was to proceed from the creative activity of the pouvoir 
spiritual, and Comte made fantastic attempts toward this by estab 
lishing his " Western Committee." As he thought of himself as the 
chairman of this committee, so he trusted to himself the establish 
ment of the new teaching. But the positive philosophy on which 
the new social order was to arise was nothing other than the ordered 
system of the positive sciences. 

Comte s projected positive system of the sciences first of all pushes 
Hume s and Condillac s conception to the farthest point. Not only 
is human knowledge assigned for its province to the reciprocal rela 
tions of phenomena, but there is nothing absolute whatever, that 
might lie unknown, as it were, at the basis of phenomena. The only 
absolute principle is, that all is relative. To talk of first causes or 
ultimate ends of things has no rational sense. But this relativism 
(or, as it has later been termed, " correlativisrn ") is forfeited at once 

45.] Nature and History : Comte. 651 

to the universalistic claim of the thinking of mathematical natural 
science, when science is assigned the task of explaining all these 
relations from the point of view that in addition to individual facts 
we must discover and establish also the order of these facts as they 
repeat themselves in time and space. This order we may call "gen 
eral fact," but nothing more. Thus positivism seeks by " laws " 
this is Comte s usual name for general facts not to explain the 
particular facts, but only to establish their recurrence. From this 
is supposed to come foresight for the future, as the practical outcome 
of science, savoir pour prevoir, although such foresight is quite 
unintelligible and unjustifiable under his presuppositions. This con 
ception of Comte s has found assent not only with philosophers like 
C. Goring, who appropriated it especially for his theory of causality, 
but also to some degree among natural scientists, particularly with 
the representatives of mechanics, such as Kirchhoff KoA. Mach. Their 
tendency is to exclude the conception of efficient agency from the 
scientific theory of nature, and to reach the elimination of " force " 
on the basis of a mere " description " or discovery of the most ade 
quate " image." This has been attempted by H. Hertz in his Prin 
ciples of Mechanics. Similar thoughts have been spun out into the 
unspeakably tedious terminologies of his " Empirio-Criticism," by 
Richard Avenarius, who has employed the generalisations of an ab 
stract dialectic, and seeks to demonstrate all philosophical conceptions 
of the world to be needless variations of one original world-concep 
tion of pure experience, which is to be once more restored. 

4. Phenomena, according to Comte, both individual and general, 
are in part simple, in part more or less complicated. Knowledge of 
the simpler must precede that of the more complex. For this reason 
he arranges the sciences in a hierarchy which proceeds step by step 
from the simple to the complex. Mathematics is followed by 
astronomy, then by physics, chemistry, biology which includes 
psychology, and finally by " sociology." This relation, nevertheless, 
is not to be conceived as if every following discipline was supposed 
to be deduced from the preceding discipline or disciplines ; it 
merely presupposes these in the sense that their more complicated 
facts include within themselves the more elementary facts ; the 
completely new facts add their own peculiar combination and nature 
to those more elementary facts. So, for example, biology presupposes 
physical and chemical processes, but the fact of life is something 
completely new, and incapable of deduction from these processes; 
it is a fact which must be verified by biological observation. Such, 
too, is the relation of sociology to the. five preceding disciplines. 
Following this principle Comte s social statics declines with charac- 

652 

Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

teristic emphasis to derive sociality from the individual, as was done 
in the Enlightenment philosophy. The social nature is an original 
fact, and the first social phenomenon is the family. Still more inde 
pendent is his social dynamics, which without psychological explana 
tion sets itself the task of discovering the natural law of the history 
of society. Comte finds this in the principle of the three stages, which 
society necessarily passes through (an aperqu, which had been antici 
pated by d Alembert and Turgot as well as by Hegel and Cousin). 
Intellectually, man passes out of the theological phase, through the 
metaphysical, over into the positive. In the first he explains phe 
nomena by supernatural powers and beings thought in anthropo 
morphic guise, in the second by general concepts [e.g. force, etc.] 
which he constructs as the essence working behind phenomena; in 
the positive stage he comprehends the particular only by the actually 
demonstrable conditions, from which it follows according to a law 
verifiable experimentally. To this universal law of the mental life 
are subject all special processes into which the same divides, and 
likewise the movement of human history as a whole. Moreover, the 
intellectual process is accompanied by a corresponding course of 
development in the external organisation of society, which passes 
out of the priestly, warlike condition, through the rule of the jurists 
(legistes), to the " industrial " stage. 

The very circumstantial philosophy of history which Comte here 
carries out, interesting in particular points, but on the whole com 
pletely arbitrary and often distorted by ignorance and prejudice, is 
to be estimated solely as a construction undertaken for his reforma 
tory purpose. The victory of the positive view of the world, and at 
the same time of the industrial order of life, is the goal of the his 
torical development of European peoples. At this goal "the great 
Thought, viz. : positive philosophy, will be wedded with the great 
Power, the proletariate." * 

But as if the law of the circuit of the three phases was to be first 
verified in the case of its author, Comte in the last (" subjective ") 
period of his thinking fell back into the theological stage, making 
mankind as Grand-etre the object of a religious veneration or wor 
ship, as whose high priest he imitated the whole apparatus of worship 
of the saints, with a positivist remodelling. Among these phantastic 
products of the imagination the history of philosophy can at most 
consider only the motive which guided Comte in his later course. 
He best set this forth in the General View of Positivism, which is 

1 Cf. on Comte, among recent works, Tschitscherin, Philosophische For- 
schungen, tr. from the Russian (Heidelberg, 1899). 

45.] Nature and History : Comte. 653 

reprinted in the first volume of the Positive Polity. This shows him 
turning aside from the outspoken individualism which had shown 
itself in his earlier conviction that positive science as such would be 
sufficient to bring about the reform of society. He has now seen 
that the positive philosophy may indeed teach how the new order of 
things is to appear, but that the work of bringing about this new 
order can be achieved only by the "affective principle" ihe feeling. 
Whereas he had formerly taught that the specifically human, as 
it develops in history, is to be sought in the predominance of the in 
telligence over the feelings, it is from the predominance of the 
heart over the intellect that he now expects the fulfilment of his 
hopes which he formulates as I amour pour principe, Vordre pour base, 
le progres pour but. 1 And since Gall has shown that the preeminence 
of heart over intellect is a fundamental characteristic of the brain of 
woman, Comte bases on this his worship of woman, which he would 
make an essential constituent in the religion of humanity. He who 
had begun with the proud announcement of a positivist papacy ended 
with an appeal to the proletariate and the emancipation of woman. 

o. It is in accord with the practical, i.e. political, ends which 
Comte followed, that in history also general facts or laws appeared 
to him more important than particular facts. He believed that in 
the realm of history a foresight (prevoyance) should guide and 
direct action. But apart from this theory and in spite of the one- 
sidedness of his education along the lines of mathematics and natu 
ral science, Comte was yet sufficiently broad-minded to understand 
and to preserve the distinctive character of the different disciplines, 
and as he had already attempted to secure for biology its own dis 
tinctive methods, he expressly claimed for his sociology the "his 
torical method." In the biological field the series of successive 
phenomena in a race of animals is only an external evolution which 
does not alter or concern the permanent character of the race (hence, 
Comte was throughout an opponent of Lamarck s theory). In 
sociology we have to do with an actual transformation of the human 
race. This has been brought about through the changing vicissi 
tudes of generations and the persisting cumulation of definite life 
processes which has been made possible thereby. The historical 
method is to return to general facts, and thus observation is to be 
guided by theory, so that historical investigation will yield only a 
construction based upon a philosophy of history. It was thus per 
haps not quite in Comte s meaning, but nevertheless it was a con 
sequence of his teaching, when the effort was made here and there 

1 " Love for the principle, order for the basis, progress for the end." 

654 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

to raise history to the plane of a natural science. John Stuart Mill 
called attention to this in his methodology. Schopenhauer had 
denied to history the character of a science on the ground that it 
teaches only the particular and nothing of the universal. This 
defect seemed now to be remedied in that the effort was made to 
press forward beyond the description of particular events to the 
general facts. The most impressive attempt of this sort was made 
by Comte s English disciple, Thomas Buckle. In his History of 
Civilisation in England (1857), Buckle defined the task of historical 
science as that of seeking the natural laws of the life of a people. 
For this purpose Buckle found in those slow changes of the social 
conditions which are recorded in the statistical tables, much more 
usable and exact material than in the recital of particular events to 
which the old chronicle forms of historical writing had been limited. 

Here the proper sense of the antithesis is disclosed : on the one 
hand the life of the masses with the changes taking place conform 
ably to general law on the other hand the independent value of 
that which presents itself but once, and is determined within itself. 
In this respect the essence of the historical view of the world has 
been by no one so deeply apprehended, and so forcibly and warmly 
presented, as by Carlyle, who worked himself free from the phi 
losophy of enlightenment by the assistance of the German idealism, 
and laboured unweariedly for the recognition of the archetypal and 
creative personalities of history, for the comprehension and ven 
eration of " heroes." 

In these two extremes are seen anew the great antitheses in the 
conception of the world which were already prevalent in the Renais 
sance, but which had not at that time attained so clear and methodi 
cal an expression. We distinguished in that period a historical 
century, and a century of natural science, in the sense that the new 
investigation of nature emerged from the conflict of traditions as 
the most valuable outcome (cf. Part IV.). From the victory of the 
methods and conceptions of natural science resulted the great meta 
physical systems, and as their sequence the unhistorical mode of 
thought characteristic of the Enlightenment. In opposition to this 
the German philosophy set its historical view of the world. It is to 
be noted that the almost complete counterpart of this antithesis is 
found in the psychological realm in the antithesis between Intellec- 
tualism and Voluntarism. On this account the attempt which has 
been made during the last decade to introduce the so-called scien 
tific * method into history, is not in accord with the development of 

1 [Naturwissenschaftliche. In English the term "science" is so commonly 
used as the equivalent of "natural science" that the confusion objected to in 

45.] Nature and History : Carlyle, Marx. 655 

psychology during our century. It is indeed not the great histo 
rians who have fallen victims to this mistake, but here and there 
some who have either been too weak to stand against the watch 
words of the day, or have made use of them for popular effect. In 
this so-called scientific * treatment of historical structures or pro 
cesses the misuse of comparisons and analogies is especially unde 
sirable as if it were a genuine insight to call society an organism ; 2 
or as if the effect of one people upon another could be designated as 
endosmose and exosmose ! 

The introduction of natural-science modes of thought into history 
has not been limited to this postulate of method which seeks to as 
certain the laws of the historical process ; it has also had an influ 
ence upon the contents. At the time when Feuerbach s Materialism, 
which was a degenerate product of the Hegelian dialectic (of. above, 
44, 6), was yet in its vigour, Marx and Engels created socialism s 
materialistic philosophy of history, in which motives from Hegel and 
from Comte cross in peculiar manner. The meaning of history they 
too find in the " processes of social life." This collective life, how 
ever, is essentially of an economic nature. The determining forces 
in all social conditions are the economic relations ; they form the 
ultimate motives for all activities. Their change and their develop 
ment are the only conditioning forces for public life and politics, and 
likewise for science and religion. All the different activities of 
civilisation are thus only offshoots of the economic life, and all 
history should be economic history. 

6. If history has had to defend its autonomy against the destruction 
of the boundary lines which delimit it from the sciences, the natural 
science of the nineteenth century has conversely contained an emi 
nently historical factor which has attained a commanding influence, viz. 
the evolutionary motive. In fact we find the natural science of to-day 
in its general theories, as well as in its particular investigations, de 
termined by two great principles which apparently stand in opposition 
to each other, but which in truth reciprocally supplement each other, 
viz. the principle of the conservation of energy and that of evolution. 

The former has been found by Robert Mayer, Joule, and Helm- 
holtz to be the only form in which the axiom of causality can be used 
by the physical theory of to-day. The epistemological postulate that 
there is nothing new in nature, but that every following phenomenon 

the text is all the more likely to occur. Of course the author is objecting not to 
scientific methods, but to the assumption that the scientific method for natural 
science is the proper scientific method for history.] 

2 [But cf. on this, Kant, Critique of Judgment, 65. Cf. also Lapie in Rev 
de Met. et de la Morale, May, 1895.] 

656 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

is only a transformation of that which precedes, was formulated by 
Descartes as the law of the Conservation of Motion (of. above, p. 411), 
by Leibniz as the law of Conservation of Force (p. 421), by Kant as 
that of the Conservation of Substance (pp. 545 f.). The discovery of 
the mechanical equivalent of heat, and the distinction between the 
concepts of kinetic and potential energy, made possible the formula 
tion that the sum of energy in nature is quantitatively unchangeable, 
and only qualitatively changeable, and that in every material system 
which is regarded as complete or closed within itself, the spatial 
distribution and direction of the kinetic and potential energy at any 
time is absolutely determined by the law just stated. It is not to be 
overlooked that in this statement the exclusion of other than mate 
rial forces from the explanation of nature is made still more sharply 
than with Descartes ; on the other hand, however, signs are already 
multiplying that a return to the dynamic conception of matter has 
been thereby introduced, such a conception as was demanded by 
Leibniz, Kant, and Schelling (cf. above, 38, 7). 

7. The principle of evolution had many lines of preparation in 
modern thought. In philosophic form it had been projected by 
Leibniz and Schelling, although as a relation between concepts, and 
not as a process taking place in time (so with Aristotle ; cf. 13) ; 
and among Schelling s disciples it was Oken who began to regard the 
ascending of classes and species in the realm of organic life as a pro 
cess in time. With the aid of comparative morphology, to which 
also Goethe s studies had contributed, Oken dared that "adventure" 
in the "archaeology of nature" of which Kant had spoken (p. 565). 
All organisms are regarded as variously formed "protoplasm" (Ur- 
schleitri), and the higher have proceeded from the lower by an 
increasing multiplication of protoplasmic vesicles. At the same time 
(1809), in his Philosophic Zoologique, Lamarck gave the first system 
atic exposition of the theory of descent. He explained the relation 
ship of organisms by descent from a common original form, and their 
differences, in part by the direct effect of environment, and in part 
by the indirect effect of environment which operates by calling for 
a greater use of some organs and a less use of others. This use 
modifies structures, and the modifications in structure are inherited. 
The variations in species which become stable were thus explained 
by the alternating influences of heredity and adaptation. To these 
factors of explanation Charles Darwin added the decisive factor of 
natural selection. Organisms tend to increase at a far higher rate 
than the available means of nutrition. Hence the struggle for exist 
ence. Those plants or animals which vary in a direction that favours 
them in this struggle will survive. 

45.] Nature and History : Darwin. 657 

The presuppositions of the theory, therefore, are the two princi 
ples of heredity and variability ; an additional element was the 
assumption of great periods of time for the accumulation of indefi 
nitely small deviations, an assumption which was made possible by 
contemporaneous geological investigations. 

This biological hypothesis at once gained more general signifi 
cance in that it promised a purely mechanical explanation of the 
adaptations or purposive elements which constitute the problems of 
organic life, and it was believed that thereby the necessity of the 
progress of nature to higher and higher forms had been understood. 
The " purposive " had been mechanically explained in the sense of 
that which is capable of survival that is, of that which can main 
tain and propagate itself and it was supposed that the same 
explanation could be applied to everything else which appears pur 
posive in other relations, especially to that which is purposive in a 
normative respect. So the theory of selection following Darwin s 
own suggestions was very soon applied on many sides to psychology, 
sociology, ethics, and history, and was pressed by zealous adherents 
as the only scientific method. Few were clear on the point that 
nature was thereby placed under a category of history, and that this 
category had experienced an essential change for such an applica 
tion. For the evolutionary theory of natural science, including the 
theory of natural selection, can indeed explain alteration but not 
progress; it cannot give the rational ground for regarding the result 
of the development as a "higher," that is, a more valuable form. 

8. In its most universal extent the principle of evolution had 
already been proclaimed before Darwin by his countryman Herbert 
Spencer, and had been made the fundamental conception of the lat- 
ter s System of Synthetic Philosophy, in which many threads of 
English philosophy are brought together. He proceeds from agnos 
ticism in so far as he declares the Absolute, the Unconditioned, the 
Unitary Being, which he is also fain to call Force, to be unknowable, 
lleligion and philosophy have laboured in vain to conceive this in 
definite ideas ; for us it is by the very nature of the case incapable 
of determination. Human knowledge is limited to an interpretation 
of phenomena, that is, to the manifestations of the Unknowable. 
Philosophy has only the task of generalising the results of the 
particular sciences, and putting these generalised results together 
into the simplest and most complete totality possible. 

The fundamental distinction in phenomena Spencer designates as 
that of the "vivid" and the "faint" manifestations of the Un 
knowable, i.e. of impressions and ideas. This indicates an attach 
ment to Hume which is not fortunate (cf. above, p. 453). From this 

658 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

starting-point, although Spencer rightly rejects the reproach of 
materialism, he yet introduces a turn in his view of the world which 
directs preeminent interest to the character of physical phenomena. 
For an examination of all the particular sciences is supposed to 
yield the result that the fundamental form in which the Absolute 
manifests itself is evolution. And by evolution Spencer under 
stands following a suggestion of the scientist, von Baer the 
tendency of all natural structures to pass over from the homoge 
neous to the heterogeneous. This active variation in which the 
ever-active force manifests itself consists in two processes, which in 
cooperation with each other constitute evolution, and which Spencer 
designates as differentiation and integration. On the one hand, by 
virtue of the plurality of effects which belong to every cause, the 
simple passes into a manifold ; it differentiates and individualises 
itself; it divides and determines itself by virtue of the fulness of 
relations into which it enters. On the other hand, the thus sepa 
rated individual phenomena come together again to form firm com 
pounds and functional systems, and through these integrations new 
unities arise which are higher, richer, and more finely articulated 
than the original. So the animal organism is a higher unity than 
the cell ; society is a higher " individual " than a single man. 

This schema is now applied by Spencer to all material and spir 
itual processes, and with tireless labour he has sought to enforce it 
in the case of the facts of all the particular sciences. Physics and 
chemistry are refractory; they stand under the law of the conser 
vation of energy. But astrophysical theory shows the differentia 
tion of the original gas into the suns and the peripheral structures 
of the planets with their satellites, and likewise the corresponding 
integration in the articulated and ordered system of motion which 
all these bodies maintain. It is, however, in biology and sociology 
that the system attains full unfolding. Life is regarded by Spencer 
as a progressive adaptation of inner to outer relations. From this 
the individualising growth of a single organism is explained, and 
from the necessary variations of the latter according to the method 
of the theory of selection is explained the alteration of species. 

Social life also in its whole historical course is nothing other than 
the progressive adaptation of man to his natural and plastic environ 
ment. The perfecting which the race wins thereby rests upon the 
dying out of the unfit and upon the survival of the fit functions. 
From the standpoint of this doctrine Spencer seeks also to decide 
the old strife between rationalism and empiricism upon both the 
logical and ethical fields. As against the associational psychology 
he admits that there are for the individual immediately evident 

45.] Nature and History : Spencer. 659 

principles, and truths which are innate in the sense that they cannot 
be explained by the experience of the individual. Hut the strength 
with which these judgments assert themselves so that consciousness 
finds it impossible to deny them, rests upon the fact that they are 
the intellectual and emotional habits acquired by the race, which 
have proved themselves to be adapted to further the race, and have 
maintained themselves on this ground. The a priori is everywhere 
an evolutionary product of heredity. So in particular for morals, 
everything in the form of intelligent feeling and modes of will sur 
vives which is adapted to further the self-preservation and develop 
ment of the individual, of society, and of the race. 

Finally every particular development reaches its natural end when 
a condition of equilibrium has been gained in which the inner rela 
tions are everywhere completely adapted to the outer, so that the 
capacity for further articulation and variation has been exhausted. 
It is, therefore, only by external influence that such a system can be 
destroyed and disturbed, so that its individual parts may enter into 
new processes of evolution. On the contrary Spencer strives against 
the assumption of the possibility that the whole universe, with all 
the particular systems which it contains, can ever come to a perfect 
and therefore permanent condition of equilibrium. He thus con 
tradicts those investigators who have regarded as theoretically possi 
ble such a distribution of energies as to exclude all alterations ; this 
is due ultimately to the fact that Spencer regards the Unknowable 
as the ever self-manifesting force, and regards evolution itself as 
the most universal law of the manifestation of the Unknowable. 

9. Taken all in all Spencer s development of the principle of 
evolution is throughout of a cosmological character, and in this is 
shown just the alteration in this controlling principle which is due 
to the prevalence of natural science in our century. This is seen 
most clearly by comparing Hegel and Spencer. With the former, 
evolution is the nature of the self-revealing spirit ; with the latter, 
it is the law of the successive manifestations of an unknowable 
force. To speak in Hegel s language (cf. p. 611). the subject has 
again become substance. In fact the Unknowable of Spencer 
resembles most that "indifference of real and ideal which Schel- 
ling designated as the Absolute. This analogy would lead us to 
expect that the cosmological form of the principle of evolution will 
not be the final one, and that the historical standpoint and method, 
as the appropriate home of this principle, will give the permanent 
form which it will take in philosophy. Tn England itself, and still 
more in America, a decided turn toward Hegel is to be noticed since 
the impressive book of Hutchinson Stirling and Wallace s excellent 

660 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

introduction of Hegel s logic. In Germany, Kuno Fischer s exposi 
tion of Hegel s doctrine, which is now just reaching completion, will 
dissipate prejudices which have hitherto stood in the way of its just 
valuation, and by stripping off the terminology which has become 
foreign to us, will cause this great system of evolution to appear in 
full clearness. 

The same tendency to win back the historical form for the thought 
of evolution is found in the logical and epistemological efforts which 
have as their goal what Dilthey has denoted with a fortunate expres 
sion, a " critique of the historical reason." The aim is to break 
through that one-sidedness which has attached to logic since its 
Greek origins, and which prescribes as the goal and norm of logical 
laws in their formal aspect the relation of the universal to the par 
ticular (cf. 12), and for the content and material of those laws the 
knowledge of nature. Under these presuppositions stand not only 
the extreme of mathematical logic (cf. 44, 4), but also the impor 
tant works of John Stuart Mill and Stanley Jevons, which are to 
be characterised essentially as the logical theory of natural science. 
Over against this, the elaborations of logical science by Lotze and 
Sigwart, especially in the latter s second edition, show a much more 
universal stamp, and in connection with the movement of historical 
idealism which has its attachments to the Fichtean view of the world 
(cf. 44, 6), a deeper comprehension of the logical forms of histori 
cal science is on the way ; such, for example, as we find in Rickert s 
investigations regarding the limitations of the concepts of natural 
science. 1 

46. The Problem of Values. 

While the end of the century finds us in the yet unadjusted strife 
between the historical and the natural-science standards, we see just 
in this continuation of an inherited antithesis how little the philoso 
phy of this period has been able to win a real progress in its princi 
ples. Its great and varied industry has been rather at the periphery, 
and in the work of adjusting relations with the special sciences, 
while the central development falls prey to a certain stagnation 
which must be simply put up with as a fact easily comprehensible 
historically. The exhaustion of metaphysical energy and the high 
tide of empirical interests give a completely satisfactory explana 
tion. For this reason we can readily understand that the philoso 
phy of the nineteenth century shows a rich development along the 
bounding provinces in which it comes in contact with the empirical 
disciplines, as in psychology, philosophy of nature, anthropology, 

1 H. Rickert, Grensen der natui-wissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung , 1896. 

4(5.] Problem of Values : Utilitarianism. 661 

philosophy of history, philosophy of law and philosophy of reli 
gion, while on the contrary it makes the impression of an eclectic 
and dependent attitude in the fundamental disciplines. Surely this 
is the inevitable consequence of the fact that it suffers from the 
repressive wealth of traditions which have attained complete histori 
cal consciousness. It is in accord with this that no earlier time has 
seen such a luxuriant and fruitful growth in the study of the history 
of philosophy. But there is need of a new central reconstruction if 
philosophy is to meet in satisfactory manner the wants which in 
recent time come once more for satisfaction from the general con 
sciousness and from the special sciences. 1 

The direction in which the solution of this problem is to be sought 
is determined on the one hand by the predominance of that volun 
tarism which extends from psychology into general metaphysical 
theories ( 44), and on the other by the circumstance that the two 
forms of the principle of evolution ( 45), viz. the historical and 
that of natural science, are distinguished from each other by their 
different attitudes toward the determinations of value. In addition 
the mighty upward sweep in the conditions of life which Europeans 
have experienced in this century has worked at once destructively 
and constructively upon general convictions. Civilisation, caught in 
this movement of rapid enhancement and extension, is urged on by 
a deeper demand for comprehension of itself, and from the problem 
of civilisation which made its appearance in the Enlightenment (cf. 
37) a movement has developed for which the "transformation and 
re-valuation of all values" (Umwertuncj oiler Werthe} has become the 
watchword. 

1. The characteristic trait in this is that in the foreground of all 
ethical considerations the relation of the individual to society stands 

lr That the Catholic Church has sought to solve this problem by a revival of 
Thoiuism is well known, and does not need to be further set forth here. Nor on 
this account do we need to cite the numerous Thomists (mostly Jesuits) in Italy, 
France, Germany, Belgium, and Holland. In theory they represent no new 
principles, but at most seek to build out the old doctrine in details so that it may 
appear in some manner adapted to modern knowledge, in particular to modern 
science of nature. But the freer tendencies of Catholic philosophy, which are 
usually called Ontologism, have created nothing new and fruitful. They attach 
themselves for the most part to the Platonisin of Malebrauche, and point back to 
Augustine, so that the antagonism which we noted in the Middle Ages and in the 
Renaissance is repeated again (cf. pp. 364, 416.) The finest presentation of 
Ontologism was found in the Italians, Rosmini and Gioberti ; the former gave 
it a sort of psychological basis ; the latter a purely metaphysical form (L ente 
crcn Prsistpnte}. In Germany Giinther introduced into it certain elements of 
the idealistic speculations, especially of Fichte s doctrine ; in France, Gratry 
from this standpoint combats especially the eclecticism of Cousin, and in this 
eclecticism he combats Hegelianism and the " pantheism," which he finds in 
both (cf. iZtude sur la Sophistique Contem/draine, letlre a M. Vacherot, 
Paris, 1851). 

662 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

forth in much more conscious and explicit form than ever before, 
whether in the positive form that the subordination of the individual 
to society is presented and grounded in some manner as the norm of 
all valuation, or whether it be in the negative form that the resist 
ance of the individual to the oppressing weight of the species is 
praised and justified. 

The first form is that which has been transmitted from the phi 
losophy of the Revolution and from Utilitarianism, especially in the 
stamp given to it by Bentham (of. p. 522). This Utilitarianism goes 
through the popular literature of the century as a broad stream in 
which the standard of the public good is taken as a matter of course 
without deep analysis of its meaning. It is characterised for the 
most part by limiting its care " for the greatest happiness of the 
greatest number " to man s earthly welfare ; the mental and spiritual 
goods are not indeed denied, but the measure of all valuation is 
found in the degree of pleasure or pain which a circumstance, a 
relation, an act, or a disposition may call forth. Theoretically, this 
doctrine rests on the unfortunate inference of the associational psy 
chology, that because every satisfied desire is accompanied with 
pleasure the expectation of the pleasure is, therefore, the ultimate 
motive of all willing, and every particular object is willed and valued 
only as means for gaining this pleasure. This formal eudaemonism 
was earlier forced either to regard the altruistic impulses as equally 
original with the egoistic, or to make them proceed from the egoistic 
through the experiences which the individual undergoes in social life. 
In contrast with this the noteworthy transformation which Utili 
tarianism has experienced in recent time consists in its combination 
with the principle of evolution, as has already been mentioned in the 
case of Spencer s doctrine (cf. 45, 8). The valuation of altruism 
from the standpoint of social ethics appears according to this new 
point of view to be the result of the process of evolution, inasmuch as 
only those social groups have maintained themselves in the struggle- 
for existence whose individual members have achieved altruistic 
thought and action in a relatively high degree. 1 The history of 
morals is a struggle of values or " ideals," from which we may in 
part explain the relativity of historical systems of morals, and in 
part their converging development to a universal human ethics. 
These fundamental thoughts of evolutionary ethics have been car 
ried out in many detailed expositions ; among their representatives 

1 Benjamin Kidd, Social Evolution, London, 1895, has attempted to determine 
the nature of religion sociologically by considering the part which ideas of the 
supernatural have played in this evolutionary process a genuinely English 
undertaking. 

46.] Problem of Values : Bentham. 663 

may be mentioned, in France, Fouillee, in Germany, Paul Ree, whose 
evolutionary theory of conscience excited attention for a time, and 
G. H. Schneider. 

[Before passing to the continental representatives of Utilitarian 
ism it will be instructive to consider more fully the changes which 
have been effected in British theories both within and without the 
so-called Utilitarian school. 1 These changes affect the standard of 
value, the motives to which ethical appeal is made, and the relation 
which the individual is conceived to sustain to the social body ; their 
nature shows the influence of the close relation which ethical theory 
in England has always sustained to social and political conditions. 
During the century England has seen an almost continuous effort 
toward social and political reform. This movement has aimed at 
an extension of political privilege, and at making possible a higher 
standard of living for the less fortunate members of society. It has 
thus been democratic in so far as it has insisted upon the widest par 
ticipation in the goods of civilisation ; but by emphasising not merely 
material comforts, but also political rights, social justice, and educa 
tional opportunities, it has tended to measure human welfare, not so 
much in terms of feeling as in terms of " dignity " and fulness of 
life or " self-realisation." The movement along these two direc 
tions has been due in part to the influence of German idealism as 
transmitted through Coleridge, Carlyle, and later through Green and 
others, but the immanent forces of social progress have had a deci 
sive influence in the same direction. 

As has been pointed out (pp. 513 f.), a general tendency of British 
theory has been to unite a social standard or criterion of moral value 
with an individualistic, and even egoistic theory of motives. This 
seemed the more possible to Bentham, because in the individualistic 
language of his day the community was defined as a " fictitious body 
composed of individual persons who are considered as constituting, 
as it were, its members." The" interest of the community, then, "is 
the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it." 
Hence it might seem that one way to promote the interest of the 
community would be for every man to seek his own interest. If, 
however, it should be necessary to bring pressure to bear upon the 
individual in order to keep him from interfering with the interests 
of others, Bentham conceived that the principal reliance should be 
placed upon what he called the four sanctions, which he specified 
as the physical, political, moral, and religious, meaning by these the 

1 The material from this point to the paragraph numbered " 2 " on p. 670 has 
been added by the translator. 

664 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

pleasures and pains derived from physical sources, from the penal 
ties of law, from public opinion, or from belief in divine rewards and 
punishments. It is for pain and pleasure alone " to point out what 
we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do," and the 
ambiguity in the terms " pain " and " pleasure," according to which 
they mean in the one case pleasure or pain of the community, and in 
the other case pleasure or pain of the agent, permits Bentham to 
suppose that he is maintaining a consistent hedonistic theory. But 
there were two other important qualifications in this hedonistic and 
individualistic theory. In the first place he intimates that the indi 
vidual may seek public pleasure as well as private, 1 thus giving the 
theoretical statement of the principle which governed his own life, 
directed as it was toward the public interest. In the next place, the 
maxim which Bentham used to interpret the phrase, " greatest good 
of the greatest number," was, " everybody to count for one, nobody 
for more than one." This, while apparently a principle of extreme 
individualism, was really a recognition of individual rights, and was 
based upon fairness rather than upon a purely hedonistic standpoint. 
It is thus essentially a social principle, and a demand that the 
pleasure which "determines what we should do" shall be not merely 
a maximum, but a particular kind of pleasure, regulated not by con 
siderations of quantity, but by principles of fairness, and justice. A 
further inadequacy of Bentham s theory to account for Bentham s 
practice appears in his famous definition that in estimating pleasures 
and pains we must consider quantity only, " push-pin is as good 
as poetry." But Bentham s own activity, if not primarily directed 
toward poetry, was at least as little directed toward push-pin for 
himself or for others. His whole life-work was given toward pro 
moting legislative and social reform, toward securing rights and 
justice; and although he had little appreciation of certain of the 
finer values of art arid culture, he was at least as little as his suc 
cessor, Mill, to be explained by the hedonistic formula. 

The theoretical individualism of the hedonistic standard for meas 
uring the values of human life and the motives for moral action 
found vigorous and successful opposition in the work of Coleridge 
and Carlyle. The former exerted his influence primarily in the 
religious field, and in special opposition to the theories of motive 
and obligation propounded by Paley (p. 514, above), which had wide 
currency in educational and religious circles. According to Paley, 
the only difference between prudence and duty is that in the one we 

1 Such pleasures seek, if private be thy end. If it be public," etc. Cf. 
J. Dewey, Study of Ethic*. 

40.] Problem of Values : Coleridge, Carlyle. 665 

consider the gain or loss in the present world ; in the other, we con 
sider also gain or loss in the world to come. Obligation, according to 
Paley, means to be urged by a violent motive, resulting from the 
command of another. Against these positions Coleridge urged that 
while man as a mere animal, or as a being endowed merely with 
" understanding," may know only motives which spring from the 
calculations of pleasures and pains, man as rational may hear another 
voice and respond to higher appeals. It is, in fact, in just this 
distinction that we find the difference between prudence and true 
morality. The written works of Coleridge were few and f ragmen 
tary, but his personal influence upon the literary, religious, and 
philosophical thought of his own and the succeeding period, in both 
Britain and America, has been powerful and far-reaching. 

The criticism of Carlyle was directed against " Benthamism." Its 
individualism of motive seemed to Carlyle adapted to aggravate 
rather than to heal the disease of the age. The economic develop 
ment had been steadily in the direction of greater individualism. It 
had substituted the wage-system for the older personal relation. 
What Carlyle felt to be needed was the deeper sense of social unity, 
a stronger feeling of responsibility. Now the pursuit of happiness 
is essentially an individualising force, "the man who goes about 
pothering and uproaring for his happiness, he is not the man that 
will help us to get our knaves and dastards arrested ; no, he is rather 
on the way to increase the number by at least one unit." A true 
social organisation can be secured only if the individualistic and 
commercial theory of interests is abandoned. This leads at once to 
the other point of Carlyle s attack, measurement of value in terms 
of pleasure and happiness. Instead of a " greatest happiness prin 
ciple," a " greatest nobleness principle " must be substituted. Man 
cannot be satisfied with the results of attempts to give him pleasure 
if these aim simply at pleasure. "Man s unhappiness comes of his 
greatness ; it is because there is an infinite in him which he cannot 
quite bury under the finite. The shoe-black also has a soul quite 
other than his stomach, and would require for his permanent satis 
faction and saturation God s Infinite Universe." It is to the heroes 
that we must look for our ideals of human life. It is in work rather 
than in pleasure that the end of human life is to be achieved. 

It was in the thought of John Stuart Mill that the fusion of utili 
tarian and idealistic principles found its most instructive illustration. 
The social philosophy of Comte and a personal character actuated by 
high ideals of duty and ardent for the promotion of public welfare 
conspired with the influences already named to secure this result. 
Educated by his father, James Mill, in the principles of associational 

666 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century [PART VII. 

psychology, associated with Ricardo, the representative of an indi 
vidualistic economic theory, and with Bentham, he inherited thus a 
theory of human nature and a method of analysis from which he 
never completely freed himself; but on the other hand he introdu3ed 
into the scheme a new content which led him to transcend the hedo 
nistic position. 1 First as regards the object of desire. It had been the 
position of the associationalists that the individual desires originally 
pleasure, and pleasure only. This is the only intrinsic good. It was 
held that other objects, however, might become associated with the 
individual s happiness, and thus become independent objects of 
desire. In this theory it would be the purpose of moral training so 
to associate the public good with the private good of the individual 
that he would come to desire the public welfare. Taught by his own 
experience that such external associations had no permanent motive 
power, Mill was led to reject this theory, and to state the hedonistic 
paradox that to find pleasure one must not consciously seek it. Of 
greater significance for our present purpose is Mill s theory of the 
motives to moral action. On the one hand he retains so much of 
the eighteenth centiiry atomistic view of conduct as to affirm that " the 
motive has nothing to do with the morality of the action, though 
much with the morality of the agent." He still retains the doctrine 
of the external sanctions without stating explicitly that however 
useful these may be to control the non-moral or immoral, until other 
motives get a foothold, they are not moral motives. But on the 
other hand he lays far greater stress upon the " internal " sanctions 
of duty. This feeling of duty, in turn, though strengthened by edu 
cation and association, has as its ultimate foundation the " social 
feelings of mankind." It is because man naturally " never conceives 
himself otherwise than as a member of a body " that the interest of 
the community is the interest of the individual. The principle of 
sympathy which had served alternately as a means of psychological 
analysis and as a term for the broader social impulse, was given its 
most important place as that on which rests "the possibility of any 
cultivation of goodness and nobleness and the hope of their ultimate 
entire ascendency." 

Finally, Mill transcends the hedonistic criterion of value. While 
maintaining that the mental pleasures are superior to the bodily 
pleasures on purely quantitative grounds, he asserts that, quite 
apart from questions of quantity, some kinds of pleasure are 
more desirable and valua-ble than others. The test for pleasure, 

1 In addition to the Utilitarianism, the Autobiography, the essays on Bentham 
and Coleridge and On Liberty are of special interest. 

46.] Problem of Value* : Mill, Spencer. 667 

whether we seek to measure its intensity or its quality, must in any 
case be subjective ; and the question as to which of two pleasures 
is the better must be decided by those who have had experience of 
both. Instead, therefore, of using pleasure as the standard for 
value, Mill, like Plato, would appeal to " experience and wisdom 
and reason" as judges. Instead of pleasure as standard, we have 
rather a standard for pleasure. If, then, we ask what these " com 
petent judges " will assign as the highest values, we may find differ 
ent names, such as love of liberty and love of power, etc., but the 
most " appropriate appellation is the sense of dignity." " It is 
better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied ; better 
to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." And in the fur 
ther development of this principle of valuation Mill even goes 
beyond Carlyle s position by declaring that to do without happiness 
is now done involuntarily by nirieteen-twentieths of mankind, and 
often has to be done voluntarily by the hero or the martyr, who in 
sacrificing his own happiness for that of others displays the a high 
est virtue which can be found in man." 

A similar conflict between hedonistic and other standards of value 
is evident in the ethical system of Herbert Spencer. On the one 
hand, following the tradition of a hedonistic psychology, Spencer 
maintains that life is good or bad according as it does or does not 
bring a surplus of agreeable feeling. The only alternative to this 
test is to reverse the hypothesis and suppose that pain is good and 
pleasure is bad. No other standard of value can be admitted. 
This position is fortified by the biological law that if creatures 
should find pleasure in what is hurtful, and pain in what is advan 
tageous, they would soon cease to exist. On the other hand, Spen 
cer propounds also a standard of value which does not easily 
conform to the test of pleasure and pain. According to this 
standard the highest conduct is that which conduces to " the great 
est breadth, length, and completeness of life " ; the highest stage in 
evolution is that reached when " conduct simultaneously achieves 
the greatest totality of life in self, in offspring, and in fellow-men." 
The subjective standard of pleasurable feeling and the objective 
standard of fulness of life are thus set over against each other. The 
attempt is made to bring them together by showing that the bio 
logical development has necessarily brought about a harmony 
between pleasure and progress, but on the other hand it is admitted 
that a condition of progress involves a lack of adaptation between 
the individual and the environment. It would therefore seem that, 
however well-suited pleasure might be as a test for the static indi 
vidual, it cannot be regarded as a test of value for the guidance of 

668 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

a progressive being. Hence Spencer maintains that the perfect 
application of his test supposes an ideal humanity. A consistent 
hedonism would require that the test of such an ideal humanity 
be solely the continuity and intensity of pleasurable feeling 
attained, but the numerous recognitions of more objective fac 
tors make it improbable that Spencer would regard merely sen 
tient beings deprived of all active faculties as the highest type of 
evolution. 

The employment by Spencer of the principles of evolution as 
affording a moral standard leads to an interesting complication of 
the problems considered under 45 with the problem of the indi 
vidual in relation to society. On the one hand, as already noted 
(p. 662), the social sentiments and related moral principles are 
regarded by Spencer as finding their basis in the evolutionary pro 
cess. These social qualities subserve the welfare of the family or 
species, and aid it in the struggle for existence. On the other hand, 
it is maintained that the fundamental law of progress is that " each 
individual shall take the consequences of his own nature and 
actions: survival of the fittest being the result." Among gregarious 
creatures the freedom of each to act has to be restricted by the pro 
vision that it shall not interfere with similar freedom on the part 
of others. Progress is therefore dependent upon giving the greatest 
possible scope to individual freedom. With Bentham and Mill the 
maxim " everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one " 
had represented a socialising of the criterion and ideal. In Spen 
cer s opinion this represents an undue emphasis upon equality ; 
from this to communism the step is only one from theory to prac 
tice. " Inequality is the primordial idea suggested " by evolution ; 
equality, as suggested in the need of restriction, is secondary. 
From this individualistic interpretation of evolution Spencer opposes 
not only communism in property, but the assumption by the State 
of any functions beyond that of securing "justice" to the indi 
vidual. The State should keep the individual from interfering 
with the freedom of other individuals. The State is thus essentially 
negative in its significance. Man in his corporate capacity may not 
realise a positive moral value in the pursuit of common good. But 
while agreeing thus with the views of Gundling and von Humboldt 
(cf. p. 520), Spencer insists that, in denying the possibility of reach 
ing positive values through the State, he aims to secure these values 
more efficiently by voluntary and private action. " Beneficence " 
belongs to the family virtues ; " justice " to the State. 1 

1 Cf. Ethics, Vol. II., The Man vs. the State, and Essays, Vol. III. 

46.] Problem of Values : Huxley, Green. 669 

The relation of evolutionary processes to the problem of moral 
values has been most sharply formulated by Huxley. 1 In opposi 
tion to certain philosophical writers who find in the evolutionary 
process a moral standard, Huxley points out with great vigour and 
incisiveness the distinction between the " cosmic process " and 
the " ethical process." The attempt to find in the " cosmic pro 
cess " an ethical standard is based upon the ambiguity in the 
phrase " survival of the fittest." Fittest, it is scarcely necessary to 
say, is not synonymous with ethically best. If the temperature 
of the earth should be reduced, the survival of the fittest would 
mean a return to lichens and diatoms. 

The ethical process must find its standard not in the cosmic pro 
cess, but in the moral ideals of man. Its principle is not that of 
the survival of the fittest, but that of fitting as many as possible 
to survive. The duty of man is not to conform to the cosmic pro 
cess, but to combat it. In a sense it may be admitted that the moral 
process is a part of the cosmic process, but the important point is 
that the moral process cannot take its standards from the non-moral 
parts of the cosmic process, and the theory of government which 
Spencer would derive from this is characterised by Huxley as 
"administrative nihilism." 2 

The opposition to an ethical theory based upon the conceptions of 
natural science, has received its most thorough-going expression in 
the work of T. H. Green. Previous English sympathisers with 
German idealism had for the most part appropriated results 
without attempting for themselves the " labour of the notion." 
Believing that current theories of evolution and ethics were 
repeating the fallacies of Hume in another form, Green set himself 
the task of criticising those fallacies and of re-stating the conditions 
under which any experience, and especially any moral experience, 
is possible. The central, fundamental, and determining conception 
is found in self-consciousness. Questions as to freedom, desire, and 
ideals must be stated in terms of self-consciousness, and not in 
physical concepts, if they are to be intelligible. Nor can self- 
consciousness be explained in terms of the unconscious, or as 
developing from the unconscious. It seems rather to be compre 
hensible only as the reproduction in man of an eternal conscious 
ness. This has an important bearing on the determination of the 
moral ideal. In the first place it requires that the end or ideal 
shall always be some desirable state of self. In this it seems to 

1 In his Romanes lecture, 1803. Reprinted as Evolution and Ethics, 1894. 
Cf. .1. Dewey, Evolution and Ethics, Monist, VIII. 321 ff. 

2 Critiques and Address?.*. 

670 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

approach hedonism, but whereas hedonism holds that pleasure makes 
a state or an object desirable, Green insists that the pleasure follows 
the attainment of desire, and that what a being desires is determined 
by the nature of the being. Man desires the full realisation of him 
self, and " in it alone he can satisfy himself." The good is therefore 
a personal good. It is also a common or social good. " Without 
society, no persons." While therefore it may not be possible to 
state definitely the specific characteristics of the " best state of 
man," history shows that man has bettered himself through insti 
tutions and habits which make the welfare of all the welfare of 
each, and through the arts which make nature the friend of man." 
It is in political society that self-consciousness finds fullest develop 
ment. The institutions of " civil life give reality to the capacities 
of will and reason and enable them to be really exercised." l 

The ultimate justification of all rights is that they serve a moral 
end in the sense that the powers secured in them are essential to the 
fulfilment of man s vocation as a moral being, i.e. as a being who in 
living for himself lives for other selves. With Green s definition 
may be compared Spencer s formulation of the ideal as " complete 
ness of life." It is a striking illustration of the strong relation 
which British ethical theory has always maintained to British life, 
that two thinkers from such opposite standpoints should approach 
so near in actual statement. 

2. Turning now to continental theories, we note that] the con 
ception of life which corresponds to this utilitarian social ethics is 
throughout an optimistic affirmation of the world. Life as an 
evolutionary process is the sum total of all goods, and the progress 
to the more perfect is the natural necessity of the actual world ; the 
strengthening and broadening of life is as well the moral law as the 
law of nature. This consequence has been carried out with the most 
refinement and warmth, and not without a religious turn by Guyau. 
He finds the highest meaning and enjoyment of individual existence 
in the conscious unity of life with society, and beyond this with the 
universe. 

But even without the evolutionary supplement, naturalism and 
materialism had asserted their joyous optimism and directed it 
against every kind of morals which avoids or renounces the world, 
especially against the religious forms of such ethical theories. This 
was shown already in the case of FeiterbacJi, who set for his philo 
sophical activity the task of making man a " free, self-conscious 

1 These principles are further developed by B. Bosanquet, The Philosophical 
Theory of the State, 1899. 

46.] Problem of Values : fiiihring. 671 

citizen of the earth." 1 The will is for him identical with the 
impulse to happiness, and happiness is nothing else than " life, 
normal, sound, without defect." Hence the impulse to happiness is 
the foundation of morals ; the goal, however, consists in the vital 
and active combination of the striving toward one s own happiness 
with that toward the happiness of others. In this positive action of 
willing the welfare of others lies the root of sympathy also. Virtue 
stands in contradiction with only that form of happiness which seeks 
to be happy at the expense of others. On the other hand, virtue has 
a certain degree of happiness as its indispensable presupposition, for 
the pressure of want forces the impulse to happiness irresistibly 
and one-sidedly toward the egoistic side. Just on this account 
human morality can be furthered only by the improvement of man 
kind s external situation a thought from which Feuerbach proceeds 
to very far-reaching demands. His moral sensualism is supported 
by the firm conviction that historical development lies along the 
line of his postulates, and with all his pessimistic and often bitter 
estimate of the present he combines a strongly hopeful optimism for 
the future. Man, as a bodily personality, with his sensuous feeling 
and willing, is for him the sole truth ; when set over against this 
truth all philosophic theories, echoes as they are of theological 
theories, collapse into nothing. 

Another optimistic materialist is Eugen Diihring, who has made 
a peculiar " philosophy of reality " the basis of his estimation 
of the " worth of life." The anti-religious character of this kind of 
world-affirmation appears here much more clearly than in the case of 
Feuerbach. Diihring sees in the pessimism of the 60 s and 70 s, which 
he has opposed with bitter relentlessuess, the romantic continuation 
of the attitudes of Christianity and Buddhism, which are hostile 
to the world. He regarded the "superstitious" ideas of the "other 
world," or the " beyond," as the real ground of the lack of apprecia 
tion for the actual world of reality ; only when all superstitious 
belief in supernatural beings has bsen banished will the true and 
immanent worth of life be completely enjoyed, in his opinion. True 
knowledge apprehends reality exactly as it is, just as it lies imme 
diately before human experience ; it is delusion to seek still another 
behind it. And even as with knowledge, so also with values, they 
must be found in what is given ; the only rational is reality itself. 
Already in the conceptions of infinity Diihring detects not so 
incorrectly a going beyond what is given ; for him, therefore, the 

1 Cf. particularly the fragment published by K. Griin, L. Feuerbach in 
Seinem Briefwcchsel itnd Vachlass. , II. 253 ff., in which Feuerbach declares his 
position as against Schopenhauer. 

672 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century . [PART VII. 

actual world is limited in magnitude and number. But it bears 
within itself all the conditions of self-satisfying happiness. Even 
the view that there is a lack of sufficient means of life, on which 
Darwin grounded his doctrine of the struggle for existence and his 
theory of selection, is controverted by Duhring in a most vigorous 
fashion, although he is not hostile to the theory of descent and the 
principle of evolution. On the basis of these conceptions Duhring 
seeks to refute pessimism by demonstrating that man s enjoyment 
of life is spoiled only by the bad arrangements and customs which 
owe their origin to ideas of the supernatural. It is the mission of 
the philosophy of reality alone to produce healthy life from healthy 
thought, and to create the satisfaction of a disposition based on a 
noble humanity, capacities for which have been given by nature 
herself in the sympathetic affections. Although Duhring has de 
claimed thus sharply and with irritation against the present social 
system, he has enlisted himself energetically in defence of the 
reasonableness of the actual world as a whole. As he has theoreti 
cally maintained the identity of the forms of human perception and 
thought with the laws of reality, so he has also convinced himself 
that this same reality contains all the conditions for ultimately 
realising the values presented in the rational consciousness. For 
this rational consciousness of ours is in the last analysis nothing 
more than the highest form of the life of nature. 

3. All these kinds of positivistic optimism make the most instruc 
tive variations in the Hegelian principle of the identity of the real 
and the rational (p. 615) ; all of them show besides a trace of that 
faith in the goodness of nature which was characteristic of Rousseau, 
and in their hope for a better future of the human race they incline 
to give an evolutionary stamp to the thought of man s unlimited 
capacity for perfection, which the philosophy of the French Revolu 
tion had produced (cf. p. 525). All the more characteristic is it 
that the last factor has given an essentially altered form to the 
opposite conception, viz. pessimism. 

In themselves optimism and pessimism, as answers to the hedonic 
question, whether the world contains more pleasure or pain, are 
equally pathological phenomena. This is true especially in the form 
in which these enter as factors into general literature. For science 
this question is as unnecessary as it is incapable of answer. The 
controversy gains philosophic significance only because it is brought 
into connection with the question as to the rationality or irrationality 
of the world-ground, as it had already been brought by Leibniz along 
one line and by Schopenhauer along another. But in both cases it 
was completely impossible to make the hedonistic origin of the 

46.] Problem of Values : Hartmann. 673 

problem disappear by the metaphysical transformation which was 
given to it. 

The pessimistic temper which prevailed in Germany in the first 
decade of the second half of our century had its easily recognisable 
grounds in political and social relations, and the eager reception and 
welcome of Schopenhauer s doctrines, supported by the brilliant 
qualities of the writer, are usually regarded as easily intelligible for 
that reason. It is more remarkable and serious that this temper has 
outlasted the year 1870, and indeed that precisely in the following 
decade it unburdened itself in an unlimited flood of tirades of a 
popular philosophical sort, and for a time has completely controlled 
general literature. Considered from the standpoint of the history of 
civilisation, this fact will be regarded as a manifestation of relaxation 
and surfeit; the part which the history of philosophy has in the 
movement is connected with the brilliant and misleading "Philos 
ophy of the Unconscious." Edward von Hartmann found a witty 
synthesis between Leibniz and Schopenhauer on the basis of his 
metaphysics, which regarded the world-ground as a complex resultant 
of the irrational will and of the " logical element" (cf. 44, 9). This 
synthesis was that this world is indeed the best of all possible 
worlds, but nevertheless that it is still so bad that it would have 
been better if there had been none at all. The mixture of teleologi- 
cal and dysteleological views of nature which had passed by inheri 
tance from Schelling to Schopenhauer (pp. 618 ff.) appears here with 
Hartmann in grotesque and fanciful development; and the contra 
diction is to be solved by the theory that after the irrational will 
has once taken its false step of manifesting itself as life and actual 
existence, this life-process goes on in a progressive development 
whose ripest meaning is the insight into the unreason of the " will to 
live." The rational element in this life-process will then consist in 
denying that unreason, in retracing the act of world-origination, and 
in redeeming the will from its own unhappy realisation. 

On this account Hartmann found the essential nature of the 
" rational " consciousness to lie in seeing through the " illusions " 
with which the irrational pressure of the will produces just what 
must make it unhappy, and out of this relation he developed the 
ethical task that each one should co-operate to save the world-will 
by the denial of illusions. He developed also the thought of funda 
mental importance for the philosophy of history that all work of 
civilisation should be directed toward this goal of salvation. The 
development of the irrational will ought to have the annihilation of 
this will as its rational goal ; hence Hartmann approves all work of 
civilisation because its ultimate end is the annihilation of life and 

674 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

the redemption of the will from the unhappiness of existence. In 
this respect he comes into contact with Mainlander, who with him 
and after him worked out Schopenhauer s theory to an ascetic " Phi 
losophy of Salvation " ; but with Hartmann these thoughts take on 
the colouring of an evolutionary optimism which shows a much 
deeper intelligence for the earnestness and wealth of historic 
development than we find with Schopenhauer. And as von Hart 
mann has anonymously given the best criticism of his " Philosophy 
of the Unconscious," from the standpoint of the theory of descent, 
so in his own development the shell of pessimism has been gradually 
stripped off and the positive principle of evolution ha ! s emerged as 
the essential thing. In him, too, Hegel has triumphed over Schopen 
hauer. 

4. All these theories of life, whose typical extremes were here set 
over against each other, vary indeed with regard to their recognition 
and gradation of individual values and goals, but they coincide in 
recognising on the whole the prevailing moral code, and in particular 
the altruism which is its chief constituent. Their differences con 
cern rather the general formulation, or the sanction, or the motive 
of morality, than morality itself. Even the more radical tendencies 
seek only to free human ethics from the perversions which it is said 
to have experienced in certain historical systems, or in their sur 
vivals and their after effects ; and through all the doctrines already 
mentioned goes a strongly democratic tendency which sets the weal 
of the whole above everything else, and estimates the worth of the 
individual much lower than was the case in the great period of Ger 
man philosophy. A tendency to hero-worship, like that of Carlyle 
(cf. p. 654), is quite isolated in our century; far more prevalent is 
the theory of the milieu or environment which Taine brought into 
circulation for the history of the mind, and which is inclined to 
minimise the part which the individual bears in the historical move 
ment as contrasted with the influence of masses. 

We cannot fail to recognise that such theories correspond com 
pletely to certain political, social, literary, and artistic conditions 
and obvious manifestations of modern life; hence it is easier to 
understand why, here and there, the reaction of individualism in 
an especially passionate form has made its appearance. We must 
insist, in the first place, that over against that type of assiduous 
striving which permits itself to be driven by every tide of influence, 
the individualistic idea of culture which belongs to that great period, 
now somewhat depreciatingly denoted Romanticism, has in no wise 
so completely died out as is supposed. It lives on in many highly 
developed personalities who do not find it necessary to make a dis- 

46.] Problem of Values : Stirner, Bahmen. 675 

play with it in literature ; for the theory of this ideal has been 
expressed by Fichte, Schiller, and Schleiermacher. And just for 
this reason it does not make common cause with the artificial para 
doxes which radical individualism loves to present on occasion. 

The most robust example of such paradoxes came from the He 
gelian " left," in the fantastic book of M. Stirner (Kaspar Schmidt, 
1806-1856), The Individual and Jus Property 1 (1844). Stirner is re 
lated to Feuerbach as Feuerbach is to Hegel : he draws the conclu 
sion which would completely invert the premises. Feuerbach had 
looked upon " spirit " or the " idea " as the " other-being of Na 
ture," and as abstract and unreal as the theological ghost. He had 
declared the only reality to be man, living man of flesh and blood ; 
but his ethics aimed toward humanity, active love to humanity. 
What is mankind? asks Stirner. A general idea, an abstraction 
a last shadow of the old ghost which is still walking, even in Feuer- 
bach s system. The true concrete reality is the individual the 
autocratic personality. Such a personality makes its world both in 
its acts of ideation and in its acts of will; therefore its ownership 
extends as far as its will extends. It recognises nothing above 
itself; it knows no other weal than its own, and serves no alien law 
or alien will. For in truth there is nothing for it except itself. 
Thus by reversing Fichte s doctrine of the " universal ego," Stirner 
attains to " egoism " in both the theoretical and the practical sense 
of the word. Pie plays the "solipsist" 2 and preaches unscrupulous 
self-seeking, Ich hab mein Sack auf nichts gestettt* All this 
sounded like an artificial cynicism, and it was a matter of doubt 
whether the book was intended to be taken seriously. At all events 
it soon lost the interest which it momentarily excited, and fell 
into an oblivion from which it has only recently been rescued. But 
when, as now, there is a disposition to see in it a first cry of distress 
from the individual repressed by the mass, it ought not to be ignored 
that the " individual " who was here seeking to emancipate himself 
from the community did not give any indication of a peculiar value 
which would have justified him in any such emancipation. His sole 
originality consisted in the courage of paradox. 

5. Another bizarre form of individualism was developed from 
Schopenhauer s metaphysics of the will, by Julius Bahnsen. Here 
the " unreason " of the will is taken with complete seriousness, but 
the pantheistic aspect of the " one only will " is stripped away. 

1 Der Einzigeund ttein Eigenthum. 

2 Cf. above, p. 471. 8 I care for nothing. 

4 Beitriiye zur Charakterologie (1867); Der Widerspruch im Wissen und 
Wesen der Welt (1881-1882). 

676 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

We know only individuals who will, and Bahnsen sees in them the 
independent elementary potencies of reality, beyond which no higher 
principle is to be assumed. The separate and self-sufficient exist 
ence of finite personalities, which Bahnsen also calls " Henads," has 
never been so sharply formulated as in this atheistic atomism of the 
will. Each of these " wills " is, moreover, divided within itself into 
two, and in this consists its unreason and its unhappiness. This 
contradiction belongs to the essence of the will ; the will is the " as 
serted contradiction," and this is the true dialectic, " the real dialec 
tic." This contradiction, however, cannot be grasped by logical 
thinking ; hence all the effort which the will makes to know the 
world is in vain. Logical thinking which excludes contradiction is 
incapable of understanding a world which consists of intrinsically 
contradictory wills. The contradiction between the world and the 
intellect makes impossible even the partial salvation which Schopen 
hauer admitted, 1 and the indestructible individual will must there 
fore endure forever the suffering of self-laceration in ever new 
existences. At so high a price is the metaphysical dignity pur 
chased, which personality here receives as its "intelligible charac 
ter." The living out of this "intelligible character," purposeless 
and futile as it really is, forms the principle of all values. 

Since the theory of knowledge involved in this " real dialectic " 
maintains that logical thinking and reality with its contradictions 
have no common measure, the fantasies of this " miserableism " make 
no claim to scientific validity ; they are only the expression of the 
gloomy mood of the individual who is caught in the conflict of his 
own will. They form the melancholy counterpart to the pert frivol 
ity of Stirner s individual. Both show what result may be expected 
if " philosophy " takes moods which constitute the peculiar nature 
of pessimism and optimism as a basis for serious conclusions. 

This is still more recognisable in the case of the great influence 
which has been exercised in the last decade upon the view of life 
and its literary expression by the poet, Friedrich Nietzsche. Many 
factors combine to form this influence : the fascinating beauty of 
language which ensnares and intoxicates even where the content 
passes over into enigmatic suggestions; a mysterious symbolism 
which, in " Thus spake Zarathustra," permits the author to revel in 
obscurity and indefiniteness ; the aphoristic form of expression 
which never requires the reader to think coherently in scientific 
terms, but rather leaves him to determine for himself how much 
stimulus and suggestion he will utilise, and thus decide the degree 

1 Cf. p. 621. 

46.] Problem of Values : Nietzsche. 677 

in which he will expect himself to enjoy the surprising hits, the brill 
iant formulations, the happy comparisons, and paradoxical combi 
nations. But all these elements are unimportant in comparison with 
the immediate impression of the personality of the writer. We meet 
an individual of the highest culture, and of a thoroughly original 
stamp, who experiences all the tendencies of the time, and suffers 
from the same unsolved contradictions by which the time itself is 
out of joint. Hence the echo which his language has found ; 
hence the danger of his influence, which does not heal the sickness 
of his age, but increases it. 

The two factors of the inner antagonism of his own nature 
Nietzsche himself has called the " Dionysus " and the " Apollo." 
It is the antithesis between voluntarism and intellectualism, be 
tween Schopenhauer s will and Hegel s idea. It appears here in 
an individual of the highest intellectual culture and aesthetic pro 
ductiveness, who is able to apprehend history and life with the 
greatest delicacy and to reproduce them poetically with equal fine 
ness of feeling. But science and art have not saved this individual 
from the dark " will to live " ; deep within stirs a passionate, com 
pelling impulse toward wild deeds, toward the achieving and unfold 
ing of power. His is the case of a nervous professor who would 
fain be a wild tyrant, and who is tossed back and forth between the 
quiet enjoyment of the goods of the highest culture on the one hand, 
and that mysterious, burning demand for a life of passion on the 
other. Now he luxuriates in serene blessedness of aesthetic contem 
plation and artistic production ; now he casts all this aside and 
asserts his impulses, his instincts, his passions. Sensual enjoyment, 
as such, has never been a value for him this is shown in the 
height and purity of his nature. The enjoyment which he seeks is 
either that of knowing or that of power. In the struggle between 
the two he has been crushed the victim of an age which is satisfied 
no longer by the impersonal and superpersonal values of intellec 
tual, aesthetic, and moral culture, but thirsts again for the bound 
less unfolding of the individual in a life of deeds. Caught in the 
struggle between its reason inherited from the past and its passion 
thirsting for the future, it and all of value that it possesses are torn 
and ground. The artistic expression of a nature thus rent and torn 
is the charm of Nietzsche s writings. 

In his first period, which contains the following in germ, the 
conflict between the two motive forces has not yet come to open 
outbreak ; rather we find him applying Schopenhauer s fundamental 
thoughts to the origin of Greek tragedy and to Richard Wagner s 
musical drama, and thus presenting art as the source of salva- 

678 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VII. 

tion from the torture of the will. But even at that time it was his 
thought that out of this tragic temper a new, a higher culture 
should be brought forth ; a prouder race should emerge, of bold and 
splendidly audacious will which would victoriously burst the bonds 
of the present intellectual and spiritual life, and even at that period 
this bent toward originality and independence threw overboard the 
ballast of the historic period. No condition and no authority is to 
repress this artistic civilisation ; aesthetic freedom is to be cramped 
neither by knowledge nor by life. 

It is not difficult to understand that when these thoughts began to 
clarify themselves the philosophic poet followed for a time along 
the path of intellectualism. Science is the free spirit which casts 
off all fetters and recognises nothing above itself; but she is such 
only when she makes the " real " man free, placing him on his own 
feet, independent of everything that is above the senses or apart 
from the senses. This science which Nietzsche would now make 
the bearer of the essence of culture is positive science, no meta 
physics, not even the metaphysics of the will ; hence he dedicates 
his book "for free spirits 1 to the memory of Voltaire, and while 
he had earlier turned Wagner from Feuerbach to Schopenhauer, 
now he himself goes the reverse way. He comes into agreement 
with the utilitarian ethics of Paul Ree; he believes in the possi 
bility of the purely scientific culture. He even goes so far as to 
see in knowledge the highest and best aim of life. Knowledge is 
for him the true joy, and the whole freshness of delight in the joys 
of the world and of life which is found in Ouapta (contemplation) 
an enjoyment of the present actual world which is at once aesthetic 
and theoretical is the fundamental note of this period, the most 
fortunate period which was granted to him. 

Then the Dionysus element of passion came to expression as an 
uncontrollable longing for strong, masterful, unsympathetic living 
out of personality, which throws down all that would stand in its 
path. The strongest impulse of man is the will for power. It is for 
him to assert this. But this unconditional assertion bursts the 
system of values in which -our civilisation, up to this time, has 
enmeshed itself ; the new ideal is in this sense " beyond good and 
bad." l The will for power knows no bonds which prescribe what is 
" permitted " ; for it, everything is good which springs from power 
and increases power; everything is bad which springs from weak 
ness and weakens power. So also in our judgments, in knowledge 

1 Jenspits von Gut und Bose, the title of one of Nietzsche s books, translated 
by A. Tille. 

46.] Problem of Values : Nietzsche. 679 

and in conviction, the important thing is not whether they are 
" true," but whether they help us, whether they further our life and 
strengthen our mind. They have worth only if they make us strong. 
Hence, conviction also may and must change as life unfolds its 
changes (as was the case in part with Nietzsche himself). Man 
chooses what he needs ; the value of knowing also lies beyond true 
and false. Here begins, therefore, the overturning and re- valuation 
of all values (Umwerthung aller Werthe). Here the philosopher be 
comes a reformer of morals, the legislator the creator of a new civili 
sation. In the third period of his development Nietzsche was full 
of the consciousness of this task. 

From this standpoint he sets up the ideal of the over-man (Ueber- 
mensch) in contrast with the ordinary, everyday man of the com 
mon herd. Will for power is will for mastery, and the most 
important mastery is that of man over man. Hegel once said that 
of all great things which the world s history shows, the greatest is 
the mastery of one free will over others. It recalls this saying 
when Nietzsche develops his new idea of civilisation from the 
antithesis between the " morals of masters " and " morals of slaves." 
All the brutality of trampling down those who may be in the way, 
all the unfettering of the primitive beast in human nature, appear 
here as the right and duty of the strong. The strong man unfolds 
and defends the energy of living as against the scantiness and 
meagreness of renunciation and humility. The morality of slaves, 
therefore, coincides essentially with the ascetic nature of the super- 
naturalism which Nietzsche had formerly combated, and the positive 
connection of the transition period with his third period consists in 
the "joyous" assertion of a world-conquering thirst for living. 

Nevertheless the ideal for the "over-man" remains veiled in 
poetic dimness and indetiniteness. According to the original ten 
dency, the over-man is the great individuality which asserts its 
primitive rights over against the mass. The common herd of the 
" far too many " (Viel-zu-Viele) exists only to the end that out of it as 
rare instances of fortune may rise the over-men. These, from century 
to century, recognize each other as bearers of all the meaning and 
worth that is to be found in all this confused driving of disordered 
forces. The genius is the end and aim of history, and it is in this 
that his right of mastery as over against the Philistine has its root. 
But according to another tendency the over-man appears as a higher 
type of the human race, who is to be bred and trained as the 
strong race which enjoys its strength of mastery in the powerful 
unfolding of life, free from the restraints and self-disturbing ten 
dencies of the slavish morality. In both cases Nietzsche s ideal of 

680 Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. [PART VIL 

the over-man is alike aristocratic and exclusive, and it is a sharp 
penalty for the poetic indefiniteness and symbolic ambiguity of his 
aphorisms that his combating of " slavish morality " and of its 
supernatural foundations has made him popular with just the very 
ones who would be the first to strike from the over-man the head by 
which he towers above the common herd of the " too many." 

Between the two lines along which the ideal of the over-man 
develops, the author has not come to a clear decision. Zarathustra 
mingles them together, with wavering lines of transition. It is clear 
that the one form is an echo of the romantic ideal of the genius as 
the other borrows from sociological evolution. But the thought 
of an elevation of the human type through the agency of philosophy 
reminds us of the postulates of German idealism. 

The remark is quite just that from this conception of the doctrine 
of the over-man the step to Fichte would not have been a long one. 
That Nietzsche could not take it was due to the fact that he had in 
his nature too much of Schlegel s " genius," which treats all expe 
riences from the standpoint of irony (p. 605). This made him unable 
to find his way back from the individual mind to the " universal 
ego " to the conception of values which assert their validity over 
all. 

7. The revolt of boundless individualism culminates in the claim 
that all values are relative. Only the powerful will of the over-man 
persists as the absolute value, and sanctions every means which it 
brings into service. For the " higher " man there is no longer any 
form or standard, either logical or ethical. The arbitrary will of the 
over-man has superseded the "autonomy of reason" this is the 
course from Kant to Nietzsche which the nineteenth century has 
described. 

Just this determines the problem of the future. Relativism is 
the dismissal and death of philosophy. Philosophy can live only as 
the science of values which are universally valid. It will no longer 
force its way into the work of the particular sciences, where 
psychology also now belongs. Philosophy has neither the craving 
to know over again from her standpoint what the special sciences 
have already known from theirs, nor the desire to compile and 
patch together generalisations from the "more general results" 
of the separate disciplines. Philosophy has its own field and 
its own problem in those values of universal validity which are 
the organising principle for all the functions of culture and civili 
sation and for all the particular values of life. But it will de 
scribe and explain these values only that it may give an account 
of their validity ; it treats them not as facts but as norms. Hence 

46.] The Problem of Values. 681 

it will have to develop its task as a "giving of laws " not laws of 
arbitrary caprice which it dictates, but rather laws of the reason, 
which it discovers and comprehends. By following the path toward 
this goal it seems to be the aim of the present movement, divided 
within itself as it often is, to win back the important conquests of 
the great period of German philosophy. Since Lotze raised the con 
ception of value to a place of prominence, and set it at the summit of 
logic and metaphysics as well as of ethics, many suggestions toward 
a "theory of values," as a new foundation science in philosophy, have 
arisen. It can do no harm if these move in part in the psychologi 
cal and sociological realm, provided it is not forgotten that in estab 
lishing facts and making genetic explanations we have only gained 
the material upon which philosophy itself must perform its task of 
criticism. 

But a no less valuable foundation for this central work is formed 
by the history of philosophy, which, as Hegel first recognised, must 
be regarded in this sense as an integrant part of philosophy itself. 
For it presents the process in which European humanity has 
embodied in scientific conceptions its view of the world and judg 
ment of human life. 

In this process particular experiences have furnished the occasions, 
and special problems of knowledge have been the instrumentalities, 
through which step by step reflection has advanced to greater clear 
ness and certainty respecting the ultimate values of culture and 
civilisation. In setting forth this process, therefore, the history of 
philosophy presents to our view the gradual attainment of clearness 
and certainty respecting those values whose universal validity forms 
the problem and field of philosophy itself. 

APPENDIX. 

P. 12. Line 15. Add : 

On the pragmatic factor, cf. C. Herrmann, Der pragmat ische Zusammenhang 
in der Geschichte der Philosophie (Dresden, 1803). 

P. 12. Line 10 from foot of the text. Add as foot-note, affixed 
to the word " positive " : 

A similar, but quite mistaken attempt has been recently made in this direc 
tion by Fr. Brentano, Die rier Phasen in der Philosophic and ilir gegenw&rtiger 
Stand (Vienna, 1895). Here belong also the analogies, always more or less 
artificial, which have been attempted between the course of development in the 
ancient and that in the modern philosophy. Cf. e.g. v. Reichlin-Meldegg, Der 
Parallelismus der alien nnd neueren Philosophie (Leips. and Heidelb. 1805). 

P. 16. Line 6 from foot of text, add : 

In all previous expositions of the history of philosophy, whether upon a larger 
or smaller scale, a chronological arrangement has been adopted, follow ing the 
order and succession of the more important philosophies and schools. These 
various arrangements have differed only in details, and these not always impor 
tant. Among the most recent might be named in addition, that of J. Bergmann, 
whose treatment shows taste and insight (2 vols., Berlin, 1892). A treatment 
marked by originality and fineness of thought, in which the usual scheme has 
been happily broken through by emphasis upon the great movements and inter 
relations of the world s history, is presented by R. Eucken, Die Lebensanschau- 
ungen der grossen Denker (2d ed., Leips. 1898). 

P. 23. To the foot-note, add : 

Windischmann, earlier (Die Philosophie im Fortgang der Weltgeschichte, 
Bonn, 1827-1834), and recently P. Deussen (Allgemeine Geschichte der Philoso 
phie, I. 1, Leips. 1894) have made a beginning toward the work of relating this 
Oriental thought to the whole history of philosophy. 

P. 24. Line 8. Affix as foot-note: 

K. Kohde has set forth with great insight and discrimination the rich sugges. 
tions for philosophy in the following period, which grew out of the transforma 
tions of the religious ideas (Psyche, 2d ed., 1897). 

P. 27. To the lit. on the Period, add : 

A. Fairbanks, The First Philosophers of Greece, N.Y. 1898. 

P. 30. Line 30. To the notice of Heraclitus, add : 

Ht&gt; was apparently the first who. from the standpoint of scientific insight, 
undertook to reform" the public life and combat the dangers of anarchy. Him 
self an austere and rigorous personality, he preached the law of order, which 
ought to prevail in human life as in nature. 

684 Appendix. 

P. 30. Line 19 from the foot. To the notice of Anaxagoras, add : 

His scientific employments were essentially astronomical in their nature. 
Neglecting earthly interests, he is said to have declared the heavens to be his 
fatherland, and the observation of the stars to be his life work. Metrodorus and 
Archelaus are named as his disciples. 

P. 42. Foot-note 1. Relating to the vovs of Anaxagoras, add : 
Cf., however, M. Heinze in the Ber. d. Sachs. Ges. d. Wiss., 1890. 

P. 46. Last line of text. To the word " curved," affix as foot 
note : 

The tradition (Arist., loc. cit.} shows this collocation ; whereas, from the 
cosmology of the Pythagoreans and likewise from that of Plato and Aristotle, we 
should expect the reverse order. 

P. 55. To the notice of Diogenes of Apollonia, add : 

He was the most important of the eclectics of the fifth century. So little is 
known as to his life that it is even doubtful whether Apollonia was his home. 
Of his writings, even Sirnplicius had only the irtpi &lt;/&gt;tf&lt;rews before him (Phys., 
32 V. 151, 24 D). 

P. 62. Add to foot-note 1 : 

because in this phase of Greek thought they run along as yet unrelated lines of 
thought, side by side with the theories of natural science. Only the Pythago 
reans seem as yet to have begun the combination between theology and phi 
losophy, which later became through Plato a controlling influence. 

P. 68. Prefix to par. 4, which begins with " But while," the 
following sentence : 

A preparation for this transition was made by the circumstance 
that even in the investigation of nature, interest in fundamental 
principles had grown weaker after the first creative development, 
and science had begun to scatter her labours over special fields. 

P. 71. To the personal notice of Socrates, add : 

He considered this enlightenment of himself and fellow-citizens a divine voca 
tion (Plato s Apology), giving this work precedence even over his care of his 
family (Xanthippe). He gathered about him the noblest youth of Athens, such 
as Alcibiades, who honoured in him the ideal and the teacher of virtue. He 
appeared thus as leader of an intellectual aristocracy, and just by this means 
came into opposition to the dominant democracy. [K. Joel. Der echte u. d. 
Xvnophontische Sokrates, Vol. I., Berlin, 1893. Vol. II. in 2 pts., 1901. Kralik, 
Sokrate.s, 1899.] 

P. 96. Line 23. Insert after Plato : 

And of their materialism which he so vigorously opposed. 

P. 102. At close of par. 4, insert : 

This personal influence he himself regarded as the most important part of his 
activity. For scientific investigation was only one side of his rich nature. The 
demand for ethical teaching and for political and social efficiency had a still 
stronger life within him. He had an open vision for the evils of his time. He 
united an adherence to the aristocratic party with an activity in the direction 
indicated by Socrates, and never quite gave up the hope of reforming the life of 
his time through his science. To this was added as a third element in his per 
sonality that pre-eminent artistic disposition which could clothe his ideals with 
poetic exposition in the most splendid language. 

Appendix. 685 

P. 103. To references on Plato, add : 

P. Lutowslawski, Origin and Growth of Plato s Logic (1897). 
[R. L. Nettleship, rhilos. Lectures, ed. by Bradley and Benson, 1897. W. 
Windelband, Plato, Stuttgart, 1900.] 

P. 104. After first par., insert : 

In comparison with the high flight of Plato, the personality and life-work of 
Aristotle appear throughout of cooler and soberer type. But if he lacks the 
impulse toward an active influence in public life, and also the poetic charm of 
diction and composition, he has, instead, all the more effective a substitute in 
the power of thought with which he surveys and masters his field, in the clarity 
and purity of his scientific temper, in the certainty and power with which he 
disposes and moulds the results gathered from the intellectual labours of many 
contributors. Aristotle is an incarnation of the spirit of science such as the 
world has never seen again, and in this direction his incomparable influence has 
lain. He will always remain the leading thinker in the realm of investigation 
which seeks to comprehend reality with keen look, unbiassed by any interest 
derived from feeling. 

P. 104. Line 10. After " knowledge," insert : 

The recently discovered main fragment of his \\o\treia. rwv Kdyvaluv is a valu 
able example of the completeness of this part, also, of his literary work. In the 
main only his scientific, etc. 

P. 104. [Especially valuable in the recent literature upon Aristotle are : H. 
Meier, Die Syllogistik den Aristoteles. Vol. I., 1896, Vol. II. in 2 pte., 1!K)0 ; G. 
liodier, Aristote, Traite de VAme, trad, ft annotee. 2 vols., Paris, 1900. Cf. also 
W. A. Hammond, ASs Psychology: The De Anima and Parva Nat., tr. with 
Int. and Notes, Lond. and N.Y. 1901 ; H. Siebeck, A., Stuttgart, 1899.] 

P. 112. As note to close of first par., attached to words " in the 
middle " : 

Cf., however, on this, A. Goedeke-Meyer, Die Naturphilosophie Epikur s in 
ihrem Verhaltniss zu Demokrit, Strassburg, 1897. 

P. 119. Line 17. After " back," insert : 

according to the general laws of association and reproduction 
(Phaedo, 72 ff.). 

P. 123. Insert after the first par. under 6, the following par. : 
This completely new attempt on Plato s part was supported by the 
theological doctrines which he was able to take from the Mysteries of 
Dionysus. Here the individual soul was regarded as a " daimon " or 
spirit which had journeyed or been banished from another world into 
the body, and during its earthly life maintained mysterious emo 
tional relations to its original home. Such theological ideas were 
brought by the philosopher into his scientific system, not without 
serious difficulties. 

P. 135. Note attached to the word "not" in line 11 (from 
foot) : 

For Aristotle means nothing else, even where, as is frequently the case in the 
Analytics, he expresses the relation by saying that the question is whether the 
one concept is affirmed or predicated (Kar-qyopciv ) of the other. 

686 

A f_-. 

P. 142. After the first sentence in the 

" The subordination of the single thing under the general oamaeftt 
is for him too, not an arbitrary act oi the intellect in its k off 
comparison; it is an act of knowledge which takes us into the 
nature oi things and reproduces the actual relations which obtain 
there," 

P. 148. Line 3. After ~ world," insert : 

Every element has thus its - natural ~ motion in a certain direc 
tion and its ~ natural ~ place in the universe. Only by collision with 
others (ftia.) is it turned aside or crowded out. 

P. 162. Before second par., insert : 

* ID the history of the Stoa we have to distimruish an older period which was 
predominantly ethical, a middle period which was eclectic, and a later period 
which was rdipons," 

P. 162. To references on Stoicism, add : 
A. SchmekeL Dit mittlfTf St.a (Berlin. 18ft2\ 

P. 162. Line 6 from foot. To references on Lucretius, add : 

R. Hemze s Com, on 3d Book (Leips. 1ST"), 

P. 163. Line 20. Add : 

Cf. E. Pappenheim (Berlin. 1?74 L. Leips. 1877 and 1881). 

P. 163. To references on Scepticism, add : 

V. Brochard, Zx* Srxyitiquef Great (Paris. 1887 &gt;. [M. M. Patrick, Sextue 
Einpiriruf and Greet Srf.fiUcism (contains trans, of the " I v yrrhonic Sketches." 
Camb. and Lond, 1899).] 

P. 163. Line 35. After ~ principle," insert : 

Cicero stands nearest to the position of Probabiiism 
Academy. See below. 17. 7. 

ky Ike 

P. 163. To the material 

A popular moral eclectic!* 
whr&gt; were more or less . - 

e 14. add : 

nSsiSS 

iTele* (cL 

dw 

-- 

.: rl 

--- 

me S. Add to HIM p 

..- f : - : - - 
,- -.:.- .&gt;::.: ..- 

life 

_ .. . - 

ppc- 

p. 67. note L 

P. 

lite- Older Aead-emj -- 
. lad bercn to 
forms &gt;cL LL 5t. Tbe camii 

X en* 4. add : 

- - - 

i__ . :. _i 

: .: 

. . - 

:- .: L - _ 

H.T. AT 
P.2IL 

. - 

---:.-- : 

P. 217. Lo*3L A 

:- .:- 

= : 

688 Appendix. 

P. 217. Line 20 from foot. To the notice of Tertullian, add : 

He was a partisan whose hot-headed fanaticism did not shrink from any para 
doxical consequence. 

P. 217. Line 3 from foot. To the notice of Clement, add : 

With iron will and tireless activity he united the peaceful and conciliatory 
spirit of scientific culture, with which he sought to exercise an influence in the 
passionate ecclesiastical controversies of his time. 

P. 218. Line 15. To the notice of Plotinus, add : 

A fine, noble nature, in whom the deep inwardising and spiritualising of life, 
which was the most valuable result of ancient civilisation, found its best embodi 
ment. 

P. 218. Line 29. Add: 

Porphyry s EtVcryo^T? ei s friis KaTyyoplas was usually known in the Middle Ages 
by the title de quinque vocibus. 

P. 224. Line 3. Add a foot-note : 

Similarly in the Epistle to the Hebrews, the relation of Jesus to the angels 
is set forth in the manner in which it is presented by Philo. 

P. 234. Line 3 from foot of text, add : 

This transition is also connected with the fact that in the Chris 
tian view the activity of consciousness just described was considered 
less from the theoretical than from the practical standpoint. The 
freedom of the will is here the central conception. The Oriental 
Church fathers in part stood nearer the intellectualisrn of the Hel 
lenistic philosophy, or at least made concessions to it ; on the other 
hand, among the western teachers of the Church who were in closer 
touch with Rome the will was most strongly emphasised in both 
psychology and theology. Among the latter the tendency is domi 
nant to regard the spiritual or immaterial principle as passive and 
determined by its object in so far as it is knowledge, but as active 
and determining in so far as it is will. 

P. 238. After line 6, insert the following paragraph : 
In this connection the conception of the infinite underwent a 
transformation which gave it a radically different value (cf. Jon. 
Cohn, Geschichte des Unendlichkeitsproblems, Leips. 1896). The mind 
of the Greeks, directed as it was upon measure and definite limita 
tion, had originally looked upon the infinite as the incomplete and 
imperfect ; it was only with reluctance that when considering the 
infinitude of space and time metaphysics had allowed itself to 
ascribe to the infinite a second subordinate kind of reality, as was 
done by the Pythagoreans, the Atomists, and Plato aside from 
the isolated case of Anaximander, whose influence lay in another 
direction. Now, infinitude had become the only predicate which 

Appendix. 689 

could be ascribed to the highest reality or to the deity, as over 
against the finite things of the world. Even the " negative " theology 
could permit this expression. The name "infinite" must be applied 
to the divine power which in the Stoic and Neo-Pythagorean phi 
losophy of nature was regarded as the essence pervading and 
informing the world with its workings ; to the One from which 
Neo-Platonism regarded worthy of the world s forms as flowing 
forth; to the creative divine will which, according to Christian 
teaching, had called forth the world from nothing, and thus shown 
its freedom from all limitation ; and finally to this supreme person 
ality himself in contrast with finite persons. Thus through this 
final development of ancient philosophy the conception of the in 
finite became the constituent mark of the highest metaphysical 
reality ; it belongs not only to the universe as extended in space, 
but also to the inmost essence of things, and, above all, to the deity. 
This latter fusion became so fixed and sure that to-day it appears 
entirely a matter of course in the sphere of thought, as well as in 
that of feeling, to conceive of the supreme being as the Infinite, in 
contrast with all finite things and relations. 

P. 256. Line 11. To the phrase "drama of universal history" 
affix the following foot-note : 

This expression has in this connection, as we see, a broader meaning, and 
one which conforms much more to the meaning of the words, than in its ordi 
nary use. 

P. 263. To the literature of the period, add : 

B. Haure"au, Notices et Extraits de quelques Manuscripts de la Bibliotheque 
National?. 6 vols., Paris, 181)0-189:5; H. Denifle and E. Chatelain, Chartula- 
rium Univerxitatis Parisifnsis. 2 vols, Paris, 1890-1894 ; H. Denifle and Fr. 
Khrle, Arch. f. Litt. u. Kirch. Gesch. d. Mittelalters, 1885 ff. 

P. 273. Line 13. To the notice of Augustine, add : 

His youth was in part wild and irregular. His father, Patricius, belonged to 
the old religion ; his mother, Monica, to Christianity. To a deeply passionate 
nature he joined not only dialectical skill and keen intelligence, but also phil 
osophical subtlety and a wide intellectual and spiritual vision, which was 
narrowed only at the last by ecclesiastical partisanship. He was made bishop 
391. 

P. 274. Line 19. 

" Eriugena" is given as first form of the name, with u Erigena" and " Jeru- 
gena" as variants. 

P. 274. Line 17, from foot, add : 

Recently his authorship has been doubted and the work assigned to a Bern- 
hard Silvestris (also Bernhard of Tours). 

P. 274. Line 14, from foot, add : 

Cf. A. Clerval, Les coles de Chartres au Moyen-Qge (Chartres, 1895). 

690 Appendix. 

P. 275. Line 5. To the notice of Abelard, add : 

The dialectical virtuosoship to which he owed his success and his fame de 
ceived both him and his time as to the slightness of his knowledge. On the 
other hand, the freer and bolder convictions which he had gained in the ethical 
and religious field by the keenness of his intellect could not overcome the coun 
ter-tendency of his age, because they did not find sufficient support in his vain 
and weak personality. In addition to the ed. in two vols. of his work, Cousin 
has edited also Ouvrages inedits (Paris, 1836). Cf. S. M. Deutsch, P. A. ein 
kritisrher Theolog. des 12 Jahrhunderts (Leips. 1883); A. Hausrath, Peter 
Abdlard (Leips. 1893). 

P. 313. Line 25. To the lit. on the Amalricans, add : 

Cf. the Treatise against the Amalric.ans, ed. by Cl. Baumker (Jahrb.f. Philos. 
u. spec. Theol., VII., Paderborn, 1893). 

P. 313. Line 15 from foot. To the lit. on Albert, add: 

V. Hertling, A. M. Beitrdge zu seiner Wiirdigung (Coin, 1880). 

P. 316. To the general lit. add : 

[T. J. de Boer, Gesch. d. Philos. in Islam (Stuttgart, 1901).] 

P. 317. Add to third par. : 

Cf. T. de Boer, Die Widerspruche d. Philosophic nach Algazalli und ihr Aus- 
gleich durch Ibn Eoschd (Strassburg, 1894). 

P. 320. Line 11, add : 

But the " natural " man finds that even among a highly developed 
people the pure teaching of the natural religion meets in most cases 
only misunderstanding and disfavour. He turns back to his isola 
tion with the one friend whom he has gained (cf. Pocock s ed. 
pp. 192 ff.). 

P. 330. Line 3 from .foot. To " Scotus," affix the reference : 

Cf. H. Siebeck, Die Willenslehre bei Duns Scotus u. seinen Nachfolgern, 
Zeitschrf. Philos. Vol. 112, pp. 179 ff. 

P. 331. Line 9 from foot, add : 

It was a great service on the part of Buridan that, in order to 
grasp the problem more exactly, he sought to state the question 
once more in purely psychological terms. He sought to do justice 
to the arguments on each side, and made it his purpose to develop 
the conception of ethical freedom, in which indifferentism should 
lose the element of arbitrary caprice, and determinism should lose 
the character of natural necessity. Nevertheless, he did not succeed 
in completely clearing up the complication of problems which inhere 
in the word " freedom." 

P. 333. Foot-note on word " synteresis," add : 
Cf., however, recently, H. Siebeck in Arch. f. Gesch. d. Philos., X. 520 ff. 
P. 339. Foot-note 1. For " and the pseudo," read : 
"and perhaps the pseudo." 

Appendix. 691 

P. 342. Line 24. Affix to " Occam," the reference : 

Cf. H. Siebeck, Occam s Erkenntnisslehre in ihrer historischer Stellung 
(Arch. f. Gesch. d. Philos., X. 317 ff.). 

T. 348. To the lit., add : 

W. Windelband, Geschichte d. neueren Philosophic, 2d ed. Vols. I. II. 1899 ; 
II. Hoffding, History of Modern Philosophy (Eng. tr. by B. Meyer, Lond. and 
N.Y. 1900) ; K. Lasswitz, Geschichte der Atomistik vom Mittelalter bis Newton. 
2 vols., Hamburg, 1889-1890 [W. Graham, English Political Philosophy from 
llobbes to Maine, Lond. and N.Y. 1900]. 

P. 352. To the lit., add : 

W. Dilthey, Auffassang und Analyse des Menschen in 15 and 16 Jahr. 
(Arch.f. Gesch. d. Philos. , IV., V.). 

P. 356. Line 5, add : 

H. Maier, M. als Philosoph (Arch.f. Gesch. d. Philos., X., XL). 

P. 356. Line 22, from foot, insert : 

The unsettled character of his life was in part due to his own character. He 
combined a proud flight of imaginative thought and an enthusiastic devotion to 
the new truth especially to the Copernican system for which he had to 
suffer, with unbridled passionate ness, ambitious boastfulness and keen pleasure 
in agitation. On his Italian and Latin writings, cf. recently, F. Tocco (Florence, 
1889, and Naples, 1891) ; cf. also Dom Berti, G. B., sua Vita e sua Dottrine 
(Rome, 1889). 

P. 357. Line 3. To the notice of Campanella, add : 

In him, too, we find learning, boldness of thought, and desire of innovation 
mingled with pedantry, fancit ulness, superstition, and limitation. Cf. Chr. 
Sigwart, Kleine Schriften, I. (Freib. 1889). 

P. 362. Line 1. After " also," insert : 

Popular Stoicism had a considerable number of adherents among 
the Renaissance writers on account of its moral and religious doc 
trines, which were independent of positive religion. 

P 367. Note 1. Add : 

Indeed, the humanistic reaction favoured Stoicism directly as against the more 
medieval Neo-Platonism. 

P. 378. To the lit., add : 

W. Dilthey, Das naturliche System der Geisteswissenschaften in 17 Jahrh. 
(Arch.f. Gesch. d. Philos., V., Vl, VII.). 

P. 379. Last line. To the notice of Galileo, add : 

His quiet, unimpassioned advocacy of the investigation of nature, which had 
been newly achieved and given its conceptional formulation by himself, could 
not shield him from the attacks of the Inquisition. He purchased peace and the 
right to further investigation, which was all that he cared for, by extreme sub 
jection. Cf. C. Prantl, Galileo und Kepler als Logiker (Munich, 1875). 

P. 380. Line 9. To lit. on I. Newton, add : 

F. R. Rosenberger, /. N. und seine physikalischcn Principien (Leips. 1895). 

692 Appendix. 

P. 380. Line 18. To the lit. add : 

E. Mach, Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung (Leips. 1883). H. Hertz, Die 
Principien der Mechanik, Introd., pp. 1-47 (Leips. 1894). 

P. 380. To the notice of Bacon, add : 

The unfavourable aspects of his personal character, which had their origin in 
political rivalry, fall into the background in comparison with the insight which 
filled his life, that man s power, and especially his power over nature, lies only 
in scientific knowledge. In a grandiloquent fashion, which was in conformity 
with the custom of his time, he proclaimed it as the task of science to place 
nature with all her forces at the service of man and of the best development of 
social life. 

P. 380. To the notice of Descartes, add : 

A complete edition of his works is appearing under the auspices of the Paris 
Academy. The main characteristics of his nature are found in the passion for 
knowledge, which turns aside from all outer goods of life, in his zeal for self- 
instruction, in his struggle against self-delusion, in his abhorrence of all public 
appearance and of the conflicts connected therewith, in the calm pre-eminence 
of the purely intellectual life, and in the complete earnestness which springs 
from sincerity. 

P. 381. To the notice of Spinoza, add : 

In proud independence, he satisfied his modest needs by his earnings from 
the polishing of optical glasses. Untroubled by the hatred and opposition of the 
world, and not embittered by the untrustworthiness of the few who called them 
selves his friends, he lived a life of thought and disinterested intellectual labour, 
and found his compensation for the transitory joys of the world, which he 
despised, in the clearness of knowledge, in the intelligent comprehension of 
human motives, and in the devoted contemplation of the mysteries of the divine 
nature. [J. Freudenthal, Lebensgeschichte SpSs, Leips. 1899 ; v. d. Linde, 
B. Sp. Bibliographic, Gravenhage, 1871.] 

P. 381. Line 24. To the lit. on Pascal, add : 

Q. Droz (Paris, 1886). 

P. 381. Line 36. To the lit. on Geulincx, add : 

J. P. N. Land, Am. Geulincx und seine Philosophic (The Hague, 1895). 

P. 413. To the foot-note, add : 

Descartes conception of these perturbations reminds us in many ways of 
Stoicism, which was brought to him by the whole humanistic literature of his 
time. Just on this account the modern philosopher fell into the same difficul 
ties respecting theodicy and freedom of the will which had vexed the Stoa. 
Cf . above, 16. His ethics was likewise related to that of the Stoics. 

P. 425. Under 32. As lit. on this topic : 

T. H. Green, Principles of Political Obligation, Wks., Vol. II., and sepa 
rately, 1895; D. G. Ritchie, Natural Eights, Lond. and N. Y. 1895; J. H. 
Tufts and H. B. Thompson, The Individual and his Relation to Society as re 
flected in British Ethics (Chicago, 1898). 

P. 440. To the notice of Locke, add : 

Plain good sense and sober charity are the main traits of his intellectual per 
sonality ; but corresponding to these there is also a certain meagreness of 
thought and a renunciation of the philosophical impulse in the proper sense. 
In spite of this, the courage of his triviality made him popular, and so made 
him leader of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. 

Appendix. 693 

P. 441. To the notice of Shaftesbury, add : 

He was one of the foremost and finest representatives of the Enlightenment. 
Humanistic culture is the basis of his intellectual and spiritual nature. In this 
rests the freedom of his thought and judgment, as well as the taste with which 
he conceives and presents his subject. He himself is a conspicuous example 
for his ethical teaching of the worth of personality. [B. Hand has recently pub 
lished The Life, Letters, and Philosophical Regimen, Lond. and N. Y. 1900. 
The Reyimeu consists of a series of exercises or meditations patterned after 
those of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. It shows a closer dependence upon 
ancient, particularly Stoic, thought than is manifest in the Characteristics.] 

V. 441. To the lit. on Adam Smith, add: 

[Hasbach, Untcrsuchungen iiber Adam Smith (Leips. 1891); Zeyss, A. S. 
(Leips. 1889); Oncken, Smith und Kant (1877) ; Schubert, in Wundfs Stu- 
dien, VI. 552 ft] 

P. 441. To the notice of Hume, add : 

Cool and reflective, clear and keen, an analyst of the first rank, with un 
prejudiced and relentless thought, he pressed forward to the final presupposi 
tions upon which the English philosophy of modern times rested. And this is 
the reason why, in spite of the caution of his utterances, he did not at first find 
among his countrymen the recognition which he deserved. 

P. 441. To the lit. on English Moral Philosophy, add:-&gt;- 

[Selby-Bigge, British Moralists (Clar. Press, 1897), contains reprints of the 
most important ethical writings of nearly all the writers of this period, with 
Introd.] 

P. 442. To the lit. on the Scottish School, add: 

McCosh, The Scottish Philosophy ; on the preceding development, E. Grimm, 
Zur Geschichte den Erkenntniss-problems von Bacon zu Hume (Leips. 1890). 

P. 442. To the notice of Voltaire, add : 

For the history of philosophy, the most important elements in Voltaire s 
nature are his honest enthusiasm for justice and humanity, his fearless cham 
pionship for reason in public life, and, on the other hand, the incomparable 
influence which he exercised upon the general temper of his age through the 
magic of his animated, striking style. G. Desnoiresterres, V. et la Societe au 
18 Sie.de (Paris, 1873). 

P. 444. To the notice on Leibniz, add: 

Leibniz was one of the greatest savants who have ever lived. There was no 
department of science in which he did not work, and that with suggestiveness. 
This universalism asserted itself everywhere in a conciliatory tendency, as the 
attempt to reconcile existing oppositions. This, too, was his work in political 
and ecclesiastical fields. 

P. 445. Line 4. Add : 

On Platner s relation to Kant, cf. M. Heinze (Leips. 1880) ; P. Rohr (Gotha, 
1890;) ; P. Bergemann (Halle, 1891) ; W. Wreschner (Leips. 1893). 

P. 445. Line 11 from foot. To the lit. on Empirical Psychology, 
add : 

M. Dessoir, Geschichte der neueren deutschen Psychologie. Vol. I. (Berlin, 
1894. New ed. in press). 

694 Appendix. 

P. 452. To the foot-note, add : 

In the field of demonstrative knowledge, Locke makes far-reaching conces 
sions to rationalism, as it was known to him from the Cambridge school ; e.g. 
he even regarded the cosinological argument for the existence of God as possible. 

P. 488. Line 24. After " world " insert : 

This theory was, in his case, none other than the imaginative view 
of Nature which had been taken over from the Italian Renaissance 
by the English Neo-Platonists. In his Pantheist icon, Toland pro 
jected a sort of cultus for this natural religion, whose sole priestess 
should be Science, and whose heroes should be the great historical 
educators of the human mind. 

P. 502. To the lit. under 36, add : 

J. H. Tufts, The Individual and his delation to Society as reflected in British 
Ethics. Part II. (Chicago, in press.) 

P. 517. Line 7. 

[The conception of " sympathy " in the Treatise is not the same as 
in the Inquiry. In the Treatise it is a psychological solvent like 
Spinoza s " imitation of emotions," and = "contagiousness of feeling." 
In the Inquiry it is opposed to selfishness, and treated as an impulse 
= benevolence; cf. on this, Green, Int., Selby-Bigge, Inquiry. ~\ 

P. 521. Line 6 from foot. To the words " human rights," add the 
reference : 

G. Jellinek, Die Erklarung der Menschenrechte (Heidelb. 1896) ; [D. G. 
Ritchie, Natural Rights, Lond. and N.Y., 1895; B. Bosanquet, The Philos. 
Theory of the State, Lond. and N.Y., 1899.] 

P. 522. Foot-note 3. 

Cf. Comte rendu des Seances des Ecoles Normales. Vol. 1. 

P. 527. Line 11 from foot of text, add : 

By this definition of history the principles of investigation in natural science 
and those appropriate to history were no longer distinguished, and the contrasts 
between mechanical and teleological standpoints were obliterated in a way 
which necessarily called out the opposition of so keenly methodical a thinker as 
Kant. (Cf. his review of Herder s book. Ideas toward the Philosophy of the 
History of Mankind, in the Jen. Ally. Litt. Ztg., 1785.) On the other hand, a 
harmonising thought was thus won for the theory of the world, quite in accord 
with the Leibnizian Monadology, and this has remained as an influential postu 
late and a regulative idea for the further development of philosophy. 

P. 529. To the lit., add : - 

E. von Hartmann, Die deutsche Aesthetik seit Kant (Berlin, 1886). Julian 
Schmidt, Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur von Leibniz bis auf unserer Zeit. 
[Kuno Francke, Social Forces in German Literature, 2d ed., N.Y. 1897.] 

P. 530. Line 8, add : 

Through this participation in the work of the highest culture, in which litera 
ture and philosophy gave each to the other furtherance toward the brilliant cre 
ations of the time, the German people became anew a nation. In this it found 

Appendix. 695 

once more the essence of its genius ; from it sprang intellectual and moral forces 
through which, during the past century, it has been enabled to assert in the 
world the influence of this, its newly won nationality. 

P. 532. To the lit., add : 

Fr. Paulsen, 7. Kant, sein Leben und seine Lehre, Stuttgart, 1898. 

P. 535. To the notice of Kant, add : 

His activity as a teacher extended not only over philosophical fields, but also 
to anthropology and physical geography ; and just in these, by his suggestive, 
discriminating, and brilliant exposition, his influence extended far beyond the 
bounds of the university. In society he was regarded with respect, and his fel 
low-citizens sought and found in him kindly instruction in all that excited gen 
eral interest. 

P. 536. To the lit., add : 

Among the publications of Kant s Lectures the most important are the 
Anthropoloyle (1798, and by Starcke, 1831) ; Loyik (1800) ; Physische Geogra- 
phie (1802-1803) ; Pddagogik (1803) ; Metaphysik (by Politz, 1821). [On this 
last, which is valuable for Kant s development, 1770-1780, see B. Krdmann in 
Philos. Monatshefte, Vol. XIX., and M. Heinze, A . s Vorlesunyen utter Met., 
Leips. 1894.] A critical complete edition, such as has long been needed, is being 
published by the Berlin Academy of Sciences. [This appears in four parts, 
comprising, I. Works, published by Kant himself ; II. Correspondence; III. Un 
published Manuscripts; IV. Lectures. Vols. I. and II. of the Correspondence 
have appeared, ed. by Keicke (Berlin, 1900).] The Kant Studien, ed. by H. 

Vaihinger (1890 ), gives the most complete information regarding recent 

literature. [Recent translations are Kant s Cosmogony (Glasgow, 1900), by W. 
Hastie ; Dreams of a Spirit AVer (Lond. and N.Y.. 1900), by Goerwitz ; 7Ae 
Inaugural Dissertation of 1770, by Eckhoff (N.Y., 1894).] 

P. 537. To the lit., add : 

E. Adickes, Kant s Systematik als systembildender Factor (Berlin, 1887), and 
Kantstudien (1894) ; E. Arnoldt, Kritische Excurse im Ge.biet der Kantforschung, 
Kbnigsberg, 1894. 

[J. G. Schurmann in Philos. Review, Vols. VII., VIII.] 

P. 551. To the lit., add : 

A. Hegler, Die Psychologic in Kant s Ethik, Freiburg i. Br. 1891. 

W. Forster, Der Entwicklunysyany der kantischen Ethik, Berlin, 1894. 

P. 557. Line 18 from foot, insert as a new paragraph : 

"The Communion of Saints," on the contrary, the ethical and 
religious union of the human race, appears as the true highest good 
of the practical reason. This reaches far beyond the subjective and 
individual significance of a combination between virtue and hap 
piness, and has for its content the realisation of the moral law in the 
development of the human race the Kingdom of God upon earth. 
(Cf. Critique of Judgment, 85ff., Religion within the Bounds of 
Mere Reason, 3d part (I. 2 ff.). 

P. 559. To the lit. under 40, add : 

[V. Basch, Essai critique sur V Esthetique de Kant, Paria, 1896.] 

696 Appendix. 

P. 564. Last line. To " fine art," attach as note : 

On the historical connections of the theories here developed by Kant within 
the framework of his system, cf. P. Schlapp, Die Anfdnge der Kritik des 
Geschmacks und des Genies (Gottingen, 1899). 

P. 569. Line 14 from foot of text, add : 

Jacobi was in youth a friend of Goethe. He was a typical personality for the 
development of the German life of feeling in its transition from the time of 
" Storm and Stress," over into the Romantic movement. He was the chief rep 
resentative of the principle of religious sentimentality. Cf. on his theory Fr. 
Harms (Berlin, 1876). 

P. 570. Line 6. Add : 

On Beck, cf. W. Dilthey in Arch. f. Gesch. d. Philos., II. 592 ff. On Maimon, 
cf. A. Molzner (Greifswald, 1890). 

P. 570. Line 18. To the notice of Reinhold, add : 

He was an ardent, but not an independent, man. His capacity to appreciate 
and adopt the work of another, and a certain skill in formulation, enabled him 
to render the Kantian philosophy a great service which was not, however, with 
out its drawbacks. In this consisted the importance of his Jena period. 

P. 570. Line 33. To the lit. on Schiller, add : 

G. Geil, /S cA. s Verhaltniss zur kantischcn Ethik, Strassburg, 1888; K. 
Gneisse, Sch. s Lehre von der asthetischen Wahrnehmung, Berlin, 1893; 
K. Berger, Die Entwicklung von Sch. s Aesthetik, Weimar, 1890; E. Kuhue- 
inann, KanCs und Sch. s Begrundung der Aesthetik, Munich, 1895. 

P. 570. Line 14 from foot. To the notice of Fichte, add : 

As he worked his own way out of difficult conditions with great energy, so 
his whole life was filled with a thirst for achievement and for the improvement 
of the world. He seeks to reform life, and especially the life of students and 
universities, by the principles of Kant s teaching. It is as orator and preacher 
that he finds his most efficient activity. High-flying plans, without regard to the 
actual conditions and often, perhaps, without sufficient knowledge of the data, 
form the content of his restless efforts, in which his "Philosophy of the Will " 
incorporates itself. The dauntless and self-forgetful character of his idealism is 
evidenced above all in his " Addresses to the German Nation " (1807), in which 
he called his people with ardent patriotism to return to their true inner nature, 
to moral reform, and thereby to political freedom. [To the Eng. tr. has been 
added the Science of Ethics, by Kroeger, 1897.J 

P. 571. Line 8. To the notice of Schelling, add : 

In his personality the predominant factor is the combining capacity which is 
shown by an imagination that received satisfaction and stimulation on every 
side. Religion and art, natural science and history, presented to him the rich 
material through which he was able to vitalise the systematic form which Kant 
and Fichte had constructed, and to bring it into living and fruitful connection 
with many other interests. But this explains the fact that he seems to be involved 
in a continuous reconstruction of his theory, while he himself supposed that he 
was retaining the same fundamental standpoint from the beginning to the end of 
his work. (Cf. the lectures by K. Rosenkranz, Danzig, 1843) ; L. Noack, Sch. 
und die Philos. der Romantik, Berlin, 1859; E. v. Hartmann, Sch. s positive 
Philosophie, Berlin, 18(59; R. Zimmermann, tSVA . s Philosophic der Kunst, Vienna, 
187(5; C. Frantz, Sc.h. s positive Philosophie, Cothen, 1879 f. ; Fr. Schaper, 
fichus Philos. der Mythologie und der Offenbarung, Nauen, 1893 f. 

Appendix. 697 

P. 571. Line 33. Insert: 

J. J. Wagner (1775-1841, System der Idtalphilosophie, 1804, Organon del 
menschlichen Erkenntniss, 18.30). 

P. 571. Line 4 from foot. To the notice of Hegel, add : 

Hegel was of a thoroughly didactic nature, with a tendency to schematise. 
An extremely rich and thorough knowledge, which was deeper and more com 
prehensive in the realms of history than in those of natural science, was ordered 
and arranged in his thought according to a great systematic plan. Imagination 
and practical ends fall far into the background in his life, in comparison with 
the purely intellectual need of comprehending all human knowledge as a histori 
cal necessity and a connected whole. This didactic uniformity appears also in 
the construction of his terminology, and has both its good and its bad side. Cf. 
H. Ulrici, Ueber Princip und Methode der H. Schen Philos. (Leips. 1841); 
P. Barth, Die Geschichtsphilos. //. (Leips. 1890). [^ ecent translations of Phi 
losophy of Mind, by W. Wallace, Clar. 1 ress, 1894 ; Philosophy of Religion, by 
Speirs and Sanderson, Lond. 1895 ; Philosophy of Right, by S. W. Dyde, 1896. 
Cf. J. MacTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, 1896 ; G. Noel, La Log- 
ique de IL, Paris, 1897.] Kuno Fischer s work on Hegel is now in press as the 
8th vol. of the "Jubilee Edition " of his Geschic.hte der neueren Philosophic, 
and has progressed in its brilliant exposition so far as to include the Logic. 

P. 572. To the notice of Schleiermacher, add : 

Schleiermacher s kindly nature, which was particularly skilful in fine and 
delicate adjustments, is developed especially in the attempt to harmonise the 
aesthetic and philosophical culture of his time with the religious consciousness. 
With delicate hand he wove connecting threads between the two, and removed 
in the sphere of feeling the opposition which prevailed between the respective 
theories and conceptions. Cf. 1). Schenkel, Sch., Elberfeld, 1868; W. Dilthey, 
Leben SchlS*. Bd. I. Berlin, 1870; A. Kitschl, Sch. s Reden ub. d. ReL, Bonn, 
1875 ; F. Bachrnann, Die Entwickluny der Ethik Schl. s, Leips. 1892. [Eng. tr. 
of the On Religion, by Oman (Lond. 1893). J 

P. 572. To the notice of Herbart, add : 

Herbart s philosophical activity was conspicuous for its keenness in concept 
ual thought and for its polemic energy. Whatever he lacked in wealth of per 
ceptual material and in aesthetic mobility was made up by an earnest disposition 
and a lofty, calm, and clear conception of life. His rigorously scientific manner 
made him for a long time a successful opponent of the dialectical tendency in 
philosophy. 

I*. 573. Line 4. To the notice of Schopenhauer, add : 

Of the recent editions of his works the most carefully edited is that of E. 
Grisebach. Schopenhauer s peculiar, contradictory personality and also his 
teaching have been most deeply apprehended by Kuno Fischer (9th vol. of the 
Gesch. d. neneren Philos., 2d ed., 1898). 

His capriciously passionate character was joined with a genius and freedom 
of intellectuality which enabled him to survey and comprise within one view a 
great wealth of learning and information, and at the same time to present with 
artistic completeness the view of the world and of life which he had thus found. 
As one of the greatest philosophical writers, Schopenhauer has exercised the 
strongest influence through his skill in formulation and his language, which is 
free from all the pedantry of learning, and appeals to the cultivated mind with 
brilliant suggestiveness. If he deceived himself as to his historical position in 
the Post-Kantian philosophy, and thereby brought himself into an almost 
pathological solitariness, he has nevertheless given to many fundamental 
thoughts of this whole development their most fortunate and effective form. 
Cf. W. Wallace, Sch. (London, 1891), R. LHimann. Sch., ein fieitrag zur 
Psychologic der Metaphysik (Berlin, 1894). [W. Caldwell, S. s System in it* 
Philosophical Significance (Lond. and N.Y. 1896). J. Volkelt, Sch. (Stuttgart, 
1900).] 

698 Appendix. 

P. 573. Line 14. After the parenthesis, insert : 

to Schelling of J. 1 . V. Troxler (1780-1860, Naturlehre des menschlichen 

Erkennens, 1828). 

P. 585. Foot-note 2, add : 

Cf. A. Schoel, H. s Philos. Lehre von der Religion (Dresden, 1884). 

P. 586. Note 3. Line 7. Insert : 

The theory thus given its scientific foundation and development by Herbart 
became the point of departure for the whole pedagogical movement in Germany 
during the nineteenth century, whether the direction taken was one of friendly 
development or of hostile criticism. A literature of vast extent has been called 
out by it, for which histories of pedagogy may be consulted,. 

P. 588. Line 14 from foot. Affix to this the reference : 

Cf. Schopenhauer s essay On the. Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient 
Reason, and his Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy (in Vol. II. of the Eng. tr.). 

P. 592. Line 9 from foot of the text. Affix the reference : 
Cf. E. v. Hartmann, Ueber die dialektische Methode (Berlin, 1868). 

P. 599. Line 21. 

See Jac. Stilling in the Strassburger Goethevortrdgen (1899), pp. 149 ff. 

INDEX. 

NOTE. Figures enclosed in parentheses indicate pages of the text to which 
supplementary matter has been added in the Appendix. Thus, under " Abe- 
lard," 690 (275) indicates that on page 690 will be found material supplement 
ary to that on page 275. 

Abbt, 446. 

Abelard, life and writings, 274, 690 
(275) ; theory of universals (concep- 
tualism), 272, 294, 298 f. ; rational 
ism and independence, 300 f., 307 ; 
psychology, 306 f. ; ethics, 308 f. ; 
religion, 319. 

Abercrombie, 629. 

Absolute, applied to the Ideas, Plato, 
128 ; to the pure Form, Aristotle, 
145 f. ; to the One, Plotinus, 238 ; 
to God, Anselm, 293 f. ; Schelling, 
608, 617 f. ; unknowable, Hamilton, 
638 ; and Spencer, 657. 

Absolutism, political, 432 f. 

Abstract ideas, see Ideas. 

Abubacer, 317, 320. 

Academicians, 164. 

Academy, Older, 101, 103, 159, 687 
(189) (see also under names of its 
adherents) ; Middle, 103, 161 f., 207 
(see also Arcesilaus and Carneades) ; 
New, 103, 162. 

Achillini, 355. 

Acosmism, 38. 

Actual vs. the potential, 140, 144, 146, 
423 f. 

Adaptation, 480 and note, 656, 658 f. 

Adelard of Bath, 274, 297. 

dSid&lt;}&gt;opa. in Stoicism, 168, 173. 

^Egydius, 314. 

jEnesidemus (the Sceptic), 160, 163; 
his " tropes," 200 ; aporise, 206. 

" ^Enesidemus," see Schulze. 

JEons, Gnostic, 244, 257 f. 

.jEschines, 82. 

Esthetic, transcendental, of Kant, 538- 
541. 

^Esthetics (see also Beauty), beginning 
of, in Aristotle, 153 ; Plotinus, 248 ; 
of Baumgarten, 484 ; Diderot, 493 f. ; 
Shaftesbury, 510 ; Home, 510 f. ; 
Burke, 511 ; Sulzer, 511 ; influence 
on philosophy of German idealism, 
630 ; Kant s, 560-564 ; Schiller s, 
600-602 ; Schelling s, 607 ; of Ro 
manticists, 611 ; Hegel s, 613; Scho 
penhauer s, 600, 622; Nietzsche s, 
677 f. 

Agnosticism, of Hamilton and Mansel, 
638 ; of Spencer, 657, 659 ; see also 
Negative Theology and cf. 546-550, 
642. 

Agricola, 354 f., 360. 

Agrippa (the Sceptic), 160, 163 ; his 
tropes, 201. 

Agrippa of Nettesheim, 357, 373. 

Alanus, 275. 

Albert of Bollstadt (Albertus Magnus), 
311, 313, 321, 326, 333, 340, 343 f., 
487, 690 (313). 

Alchemy, 373 f. 

Alcidamas, 74. 

Alcmaeon, 46, 64, 67, 150. 

Alcuin, 273. 

d Alembert, 442, 477, 652. 

Alexander Aphrodisias, 161, 234, 338 f., 
359. 

Alexander of Hales, 313, 344. 

Alexander, S., 630. 

Alexandria, 158, 213 ; Catechists, school 
of, 214, 217. 

Alexandrian Philosophy, 213 ff. ; see 
also Neo-Pythagoreanism, Philo, Plo 
tinus, etc. 

Alexandrists, 354 f., 359. 

Alexinus, 71, 89. 

Alfarabi, 317. 

Alfred de Sereshel, 344. 

Algazel, 317. 

Alhacen, 344. 

Alkendi, 317. 

Allegorical interpretation, 221 ff. 

dXXolbxm and irepi^opd as kinds of 
Kli&gt;r,ffi!, 39. 

Althus, 382, 433 f. 

Altruism, Cumberland on, 435 ; origi 
nal or derived, 508 ff. ; evolutionary 
view of, 659, 662 ; Feuerbach, 671, 
675 ; see Egoism. 

Amalric, Amalricans, 313, 339, 690 
(313). 

700 

Index. 

Amelius, 218. 

Arnmonius Saccus, 218. 

Ampere, 627, 636. 

Analogies of Experience, 545. 

Analytic, transcendental, of Kant, 
533 f., 538, 542 ff. 

Analytics of Aristotle, 104, 132-138. 

dvd/j.vrja-1^ (recollection), with Plato, 118, 
685 (123) ; Augustine, 278. 

Anaxagoras, life, 30 ; astronomical in 
terest, 684 (30), 41, 54 ; theory of ele 
ments, 41, 52 ; of the poCj, 41 f., 54, 
62 f., 684 (42), 185 ; influence of this 
on Plato, 128 ; and on Stoics, 187 ; 
teleolosy, 42, 54, 98 note ; theory of 
cognition, 60, 62 f., 65; cf. 29, 91, 
128, 185. 

Anaximander, 27 ff., 33 ff., 49, 60, 688 
(238). 

Anaximenes, 27, 29, 32 f., 48. 

Ancillon, 627. 

Andronicus, 104, 159. 

Anniceris, 70, 87. 

Anselm, 272, 295 ; life and writings, 
274 ; ontological argument, 292 f., 
321, 331. 

Anticipations of perception, 545. 

Antinomy, between thought and ex 
perience, 11 ; Zeno s antinomies, 44, 
55 f. ; Kant s doctrine of, 550. 

Antiochus, 103, 161 f. 

Antisthenes, 70, 72, 83 f., 94, 96; see 
also Cynics. 

Apathy, Stoic doctrine of, 168. 

&Tceipov, see Infinite. 

Apelles, 258. 

Apollodorus, 162. 

Apollonius, 213, 215. 

Apologists, 214, 217, 222 ff., 231, 237. 

A posteriori, see A priori. 

Apperception, distinguished from per 
ception, by Leibniz, 463 ; transcen 
dental, of Kant, 545 ; Herbart s doc 
trine of, 587. 

A priori, Leibniz s conception of, 398 ; 
Wolff, 460 ; Kant, 533, note 2 ; evo 
lutionary explanation of, 659, 662. 
Cf. also 105 ff. ; 292 f ., 343 ff., 388 ft., 
538 ff., 551 ff. 

Apuleius, 213, 216, 228. 

Arabian Philosophy, 15, 316 f., 319, 
337 ff., 690 (316 f.). 

Arcesilaus, 103, 160 f. 

Archelaus, 76, 684 (30). 

Archytas, 31, 103, 123, 215. 

Ardigo, 631. 

Aristarchus, 162. 

Aristides, 217. 

Aristippus, 70, 72, 85 ff., 93, 165, 170; 
see also Cyrenaics. 

Aristippus the Younger, 70, 72, 86. 

Aristobulus, 216, 220 f. 

Aristophanes, 81. 

Aristotelianism (see Peripatetics), in 
Middle Ages, 269 f., 288, 302 f., 311 ff., 
316 f., 324 ff., 329, 333, 338; in the 
Renaissance, 353 f., 357-359, 364. 

Aristotle, conception of philosophy, 2 ; 
completer of Greek science, 25, 99 f. ; 
on 6a.vfj.deiv and apx^, 31 f. ; as source 
for Sophistic doctrine, 88 ; life and 
writings, 103 f., 685 (104); logic, 132- 
138, 543, 685 (135 note), 686 (142); his 
central principle, 139, 6. r ;6 ; doctrine 
of cause, 141 ff. ; categories, 142; re 
lation to Plato s Ideas, 139, 142 f.; 
his personality compared with Plato s 
685 (104); doctrine of matter, 144 
of Being or essence, 139 f., 145 f. 
monotheism, 145 f.; cosmology, 147 
cosmical elements, 686 (148); psy 
chology, 149 ; ethics, 161 ff.; politics, 
152 f.; poetics, 153 f.; influence on 
Stoics, 176, 181 ; immanence and 
transcendence in his doctrine, 178 f.; 
on freedom, 191 f . ; on law in nature, 
195 ; evil due to matter, 196 ; influ 
ence of his monotheism, 211 ; recep 
tion of his doctrine the decisive factor 
in Scholasticism, 269, 311 f.; cf. also 
229, 236, 255, 320, 331, 340, 354, 398, 
402, 420 ; see also Aristotelianism. 

Aristoxenus, 159, 161. 

Arius Didymus, 162, 216. 

Arnauld, 381. 

Arnobius, 214, 217, 224 f, 

Arnold, 445. 

Arrian, 21(i. 

Ars inveniendi, 383-387. 

Art, its influence on philosophy, 530, 
568, (i"7 f.; for theories of its origin, 
purpose, and function, see ^Esthetics. 

Art of Lull ; see Lullus. 

dpx^i of cosrnologists, 32 ff. ; the Ideas 
as dpx^i with Plato, 118; four princi 
ples, Aristotle, 138, 141. 

Asceticism, 230, 620 f. 

Aseity, of God, 292 ; of substance, 408 ; 
of individuals, 676. 

Assent, as characteristic of the judg 
ment, 207 ; 394 ; as ethical factor, 
308. 

Association (see also Psychology), in 
recollection, Plato, 685 (119); John 
of Salisbury, 307 ; Hobbes, 413 ; Hart 
ley, 455 ; laws of, with Hume, 473 ; 
explains ideas of substance and cau 
sality, ace. to Hume, 473-476 ; of 
nineteenth century, 628 f.; Mill and 
Bain, 635 ; in ethics, 662, 666 ; in 
Herbart s Pedagogics, 586 ; in aes 
thetics, 511. 

Astrology, 373 ff. 

Astronomy, of the Pythagoreans, 45, 
66 f. ; of Anaxagoras, 54 ; of Plato, 
130 f. ; of Aristotle, 147 f. 

Index. 

701 

Ataraxy, 165 ; of Epicurus, 166 ; of 
Sceptics, 167 ; of Stoics, 168. 

Atheism, 86, 493, 641,675. 

Athenagoras, 217, 224. 

Atom, conception of, with Leucippus, 
43; of Democritus, 107, llOff. ; with 
Epicurus, 184 ; compared with monad 
of Bruno, 371 ; Buffon s, 480. 

Atomism, of Leucippus, 42 ; of Democri 
tus, 108, llOff.; of Epicurus, 183 f.; 
in Ethics, see Individualism. 

Atomists, 29, 42 ff., 54, 688 (238); see 
also Leucippus, Democritus. 

Attributes, the two, of Descartes, 405 f. ; 
with Spinoza, 408 f., 419. 

Augustine, 264 ff., 268, 270 ; life and 
works, 273, 689 (273) ; doctrine, 276- 
287 ; influence of his theory of the 
will, 311 f., 329 ff., 394, 416 ; his em 
phasis on personality and inner ex 
perience, 303, 340, 344, 364 ; influence 
on Reformers, 337, 353, 364 ; cf. also 
324, 326, 333, 337, 391, and Augus- 
tinianism. 

Augustinianism, contrasted with Aris- 
totelianism, 303 ff., 324, 326, 329 ff., 
334, 341, 344, 364, 661 note. 

Austin, 629. 

Authority as philosophical principle, 
219 ff., 502 f., 514 f. 

Autonomy of practical reason, 553 ; cf. 
675, 680 ; see Will and Voluntarism. 

Avetnpace, 317. 

Avenarius, 633, 6."&gt;1. 

Averroes and Averroism, 317 ff., 320, 
323, 329, 331, 336, 338 ff., 354 f., 359. 

Avicebron, 318, 332, 338 f., 341. 

Avicenna, 299, 317, 340, 344. 

Axioms of perception, 545. 

Baader, 571. 

Babeuf, 523. 

Bacon, Francis, 379 ; life and writings, 
380, 692 (380) ; his method, 383-388 ; 
" idols," 383 ; aim, 386 f. ; attitude 
toward religion, 400 ; on final causes, 
401 ; "the New Atlantis," 387, 429. 
Cf. also 406, 412, 477, 494, 625. 

Bacon, Roger, 314, 319, 333, 341, 344 f., 
307. 

Baer, von, 658. \ 

Bahnsen, 675 f. 

Bailey, 629. 

Bain, 629, 635. 

Baldwin, 630. 

Ballanche, 628, 649. 

Barbara, 355. 

Bardesanes, 217. 239. 

Barthez, 627, 635. 

B;\rtholmess, 627. 

Baseilow, 446, 526. 

Basileides, 214, 217, 243, 258 f. 

Basso, 355, 371, 406. 

Batteux, 456. 

Baumgarten, 444, 484. 

Bayle, 439, 442, 477, 491, 494, 495, 504 f. 

Baynes, 629. 

Bazard, 628. 

Beattie, 442, 537. 

Beautiful soul, as ideal, 602. 

Beauty, its relation to the good with 
Flato, 125 ; first treated indepen 
dently by Plotinus, 248 f. ; of the 
universe emphasised in Renaissance, 
358, 367 ff. ; and by Shaftesbury, 489 ; 
factor in ethics, 509 ; Home, Burke, 
Sulzer on, 510 f. ; Kant, 560-563 ; 
Schiller on, 600 f. Cf. ^Esthetics. 

Beck, 570, 579, 696 (570). 

Becker, 398. 

Becoming ; see Cosmic processes. 

Bede, 273. 

Being, early Greek conceptions of, 31- 
47 ; as world-stuff with Milesians, 32 ; 
as corporeality or space-filling sub 
stance, Parmenides, 37 ; plurality of, 
assumed, 39 ff. ; = atoms, 42 f. ; plu 
rality of, denied by Zeno, 44 ; found 
in numbers, Philolaus, 45 ; identified 
with the good by Euclid, 96 ; equiva 
lent to atoms with Democritus, 108; 
to Ideas with Plato, 109, 118; to 
essence with Aristotle, 139 ; and fur 
ther to pure thought, 145 ; to spirit 
with Neo-Platonism and Patristic 
thought, 232; with Plotinus, 245; 
sought in the universal by .John 
Scotus, 289 ff . ; treated as an attri 
bute of varying intensity, 291 f. ; and 
by Descartes, 405; God as infinite, 
bodies and minds as finite, 40.~&gt; ; to 
be thought only as a kind of con 
sciousness, 579 ; comprehensible only 
as a product of reason, Fichte, 581 ; 
Eleatic conception of, in Herbart, 
584 ; only a means, Fichte, 595 ; de 
rived from freedom, Weisse, 633 ; see 
also Reality, Substance. 

Bekker, 401. 

Belief, Hume s theory of, 475, 477. 

Bellarmin, 382. 

Belsham, 628. 

Beneke, 573, 577, 637. 

Bentham, 441, 513, 522, 662-665, 666. 

Berengar, 275, 297. 

B^rigard, 355. 
j Berkeley, 439 f., 452, 469 f., 476 note. 

Bernard of Chartres, 272, 274, 294, 
302 f., 357, 689 (274). 

Bernard of Clairvaux, 273, 275, 30L 
305. 

Bernhard of Tours, 689 (274). 

Bernhard Silvestris, 689 (274). 

Bertrand, &lt;W7 . 

Bessarion, 354, 358 f. 

Bias, 24. 

702 

Index. 

Bichat, 627, 635. 

Bilfinger, 444. 

Bion, 686 (163). 

Biran, Maine de, 627, 635 f. 

Bodies, as portions of space, Pythag 
oreans, 46 f. ; Plato, 129 ; Descartes, 
404 ; as complex of ideas, Berkeley, 
470 ; as force, Leibniz, 421 ; phenom 
ena, Kant, f&gt;45 f. 

Bodin, 382, 427, 431, 433, 526. 

Body and Soul, 301 f.; see Soul. 

Boehine, 354, 357, 367 f., 369 f., 371, 
374 f., 403, 618. 

Boerhave, 454 f. 

Boethius, 270, 273, 288, 296. 

Bolingbroke, 441, 523. 

Bolzano, 633. 

Bonald, 628, 648. 

Bonatelli, 631. 

Bonaventura, 313, 333 f., 341. 

Bonnet, 442, 458, 634. 

Boole, 629. 

Bosanquet, 630, 670. 

Bossuet, 486, 527. 

Bouilte, 356, 368, 372. 

Bouterwek, 573, 587, 635. 

Bowne, 630. 

Boyle, 380. 

Bradley, 630. 

Broussais, 627, 634, 642 note. 

Brown, Peter, 440 ; Thomas, 440. 

Brucker, 10, 445. 

^ Bruno, 354, 356. 360, 367 ff., 389, 397, 
402, 409, 422, 592, 691 (356). 

Buchanan, 433. 

Buchez, 628. 

Buchner, 632, 643. 

Buckle, (564. 

Budde, 444. 

Buffon, 442, 480. 

Buisson, 627. 

Buridan, 315, 331, 690 (331). 

Burke, 441, 511. 

Butler, 441, 513 f. 

Cabanis, 442, 627, 634, 642. 

Cabbala, 317, 372. 

Caesalpinus, 355, 359. 

Caird, E., 630; ,!., 630. 

Calderwood, 629. 

Callicles, 75. 

Callippus, 147. 

Calvin, 356, 364. 

Cambridge school, see Neo-Platonism, 

English. 
Campanella, 356, 370 f., 373, 376 f., 383, 
387, 391, 403, 413, 427, 430, 526, 691 

Can ton i, 631. 

Cardaillac, 627. 

Cardanus, 356, 372 f., 431. 

Carlyle, 629, 654, 663-665, 667, 674. 

Carneades, 103, 160 f., 194 f., 201, 207. 

Caro, 627. 

Carpocrates, 217, 258. 

Carriere, 632. 

Cartesians and Cartesianism, 414 ff. 
448, 453, 467 ff., 470, 477, 503. 

Cassiodorus, 270. 

Cataneo, 631. 

Catch questions among the Sophists 
and Megarians, 89. 

Categories, Aristotle s, 142 ; Stoics, 
198 f.; of Plotinus, 245; natural 
categories not to be applied to God, 
according to Augustine, 279 f.; of 
Kant, 542 f. ; reduced to causality, 
Schopenhauer, 588 ; of nature, Schel- 
ling, 598 ; Hegel s doctrine of, 611 ; 
Havtmann s, 647 f. 

Causa sui, 408. 

Cause and causality, Idea as, with 
Plato, 128 ; four causes of Aristotle, 
141 ; final and mechanical, 144 ; 
emphasised by Stoics, 181 ; concep 
tion of, criticized by Sceptics, 205 f. ; 
God as final, formal, and efficient 
with Bruno, 367 ; God as rational 
ground and efficient cause with 
Boehme, 3(57 ; formal causes empha 
sised by Bacon, 384 ff. ; given a new 
meaning by Galileo and his succes 
sors, 399 ff.; final, rejected by Bacon. 
Descartes, Spinoza, 401 ; sought in 
motion, not in substances, by Gali 
leo, 410 ; God the sole true cause. 
Occasionalism, 415; occasional, 415; 
the central difficulty in the concep 
tion of causality, 415; equivalent to 
mathematical consequence with Spi 
noza, 418 ; analysed and declared 
the result of custom by Hume, 474- 
476 ; re-examined by Kant, 542-546 ; 
Kant s unjustifiable use of, 577 f.; 
the only category recognised by 
Schopenhauer, 588 ; thing-in-itself 
not cause of phenomena, 589 ; ex 
pressed in principle of conservation 
of energy, 655 f. 

Celsus, 216. 

Cerdo, 258. 

Cerinthus, 257. 

Chaignet, 627. 

Chalmers, 629. 

Chance and contingent, with Aristotle, 
143, 148 ; in nature, with Hegel, 641 ; 
views, with Herbart, 585 ; see Contin 
gency. 

Change, as problem of philosophy, 47 ff.; 
law of, with Ileraclitus, 50 ; denied by 
Parmenides, 51 ; mathematical analy 
sis of, Galileo, 388 ; as contradiction, 
Herbart, 584. 

Character, intelligible and empirical, 
555, 589, 676. 

Charron, 355, 362 f., 376, 391. 

Index. 

703 

Chasseboeuf, see Volney. 

Chateaubriand, 627. 

Chesterfield, 515. 

Christianity, relation to Greek thought, 
212, 223 f.; its view of authority and 
revelation, 221 ff. ; of spirit and mat 
ter, 231 ff. ; of personality of God, 
238, 251 ; its view of history, 250 ff.; 
the "true" of Deism, 487 ff.; with 
Schelling, 619 ; Diihring on, 671 ; see 
also Religion, Revelation, Theology, 
God. 

Chrysippus, 159, 162, 168, 181, 187, 
193 f., 196, 203. 

Chubb, 441. 

Church, conceived as fellowship, 261 ; 
Thomas, Dante, Occam, 326-328 ; at 
titude toward Aristotle, 312, 364 ; and 
state, theories of, 326, 433 f., 487, 557 ; 
preserves ancient civilisation and edu 
cates modern Europe, 263 ff . ; one of 
the foci of Augustine s thought, 270, 
283 ; doctrine definitively closed, 363 ; 
Catholic, revives Thomism, 6(51 note. 

Cicero, 161 f., 163, 177, 204, 223, 301, 
680 (163). 

Civilisation, as factor in history of 
philosophy, 13 ; influence on anthro 
pological period of Greek thought, 
66 ff. ; its worth denied by Cynics, 
84 ; affirmed by Cyrenaics, 86 ; the 
Hellenistic, 1"&gt;5 ff. ; preserved by the 
Church, 203 ff. ; of the Renaissance, 
348 ff. ; modern, 386 f. ; problem of, 
in Enlightenment, 518 ff., 601 ; Man- 
deville, 524 ; Rousseau, 525 ; Kant 
on, 559 ; Fichte on, 605 f. ; problem 
of, in nineteenth century, 661 ff.; goal 
of, Hartmann. 673 f. ; individualistic 
views of, 675 ff. 

Civitas dt&gt;,i, of Augustine, 285. 

Clarke, 441, 490, 504. 

Clauberg, 381, 416. 

Cleanthes, 159, 162, 188. 

Clearness and distinctness, Descartes, 
392, 398, 450 ; Leibniz, 398, 462-404. 

Cleidemus, 70. 

Clement of Alexandria, 214, 217, 252, 
688 (217). 

Clement of Rome, 259. 

Clitomachus, 161. 

Cogan, (;_ &lt;.. 

Coyito ergo sum, of Descartes, 391 f. 

Coincidentia oppositorum, of Nicolaus 
Cusanus, 340; of Bruno, 308; of 
Boehme, 375 ; referred to by Schel- 
ling, ;"&gt; .):. . 

Coleridge, 629, 603-665. 

Collective consciousness, 645, 649. 

Collier, 471. 

Collins, 441, 496. 

Combe, 629, 635. 

Comenius, 385. 

Common sense, doctrine of, 460, 482 f., 
690, 649 ; cf. 203 ; 609 ; see also Scot 
tish School. 

Communism, 428 f., 522 f., 668; sup 
posed, of Plato, 126. 

Comte, 624, 628, 650-054, 655, 665. 

Conception, its importance with Socra 
tes, 95 f. ; relation to Idea with Plato, 
118 f., 121 ; with Aristotle, 133, 142 f. ; 
derived from sense perception by 
Stoics and Epicureans, 203 ; Abe- 
lard s theory, 306 ; Locke s, 451 ; 
Berkeley s, 452 ; as knowledge of the 
Absolute, Hegel, 611. 

Concepts, Aristotle s doctrine of, 137; 
Occam, 342 f. ; pure concepts of un 
derstanding, 542 ff. ; see Concep 
tion, Universals, Ideas, Realism, 
Nominalism, Terminism. 

Conceptualism, 272 ; of Abelard, 298. 

Condillac, 43!), 442, 456 ff., 478 f., 521, 
527, 634, 050. 

Condorcet, 443, 527. 

Conscience, 234 ; Abelard s view of, 
308 ; Thomas, 333 ; Butler, 514 ; 
Smith, 517 ; as synteresis, 333 ; in 
Traditionalism, 048, and Eclecticism, 
649 ; Ree, 663. 

Consciousness, defined, 234 ; as a uni 
tary function with Aristotle, 150 ; and 
Bonnet, 458 ; characteristic of man, 
with Alcmaeon, 64 note 4 ; certainty 
of, as starting-point with Augustine, 
276 f. ; with Descartes, 391 ; one of 
the two attributes of all reality, 
Descartes, 405 ; all minds modes of, 
406, 408 ; modes of denied to God, 
408 ; vs. unconscious, Leibniz, 402 ; 
"in general," of Kant, 545, 563; 
with Beck, 579 ; self-consciousness 
Fichte s first principle, 580 f., 593 f. ; 
as intelligible space, Herbart, 585 ; 
Maimon s doctine of, 578. 

Consensus gentium, 204, 436, 449 f. 

Conservation, of motion, 411 ; of force, 
421 ; of substance, 545 ; of energy, 
655 f. ; cf. 37-39. 

Constantinus, 302. 

Contarini, 355. 

Contemplation, 306 ; aesthetic, 250, 561, 
600, 621 f., 677; intellectual, 154, 
280, 333. 

Contingency of the finite, 347 ; in free 
dom of the will, 330; of the individ 
ual, 341 ; of the particular laws of 
nature, 422, 506 ; of the world, 492. 

Contract theory of the state, 174 f. , 
328. 432, 518 ff., 558 ; see also state. 

Contradiction, in the dialectical method, 
591 f. ; real, 676 ; principle of, 61, 
88, 138, 398, 583 f., 591. 

Contrast, 473. 

Copernicus, 369. 

704 

Index. 

Copula, 37. 

Cordemoy, 381, 415. 

Cornutus, 216. 

" Correspondence concerning the na 
ture of the Soul," 454. 

Cosmic Processes, early Greek concep 
tions of, 47 ff. ; Aristotle s principle 
for explaining, 140, 144 ; see Change. 

Cosmogony, poetic, 27 ; emanistic, 249 ; 
early physical, 47 ff. 

Cosmological argument, 145, 409, 550. 

Cosmopolitanism, Stoic and Roman, 
176 f. ; Fichte, 606. 

Cousin, 627, 636, 649, 652, 661 note. 

Grantor, 103, 164. 

Crates of Athens, 103. 

Crates of Thebes, 72, 85. 

Gratylus, 70. 

Creation, opposed to evolution and 
emanation, 252-254. 

Cremonini, 355. 

Creuz, 445. 

Criteria, of truth, 197 ff., Descartes, 
392 ; Kant, 543 ff. ; see also Ration 
alism and Empiricism of true revela 
tion, 225 f. ; moral, 501 ff., 664 ff. ; 
see Value. 

Critias, 76. 

Critical method, 533. 

Criticism, immanent, 18 ; of Kant, 
5:54 ff. ; its difficulties, 574 ff. ; as 
task of philosophy, 681. 

Critique or criticism of reason, Kant s, 
532 ff. 

Crousaz, 444, 478. 

Crusius, 444, 484 f. 

Cudworth, 382, 401, 435, 449, 503. 

Cumberland, 382, 435 f., 508, 513. 

Cusanus, see Nicolaus. 

Custom, explains substance and causal 
ity with Hume, 475, 476. 

Cynics, 70, 82 ff., 90, 94, 96, 164, 166, 
169, 171, 684 (96), 686 (163), 687 
(216). 

Cyrenaics, 70, 82, 86 f., 94, 165. 

Czolbe, 632, 641. 

Daimonion (or Daemon) of Socrates, 98. 
Dalgarn, 398. 
Damascius, 215, 218. 
Damiron, 627. 

Dante, 311, 314. 327, 334, 426. 
-V Darwin, Ch., 630, 656 f., 672. 

Darwinism, with Empedocles, 53; see 

Natural Selection and Survival of the 

fittest. 
Daube, 627. 
Daubenton, 443. 
David of Dinant, 313, 339, 410. 
Deduction, Aristotle s conception of, 
134 ; transcendental, of Kant, 544. 
Definition, Socrates, 95 ; Aristotle, 
137 f. 

Degerando, 10, 627, 635. 

Deism and Deists, 488-497, 523. 

Deity, first used as philosophical prin 
ciple by Anaximander, 34 ; as Idea 
of the Good, Plato, 128 ; as demiurge, 
Plato, 130 ; as pure Form, with Aris 
totle, 145 ; as pneuina, with Stoics, 
186 f. ; p:picurus view of, 188; as 
infinite, 689 (238) ; above knowledge 
and Being, 335 ; distinguished from 
God, 335 ; as natura naturans, with 
Eckhart, 335 f. ; see also God. 

Demetrius, 216, 686 (163). 

Demiurge, Plato s idea of, 130 ; Valen- 
tinus, 254 ; Gnostics, 257 ff. 

Democritus, belongs to Systematic Pe 
riod, 25 f., 99 f. ; life and writings, 
100 f. ; grounds metaphysics anew, 
105-108 ; his system of materialism, 
109-116 ; relation to Plato, 105-108, 
118 f., 130; to Aristotle, 138 f., 148 
ff. ; to Epicurus, 165, 183-185, 202 ; 
to Stoics, 180 f. ; revived, 353 ; influ 
ence in Renaissance, 369, 371 f. ; his 
principle of reduction of qualitative 
to quantitative victorious with Gali 
leo, 388 ; with Bacon, Descartes, 
Hobbes, 401, 403 ; influence on Leib 
niz, 422 ; compared with Kant, 541 ; 
opposed by Schelling and Goethe, 
51)8 f. 

Demonax, 213, 216, 686 (163). 

De Morgan, 629. 

Dependence, absolute (Schleiermacher), 
582. 

Derham, 491. 

Descartes, begins a new development, 
379; life and writings, 380, 692 
(380) ; method, 389 ff. ; cogito ergo 
sum, 391 f. ; innate ideas, 392 ; 
proofs for existence of God, 392 f., 

405 ; on error, 394 ; on sense quali 
ties, 403 ; his dualism of substances, 
404 f. ; conception of substance and 
attribute, 406 ; doctrine of bodies, 

406 ; on conservation of motion, 411 ; 
on the passions, 412 ; on mind and 
body, 413 f. ; ethics, 414, 692 (413) ; 
cf. also 400 f., 410, 467, 636. 

Determinism, Socrates, 79 f. ; Stoics, 
193 f. ; opposed by Carneades and 
Epicurus, 194 f . ; intellectualistic, 
330 ; see also Freedom. 

Development, Aristotle s central prin 
ciple, 139 ff. ; Thomas, 324 ; Leib 
niz, 424 ; Robinet, 481 ; Schelling, 
597 ; Hegel, 611 ff. 

Dewey, 630, 669. 

Dexippus, 218. 

Diagoras, 76. 

Dialectic, of Zeno, 44, 55 f. ; of Soph 
ists, 69, 88 ff. ; of Plato, 120 ; of Aris 
totle, 132 f., 137 ; of Proclus, 251 ; of 

Index. 

705 

Scholasticism, 271 ; opposed by the 
Mystics, 272 ; of Abelard, 300 ; at- 
tacked in Renaissance, 360 ; natural, 
of Ramus, 361 ; transcendental, of 
Kant, 548 ; philosophy as, Schleier- 
macher, 582 ; of Fichte and Hegel, 
691, 611 f . ; influence on St. Simon 
and Comte, 650-652 ; as real, with 
Bahnsen, 676. 

Dictearclms 159, 161. 

Diderot, 442, 457, 489, 493, 496, 608. 

Didymus, see Arius. 

Dilthez, 63:3, 660. 

Dio Chrysostomos, 686 (163). 

Diodorus Cronus, 71, 89. 

Diogenes Laertius, 215. 

Diogenes of Apollonia, 32, 55, 62 ff., 
70, 150, 187, 684 (55). 

Diogenes of Babylon, 162. 

Diogenes of Sinope, 70, 72, 84 f., 94. 

Dionysidorus, 89. 

Dionysius the Areopagite, 271, 274. 

Dippel, 445. 

Docta ignorantia, with Nicolaus Cusa- 
nus, 337, 343, 347. 

Dogmatism, of Reid, 483 ; defined by 
Kant, 534 ; by Fichte, 580. 

Dominicans, 313, 340. 

Doubt, as Augustine s starting-point, 
277 ; of Descartes, 390 f. 

S6a, see Opinion. 

Drobisch, 631. 

Dualism, of Pythagoreans, 46 ; of 
Plato, 120, 130 ; overcome by Aris 
totle, 133 ; ethical and religious, in 
Alexandrian thought, 229 ff., 2: .;") ff. 
of Gnostics and Manichaeans, 239 f. 
with Augustine, 285 f. ; anthropo 
logical, of body and soul, 304 ff. 
metaphysical, 403 ff. ; of substances, 
with Descartes, 404 f. ; exception 
made in case of the passions, 413 f. ; 
controlling view of Enlightenment, 
448 ; moral, of Kant, 555 f. 

Duclos, 443. 

Diihriug, 632, 671 f. 

5tfva/i$, 140, 179 ; see also Potential, 
Power, Dynamic. 

Duns Scotus, personality and writings, 
311, 314; separates theology from 
philosophy, 322 f. ; metaphysical 
psychology, 324 f. ; indeterminism, 
330, 332 f. ; on relation of intellect 
and will, :J:U, 690 (330) ; on indi 
viduality, 341 f. ; gave impetus to 
empirical science, 344 ; influence on 
Bacon, 384 ; on Descartes, 394 ; on 
Leibniz, 420, 423. 

Durkht im, 628. 

Duty, Stoics, 172; Kant, 551. 

Dynamic conception, Strato and the 
Stoics, 179, 236; Leibniz, 421, &lt;;:,&lt;; ; 
theory of matter, Kant, 546, 656 ; 
Schelling, 597 ; recent, 656 ; cf. 
8vva.fj.is. 

Eberhard, 446. 

Eckhart, 311, 314, 330, 332, 334 ff., 
340, 365, 375, 583. 

Eclecticism, ancient, 161, 684 (55), 686 
(163) ; French in nineteenth century, 
627, 636, 649, 661 note ; see Scepti 
cism. 

Economic basis of history, 655 ; see 
Political Economy. 

Ecphantus, 46, 56. 

Ecstasy, with Philo, 227 ; Neo-Platon- 
ism, 228 f., 250. 

Education, in Plato s Republic, 127 ; 
of the human race through revela 
tion, 226 ; according to Lessing, 498 ; 
in Rousseau, 526 ; see also Peda 
gogics. 

ty^onKdv, 172, 179, 187, 339. 

Ego, of Fichte, 593 ff. 

Egoism, with Hobbes, 434 f . ; Lamet- 
trie, etc., 515; combined with Utili 
tarianism, 513 ff., 662 f., 671 ; Stir- 
ner s, 671, Nietzsche s, 678 f. ; see 
Hedonism, Pipicureanism, Individ 
ualism. 

et5w\a, 113-115, 188, 468; cf. Idols. 

Elean-Eretrian School, 70, 82. 

Eleatics, 28, 30, 34 ff., 51 ff., 59 ff., 
89 f., 584 note, 585 note; see also 
Xenophanes. 

Elements, of Empedocles, 39 f. ; as 
homoiomeriai, with Anaxagoras, 41 ; 
of Pythagoreans, 57 ; with Aristotle, 
147 f. 

Emanation, in Alexandrianism, 242 f. ; 
as eternal necessity, 249 ; as a logical 
system, 250 f. ; with Erigena, 289-291. 

Emotions, ancient conception of, 165 ; 
Stoics on, 168; Descartes and Spi 
noza, 412-414; Hobbes, 413; Ideol 
ogists, 457. 

Empedocles, 29 f., 39 f., 51 ff., 58 ff., 
92. 

Empiricism, favoured by Nominalism, 
344 ; in Renaissance, 360 f., 362, 
376 f. 379 ; Bacon s, 383 ff. ; influ 
enced by mathematics, 387 f. ; Locke s, 
450 f.; of Hume, 476; Schelling s 
metaphysical, 619. 

Empirio-Criticism, 651. 

* (V KO.I wiv, 35, 590 ; cf. Pantheism. 

Encyclopaedists, 439, 442. 

End, see Teleology. 

tvtpyeia, 140, 144. 

Energy, specific of the sense organs, 
66, 113 ; principle of conservation of 
energy, 655 f. ; see Conservation, and 
ivtpyeia. 
; Enfantin, 628. 
| Engel, J. J., 446. 

706 

Index. 

Engels, Fr., 632, 655. 

Enlightenment, the Greek, 66 ff . ; 
philos. of, 437 ff. ; its meaning, 506 f., 
dominated by natural science, 624 ; 
cf. also 650. 

Ens realissimum, et perfectissimum, 
292, 393, 408. 

Entelechy, of Aristotle, 140 ff. ; revived 
by Leibniz, 420. 

Epicharmus, 66. 

Epictetus, 213, 216, 230. 

Epicurus and Epicureanism, 158 f.; life 
and writings, 162 ; ethics and theory 
of life, 165 f., 170 f.; theory of the 
state, 173 ff., 686 (174), 328; view 
of Nature, 180, 182-186, 687 (204 
note) indeterminism, 193 f. ; logic and 
theory of knowledge, 198, 202 f., 205 ; 
cf. also 211 f., 229, 252, 353, 369, 
521. 

Epistemology, or theory of cognition, 
origin of its problems, 58 ; of Greek 
cosmologists, 58-65 ; treated psycho 
logically by Protagoras, 91 ff.; of 
Aristippus, 93 f.; of Socrates, 94 ff. ; 
made basis of metaphysics, 101, 
104 ff. ; of Democritus, 104 ff., 110 ff. ; 
of Plato, 104 ff., 117 ft .; the principle 
of Aristotle s logic, 133 ; Stoic, 199, 
207 ff. ; of Sceptics, 200-202, 205-207 ; 
of Epicureans, 204 f . ; of Augustine, 
277-282 ; of Occam, 325 ; of Mysti 
cism, 335 ff. ; of humanistic Renais 
sance, 370; of Descartes, 392-394, 
403 ; of Spinoza, 396, 408 f . ; of 
Malebranche, 417; made central in 
philosophy of Enlightenment, 447 ; 
general character of modern is to 
emphasise inner experience, 466 ; of 
Locke, 467-469 ; of Berkeley, 469 ; of 
Collier, 471; of Hume, 472-477; 
of Condillac and Ideologists, 478 ff. ; 
of Reid, 482 f.; of Leibniz, 483; 
Wolff and his successors, 460 ff., 
484 ff.; of Kant s pre-critical period, 
465 f., 485 f. ; general character of 
his critical, 533 ; exposition of the 
same, 537-550 ; of Kant s successors, 
573 ff.; Fichte, 579; Schleiermacher, 
582; Herbart, 583 ff.; Schopen 
hauer s, 588 f. ; Hamilton, 638 ; 
Lotze, 644 ; Comte, 650 f. ; Spencer, 
657-659 ; Nietzsche, 679 ; see also 
Knowledge and Signs. 

Erasmus, 360. 

Eratosthenes, 162. 

Erdmann, 631. 

Eric of Aux., 273. 

Erigena, John Scotus, 271, 274, 289- 
291, 335, 419, 689 (274). 

Eschenmayer, 616. 

Esse, in intellectu and in re, 293, 393, 
408 ; objective, contrasted with subjec 
tive, 325 ; with formaliter, 325, 393 ; 
with nosse and velle, Augustine, 
280 ; Cainpanella, 370. 

Essence, with Aristotle, 139, 141 and 
existence, 293 ff., 393, 408. 

Essenes, sect of, 213, 231. 

Eternal truths, see Verites. 

Eternity, of the world, Aristotle, 144 f.; 
Origen, 253 f.; Plotinus, 249; and 
time, 287. 

Ethics, principle of, first propounded 
by Heraclitus, 63 ; problems raised 
by Sophists, 72 ff.; intellectualistic 
and eudaemonistic of Socrates, 77 ff. ; 
of Democritus, 115 f . ; of Plato, 
123 ff. ; the basis of his idealism, 
108 f., 117 f.; of Aristotle, 151 ff.; of 
the Stoics, 163 ff.; of Epicureans, 165 
ff. ; of Sceptics, 165 ff. ; of Augustine, 
287; of Abelard, 308; of Thomas, 
332 f. ; of Descartes and Spinoza, 
414 ; individualistic of eighteenth cen 
tury, 500 ff. ; three main questions, 
501 ; of Locke, 502 f. ; intellectual 
istic, of Clarke, etc., 503 f.; Leibniz 
and Wolff, 505 ff. ; sesthetic of Shaf- 
tesbury and Hutcheson, 508 f. ; utili 
tarian, of Bentham, 513, 522, 662- 
664, 665 ; of J. S. Mill, 665 ff. ; Butler 
and Paley, 514 ; egoistic, 515, utili 
tarian, separated from egoism, Hume, 
516 ff.; of Smith, 517 f.; of Kant, 
551-557 ; as chief philos. discipline, 
Fichte, 595 ; Schiller s aesthetic, 
600 ff. ; of genius, Romanticists, 603 ; 
branch of aesthetics, Herbart, 603 ; 
evolutionary theory of, 659, 662, 667- 
669 ; Green s, 669 f. ; individualists 
of Nietzsche, 679 ; see also Virtue, 
Virtues, Good. 

Eubulides, 71, 89. 

Eucken, 633, 642. 

Euclid, 70 f., 89, 96, 102. 

Eudaemonism, in Greek ethics, 79 ff., 
87, 151 ; opposed by Kant, 552, 559 ; 
in Utilitarianism, 662 ; see Hedonism, 
Utilitarianism. 

Eudemus, 161, 198. 

Eudorus, 216. 

Eudoxus, 103, 147, 186. 

Euemerus, 70. 

Euripides, 66. 

Eusebius, 216. 

Euthydemus, 89. 

Evil (see also Theodicy) in the world, 
195-197 ; negative with Plotinus and 
= matter, 247 ; Patristic doctrine of, 
252 f. ; negative with Augustine, 280 ; 
reduced to metaphysical and due to 
finiteness, Leibniz, 491; "radical," 
Kant, 556. 

Evolution, as opposed to emanation, 
243 ; Comte on, 653 ; as principle in 

Index. 

707 

recent thought, 655-660 ; two forms 
of, 659, 661 ; in ethics, 659, 662, 667- 
609 ; in Hartmann, 674; see also De 
velopment, Natural selection, etc. 

Existence ; see Essence, and also God. 

Experience, in opposition to thought, 
58 f. ; Democritus and Plato, 105 f., 
110, 114 f. ; inner and outer, 450 f. ; 
inner more certain than outer, 276 ff., 
345, 362 f., 460 ff. ; as history of sal 
vation, 276 f., 305; as sole basis of 
psychology, 635 ; as organised sys 
tem of phenomena with Kant, 545 f. ; 
its conditions not themselves capable 
of being experienced, 577 ; cf. also 
Empiricism. 

Experiment, with Bacon, 384 ; with 
Galileo, 388. 

Faculty, 451, 577, 634 f., 637 ; see also 
Psychology. 

Faith, and reason (see Reason), a priori 
of Kant, 554 ff. ; Jacobi s doctrine of, 
574. 

Fearn, 628. 

Fechner, 632, 644 f. 

Feder, 446. 

Feeling, withCyrenaics, 86 ; Victorines, 
305 ; Ideologists, 457 ; emphasized by 
Rousseau, 458 f. ; made basis of be 
lief in external world and in causality 
by Hume, 475-477 ; Herder, 465 ; 
basis of morality with Protagoras, 
74 ; Shaftesbury, 500 ; and others, 
510 ; recognized as distinct faculty 
by Tetens and Kant, 512 ; a priori, 
560 ; immediate knowing, Jacobi, 
574; as communion with the infinite, 
582 ; Comte on, 653; aesthetic, 483 f., 
50!&gt; f. 

Ferguson, 441, 510. 

Ferrari, 631. 

Ferri, 631. 

Feuerbach, 632, 640 f., 610 f., 675, 678. 

Fichte. ,1. G., life and writings, 570; 
his character, 696 (570) ; concep 
tion of philosophy and starting-point, 
570 f. ; dialectical method, 590 f. ; 
system. : . 3-;V. )( ; philosophy of his 
tory, 005 f. ; latest doctrine, 610 ; cf. 
also 4:5-2, 035-637, 640, 660, 661 note, 
675, 680. 

Fichte, I. H., 632, 640. 

Ficiim, :;:&gt;!, 358. 

Figulus, 215. 

Final causes ; see Cause. 

Fiorentino, 631. 

Fire, as first principle, Heraclitus, 36, 
50. 

Fischer, K., 13, 631, 642, 660. 

Fludd, 357. 

Fontenelle, 410. 

Force, moving, Empedocles, 40 ; An- 
axagoras, 41 ; conservation of, 421, 
656 ; = the absolute, 657, 659 ; to be 
eliminated, 651 f. ; see also Con 
servation. 

Foreknowledge of God, as argument of 
determinism, 193. 

de la Forge, 381, 416. 

Form, essential nature of things, with 
Democritus, 107, 111 ff. ; with Plato, 
107-109, 129 (see also Idea); con 
trasted with matter by Aristotle, 
139 ff. ; pure, 144 f. ; in psychology 
of Scholastics, 324 f. ; with Averroes, 
338 ; individual Forms with Scotus, 
341 ; used by Bacon, 384 f. ; distin 
guished from content in ideas by 
Lambert, 401 ; by Kant, 465 f. ; pure 
Forms of sensibility, 465 f., 539-542 ; 
of the understanding, 541 f. ; fur 
nished by the subject, Reinhold, 576 ; 
Maimon, 578 ; from without, Her- 
bart, 583. 

Fortlage, 632, 637, 646. 

Foucher, Sim., 355. 

Fouillee, 663. 

Fowler, 629. 

Franck, A., 627. 

Franck, Seb., 356, 365, 368. 

Francke, 445, 487, 583. 

Francki, 631. 

Francis of Mayro, 315, 342. 

Franciscans, 313 f., 341. 

Eraser, 630. 

Frayssinons, 628. 

Fredegisus, 274. 

Frederick II. of Sicily, 319. 

Frederick II. of Prussia, 446, 516. 

Freedom, ethical, maintained by Socra 
tes, 191 ; distinguished from freedom 
of choice by Plato, 191 ; Aristotle s 
conception of freedom, 192 ; Stoics 
deterministic views, 193 ; metaphysi 
cal freedom as indeterminism of Epi 
curus, 194f. ; central conception with 
Church Fathers, 688 (234); applied 
to God by Patristic thought. 252 ; used 
to explain origin of evil, 252 f.; both 
maintained and denied by Augustine, 
282-285 ; maintained as determinism 
by Thomism, 329 f.; as indetermin 
ism by Scotus and Occam, 330 f.; as 
ethical, Buridan, 331, 690 (331); as 
source of error, Descartes, 394 ; with 
Miih-branche, 407 ; denied by Hobbes 
and Spinoza. 413 ; as postulate, Kant, 
554 f. 

Free thought, 448, 486 ff. 

Fries, 573, 575. 

Fulbert, 302. 

Gabler, 640. 

Gale, Theophilus, 382. 

Gale, Thomas, 382. 

708 

Index. 

Galen, 216, 316, 687 (216). 

yaX-nviff/jifc, 166 ; cf. 116. 

Galileo, 378 f., 388 f., 398 ., 400, 402 f., 
410, 541, 691 (379). 

Gall, (527, 634, 653. 

(ialuppi, 631, 636 note. 

Carat, 443, 522. 

Garve, 446. 

Gassendi, 355, 391. 

Gaunilo, 293. 

Gaza, Theod., 354. 

7^e&lt;rts, with Plato, 106, 120. 

Genius, defined by Kant, 564 ; Schelling, 
607 ; as the end of history, 679 ; in 
morals, 602 f., 679 f. 

Gennadius, 359. 

Gentilis, 382, 431. 

Geometry and geometrical method (see 
Mathematics) made supreme by Car 
tesians, 395-399 ; in philos. of law, 
432; opposed by Riidiger, Crusius, 
and Kant, 484 f. 

Georgius of Trebizond, 354, 359. 

Gerbert, 272, 275, 302. 

Gerson, 315, 323. 

Gersonides, 318. 

Geulincx, 379, 381, 396, 410, 415, 417, 
692 (381). 

Gibieuf, 381, 416. 

Gilbert, 275, 335. 

Gioberti. 631, 661 note. 

Gioja, 631. 

Glanvil, 474. 

Glogau, 633. 

Gnostics, 214, 217, 222, 224, 237, 239, 
243, 257. 

God (see also Deity, Theology), first 
philos. conception of, as matter, 
Anaximander, 34 ; as tv KO.I Trdt&gt;, 
Xenophanes, 34 f.; his relation to 
the world in Hellenistic thought, 
235 ff.; exalted above all mind or 
matter, 237 (see " Negative Theol 
ogy"); personality of, in Christian 
ity, 238, 251 ; personality of, rejected 
by Greek and Neo-Platonic thought, 
238 ; implicit and explicit, 290, 346, 
619; source of truth for Augustine, 
278 f.; Anselm s argument for exist 
ence of, 292 f., 485 ; distinguished 
from deity by Gilbert, 335 ; the final, 
formal, and efficient cause of universe 
with Bruno, 367 ; self-generation of, 
with Boehme, 375 ; Descartes proofs 
for, 392 f.; as sole substance with 
Descartes, 405 ; as " raison univer- 
SflMe" with Malebranche, 407; as 
" causa SMI," Spinoza, 408 ; as " na- 
tura naturans," 335 f., 368, 409; as 
central monad, Leibniz, 424 ; his 
existence demonstratively certain, 
Locke, 469 ; arguments for, criticised 
by Kant, 549 f.; as postulate of a 

priori faith, 556 ; as identity ol 
thought and Being, Schleiermacher, 
582 ; as moral world-order, Fichte. 
595 ; as the Infinite, Schelling, 609 ; 
as Idea, Hegel, 611 ; personality of, 
in Hegelian School, 639 f. ; as general 
consciousness, Fechner, 645. 

Goethe, 3(56, 530, 597 ff., 599, 698 (599), 
602, 656. 

Godwin, 522. 

Goring, 633, 651. 

Good, the, Socrates leaves it undefined, 
79 ; virtue with Antisthenes, 83 ; 
pleasure with Aristippus, 85 ; Idea 
of, with Plato, 122 f., 125 ; happiness 
or well-being with Aristotle, 151 ; 
pleasure with Epicurus, 165 f., 170; 
virtue with Stoics, 168 ; absorption 
in the deity with Neo-Platonists, 250 ; 
contemplation with Augustine, 286 f.; 
and Thomas, 333 f.; love with Scotus, 
334 ; intellectual love of God with 
Spinoza, 435 ; recognized by God s 
wisdom, ace. to Thomas, 332 ; result 
of God s will, Scotus, 332 ; high 
est good = perfection with Leibniz, 
505 ; Kant s doctrine of, 555 ; hedo 
nistic view of, 662 ; Carlyle s, 665 ; 
Mill s, 667; Green s, 670; "beyond 
good and bad," 678 f. 

Gorgias, 30, 69, 71, 89 f. 

Goschel, 640. 

Gottfried of Fontaine, 330. 

Gottsched, 444. 

Grace, realm of, opposed to nature, 
318 ff. ; irresistible with Augustine, 
282, 284 ; supported by Thomas, de 
nied by Scotus, 334. 

Grammar, blended with logic with the 
Sophists, 88, 96; Terminists, 342 f.; 
Humanists, 360. 

Gratry, 661. 

Gravitation, 388, 402. 

Green, T. H., 630, 663, 669 f. 

Gregory of Nyssa, 254, 261. 

Grimm, 443. 

Grote, 71. 

Grotius, 382, 427, 431 f., 526. 

Gundling, 520. 

Giinther, 633, 661 note. 

Guyau, 628, 670. 

Haeckel, 632. 

Hall, 630. 

Hamann, 510, 569, 576, 693. 

Hamilton, 624, 629, 638 f. 

Hansch, 444. 

Hardenberg, see Novalis. 

Harmony, of the world, according to 
Heraclitus, 36, 49 f. ; and spheres, 
Pythagoreans, 45 ; Bruno, 367 f. ; 
Sliaftesbury, 489 ; pre-established ac 
cording to Leibniz, 416 note 1, 424, 

Index. 

709 

483 ; between substances, Geulincx, 
415 ; the soul a, 62. 

Harris, 030. 

Hartley, 440, 455, 480, 613. 

Hartmann, (533, 646-648, 673 f. 

Harvey, 402. 

Haure au, 627. 

Heaven, as realm of order and perfec 
tion, according to Anaxagoras, 41 f., 
64 ; Pythagoreans, 57 ; Aristotle, 
147. 

Hedonism and Hedonists, 70, 85 ff. ; 
93 f. ; of Epicurus, 165 f., 170 f. ; 
of Pyrrho, 167; of Lamettrie, etc., 
515 ; of Bentham, 662-664 ; criti 
cised by Coleridge and Carlyle, 661 f. ; 
by Green, 670 ; transcended by Mill, 
6(56 f. ; of Spencer, 667 f. ; see also 
Cyrenaics, Egoism, Epicureanism, 
Ethics, Utilitarianism and Eud&lt;e- 
monisrn. 

Hegel, conception of history of philoso 
phy, 10 f., 13 ; general work as phil 
osopher, 530, 569 ; life and writings, 
571 f., 697 (571); dialectical method, 
592, 698 ("&gt;92) ; relation to Plato, 
610 ; system, 6 1 1-6 L5, 624, 640, 646 f., 
649, 652, 655, 65i&gt; f., 6J1, 672, 674, 
677, 681. 

Hegelian school, 631 f., 639 ff., 675. 

Hegesias, 70, 87. 

Hellenistic philosophy, 155 ff. 

Helmholtz, 633, 642/655. 

Helmont, 357. 

Helvetius, 443, 515. 

Hemming. 382. 

Hemsterhuys, 510. 

Hmiads, 251, 676. 

Henry of Ghent, 314, 330 f., 340 f., 345. 

Hentsch, 445. 

Heracleides Lembus, 161. 

Heracleides of Pontus, 103. 

Heraclitus, (^general character of his 
thought, 28 ) life and writings, 30 ; 
as a reformer, 683 (30) ; conception 
of the universe, 3(5 ff. ; of the cosmic 
process, 49 f., 687 (181) ; of cogni 
tion, 58 f. ; influence on Protagoras. 
92 ; on the Stoics, 186, 209, 687 (186); 
on ^Euesidemus, 200 ; his principle 
active in Fichte, 595, 612 note ; cf. 
also 72, 118. 

Herbart, miscalled a realist, 569 note ; 
life and writings. 572, 697 (572) ; 
metaphysics, 683-586, 592 ; psychol 
ogy, 577, 586 f. ; ethics, 603 f. ; peda 
gogics, 586 note 3, 698 (586); his fol 
lowers, 631, 637, 649. 

Herbert of Cherbury, 379, 382, 436, 
449 f., 495. 

Herder, personality and writings, 439, 
446, 570; psychology, 464 f., influ 
enced by Shaftesbury, 489, 507 ; his 
view of history, 527 f., 694 (527); 
in literature, 530 ; influence on Kant, 
559 ; criticises Kant, 576 ; influenced 
by Spinoza, 598. 

Heredity, 656 f. 

Herennius (Pseudo.), 277. 

Hermes (Trismegistus), 216. 

Hermes, Fr., 633. 

Hermetic writings, 227, 237. 

Hermippus, 161. 

Herschel, 629. 

Hertz, 651. 

Heteronomy in morals, 552 f. 

Hicetus, 66. 

Hickok, 630. 

Hierocles, 218. 

Hildebert of Lavardin, 275. 

Hinrichs, 640. 

Hippasus, 57. 

Hippius, 69, 71, 73 f., 88. 

Hippo, 70. 

Hippodamus, 66, 74. 

Hippocrates, 67, 316. 

Hippolytus, 214, 217. 

History, philosophy of, 19 ; its worth 
first recognised by Cicero, 177 ; prob 
lem of, first suggested by Christi 
anity, 255 ff. ; Patristic views of, 
256 ff. ; with Augustine, 285 f ; 
Lessing s sense for, 498 f. ; worth of, 
examined by Rousseau, 525 ; philoso 
phy of, with Vico, 526 ; with Herder, 
527, 694 (527); with Kant, 559; with 
Schiller, 604 f. ; Romanticists, 605 ; 
Fichte, 605 f. ; depreciated by Scho 
penhauer, 621, 654 ; Comte s, 650- 
653 ; materialistic, 654 f. ; Hart 
mann, 673 ; as central principle with 
Hegel, 612; economic basis of, 655; 
contrasted with natural science, 625, 
648 ff., 694 (527); its influence in 
principle of evolution, 626, 655 ff., 
657 ; Nietzsche s view of, 679. 

History of Philosophy, see Philosophy. 

Hobbes, life and writings, 381 ; method, 
389 ; attitude toward religion, 400 ; 
on teleology, 401 ; mathematics the 
only rational science, thought a 
reckoning, 404 ; mechanical concep 
tion, 412 ; sensualistic psychology, 
413 ; determinism, 413 ; theory of 
state and society, 431-434 ; opposed, 
435 ; influence on the Enlightenment, 
448 f., 502. 512 f., 514, 517, 518 f.; cf. 
also 403, 406, 411, 467, 508, 586. 

Hodgson, 630. 

Holbach, 443, 516; see also Systeme de 
la Nature. 

Home, 441, 510 f. 

Homoiomeriai of Anaxagoras, 41. 

Huet, 395. 

Hugo de Groot, See Grotius. 

Hugo of St. Victor, 275, 305, 324, 334. 

710 

Index. 

Humboldt, 520. 

Humanism, 349 fl, 352 ff., 360; aes 
thetic in Germany, 602. 

Humanity, religion of, 653. 

Hume, life and writings, 441 ; charac 
ter, 693 (441); "impressions and 
ideas," 453, 657; theory of knowl 
edge, 472-477 ; on causality, 474-476 ; 
ethics, 5161; conception of "sym 
pathy," 517, 694 (517); on natural 
religion, 494 f. ; "Natural History of 
Religion," 497 ; influence on Kant, 
535, 537 note 4, 545 ; on Spencer, 657 ; 
cf. also 415 note 1, 574 note 7, 579, 
635, 650. 

Hutcheson, 441, 509. 

Huxley, 630, 669. 

Huyghens, 380, 421. 

Hylozoism, of the Milesians, 32, 44, 48 ; 
dynamic, with Strato, 179; material 
istic, in France, 458, 480, 493. 

Ibn Tofail, see Abubacer. 

Ideal, aesthetic, 564, 613 ; moral, of Soc 
rates, 79; of Plato, 125; Aristotle, 
151; of the Sage, 164 ff.; Green on, 
669; "beyond good and bad," 678; 
of Reason, Kant, 549. 

Idealism, Plato s system of, 116-131 ; 
psychological and epistemological of 
Occam, 325 f.; Nee-Platonic of Eck- 
hart, 335; subjective, of Berkeley, 
470; of Collier, 471 ; transcendental 
or critical of Kant, 541, 543; devel 
opment by Kant s successors, 568 ff.; 
Fichte s definition of, 580; his sub 
jective, 596, 642, 660; Schelling s 
objective, 597-599 ; absolute or Spino- 
zistic, 608; religious, 6091; Schiller A 
aesthetic, 600-602; Hegel s logical, 
611-615; recent, 642, 660, 680 ; influ 
ence on British thought, 629, 654, 663, 
665; teleological of Lotze, 6431; see 
also Ideas, Neo-Platonism. 

Ideas, (1) In Platonic or related senses: 
with Plato, 109, 118 ff.; Aristotle s 
criticism on Plato s Ideas, 133 ; their 
influence on him, 142 f.; Plato s the 
ory opposed by Stoics and Epicureans, 
203 ; innate, 204 ; Plato s Ideas trans 
formed to thoughts of God by Neo- 
Pythagoreanism and Neo-Platonism, 
233; Philo s doctrine, 2401; Ploti- 
nus, 245 ; Augustine, 279 ; in mediaeval 
thought (see Universals); revived by 
Kant as necessary problems of reason, 
549; ethical of Herbart, 604; Neo- 
Platonic of Schelling, 609, 617; as 
God s intuition of himself, 610 ; God 
as Idea, Hegel, 611 ; state as Idea, 
613; Idea as object of aesthetic con 
templation with Schopenhauer, 621 ; 
= the "logical factor" in reality, 

Hartmann, 646 ; rejected by Feuer- 
bach, 641, 675; see also Idealism, 
Plato, Neo-Platonism, Conception. 
, (2) In sense of a mental modifica 
tion or content (Ger. Vorstellung) : 
transition from Platonic usage, 203, 
306, 450; Locke on, 450 1; copies of 
impressions, Hume, 453, 472 ff. ; and 
Spencer, 658 f.; abstract, how formed, 
Locke, 451 ; a fiction, Berkeley, 452, 
470 ; innate, of Cicero and Eclectics, 
204 ; of Descartes, 392, 449 ; of Cud- 
worth, 449; as virtual determining 
principles, with Leibniz, 463; with 
Kant, 465 f. ; with Tetens, 466. 

Identity, principle of, exaggerated with 
Sophists, 89 1 ; of thought and being 
with Parmenides, 37 f. ; with Schleier- 
inacher, 582 ; system of, 608. 

Ideology, 457 ff., 478 ff., 627, 634 f. 

Idols, Bacon s doctrine of, 383 1 

Image, 113-115, 188, 450. 

Imagination, 281, 306 1, 544, 547, 563, 
594. 

Imitation, as essence of art, 153 1, 483 f. 

Immanence and transcendence of God, 
178 1, 235 ft ., 242 ff., 245, 337 1, 611. 

Innnaterialism, Plato s, 109, 116 ff.; 
Leibniz, 421 ff. 

Immortality of the soul, in myth, 62 
note 1, 685 (123); problematic with 
Socrates, 79 ; asserted with Plato, 
124, 685 (123) ; and in Platonism, 232 ; 
with Aristotle, 1501; Stoics, 187; 
lost in pan-psychism, 339 f. ; not de 
monstrable according to Duns and 
Occam, 322; maintained in Deism, 
4951; postulate with Kant, 5551; 
debated in Hegelian School, 639 ff. 

Impenetrability, 404, 467. 

Imperative, categorical, of Kant, 551 ff. ; 
of Fichte, 594 ; hypothetical, 551 f . 

Imperfection, see Evil and Theodicy. 

Impressions, source of all ideas, with 
Hume, 453, 472 ff. ; Spencer, 657. 

Indeterminism, 1941, 329 ff.; see Free 
dom. 

Indian Wisdom, 621. 

Indifferentism, 297 ; theological, 427. 

Individualism, of Democritus, 116; of 
Greek epigones, 163 ff. ; of Epicurus, 
1701 ; of Renaissance political theory, 
432 ; of Hobbes and Spinoza, 434 f. ; 
of the eighteenth century. 500 1 ; of 
Leibniz, 423, 507; of Shaftesbury, 
5081 ; of political theory in eighteenth 
century, 520 ; of Romanticism, 603, 
674 ; of Bentham, 663 f. ; of Spencer, 
668 ; of Stirner, Bahnsen, Nietzsche, 
(574-680. 

Individuality, problem of, 337 ff. 

Induction with Socrates, 97 ; Aristotle 
on, 137 ; Bacon s, 384-386 ; con- 

Index. 

711 

trasted with Galileo s method, 388 ; 
Descartes theory of, 390. 

Infinite, regarded by Greeks as imper 
fect, 40 ; the, of Anaximander, 33 ; 
contradictions involved in conception 
of, Zeno, 44 ; transformation in the 
conception of, from Greek to Neo- 
Platonist and modern views, 688 f. 
(238) ; attribute of the deity, Neo- 
Platonism, 23(5 ; of divine will, Origen, 
252 ; of God with Cusanus, 345-347 ; 
of the world in the Copernican system 
and with Bruno, 368 f. ; of the divine 
substance, with Descartes, 405 ff. ; of 
attributes and modes, with Spinoza, 
409 f. ; felt in religion, according to 
Schleiermacher, 582 ; as occasion of 
the antinomies, with Kant, 550 ; of 
the Ego and its activity, with Fichte, 
594 ^ unknowable according to Hamil 
ton, 638; opposed by Diihring, 671. 

Innateness, of ideas, Cicero and Eclec 
tics, 204 ; Descartes, 392 ; Herbert, 
Cudworth, 449 ff . ; virtual, 463 f. ; of 
moral truths, 503 ; controverted by 
Locke, 450 ; by Herbart, 583 ; evolu 
tionary explanation of, 658 f. 

Intellect, its relation to will with 
Thomists and Scotists, 329 ff. ; active 
and passive with Alexander Aphro- 
disias and Averroes, 339 f. ; as finite 
mode, 408; infinite mode, 410; in 
capable of knowing the world, 676 ; 
see also Understanding, Reason, 
Nous, Will, Intellectualism. 

Intellectualism, of early science, 62 ; 
of Socrates, 79 f. ; of Democritus, 
115 f.; of Aristotle, 151, 154; of 
Augustine, 286 f. ; of Thomas, 330, 
333 f. ; of Eckhart, 334-337; of 
Clarke, 504 ; opposed by Comte, 653 ; 
contrasted with voluntarism, 654, 
676 ff. ; united with voluntarism by 
Hartinann, (546 f. ; see Voluntarism. 

Intellectual perception, 581, 591 ff. 

Intuitive knowledge, with Plato, 118 f.; 
Occam, 342 f. ; Descartes, 392 ; Locke, 
467 f. ; Hume, 472 f. 

Intuitive understanding, with Kant, 
r,47, 567. 

Iremeus, 217, 221 f., 224, 226, 232, 259, 
261. 

Irony, with Socrates, 97 ; of the 
Romanticists, (505, (ill, 620, 680. 

Irrationalism, til.") ff. ; Schelling s, 
(Hti ft .; Schopenhauer s, 620 ff., 646, 
(572 f. ; Bahnsen s, 675 f. 

Irwing, 445. 

Iselin, 527. 

Isidore of Sevilla, 270, 273. 

Jacobi, 569, 573 ff., 588, 594, 602, 696 
(569). 

Jamblichus, 31, 215, 218, 220, 222, 226, 
250. 

James, 630. 

Janet, 627. 

Jansenists, 416. 

Jaucourt, 443. 

Jesuits, 41(5, 434, 661 note. 

Jesus, his influence, 223; as centre of 
world s history, 256 ff. 

Jevons, 629, 660. 

Jewish philosophy, 317. 

Joachim of Floris, 319. 

John of Brescia, 320. 

John of Damascus, 271, 273. 

John of Rochelle, 344. 

John of Salisbury, 276, 307, 360. 

Jouffroy, 627, 636. 

Joule, 655. 

Judgment, Aristotle s treatment of, 
135 ff. ; Stoics, 207 f. ; with Augustine, 
278-280, 361 ; Descartes, 394 ; with 
Ramus, as an equation, 479, 639; 
synthetic a priori, how possible, 533, 
538, 542 ; as a faculty, 561 ; Kant s 
Critique of, 559 ff. ; see also Logic. 

Julian, 218. 

Jung, 381, 397. 

Jus naturale, 177 ; see Law, and Right. 

Justice, as principle of the state, with 
Plato, 127 ; Godwin on, 522 ; as end 
and criterion, with Bentham, 663 f. ; 
Spencer on, 668. 

Justin Martyr, 214, 217, 223 f., 237, 
259, 687 (217). 

Kalokagathia, Socrates, 79 ; Shaftes- 
bury, 509. 

Kant, conception of philosophy, 4 ; life 
and development, 534-536, 695 (532, 
535) ; writings of pre-critical period, 
445 ; of critical period, 536, 695 (535, 
536) ; his pre-critical thought, 465 f., 
474 note 3, 478, 479 f . , 485 f ., 490 ; criti 
cal period, general character, 533 ff. ; 
his Critique of Pure Reason, 537-550, 
695 (537) ; of Practical Reason, 551- 
556, 695 (551) ; philos. of religion, 
556 f., 695 (557) ; of law, 557 f. ; of 
history, 558 f. ; Critique of Judg 
ment, 560 f. ; aesthetics, 561 ff., 695 
(559), 696 (56-*) ; teleology, 490, 
565-567 ; influence on succeeding 
thought, 530, 569, 573 ; his doctrine 
of thing-in-itself criticized and trans 
formed, 573-590 ; cf. also 198, 432, 
484, 635 f., (538, (540, 642, 656, 680 ; see 
also Neo-Kantians. 

Kantians, 570, 575 f. 

Kd0ap&lt;m, Aristotle s doctrine of, 153 f. 

Kepler, 378 f., 388, 402. 

Kidd, Benjamin. 662 note. 

Kirchhoff, 651. 

von Kirchmann, 633. 

712 

Index. 

Knapp, 643 note. 

Knowledge, as participation in world 
consciousness, 03 f. ; as copy of 
reality, 114, 119, 202, 325, 468, 543; 
cf. also Signs; as recollection, 118ft, 
223 ; as impersonal and super-per 
sonal function, 339 f., 579; as rela 
tion, with Lotze, 644 ; as relation to 
the object, with Kant, 538 ff. ; limits 
of, with Socrates, 97 f. ; with Locke, 
468 ; with Hume, 476 ; with Kant, 
546 f. ; with Maimon, 579 f. ; with 
Comte, 650 ; in agnosticism, 638, 657 ; 
as end in itself, 23, 350 ; as set over 
against faith, 322 f., 574 ; as power, 
Bacon, 386, 434 f. ; sovereignty of, 
650 ; problems of, see Epistemology. 

Knutzen, 444. 

Koppen, 569. 

Krause, 569, 571, 610. 

Krug, 573, 581. 

Kriiger, 445. 

Laas, 633. 

Labanca, 631. 

Labriola, 631. 

Labruyere, 515. 

Lactantius, 217. 

Ladd, 630. 

Lamarck, 480, 653, 656. 

Lambert, 445, 461, 480. 

Lamennais, 628, 649. 

Lamettrie, 442, 455 ff., 479 f., 515, 641. 

Lancelin, 522. 

Lanfranc, 275. 

Lange, 633, 642. 

Language, bearing on philos. studies 
by Sophists, 87^f., 96; by Abelard, 
306 ; by Rarnus, 361 ; Locke on, 451 ; 
Condillac, 478 ; Humboldt, 602 ; de 
Bonald, 648. 

Lantruet, 433. 

Laplace, 479 f. 

Larochefoucauld, 515. 

Laromiguiere, 627, 634 f. 

Latitudinarians, 486. 

Law, first grasped clearly by Heraclitus, 
37, 50 ; suggested by mathematics 
and astronomy, Pythagoreans, 56 f. ; 
relation to Nature, 73 ; emphasised 
by Democritus, 111 ; by Stoics, 181 ; 
contrasted with fact, 398, 566 ; as 
general fact, Comte, 651 ; of Nature, 
as moral authority, Stoics, 171 f. ; 
Cicero, 177 ; Abelard, 308 f. ; Thomas, 
326 ; Renaissance, 435 ; Enlighten 
ment, 503; in history, 652-654; see 
Nature and Right; cf. 299 note 2. 

Lazarus, 631, 642. 

Leechman, 629. 

Lefevre, 354. 

Leibniz, writings, 382, 444 ; life, 443 f. ; 
character, 693 (444) ; his method, 

397-399 ; distinction between eternal 
and contingent truths, 398 f. ; prin 
ciple of sufficient reason, 399 ; atti 
tude toward mechanism and tele 
ology, 420-425, 694 (527) ; dynamical 
standpoint, 421, 656 ; monadology, 
422 ff. ; pre-established harmony, 
424, 483 ; anticipation of principle 
of evolution, 421-424, 656 ; on innate 
ideas, 462-464 ; on knowledge of ex 
ternal world, 483; theodicy, 491 f., 
672 f. ; optimism, 492, 673 ; ethical 
principle of perfection, 505 ; influence 
on Kant, 465, 535, 538, 566 ; on Fries, 
575; Reinhold, 576; Maimon, 578; 
contrasted with Fichte, 593 ; influ 
ence on Hegelians, 632, 640 ; cf. also 
379, 483 f., 486 f., 490, 494, 501, 511, 
519. 527, 583. 

Leroux, 628. . 

Lessing, 439, 446, 497, 498 f. 

Leucippus, 29 f., 42 f., 52 ff., 60, 108, 
111, 128 f. 

Lewes, 11, 630. 

Lewis, 629. 

Liberatore, 631. 

Liebmann, 633, 642. 

Life, as principle of explanation with 
Ionics. 32 ; with Aristotle, 141 ; with 
Leibniz, 422 ; as limit to mechanical 
theory, 565 ; as central conception of 
Schelling s philos. of Nature, 598. 

Lips, 355. 

Littr6, 628. 

Locke, leader of English Enlighten 
ment, 439; life and writings, 440, 
692 (440); psychology, 450 f., 453; 
on knowledge of external world, 
467 f. ; on existence of God, 469 ; 
attitude toward rationalism, 694 (452 
note) ; on toleration, 487 ; ethics, 
502 f., 513 ; on the state, 519 ; influ 
ence in France, 456 ff. ; developed 
by Berkeley, 469 ; and Hume, 472 ; 
criticised by Leibniz, 462-464 ; cf. 
also 114, 391, 404, 537. 

Logic, defined, 20 ; Sophists, 88 ff. ; 
Socrates, 97 f. ; Plato s, or dialectic, 
119 ff. ; Aristotle s, 132-138, 686 
(142) ; Peripatetics, 197 f. ; Stoics, 
198 f . ; hypostatisation of logical pro 
cesses by Porphyry and Proclus, 
250 f. ; main topic of Middle Ages, 
270 f. ; logical relations identified with 
metaphysical, 290, 686 (142) ; formal 
logic the only possible for empiricism, 
360 f. ; of Ramus, 361 ; terministic 
of Occam, 342 ; Hobbes, 404 ; Con 
dillac, 478 f. ; developed by Hamilton 
and others to an algebraic calculus, 
629, 639 ; transcendental, of Kant, 
643 ; this attacked by Herbart, 583 ; 
metaphysical, of Hegel, 611 ff., 645; 

Index. 

713 

recent tendencies, 660 ; the logical 
inadequate to explain reality, 143, 
341, 399, 425, 47(5, 485, 566, 641, 
647 f.,676 ; see also Dialectic, Realism. 

Logos, doctrine of, with Heraclitus, 
36 f.; Stoics, 180 f., 186; influence 
of Stoic doctrine on Christian, 223 f.; 
Philo s doctrine of, 241 f.; Urigen, 
254. 

Longinus, 218, 233. 

Lossius, 445, 461. 

Lotze, 624, 632, 643 f., 660, 681. 

Lowndes, 629. 

Lucretius, 162, 686 (162). 

Lullus, 315, 321, 397. 

Luther, 356, 364 f. 

Lyceum, see Peripatetic School. 

Lycophron, 74 f. 

Mably, 443, 523. 

Macchiavelli, 382, 426 f. 

Mach, 651. 

Mackenzie. 630. 

Mackintosh, 629. 

Macrocosm and microcosm, 187, 366 ff. 
422 f. 

Magnenus, 355. 

Maieutic, 97. 

Maignanus, 355. 

Maimon, 570, 578, 696 (570). 

Maimonides, 318 f., 321. 

Mainlander, 633. 

Maistre, Jos. de, 627, 648. 

Malebranche, 379, 381, 405, 407, 410, 
416 f., 435, 471, 486, 636, 661 note. 

Mamiani, 631. 

Man, identified with animal world, 
52 f . , 453 f . , 455 f . ; as measure, 92 ; 
as centre of creation and end of 
history, 261 ; as microcosm, 347, 
369 ff. ; reverence for, Kant s ma 
terial principle, 553 ; as object of 
religious veneration, Comte, 652 f. ; 
capacity for perfection, 525, 672. 

Mandevillo, 441, 515 f., 524 f. 

Mani and Manichseism, 239 f., 286. 

Mansi-1, H29, 638. 

Marcianus Capclla, 273, 296. 

Marcion, 221. 2-&gt;. 

Marcus Aurelius, 213, 216, 230. 

Mariana, 382. 

Marsh, (&gt;:!(). 

Marsilius of Inghen, 315. 

Marsilius of Padua, 345, 426, 432. 

Martin, 627. 

Martincau. II.. 629. 

Martineau, .las., 630. 

Marx, (i32. 655. 

Materialism, of Leucippus, 43 ; of 
iVmoiTitiis, 108, 109 ff. ; of Epicu 
reans, 183-186; of Stoics, 186; of 
Hobbes, 413 ; of Spinoza s adherents, 
454 ; of Hartley, etc., 455 f.; French, 
456-458, 479 ff . ; culminates in the 
Systeme de la Nature, 481 ; in psy 
chology of nineteenth century, 634 ; 
of Feuerbach, 641, 655 ; moral, 671 ; 
recent, 642 f.; as philos. of history, 
655. 

Mathematics, with Pythagoreans, 45- 
47, 56 f.; in Plato s system, 129 ; in 
fluence on modern philos., 372 f., 379, 
387-389, 395-399 ; on Spinoza, 396, 
418; on Comte, 651, 653; distin 
guished from philos. by Kant, 485 ; 
the sole demonstrative science with 
Hume, 473 ; how possible, 539 ff. ; 
see also Geometrical Method. 

Matter, cosmic, of Ionics, 32 ; Anaxi- 
mander, 33 ; opposed to form by 
Aristotle, 139 ff. ; accessory cause, 
144 ; Non-being or space with Plo- 
tinus, 246 f.; evil, 247 ; regarded as 
self-moved, etc., by Averroes, 338; 
identified with space by Descartes 
and Spinoza, 406, 410; Kant s dy 
namic theory of, 546 ; contradiction 
in conception of, Herbart, 584. 

Maupertuis, 442, 478, 489. 

Maximus Conf., 274. 

Maximus of Tyre, 216. 

Mayer, 633, 655. 

McCosh, 629. 

Mechanics, created by Galileo, 388 ; in 
fluence on philos.. 400 f.; lit. of, 692 
(380) ; recent theories, 651. 

Mechanism and mechanical view of 
world, Leucippus, 53 ; with Strato, 
179 ; Epicurus, 183 ; Galileo, Des 
cartes, Spinoza, 401 ; opposed by 
Cudworth, etc., 401 f. ; reconciled 
with teleology by Leibniz, 420 ff.; 
opposed by Schelling and Goethe, 
598 f. ; influential in this century, 
624 f. ; in associational psychology, 
635 ; see also Materialism, Natural 
ism. 

Medici, Cosmo d , 354. 

Medicine, independent origin, 2 ; aetio- 
logical, 66 ; magical, with Paracelsus, 
373. 

Megarians, 70 f., 82, 89. 

Meier, F., 445. 

Meiners, 446. 

Melancthon, 356, 359, 364, 426. 

Mrlissus. 28, 30, 44. 

Mrlit... 217. 

Mcmlflssnlm. 445. 478, 483, 507. 512, 
621. 

Mcncdcinus, 72. 

Metaphysics, origin of name, 19; 
sjnmmlfd anrw by Drmocritus and 
Plato, KM; Plato s theological, 128; 
Connected with logic, 133 ; of Aris 
totle, 139 ff. ; of Theophrastus, 178; 
of Stoics, 180; religious, 214 ff.; of 

714 

Index. 

logical genera and species, 271 ff. ; 
of inner experience, 276 ff. ; logical, 
of Realism, 290 ff.; of Nominalism, 
296 ; of psychology, 323 f. ; Boehme s, 
374 f. ; as mathematical physics, Des 
cartes, 393 ; Bacon s def. of, 401 ; 
Spinoza s, 408 ff.; Leibniz, 420 ff.; 
Wolff, 482 ; Berkeley, 470 ; as basis for 
morals, 503 f. ; Kant s attitude toward, 
465, 478, 486, 537 ; of intellectual per 
ception, 592 ; of the irrational, 616 ff. ; 
Lotze s, 644 ; recent idealistic, 642; 
historical with Comte, 652. 

Method, maieutic of Socrates, 97 ; 
modified by Plato, 118 f.; Aristotle s 
deductive, 137 ff. ; scholastic, 312, 344 ; 
inductive, 97, 118, 137, 344, 384 ; 
problem raised in Renaissance, 378, 
383 ; of Bacon, 383 ; of Galileo and 
Kepler, 388 ; of Descartes, 389 ff. ; 
of Hobbes, 389 ; Descartes method 
misunderstood by his disciples, 395 ; 
geometrical, supreme with Spinoza, 
396 f.; continued by Wolff, 482; 
criticized by liiidiger and Crusius, 
484 f . , exploded by Kant, 485 ; in 
adequacy of psychological, recog 
nised by Kant, 533 ; critical of Kant, 
533 ; dialectical of Fichte and Hegel, 
591 f. ; historical compared with that 
of natural science, 648, 651, 653 f., 
657, 660. 

Metrodorus, 76, 684 (30). 

Metrodorus the Epicurean, 162. 

Michael Psellos, 342. 

Microcosm, see Macrocosm. 

Milesians, 28 f., 32 ff., 48 ff. 

Mill, James, 629, 665. 

Mill, J. Stuart, 629, psychology and 
method, 635, 654, 660 ; ethics, 665-667. 

Milton, 433. 
, 47, 120. 

Mind (see Spirit, Soul, Psychology), 

mode of consciousness, 406. 
Minucius Felix, 214, 217, 224. 
Mode, all bodies and minds modes 

of spatiality and consciousness, Des 

cartes, 406 ; infinite and finite of 

Spinoza, 409 f. ; everything a mode 

of both attributes, 420. 
Moderatus, 215. 
Moleschott, 632. 
Monad, Bruno s conception of, 371, 
Leibniz, 423. 

Monism, original presupposition, 32 ff. ; 
metaphysical, of the Eleatics, 37 ff. ; 
of the spirit, in Neo-Platonism, 240 ff. ; 
in the Renaissance, 367 ff. ; modern 
so-called, 632, 643. 

Monotheism, pantheistic with Xeno- 
phanes, 34 ; of Cynics, 85 ; theistic 
with Aristotle, 145 f. ; as final form 
of religion, 497 f. 

Montaigne, 355, 362, 376, 403. 

Montesquieu, 443, 516. 

Moral law, with Kant, 552 ; see Ethics. 

Morals, Plato s, 125 ff. ; ascetic, 230 ; in 
eighteenth century, 502 ff. ; of master 
and slaves, 679 ; see Ethics. 

" Moral sense," 509, 517. 

More, Henry, 382, 402, 404, 435, 450, 503. 

More, Thomas, 382, 427 ff. 

Morell, 629. 

Morelly, 443, 523. 

Morgan, 441. 

Morgan, Lloyd, 630. 

Moritz, 445. 

Motekallemin, 317. 

Motion, as basis of mediating attempts, 
39 ; the essence of change, 43 ; early 
theories of its cause, 52 ff. ; contra 
dictions in conception of, Zeno, 55 ; 
basis of feelings with Cyrenaics, 86 ; 
of perceptions with Protagoras, 92 ; 
with Democritus, 113 f., 115 f. ; with 
Aristotle, 147 f. ; made cause of all 
cosmic processes by Galileo, 388, 410 ; 
conservation of, Descartes, 411. 

Motives, Greek theories, 72, 75, 79 f. ; 
eighteenth century, 501, 514-517 ; 
Mill, 666 ; see Freedom, and Will. 

Music, theory of Pythagoreans, 45. 

Musonius, 216. 

Mutazilin, 318. 

Mysteries, 124, 685 (123). 

Mystics and Mysticism, source in Neo- 
Platonism, 227 ; a factor of Med. 
philos., 266 ff., 275, 304 ff., 333, 409, 
487, 083 ; of Biran, 636. 

Myths, with the Sophists, 76 ; Plato, 
102, 123, 687 (123) ; Stoics, 189 f. ; 
Gnostics, 243 f. ; Schelling, 619. 

Naive and sentimental, 604 f. 

Nativism, 539 note 1. 

Naturalism of Strato, 179 ; of Arabians, 
338 ; of Renaissance, 401 ff. ; of En 
lightenment, 479 ff., 527; see also 
Materialism, Mechanism. 

Natural law, see Law, and Right. 

Natural religion, 486 ff. ; see Deism, and 
Religion. 

Natural selection, 53, 656 f., 672. 

Natural science, among the Greeks, 
27 ff. ; daughter of Humanism, 351 ; 
favoured by Nominalism, 343 f., 376 ; 
its decisive influence on modern 
philos., 378 ; how possible, Kant, 
541 ff. ; influence in nineteenth cen 
tury, 624 f., 648 ff. ; its method 
compared with that of history, 648, 
651,653 f., 657, 660. 

Natura Naturans and Natura Naturata, 
probably first used by Averroism, 
336, 338 ; with Eckhart, 335 f. ; with 
Bruno, 368 f . ; with Spinoza, 409. 

Index. 

715 

Nature, first object of philosophy, 25, 
27 f. ; contrasted with statute, 73 ft . ; 
with Deinocritus, 116; Plato s phi- 
los. of, 129 f. ; Aristotle s, 140 ff. ; 
Stoic doctrine of life according to, 
171 f. ; regarded as equivalent to law, 
171; Strato s view of, 179; Epicu 
reans view of, 183 ff. ; Stoics , 180 f. ; 
spiritualisation of, by Plotinus, 249 ; 
by Valentinus, 254 ; return to, by 
school of Chartres, 302 f. ; relation 
to deity with Eckhart, 335 ; return 
to, in Renaissance, 350 f., 306 ; re 
garded as God made creatural, 368 ; 
spiritualisation of, in Renaissance, 
373; despiritualised again, 401; rec 
ognised as one, 402 : identified with 
God, Spinoza, 409 ; opposed to in 
stitution, 435 ; Kant s philos. of, 
546; purposiveness of , 559 ff . , 565 ff . ; 
specification of, 566 ; as objectifica- 
tion of will, Schopenhauer, 589 ; 
Schelling s philos. of, 597 ff. ; Goethe s 
view, 597, 599 ; as realm of the con 
tingent, 143, 341, 344, 425, 560, 641 ; 
as aesthetic standard, 493 f ; as ethical 
standard, 73 f., 85, 116, 435 f., 624 f., 
668 f., 072 ; state of, with Cynics, 
83 f . ; Hobbes, view of, 434 f . ; Rous 
seau, 525 ; Kant, 558 ; Schiller, 604 f. ; 
Fichte, 608. 

Nausiphanes, 165. 

Necessity, mechanical, with Leucippus, 
53 ; with Plato, 130 ; logical, with 
Aristotle, 134 ; natural, with Stoics, 
181 ; denied by Epicurus, 183 ; two 
kinds, Leibniz, 399 ; Spinoza s, 419 ; 
subjective, Tetens, 466 ; of evil, Leib 
niz, 492 ; logical, identified with real 
ity, 537 ; of a priori Forms, 539 ff. ; 
feeling of, attaching to experience, 
Fichte, 579; teleological, of ideal 
ism, 590 ; see also Materialism, Mech 
anism. 

Negative theology, with Philo, Apolo 
gists, and Neo-Platonists, 237 f., 689 
(238) ; with Scotus Erigena, 290 ; of 
Eckhart, 335 ; of Bruno, 368 ; of Spi 
noza, 408 ; cf. Agnosticism. 

Nekkain, Alex., 344. 

Neo-Kantianism, 633, 642 f. 

Neo-Platonism, dependent on earlier 
/ Greek conceptions, 123, 157 ; per 
sonality and writings, 215, 218 ; phil 
osophical interpretation of myths, 
222 ; on spirit and matter, 233 ff. ; 
doctrine of Ideas, 117 note 6; 233 
note 2 ; on nature of God, 237 ff., 689 
(238); on history, 255; in Middle 
Ages, 268 ff. ; influence on Augustine, 
27!* f., 286 ; on John Scotus, 289 ff. ; 
on Bernard of Chartres, 294; on 
William of Champeaux, 295 ; on 

Malebranche, 417 ; on Schelling, 610 ,- 

see also Plotinus, Proclus. 
j Neo-Platonists, English, of Cambridge, 

382, 435, 449 f., 490 note, 502 f., 694 

(488). 
Neo-Pythagoreans, 117 note 6, 123, 

213, 215, 220 f., 230 f., 233, 237, 

689 (238). 
Newman, 630. 
Newton, 378, 380, 691 (380), 402, 421, 

479, 490. 

Nicolai, 445, 483, 507, 521. 
Nicolas d Oresme, 345. 
Nicolaus d Autricuria, 344. 
Nicolaus disarms, 312, 315, 335 f., 337, 

343, 345 f., 368 f., 371, 402, 405, 409, 

419, 422, 548, 592. 
Nicole, 381. 
Nicomachus, 213, 216. 
Nietzsche, 633, 076-680. 
Nifo, 355, 359. 
Nigidius Figulus, 215. 
Nineteenth century, philosophy of, 

023 ff. 

Nizolius, 355, 300, 376. 
Nominalism, 272 ; its origin, 296 ; of 

Roscellinus, 290 f. ; revived, 312, 

342 ; favours study of natural science, 

343 f., 370; influence on Descartes, 
Locke, and Hobbes, 403 f. ; on Locke, 
451 f., 408 ; on Berkeley, 452, 469 ; of 
Feuerbach, 641 ; see also Termin- 
ism. 

Norms, 63, 69, 181, 279, 680. 

Norris, 471. 

Noumena, Kant s theory of, 547 f. 

vovs, of Anaxagoras, 42, 084 (42) 54, 
03; as part of soul with Plato, 124; 
with Aristotle, 150; with Theo- 
phrastus, 178 f. ; Plotinus, 245 ; Au 
gustine, 279, note 3 ; see Reason. 
| Novalis, Fr. v. Hardenberg, 571, 599. 

Numbers, with Pythagoreans. 45, 47 ; 
with Plato, 122, 129, 131 ; in Alex- 
andrianism, 242 ff. ; in the Renais- 
i sance, 372, 387. 

Numenius, 213, 216, 220, 223, 232. 

Object, of knowledge, Kant, 537 ff., 

574, 576 ; indifference of subject and 

object, 608. 
Objectification, 589. 
Objective, with Descartes, = subjective 

in modern sense, 393; objective spirit, 

with Hegel, 613; cf. Esse. 
Occam, see William of Occam. 
Occasionalism, 410 ff., 474 note 3. 
Odo (Odardus) of Cainbray, 295. 
| Oinomaos, 216, 686 (163). 
Oken, 571, 598, 608, 656. 
Oldendorf, 382. 
i One (li), of Xenophanes, 34 f. ; with 

Parmenides, 38 ; with Neo-Pythago- 

716 

Index. 

reans, 237 f.; with Plato, 122 ; with 

Proclus, 251. 
Ontological argument of Anselm, 292 f. ; 

restated by Descartes, 393. 
Ontologisrn, 631. 661 n. 
Ontology, of the Stoics, 199 ; possibility 

of denied, 546 ff. ; cf. Metaphysics. 
Ophites, 258. 
Opinion, opposed to knowledge, 58, 9"&gt;, 

105-117; to sense perceptions, 204; 

relativity of, 201. 
Optimism, religious, 252 ; of Bruno, 

368 ; of Shaftesbury, 489 ; of Leibniz, 

492 ; Voltaire on, 493 ; of Rousseau, 

526 ; of utilitarianism and positivism, 

670 ff. 
Optimism and pessimism, as moods, 

676 ; united, Hartmann, 673 ; see 

Pessimism. 

Oratory (Fathers of), 416. 
Order, Heraclitus, 36, 49 ; as norm, 63 ; 

Anaxagoras, 42, 54 ; moral, Kant, 556, 

566 ; as God, with Fichte, 595. 
Ordo nrdinans, 595. 

Ordo rerum = ordo idearum, with Spi 
noza, 396, 419 f. 
Organism, as principle with Aristotle, 

141 ; Buffon s theory of, 480 ; as 

"miracle," Kant, 480, 565; with 

Schelling, 599 ; as analogue of society, 

655. 
Organon, of Aristotle, 104, 132 ff. ; the 

new, of Bacon, 380, 383 ff. 
Orient, its philosophy, 23 note, 683 

(23); influence, on Greeks, 27, 211, 

213 ff. ; on Middle Ages, 310, 316 ff. 
Origen, the Christian, 214, 216 ff., 222, 

233, 235, 253 f., 261, 499. 
Origen, the Neo-Platonist, 218. 
Osiander, 356, 365. 
Oswald, 442. 
otola., with Plato, 106 ff., 120-123; 

Aristotle, 139 ff. ; Plotinus, 245; 

Origen, 254. 
"Over-man," 679 f. 

Pain, Schopenhauer s view of, 620 ; see 
also Pleasure. 

Paley, 441, 513, 514 f., 664 f. 

Paiicetius, 161 f., 190. 

Panentheism, of Krause, 610. 

Pan-psychism, 340. 

Pantheism, suggestions for in Eleati- 
cisrn, 34 f., 37; Strato s, 179; of 
Stoics, 180 ; in conjunction with the 
ism, 236 ; logical of Realism, 295 ; of 
Averroism, 313, 338 ff. ; of Amal- 
ricans, 339 ; tendency of Renaissance, 
358, 367 ff. ; of Cartesian isrn, 405 ff. ; 
and esp. Spinozisrn. 408 f., 419; 
Schelling s, 608 ; Feuerbach s, 640 f. ; 
alleged, of Hegelianism, 639 f., 661 
note. 

Paracelsus, 357, 368, 370 f., 373 f., 403. 

Parallelism, with Spinoza, 419 ; mate 
rialistic interpretation of, 453 f. ; 
psycho-physical, 644-646 ; see also 
Soul. 

Paralogisms of Pure Reason, 549. 

Parker, 491. 

Parmenides, 28 ff., 37 ff., 46, 51, 58 ff., 
90, 118, 129 f. 

ira.pov&lt;rla, 120. 

Participation, of things in the Ideas with 
Plato, 120 ; of finite minds in God, 
Malebranche, 407. 

Particular, see Universal. 

Pascal, 381, 395, 692 (381). 

Passions, ancient conception of, 165 ; 
Stoics on, 168 ; Descartes and Spinoza, 
412-414; Hobbes, 413; Nietzsche, 
677 ; cf. Emotions. 

Patristics, 214. 

Patrizzi, 354. 369. 

Pedagogy, of Humanism, 360 ; of Ba 
conian doctrine, with Cornenius and 
Rattich, 3S5 ; Rousseau s, 526 ; of 
associational psychology, with Her- 
bart and Beneke, 698 (586) ; see also 
Education. 

Perception, contrasted with reflective 
thought by cosmologists. 58 ff. ; Pro- 
tagoras s theory of, 91 ff. ; Democri- 
tus, 105, 113 ff. ; Epicurean theory, 
202 ; Stoics , 202 ; only of our own 
states, ace. to Campanella, 370 ; with 
Leibniz, 462 f. ; pure, with Kant, 
539 ff. ; implies a synthesis, 539 ; 
feeling of reality of sensuous, Jacobi, 
574 ; intellectual, 581, 592. 

Peregrinus Proteus, 216. 

Peripatetic School, 103, 159, 161, 164, 
178, 180, 229, 411 ; see also Aristote- 
lianism. 

Pe.rseitas boni, 332, 416 note 2. 

Persius, 216. 

Personality, emphasised in Hellenistic 
thought, 223 ; found in spirit, 232 ; 
Christian view of, 251 ; emphasised 
by Christian thinkers as against Ara 
bian pan-psychism, 340 ; worth of, 
Kant, 553 ; conception of in Hegelian 
School, 640. 

Pessimism, among the Cyrenaics, 87 ; 
among Stoics, 169 ; in Christian doc 
trine, 252 ; Swift s, 515 ; Rousseau s, 
625; Schopenhauer s, (520 ff., 673; 
opposed by Diihring, 671 ; German 
of nineteenth century, 673 ; Bahn- 
sen s, 676. 

Peter Lombard, 275. 

Peter of Poitiers, 275. 

Petrus Aureolus, 315. 

Petrus Hispanus, 315, 342. 

Ph3do, 72. 

Phaedrus, 162. 

Index. 

717 

Phaleas, 74. 

Phenomena and phenomenal, objects 
of sensation or perception as, 92 f . , 
106, 110; space and time as, 421 f., 
486, 540 f., 585, 588 ; " impressions," 
453, 472 ff., 657 ; opposed to true 
reality as qualitative to quantitative, 
110 f. ; 388 f.; as changing and particu 
lar to changeless and universal, 120 ff. ; 
as spatial to the spiritual or dynamic, 
421 and note 3 ; as sensuous to intel 
ligible, 110 f., 120 ff., 421 note 3, 483, 
486 ; as = a priori and necessary, 
540 ff., opposed to things-in-them- 
selves, 541 f., 546 ff. ; and to the realm 
of faith and freedom, 554 f. ; cf. also 
Thing-in-itself, Supersensuous, Ra 
tionalism, Knowledge. 

Pherecyde.s, 24, 34. 

Philip, or Philippus, of Opus, 103, 123. 

Philo of Larissa, 103, 161 f. 

Philo of Alexandria, 214, 216, 220 ff., 
227, 231, 237, 240 ff., 290, 319, 687 
(217), 688 (224). 

Philodemus, 162, 198, 342. 

Philoluis, 29, 31, 45, 60 f., 63, 129, 215. 

Philosophy, various conceptions of, 
1 ff.; relation to other sciences, 5, 
657, 680, to civilisation, 6, 13 ; exter 
nal position, 7 ; share of different 
peoples in, 8; division of, 18 ff. ; 
sources of, among the Greeks, 23 ff., 
27 ff.; at first cosmological, 27 f.; then \ 
anthropological and practical, 68 ff. ; 
Aristotle s division of, 153 ; sepa 
rating of special sciences from, 156 ; 
as wisdom for life, 157 ff. ; fused with 
religion, 210 ff.; relation to Chris 
tianity, 224 ff. ; to theology with 
Scholastics, 321 ; separation from 
theology, 354, 375, 389; relation of 
modern to religion, 399 ff. ; under 
control of natural science, 378 ff. ; 
as world-wisdom in Enlightenment, 
437 ff. ; as psychology, 447 ff.; as 
criticism, 532 ff.; influence on litera 
ture, in Germany, 694 (530); Fichte s 
conception of, 579 ; Hegel s concep 
tion of, 611, 616; of this century, 
623 ff.; as science of values, 680 f. 

Philosophy, history of, defined, 9; 
Hegel s view of, 10 f., 12 f., 614, 
681 ; Fischer s view of, 13 ; three fac 
tors in, 11-14; tasks of, 15; sources 
for, 15 ff.; its significance, 681; and 
see also each of the periods and 
writers treated; division of, 21 f.; 
additional literature of, 683. 

Philostratus, 215. 

Phrenology, 517. 

&lt;i*m, as title of early philosophic writ 
ings, 29 f. ; as nature, Xenophanes, 
34 ; as origin, or primal substance, 
47 ff. ; opposed to 06ns, 74 ff., 435 ; 
harmonized with v6uos with Stoics, 
172, 209 ; Plotinus, 246. 

Phurnutus, see Cornutus. 

Physico-theology, with Stoics, 195- 
197; Enlightenment, 489 ff.; criti 
cized by Hume, 494 f. ; Kant s early, 
490 ; his later criticism on, 550 ; see 
Teleology. 

Pico, 354, 372 f. 

Pierre d Ailly, 315, 333, 345. 

Pietism, 445, 487, 583. 

Pinel, 627. 

Pittacus, 24. 

Pity, see Sympathy. 

Plainer, 445, 693 (445). 

Plato, as authority for Socrates, 71, 77, 
97 ; as systematiser, 99 ; general 
character of philos., 101 ; life and 
writings, 102 f., 684 (102), 685 (103); 
grounds metaphysics anew, 105-109; 
Ideas, 116 ff. ; doctrine of recollec 
tion, 118, 685 (119); of soul, 685 
(123); logic and dialectic, 119 f.; 
Idea of Good, 122 ; his psychology, 
123 f.; ethics, 125; politics, 126 f. ; 
on education, 127; teleology, 128; 
ductrine of space, 129, 687 (238); 
importance of mathematics for, 129 ; 
philos. of Nature, 129 f.; relation to 
Aristotle, 133, 139 ff.; on freedom, 
191; influence of his dualism, 211 ; 
regarded as starting-point for natural 
science, 303 ; influence on More s 
Utopia, 428 f . ; on Bacon s New At 
lantis, 429 ; on Cambridge Platonists 
(see Neo-Platonists, English); on 
Malebranche, 661 note ; on Mill, 667; 
on Schelling through Neo-Platonism, 
610; cf. also 184, 229, 242, 255, 
420, 546. 

Platonism, as a characteristic of Alex 
andrian philosophy, 212 ; see also 
Academy and Neo-Platonism. 

Play-impulse, 601. 

Pleasure and Pain, referred to differ 
ences in motion, 86 ; as ethical crite- 
rian, 165, 170 ; measurement of, in 
utilitarianism, 513, 666 f., and pessi 
mism, 672; {esthetic as function of the 
faculty of approval or judgment with 
Kant, 560, 562 ; see also Eudaemo- 
nism, Hedonism, Utilitarianism. 

Pleroma, of Gnostics, 239. 

Pletho, 354, 358. 

Plotinus, 214 f., 218, 228, 233 ff., 237 f., 
244 ff., 290, 335, 367, 510, 688 (218). 

Ploucquet, 444. 

Plurality, of substances, 39; with Her- 
bart, 584, cf.; 423 f.; denied by the 
Eleatics, 37 f., 44; of co-existing 
worlds, in Atomism, 54 ; with Bruno, 
369. 

718 

Index. 

Plutarch of Chsr., 175, 213, 216, 221. 

231 f., 225, 239. 
Plutarch of Athens, 215, 234. 
Pneuma, Stoic doctrine of, 186 f. 
Poiret, 381, 395. 
Polemo, 103. 

Political economy, 517 f., 522 f., 666. 
Politics, see State. 
Polus, 75. 
Polybius, 176. 
Pomponatius (or Pomponazzi), 355, 

Pope, 447, 508. 

Porphyry, 31, 215, 218, 250 f., 288, 688 
(218). 

Porta, 355. 

Posidonius, 161 f., 230, 687 (189). 

Positive philosophy, of Schelling, 619 ; 
see Positivism. 

Positivism, of Epicureans, 205 ; influ 
ential in Renaissance, 361 ; of Hume, 
477 ; of Bayle and the Ideologists, 
477 ff. ; of Comte, 650-653 ; cf. 628, 
633, 671 f. 

Possibility, with Aristotle, 140 ; with 
Leibniz, 425 ; as category, with Kant, 
543 ; as eternal truth, with Weisse, 
640 ; cf. Potential, Actual, Necessity. 

Postulates, of empirical thought, 545 ; 
moral, 554 f. ; cf . 590. 

Potencies, Schelling, 609. 

Potential, 140, 144, 146. 

Power, with Aristotle, 140 ; Locke, 404, 
467 ; will for, with Nietzsche, 678 ; 
see also Potential, Force ; mental, 
see Faculty. 

Pragmatic factor, in history of philoso 
phy, 11-13,683 (12). 

Prantl, 631. 

Predestination, with Augustine, 284 f. ; 
maintained by Thomas, and rejected 
by Scotus, 334. 

du l j rel, 633. 

Provost, 627. 

Price, 440, 503. 

Priestley, 440, 455, 480, 513. 

Principium individuationis, 337, 341, 
589. 

Principle of Contradiction, Zeno, 61 ; 
Protagoras, 88 ; Aristotle, 138 ; Leib 
niz, 398 ; Herbart, 583 f. 

Principle of Identity, Sophists, 89 f. 

Principle of Sufficient Reason, 399. 

Principles, pure, of the Understanding, 
541 f., 545 f. 

Principles, regulative, 549. 

Probabilism, with Carneades, 207 ; Hu 
manists, 361 ; practical, of Hume, 
477, 494. 

Proclus, 215, 218, 220, 222, 226, 228, 
238, 250 f. 

Prodicus, 69, 71, 73, 76, 88, 96. 

Protagoras, life, 70 ; ethical and reli 

gious views, 74, 76 ; perception the 
ory, 86, 91 f. ; influence of this on De- 
mocritus and Plato, 104 f., 117 ; 
relativism, 92, 105, 117 ; cf. 60 note 
1, 69, 88. 

Protestant philosophy, 364 f., 426, 433 f. 

Psellos, see Michael. 

i/ ux ), see Soul. 

Psycho-physics, 645. 

Psychology, at first materialistic, 65 ; 
advanced by the Sophists, 69 ; of the 
Cyrenaics, 86 ; of Protagoras, 91 ff. ; 
of Democritus, 113-115; of Plato, 
123 f. ; of Aristotle, 149 f. ; of Stoics, 
168, 187 f., 202-204 ; of Epicureans, 
202 ; of Plutarch, Origen, etc., 232 ; 
of Neo-Platonism, 234 ; of Augustine, 
280-283 ; studied in the Middle Ages, 
303 ff. ; associational, founded by 
John of Salisbury, 307 ; metaphysical 
psych, of Thomas, Scotus, and Oc 
cam, 324 f. ; empirical psych, of 
later Scholastics, 344 f. ; mechan 
ical, of Descartes and Spinoza, 412, 
414 ; associational, of Hobbes, 413 ; 
empirical, made authority for epis- 
temology, 447 ff. ; of Locke, 450 f., 
467 f. ; of Berkeley, 452, 469 ; of 
Hume, 453, 472 ff. ; materialistic, of 
Descartes disciples, 454 ; of Hartley, 
455 ; of Priestley, 455 ; of Lamettrie, 
455 f. ; sensualistic and associational, 
of Condillac and Ideologists, 456- 
459 ; as philosophy with Scottish 
School, 459 f. ; rational and empiri 
cal, of Wolff, 460 ; Lambert, 461 ; 
Leibniz, 462-464 ; new division of 
faculties, 512 ; rational, criticized by 
Kant, 549; "faculty" theory, criti 
cized by Schulze and Herbart, 577 ; 
Herbart s, 586 f. ; as a central sub 
ject in this century, 626, 628 f., 634 ; 
of Ideologists of this century, 635 f. ; 
" without a soul," 643 ; social or com 
parative, 631, 649; lit. of, 20, 445, 
693 (445), 628 f. ; 632. 

Puffendorf, 382, 397, 432. 

Purpose, see Teleology. 

Purposiveness, subjective and objective 
= aesthetic and teleological, 559 ff. ; 
as heuristic principle, 565 f. 

Pyrrho, 160, 163, 165 ff., 200. 

Pythagoras, 24, 30 f., 215, 372. 

Pythagoreans, 29 ff., 45 ff., 56 f., 60 f., 
72. 106 f., 120, 131, 147, 212 f., 684 
(46, 62), 688 (238) ; see also Neo- 
Pythagoreans. 

Pythagoreanism, 215, 402, 687 (189). 

Qualities, primary vs. secondary, 117; 
all qualitative reduced to quantita 
tive by Democritus, 111 ; this opposed 
by Aristotle, 148 ; occult displaced, 

Index. 

719 

372, 402 ; intellectuality of, 403 ; pri 
mary and secondary, with Descartes 
and Locke, 404, 467 f. ; distinction 
denied by Berkeley, 46!) ; absolute, 
of Herbart, 585. 

Quantification of the predicate, 639. 

Quantitative, the only determinations 
recognised by Democritus, 111 ; this 
shifted to cosmic processes and re 
asserted by Galileo, 388; and by 
Hobbes and Descartes, 389, 393, 404 ; 
opposed by Schelling and Goethe, 
598 f. ; in ethics, 513, 664, 666 f. 

Quesnay, 443. 

Rabanus Maurus, 273. 

Kamundus Lullus, see Lullus. 

Ramundus of Sabunde, 315, 322. 

Ramus, 355, 361. 

Rationalism, of Pythagoreans, 45 f. ; 
of Cosmologists, 60 ; of Plato and 
Democritus, 105, 108, 110; of the 
Stoics, 207 ff. ; of Abelard, 300 ; of 
Descartes, 389-393 ; of Spinoza, 396, 
418 f. ; of Locke, 694 (452) ; of Wolff, 
482 ; theological, of Socinians, 487 ; 
of Clarke, in Ethics, 504 ; of Bayle, 
504 f. ; of Kant, 540. 

Rattich, 385 note 4. 

Ravaisson, 627, 636. 

Realism, mediaeval, 271 f. ; of John 
Scotus, 289 ; tends to pantheism, 295 ; 
modified, 297 ; criticized by Abelard, 
298 ; of Scotus, 341 ; persists in Des 
cartes, 405 ; in Spinoza, 408, 419. 

Reality, grades of, 106, 250 f., 291 ff. 

Reals, of Herbart, 584 f. 

Reason, as motive-matter with Anax- 
agoras, 41 f. ; active and passive with 
Aristotle, 150 ; Stoic doctrine of, 
171 f., 175, 180, 187 f., 223 ; opposed 
to revelation by Tatian, Tertullian, 
and others, 224 f. ; Philo s doctrine, 
241 f. ; and faith with Abelard, 300 
f. ; with Albert and Thomas, 321 f. ; 
with Scotus and Occam, 322 f. ; ac 
tive and passive with Averroes, 339 ; 
God as, with Malebranche, 407 ; 
Kant s criticism of, 532 ff. ; in nar 
row sense as a faculty, 549 ; practi 
cal, of Kant, 551 ff. ; as immediate 
feeling of reality of supersensuous, 
Jacobi, 574 ; system of, as subject of 
philos., 581; general character of, 
590 f. ; Fichte s portrayal of. "&gt; .&gt;:;- 
596, 605 f. ; objective system of, 
Schellinsr, 5&lt;)7-f&gt;99, 618 f. ; aesthetic, 
607 f. ; Schiller s aesthetic, 600 f. ; 
Hegel s system of, 611-61") ; opposed 
to will, 648, 677 ; contrasted with his 
torical tradition, 648 f. ; universal, 
649 ; cf. vovs, and Revelation. 

Reciprocity, 543, 546 ; cf. 414 f.,417, 424. 

Recollection, Plato s doctrine of, 118 f. 

Re"e, 663, 678. 

Reflection, as source of ideas with 
Locke, 451 ; as idealistic method 
with Fichte, 581 ; emotions of, 509, 
614. 

Reid, 442, 459, 482, 537. 

Reimarus, 445. 489, 496 f. 

Reinhold, 570, 575 ff., 696 (570). 

Relativity of knowledge, Protagorean, 
92 f. ; of Aristippus, 93 f. ; with Scep 
tics, 200 ff. ; with Comte, 650 ; with 
Spencer, 657 ; relativism fatal to phi 
los. , 680 ; see also Knowledge and 
Epistemology. 

Religion, relation to philos., in early 
thought, 27, 683 (24), 685 (123); 
among Cyrenaics, 86 ; in Hellenistic 
thought, 158, 210 ff.; Epicurus atti 
tude toward, 188 ; Stoics , 189 ; 
attitude of Galileo, Bacon, Hobbes, 
Descartes, Leibniz, 400 ; natural, 
Herbert of Cherbury, 436 ; Locke on 
toleration in, 487 ; natural religion in 
eighteenth century (see Deism) ; as 
postulate for morality, 496 ; history 
of, by Hume, 497 ; as education of 
human race, Lessing, 498 f.; Kant s 
philos. of, 556 f. ; based on feeling 
of absolute dependence, Schleier- 
macher, 582; Herbart s philos. of, 585, 
as Vorstcllnnfi, Hegel, 613 ; as motif 
in Schilling s philos., 616 ; as organon 
for philos., 619; Feuerbach s expla 
nation of, 641 ; of humanity, Comte, 
650, 652 f . ; see Revelation, Chris 
tianity. 

Remigius, 273. 

Renaissance, foreshadowing of, 302, 
307 ; philos. of, 349 ff. ; its innovat 
ing impulse, 352 ff., 387, 429. 

Renouvier, 628, 636. 

Representation, in Leibniz s system, 
422 ff . 

Responsibility, 172, 192-194; presup 
poses contingency of the will, 330 f. ; 
cf. Freedom. 

Reuchlin, 357, 372 f. 

Revelation, as tradition or ecstasy, 
219 ff. ; in relation to history, 223, 
256 ff. ; in relation to reason, 219 ff. ; 
as equivalent to reason, 223 f., 487 ; 
as opposed to reason, 224 f., 322 f., 
399 f., 494 ; in harmony with reason, 
321 f., 367, 487 ff. ; above reason, 
321, 638; cf. Religion, Christianity. 

Revolution, theory of, 433, 521 ff., 648, 
872. 

Ribot. 628. 

Ricardo. &lt;(!(&gt;. 

Richard of St. Victor, 275, 305. 

Richard of Middletown, 314, 331, 333. 

Rickert, 646, 660. 

720 

Index. 

Riehl, 629, 633. 

Right or law, philos. of, with Sophists, 
74 f. ; Socrates, 80 f. ; Stoics and 
Cicero, 177 ; Thomas, 326 ; in Re 
naissance, 426-436 ; Macchiavelii, 
426 ; Protestant and Catholic, 426 ; 
More, 427 f. ; Grotius, 431 ; Hobbcs, 
431-435, 692 (425) ; Thomasius, 520; 
Kant, 557 f. ; Fichte, 595 f . ; Hegel, 
613. 

Rights, claim of equal, by Sophists, 74 ; 
based on contract, 432 ff. ; original, 
520 f., 694 (521) ; Fichte on, 595 f. ; 
significance of in utilitarian develop 
ment, 663 f. ; Green on, 670. 

Ritschl, 633, 642. 

Robert Pulleyn, 275. 

Robinet, 442, 481, 489. 

Romagnosi, 631. 

Romanes, 630. 

Romantic and classic, 605, 613. 

Romanticism and Romantic School, 
571, 603, 605, 609, 611 ; cf. 650, 
674, 680, 696 (569). 

Roscellinus, 274, 296 f., 298. 

Rosenkrantz, 633. 

Rosenkranz, 631. 

Rosmini, 624, 631, 636 note, 661 note. 

Rothe, 632. 

Rousseau, life, 443 ; emphasis on feel 
ing, 439, 458 f., 510 ; relation to the 
Revolution, 439, 502 ; contract the 
ory, 432, 519, 521 ; on civilisation 
and "nature," 502, 525 f., 672; on 
education, 526 ; influence on Herder, 
527; Kant, 559; Schiller, 604; cf. 
also Romanticism. 

Royce, 630. 

Royer-Collard, 627. 

Riidiger, 444, 461, 484. 

Rage, 632, 640. 

Saadjah Fajjumi, 318. 

St. Lambert, 443, 522, 527. 

St. Martin, 459, 528, 618, 648. 

St. Simon, 628, 650. 

Saisset, 627. 

Sallustius, 218. 

Salvation, by absorption into the One, 
250 ; by grace, 285 ; as centre of his 
tory, 256, 261 f. ; through art and 
science, 622; culture, 673 f.; art, 
677 f. ; as starting-point for psy 
chology, 30"). 

Sanchez, 35 &gt;, 362, 376, 383, 403. 

Sanction, in morals, 501, 503, 513-517, 
665 f., 6!5f5; see Motive. 

Saturninus, 214, 217, 239, 258. 

Satyrus, 161. 

Scaliger, : ,.V&gt;. 

Sceptics and Scepticism, ancient, 160, 
163, 165, 170, 200, 205 f., 686 (163) ; 
of Renaissance, 361, 376; in Car- 
tesianism, 394 f. ; of Enlightenment, 
403, 478; Hume s so-called, 476; 
Schulze s, 577 ; of Maimon, 578 f. 

Schelling, life and writings, 571, 696 
(571); Philos. of Nature, 597-599; 
Transcendental Idealism, 607 ; Sys 
tem of Identity, 608 ; Neo- Platonic 
Idealism, 609 f. ; irrationalism and 
theosophy, 616-620; cf. also 432, 
646 f., 649, 6.-&gt;6, 659, 673. 

Schematism of the categories, 544. 

Schiller, as factor in German idealism, 
530, 568 ; life and writings, 570 ; doc 
trine, 600-602, 604 f., 696 (570) ; 
influence on Hegel, 613 ; cf. also 484, 
489, 507, 528, 675. 

Schlegel, 571, 591, 603, 605, 617, 680. 

Schleiermacher, 569, 572, 697 (572), 
582 f. , 603, 675. 

Schmid, Erh., 570. 

Schmidt, Casp., see Stirner. 

Schmidt, Lor., 445. 

Schneider, 663. 

Scholastic method, 312 f. 

Scholastics, -cism, 229, 266 ff. 

Schools of philosophy, as associations, 
6 f., 66, 70, 100 f., 103, 159 ff. ; see 
also Academy, Epicurus, Elean-Ere- 
trian, Socratic, Stoic, Peripatetic. 

Schopenhauer, life and writings, 572, 
697 (572); theory of knowledge, 588 ; 
of will as thing-in-itself, 589 ; as un 
reason, 620ff., 673 ; pessimism, 620 ff., 
673 ; aesthetics, 600, 621 f . ; ethics, 
590, 620-622 ; voluntaristic influence, 
646 f.. 677. 

Schoppe, 355. 

Schubert, 571, 599. 

Schulze (TEnesidemus), 569, 577 f. 

Schwencki eld, 356, 365. 

Science, as equivalent to philosophy, 
2 ; created by Greeks, 23 ; its essen 
tial nature, 95 ; Comte s system of 
the sciences, 650 f. ; relation of to 
philos., 684 (68), 657 f., 660 f . ; to 
life, 305, 345, 386 f., 521 ff., 625, 
650, 678; see Philosophy, Natural 
Science. 

Science of knowledge, Fichte, 579 ff., 
591 ff. 

Scotism, see Duns Scotus. 

Scottish School, 442, 693 (442), 459, 
482, 510, 627 f., 636, 638; cf. 649. 

Scotus Erigena, see Erigena. 

Search, 440. 

Seelye, 630. 

Selection, natural, 656 ff., 672; see 
Darwinism, and Survival of Fittest. 

Self, a " bundle of perceptions," Hume, 
474 ; contradiction involved in con 
ception of, Herbart, 584 ; as pre 
supposition for consciousness, Ulrici, 

Index. 

721 

Self-consciousness, Aristotle, 145 ; Neo- 
Platonists, 234 ; Descartes, 390-31)2 ; 
Locke, 407 ; see Consciousness. 

Self-enjoyment of personality, 110, 170, 
500, 003, (577 ff. 

Self-preservation, as practical princi 
ple, 434 f., 505 ; of the reals, with 
Herbart, 586. 

Self-realisation, Aristotle, 151 ; Leib 
niz, 505 f . ; Shaftesbury, 508 ; Fichte, 
594 ; Romanticist, 001 ff. ; Green, 
00!) f. 

Self-seeking, as a right of the individ 
ual, 075 ; see Egoism, and Individ 
ualism. 

Selfish system, 434, 502, 513 ff., 524. 

Semler, 445, 498, 523. 

Seneca, 213, 215, 230. 

Sennert, 355, 371, 400. 

Sensation, view of Cosmologists, 64 f. ; 
of Sophists, 91 ; of Democritus, 112 f.; 
of Aristotle, 149 f. ; Descartes on, 
414 ; Kichte, 593 ; see also Sensibility, 
Sensualism, Perception, Psychology. 

Senses, world of, as a mixture of Being 
and Non-being, with Plato, 129, with 
Plotinus, 247 ; as evil, 229 ff.; cf. also 
Sensation. 

Sensibility, Leibniz s view of, 463 ; 
space and time as Forms of, with 
Kant, 465 f . ; faculty of receptivity, 
480 ; separation of from understand 
ing opposed, 576. 

Sensualism, of Protagoras, 91 ; of Cyn 
ics, 96 ; of Stoics and Epicureans, 
202 f. ; basis for orthodoxy, 225 ; as 
a consequence of Nominalism, *97 ; 
Campanella s, 377; of Hobbes, 413, 
449 ; of the Enlightenment, 439, 449, 
452, 456 ff., 634 \ sceptical, 456 ; ma 
terialistic, 479 ; Feuerbach s, 041, 
071; in ethics, 514 f . , "supra-nat 
ural," of Jacobi, 575. 

Sermonism, 272, 298. 

Servetus, 402. 

Seven Wise Men, 24. 

Sextians, 101, 103. 

Sextus Kmpiriciis, 160, 103, 086 (163). 

Shaftesbury, 441, 488 f., 501, 508 f., 
510, 51 ;",, :V23, r,; ,2, 693 (441). 

Sidgwick. Oi 9. 

Sidney, 43:!. 

Sinus, theory of, 325 f., 343, 403, 451 f., 
478 f., :. 

Sigwart, &lt;: ,: ,, 060. 

Simon of Tom-nay, 320. 

Simon, Jul. (127. 

Simplirius. :!1 f., 219, 339. 

Sin, as error, with Socrates, 80, 191; 
as a falling away, 253 ; as problem of 
theodicy, 197, 491 f. ; as radical evil, 
with Kant, 556 f. 

Smith, 441, 617 f., 524, 693 (441). 

Socialism, 428-430, 596, 628, 632,650; 
its materialistic philosophy of history, 
655 ; see also State, and Communism. 

Social psychology, 631, 649. 

Society, utilitarian theory of, among 
Epicureans, 173 f.; need of, 328, 432, 
435, 518 ; to be grounded on reason, 
521 ; see Sociology, and State. 

Socinianism, 487. 

Sociology, 628, 651 f. 

Socrates, general character of his teach 
ing, 61) f.; life, 71,684 (71); ethical 
doctrine, 70-82 ; theory of knowledge, 
94-98 ; influence on Plato, 101 f., 107 f ., 
116, 118 f.; doctrine of freedom, 191 ; 
cf. also Socratic Schools. 

Socratic Schools, 70 ff., 82 ff., 89, 96. 

Solger, 571, 611. 

Solipsism, 448, 471, 588, 643. 675. 

Solon, 24, 34. 

Sophists, 25 f., 67 ff., 73 ff., 88 ff., 221. 

Sophocles, 74. 

Sorbiere. 355. 

Sotion, 161, 163, 215. 

Soul (see also Psychology, Self), first 
conceived as moving force, 02 ff. ; 
with Democritus, consists of atoms, 
113; pre-existence of, 119, 123, 685 
(123), 230 f., 249; transmigration of, 
62, 119, 232, 68-") (123); its twofold 
aspect with Plato, 123 f., 085 (123); 
immortality of, with Plato, 124 ; three 
souls with Aristotle, 149 f. ; Stoic view 
of, 187 f. ; Epicurean, 188; conception 
analysed by Alexandrian thought, 
232 ; contrasted with spirit and vital 
force, 232 f.; divided into higher and 
lower by Plotinus, 240 ; unity of, 
with Augustine, 278 ; as monad, Leib 
niz, 424 ; a blank tablet, Locke, 450; 
with Berkeley, see Spirit; with Hume, 
see "Self"; substantiality of, criti 
cized by Kant, 549; immortality of, 
in Hegelian School, 033; substance 
of, 458, 409, 635 f. ; tripartite division 
of, 512, 534 ; faculties of, see Psychol 
ogy ; see also Immortality. 

Soul and body, 301 ff., 405 ff., 412 ff., 
420, 453 ff., 034 ff. 

Sovereignty, 432, 519 ff.; see State, and 
Contract. 

Sozzini (Lelio and Fausto), 356. 

Space, with Parmenides = Non-being, 
37; exists, Leurippus, 42 ; with Plato 
= Non-being, 129; accessory cause 
of world, 129, 131; mode of ideation, 
with Hobbes, 404 ; space-filling qual 
ity or extension, one of the two at 
tributes of reality, Descartes, 405; 
and Spinoza, 410 ; a product of sub 
stance or order of co-existence, Leib 
niz, 421 f.; pure Form of sensibility 
with Kant, 40."&gt;f., 539-541 ; product 

722 

Index. 

of psychical mechanism, Herbart, 
585 ; as prindpium individuationis, 
Schopenhauer, 589. 

Spaventa, 631. 

Species (logical), with Plato, see Ideas ; 
with Aristotle, 142 ; in Middle Ages, 
see Universals; intelligibiles, 325, 
343. 

Specification of nature, with Kant, 566, 
640. 

Spencer, 630, 638, 657-659, 662, 667- 
669. 

Spener, 445, 487, 583. 

Speusippus, 103, 123, 164, 243. 

Spiuola, 486. 

Spinoza, 379; life, writings, 381, 692 
(381); geometrical method, 396; at 
titude toward religion, 400, 428, 433, 
495; toward teleology, 401; doctrine 
of substance, 407 f. ; mysticism and 
pantheism, 409 ; modes, 409 ; causal 
ity, 418; parallelism of attributes, 
419 ; on the emotions, 412 ; determin 
ism, 413; ethics, 414, 434 f. ; as one 
centre of German idealism, 568 f,, 
580, 582, 5C7, 597 ; esp. of Schilling s, 
608 f.; cf. also 391, 403, 410 f., 422, 
453, 480, 498, 548, 586. 

Spirit, not equivalent to immaterial with 
Plato, 118; pure Form with Aris 
totle, 145 ; opposed to matter by later 
Stoics, 230; by Apologists, 231 f.; by 
Alexandrian thought, 231-23-) ; made 
equivalent to immaterial, 229 ; con 
trasted with soul, 232 f.; the only sub 
stance with Berkeley, 470 ; Hegel s 
objective, 613, 649; absolute, 615; as 
illusion, Feuerbach, 641., 675. 

Spirits, animal, 187, 411, 414. 

Spiritualism, Berkeley s, 470; recent 
French, 627, 636. 

Spiritualisation, of the universe, 249, 
253. 

Spontaneity, according to Kant, of the 
understanding, 486 ; of the reason, 
543 ; controverted by Herbart, 583. 

Spurzheim, 027. 

Stages, the three, according to Comte, 
652. 

Stapfer, 635 note. 

State : Cynic attitude toward, 84 f. ; Cy- 
renaic, 86; Plato s doctrine of, 126; 
Aristotle s, 152 f. ; Epicurean doctrine 
of, 173 f.; Stoics, 173-177; Thomas 
on, 326 f.; Dante, 327; Occam, 328; 
Macchiavelli, 426; Protestant and 
Catholic theories, 426 f., 433 f.; Spi 
noza, 428, 434 f. ; More, 427-429 ; Ba 
con, 429; socialistic, of Campanella, 
430 ; contract theory of, Hobbes arid 
others, 432 f., 434, 518 f.; Rousseau, 
519 ; Enlightenment theory of, 520 ff. ; 
Kant, 558 ; Fichte, 596, 606 ; Hegel, 
613; Spencer, 668; Green, 668; see 
also Contract theory. 

Steffens, 571, 599. 

Steinthal, 631, 649. 

Stewart, 442. 

Stilpo, 71, 90. 

Stirling, 630, 659. 

Stirner, 675 f. 

Stoics and Stoicism, general, 157, 159, 
686 (162), 687 (189) ; personality 
and writings, 162 ; ethics, 164 ff., 
167 ff., 171 ff. ; view of society, 175 ; 
view of Nature, 180- ff., 687 (186), 
689 (238) ; conception of law and 
providence, 18df., 687 (181) ; theory 
of knowledge, 202 ff., 207 ff. ; in the 
Renaissance, 394, 402, 691 (362, 367) ; 
in Shaftesbury, 693 (441); cf. also 
210 f., 221, 223, 230. 

Strato, 159, 161, 179, 180, 199, 338. 

Strauss, 632, 642. 

Strife, as principle. Heraclitus, 50. 

Struggle for existence, 656, 672. 

Striimpell, 631. 

Sturm, Joh., 361. 

Sturm. J. Chr., 397. 

Suarez, 355, 363. 

Subject, 608, 611. 

Subjective = real, 325 ; subjectivity of 
sense-perception, 60 note, 92, 105, 
112 f., 403, 467, 469, 540 f. ; spirit, 
614. 

Sublime, Longinus on, 218 : Burke on, 
511 ; Kant, 563 f. 

Subordination, as the essential charac 
teristic of judgment, 135, 685 (135), 
686 (142); cf. 639. 

Substance, two elements in first con 
ception of, 35 f. ; Aristotle s con 
ception, 143; Stoic, matter, 199; 
category of, not applicable to God, 
Augustine, 279 f. ; acquires a new 
content in Renaissance, 399 ff . ; Car 
tesian dualism of, 404 ff. ; God as 
sole, 405, 410 f. ; finite substances 
become modes, 408 ; unchangeable 
existence with Spinoza, 408 f., 418; 
substance becomes force with Leib 
niz, 421 ; unknowable, Locke, 468 ; 
no corporeal substances, spirit the 
sole, Berkeley, 469 f. : idea of, due 
to association, Hume, 473 f. ; cate 
gory of, Kant, 543 ; permanent, 545 f . ; 
given a new meaning by Fichte, 595 ; 
restricted to investigation of Nature, 
Wundt, 646 ; cf. Being. 

Suggestion, 455 note. 

&lt;rvy K aTd6effis, 207, 308, 394. 

Sulzer, 445, 511 f. 

Summists, 275, 313. 

Supersensuous, 117, 323, 483, 555, 671 f. ; 
cf. World, Reason. 

Superstition, among the Stoics, 189 f. ; 

Index. 

723 

systematised in magic, 373 f. ; com 
bated, 401 ; = religion, Hobbes, 400, 
433 ; cf. Religion. 

Supposition, 325 f., 342 f. 

Survival of the fittest, 63, 185, 656, 
658, 668 f. 

Suso, 314. 

Suspense, of judgment, among Sceptics, 
167, 202; cf. 363, 394. 

Silssmilch, 527. 

Swift, 515. 

Syllogism, Aristotle s doctrine of, 135 ; 
criticized by Sceptics, 201 ; regarded 
as unfruitful in the Renaissance, 360. 

Symbolism, of numbers, see Numbers. 

Sympathy, in tragedy, 153 ; with Hume 
and Smith, 517 f., 694 (517) ; Mill, 
666 ; Schopenhauer, 590, 620 ; Yeuer- 
bach, 671. 

Syncretism, 161, 580. 

Synergism, 334. 

Synteresis, 333, 690 (333). 

Synthesis, Neo-Platonist doctrine of, 
234 ; Kant s conception of, 538 and 
note 3 ; his logic of, 543 ; his prac 
tical synthesis, 551 ; of the pure and 
practical reason, 561. 

Synthetism, of Krug, 581. 

Syrianus, 218. 

Sy stemc de la Nature, 443, 458, 481, 
493. 

Syzygies, of the Gnostics, 244. 

Talne, 628, 674. 

Tapparelli, 631. 

Tarde, 628. 

Taste, sesthetic and ethical principle, 
509, 603 f. ; critique of, 562. 

Tatian, 214,217, 224. 

Tauler, 314. 

Taurellus, 356, 374. 

Teleology, of Anaxagoras, 42, 54 ; of 
Socrates, 98 ; Plato, 128 ; Aristotle, 
144 ff., 178 ; rejected by Strato, 179 ; 
maintained by Stoics, 181 f., 195 ff. ; 
opposed by Epicureans, 182 f. ; of 
history, among Christian thinkers, 
200 ff. ; of Nature and history with 
Thomas, 327 ; Herder, 527 ; rejected 
by Descartes, Bacon, and Spinoza, 
401 ; of Leibniz, 4:&gt;0-42."&gt;, 491 f. ; 
aesthetic of Shaftesbury, 489 ; utili 
tarian of Reimarus and Wolff, 490 : 
rejected by Bayle and Holbach, 493 f. ; 
early, of Kant, 490 ; later, 559 ff. ; as 
principle in idealism, 590 ; with Schel- 
ling, 598 ff. ; Herbart, 585 note 2 ; 
Lotze, 644 ; Hartmann, 647, 673. 

Teles, 216, 68&lt;5 (163). 

Telesio, 356, 376, 383. 

Terminism, of Occam, 325, 342 ; of 
Renaissance, 360 f . , 376 ; influence on 
Descartes, Locke, and Bacon, 403 f., 
448 ; of Hobbes, 448 ; of Locke, 468 ; 
see also Nominalism. 

Tertullian, 214, 217, 221 f., 224 f., 688 
(217). 

Testa, 631. 

Tetens, 445, 512. 

Thales, 24, 27, 29, 32 f., 48 f. 

Themistius, 218. 

Theodicy, of Stoics, 196 f. ; of Plotinus, 
247 ; Patristic, 252 f. ; of Augustine, 
280, 283 f. ; of Leibniz, 491 f. ; of 
Kant, 559 ; of Schopenhauer, 620 ; 
Hartmann, 673 ; see also Teleology, 
and Evil. 

Theodoric of Chartres, 294, 302. 

Theodoras, 70, 86 f. 

Theogony, of the Gnostics, 243 f. ; 
Boehme s, 375 ; Schelling s, 618 f. 

Theology, combination with philosophy, 
Pythagoreans, Plato, 62, 684 (62 
note), 685 (123) ; Aristotle s, 145 f. ; 
syncretistic, 687 (189); natural and 
revealed, 321 f. ; theol., separated from 
philosophy as " practical," by Scotus, 
333 ; separation completed in Renais 
sance, 354, 375, 389 ; same task as 
philosophy, 616 ; see also Religion. 

Theophilus/217. 

Theophrastus, 103, 159, 161, 164, 178 f., 
198. 

eeupla, 154, 250, 286, 333, 350 f. 

Theosophy, of Renaissance, 366 ff. ; 
Schelling s, 615 ff. 

Theurgy, 250. 

Thing, as a contradiction according to 
Herbart, 584 ; real and apparent, 
584 f. 

Thing-in-itself, with Kant, 547 ; criti 
cized by Jacobi, 573 ; by Reinhold, 
575 f. ; by Schulze, 577 ; conception 
of, modified by Maimon, 578 ; re 
placed by Beck, with " conscious 
ness" in general, 579 ; coincides with 
Spinoza s God, Schleiermacher, 582 ; 
idealistically resolved by Fichte, 579 ; 
re-shaped pluralistically by Herbart, 
583 ff. ; found in the will by Schopen 
hauer, 588 f. 

Thomieus, 359. 

Thomas Aquinas and Thomism, as 
systematiser, 31 1 ; life and writings, 
313 ; on faith and reason, 321 ; psy 
chology, 324 ; doctrine of the state, 
326 f. ; on relation between will and 
intellect, 328 ff. ; determinism, 330 ; 
God and the good, 332 ; ethics, 333 ; 
on problem of individuality, 340 f. ; 
opposed by empiricism, 344 f., 402 ; 
by Cartesians, 416 ; by Crusius, 485 ; 
revival of, in nineteenth century, 661 
note. Cf. also 299, 487, 492. 

Thomasius, 432, 444, 506, 520 f. 

Thought, opposed to perception by Cos- 

724 

Index. 

mologists, 58 ff. ; by Plato and De- 
mocritns, 105 ; as object of Logic, 
133 ; as the divine self-consciousness, 
with Aristotle, 145 ; conceived as a 
reckoning, 404, 478 f., 639 ; form and 
content of thought, 401, 541 ff. ; as 
"attribute" with Spinoza, see Con 
sciousness ; see also Reason, and 
Episteinology. 

Thrandorf, ($32. 

Thrasyllus, 162, 216. 

Thrasymachus, 75 f . 

Thurot, 627. 

Tiedemann, 10, 445. 

Time, as form of inner sense, with 
Augustine, 283 ; as perception a 
priori with Kant, 465, 539 ff.; Her- 
bart s view, 585. 

Timon, 160, 167, 200. 

Tindal, 441, 496. 

Tocco, 631. 

Toland, 441, 488, 493, 523, 694 (488). 

Toleration, 307, 427 ff., 433, 487. 

Tooke, 440. 

Tracy, Destutt de, 442, 457, 634 f . 

Traditionalism, French, 627 f., 048 f. 

Tragedy, defined by Aristotle, 153. 

Transcendence, of God, 140, 230, 338 ; 
cf. Immanence. 

Transcendental philosophy, 532 ff. ; 
illusion, 548. 

Transformation of values, 661, 679. 

Trendelenburg, 632. 

Trinity, doctrine of Augustine. 280 ; in 
Realism, 295 ; above reason, 321. 

Tropes of JEnesidemus, 200 ; of Agrippa, 
201. 

Troxler, 698 (573). 

Truth (see Epistemology), twofold, 
320 ff., 494. 

Truths, Leibniz on necessary and con 
tingent, 398 f., 425 ; see Verites. 

Tschirnhausen, 382, 391. 

Tucker, 410. 

Turbiglio, 631. 

Turgot, 443, 652. 

Twofold truth, doctrine of, 320 ff., 494. 

Tyndall, 630. 

Ueberweg, 16, 631. 

Ulrici, 032, 040. 

Unconditioned, the, as Idea, with 
Kant, 549 ; unknowable, according 
to Hamilton, 638, and Spencer, 657. 

Unconscious, the, with Leibniz, 424, 
402 f.; with Fichte, 594 and note 1 ; 
with Hartmann, 640 f., 673. 

Understanding, differs from sensibility 
by distinctness of its ideas with 
Leibniz, 463 ; faculty of spontaneity 
with Kant, 486; forms of synthesis 
of, 542 ; prescribes laws to Nature, 
542 ; intuitive, 567 ; separation of 

from sensibility, opposed by Kant s 
critics, 576 ; principles of the, op 
posed by Fichte, Hegel, et aZ., 591 f. ; 
and by Coleridge, 665. 

Uniformity of Nature, understood in 
astronomy, 57 ; taught by Democri- 
tus, 107 ff. and the Stoics, 180 f., 
194 f. ; restricted by Aristotle, 142 f. ; 
denied by Epicurus, 182 f. ; affirmed 
in Renaissance, 401 ff. ; critical 
theory of, 541 ff. ; see also Law and 
Nature. 

Unity, the Eleatics, 38 ; Spinoza, 419 ; 
in plurality, 422, 424 ; of conscious 
ness, 150, 458 ; synthetic of Kant, 
540, 542 ; of human race, 261 ; of 
reason and nature as ethical princi 
ple, 604 f.; see also One. 

Universal and particular (see also Real 
ism, Nominalism, and Conceptional- 
ism), Socrates, 97; Plato s Ideas as, 
107-109, 119-122; Aristotle, 133 ff., 
142 f. ; mediaeval controversy over, 
287 ff. ; Abelard, 2!)!) ; Nizolius, 300 f.; 
as category, 543 ; Spinoza, 409 ; 
Feuerbach and Stirner, 041, 075. 

Universe, as organism and work of 
art, 307, 489 ; as homogeneous, 402 ; 
see World, and Nature. 

Universality, as criterion of the a priori 
with Kant, 540 ; see Validity. 

Unreason, of the world-ground, 015 ff. ; 
073 f., 676. 

Utilitarianism, with Sophists and Soc 
rates, 74 f., 78 f. ; with Epicurus, 
174 f. ; in the Enlightenment, 490, 
503, 506 f., 512 ff. ; quantitative with 
Bentham, 513, 522, 662-664, 605 f. ; 
theological, Paley, 514 ; of philoso 
phy of law, 522 ; in nineteenth cen 
tury, 025, 602 f., 670 ff . ; of Mill, 
665 ff. ; and evolution, 602, 667 f. 

Utopia, Bacon s, 387, 429 f. ; More s, 
427-429 ; Campanella s, 430 f. ; cf. 
also 126. 

Valentinus, 214, 217, 239, 243, 254. 

Vacherot, 627. 

Validity, universal, as problem of the 
Sophists 68, 74, 93 ; postulated by 
Socrates, 69, 81, 95 ff. ; as prob 
lem of Kant, 538 and note 2, 539 ff., 
551 ff., 560 ff. ; as true problem of 
philosophy, 627, 680 f. 

Valla, 355, 360. 

Values, conception of, introduced into 
theoretical consideration by Anaxag- 
oras, 42 ; by Anaximander, 49 ; by 
Pythagoreans, 57 ; by Plato and De- 
mocritus, 100 ; by Aristotle, 143 ; 
natural and artificial, 517 ; cf. also 
Nature and 0J&lt;r ; anthropomorph 
ism of, rejected by Spinoza, 401 ; by 

Index. 

725 

Systems de la Nature, 493 ; theory 
of, with Beneke, 637 ; problem of, 
000 ff. ; transfonnatiou of, 601, 67!) ; 
relativity of, 76, 680 ; universal va 
lidity of, as problem, 551, 553, 560, 
627, 661, 680 f. ; of civilisation, 523 
ff., 660 ff. ; social, 513, 522, 663, 667 ; 
realm of, Lotze, 644, 681 ; measured 
in terms of pleasure, see Hedonism ; 
by other standards, see Good and 
Worth. 

Van Helmont, 403. 

Vaniiii, 369. 

Variability, of the World-ground, 371 ; 
of organic matter in Darwinism, 
656 1.; with Spencer, 657. 

Varro, 161, 163. 

Vayer, 355. 

Veitch, 629. 

Venn, 629. 

Ventura, 631. 

Vera, 631. 

Verites eternelles, de fait, with Leib 
niz, 398, 422, 425, 465, 491 f. ; cf. 
566, 640. 

Vernias, Nicoletto, 355. 

Vico, 526, 528. 

Victorines, 275, 305, 323, 414. 

Villers, 635. 

Vincent of Beauvais, 313, 344. 

Vinci, Leonardo da, 387. 

Virtual innateness, 463-466, 583. 

Virtualism of Bouterwek, 588, 635. 

Virtue, ambiguity of the term, 78 ; 
consists in knowledge, Socrates, 78 
ff. ; necessarily results in happiness, 
81 ; the sole good, Antisthenes, 83; 
is ability for enjoyment, Aristippus, 
85 ; is knowledge, 164 ; is suspense 
of judgment, Sceptics, 167 ; is sole 
good for Stoics, 168 ; arises only 
through the logos, Philo, 227 ; as 
stimulated by beauty, Plotinus, 250 ; 
relation to happiness. Kant, 555 f. ; 
see also Ethics and Good. 

Virtues, the four cardinal, of Plato, 
125 f. ; ethical and dianoetic, of 
Aristotle, 151, 154 ; these subordi 
nated to the Christian by Augustine, 
287 ; dianoetic, above the practical, 
with Thomas, 333 ; cf. Kthics. 

Vischer, 631. 

Vivi-s. :;.V,, 360 f., 376, 383. 

Vogt, 63:2, 642. 

Void (see also Space), with Parmenides, 
38 ; with Gnostics, 239. 

Wlkerptychologie, 631, 619. 

Volney, 443, 521. 

Voltaire, 439, 442, 456, 480, 489, 493, 
495 f., 505, 521, 523, 693 (442). 

Voluntarism, of Augustine, 281 ff. ; of 
Scotus, 328 ff. ; of Descartes, 394 ; 
of Leibniz, 425 ; of Kant, 554 f. ; of 
Fichte, 580 f., 594 f. ; of Bouterwek, 
587 f. ; of Schopenhauer, 588 f., 677 ; 
of Biran, 636 ; of recent psychology, 
637, 646, 654 ; in ideals of life, 676- 
679 ; see Intellectualism, and Will. 

Wagner, J. J., 697 (571). 

Wagner, Richard, 677 f. 

Wagner, Rudolph, 632, 642. 

Wallace, A., 630. 

Walter of Montagne, 274. 

Ward, 630. 

Way upward and downward, Heracli- 
tus, 36, 50. 

Weber-Fechner Law, 645. 

Wedgwood, 629. 

Weigel, Erhard, 382, 397. 

Weigel, Valentine, 356, 366, 370, 374, 
397. 

Weiss, 445, 513. 

Weisse, 632, 640. 

Whewell, 629. 

Wilckins, 398. 

Will (see also Freedom) with Augus 
tine, 281 f. ; relation to intellect, 
328 ff. ; recognised as factor in judg 
ment by Descartes, 394 ; the only 
absolute good, 551 ; Bouterwek on, 
587 ; as thing-in-itself and source of 
misery, Schopenhauer, 588 f . , 020 ff. ; 
as first principle, Maine de Biran, 
636 ; Beneke, Fortlage, 637 ; Wundt, 
646 ; Hartmann, 646, 673 ; Bahnsen, 
675 f. ; Nietzsche, 677 ; see Volun 
tarism. 

William of Auvergne, 314, 332, 340. 

William of Champeaux, 272, 274, 294, 
298. 

William of Conches, 274, 302 f., 357. 

William Durandus, 315. 

Williamde la Marre, 314. 

William of Occam, 312, 315, 322 f., 
325, 328, 330, 342 ff., 376, 426, 432, 
691 (342). 

Winkler, 382. 

Wise man, Stoic ideal of, 169, 171 ff. ; 
Epicurean, 166, 170 f. 

Wise Men, the Seven, 24. 

Wolff, Chr., life and writings, 444; 
aims to systematise the thought of 
Leibniz, 460 f. ; method and meta 
physics, 482 ; attacked, 478, 484 f. ; 
attitude toward religion, 487 ; teleol 
ogy, 490 ; ethics, 505 ff. ; on the state, 
519 f. ; cf. also 397, 432, 439, 478, 
520. 

Wolff, P., 454. 

Wollaston, 441, 504. 

Woolston, 49(5. 

Wordsworth, 629. 

World, early Greek views of, 31 ff. ; 
two worlds, of the myths, 685 (123) ; 
of Pythagoreans, 47, 57 ; of Plato, 

726 

Index. 

123 ; of Middle Ages, 294, 323 ; of 
Kant, 555 ; origin of, according to 
early Greeks, 48 ff. ; plurality of, 49 ; 
a process, Heraclitus, 50 ; incorpo 
real, of Plato, 117 f . ; origin of, with 
Plato, 130 ; Aristotle s view of, 147 f. ; 
Epicurus, 184 ; as macrocosm, Stoics, 
187 ; Bruno and Boehine, 366 ff. ; 
product of spirit, 235 ; relation of to 
God, 235 ff. ; eternal, of Origen, 254 ; 
intelligible, 290 ; Copernican theory 
of, 369; intelligible in God, Male- 
branche, 417 ; the best, Leibniz, 
491 f. ; as Idea with Kant, 549 f. ; 
historical view of, in German ideal 
ism, 612, 625 f., 654 ff. ; natural 
science view of in nineteenth cen 
tury, 624 f., 651 ff., 659. See also 
Universe, Nature, Natural Science, 
History. 

World-reason, 128, 172, 187. See also 
Logos. 

World-soul, 63 note 1, 131 ; evil with 
Plato, 231. 

World-stuff, 32; as water, as air, 32, 

55 : as fire, 36. 
World-will, 589, 622, 673. 
Worms, 628. 

Worth, of the person, 553 ; see Value. 
Wuudt, 633, 646. 

Xeniades, 84. 

Xenocrates, 103, 123, 164, 243, 687 

(189). 

Xenophanes, 28, 30, 34 ff., 46, 146. 
Xenophon, 71, 77 ff., 82, 97, 182. 

Zabarella, 355. 

Zeller, 631. 

Zeno of Elea, 28, 30, 44, 55 f., 61, 

89 ff. 

Zeno of Sidon, 162. 
Zeno the Stoic, 159, 162, 168, 175. 
Ziller, 631. 
Zimara, 355. 
Zimmermann, 631. 
Zorzi, 357. 
Zwingli, 356. 

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