SOURCE: “Philosophical Position,” in Schleiermacher: Personal and Speculative, Alexander Gardner, 1903, pp. 131-223.

[In the following excerpt, Munro presents a detailed overview of Schleiermacher's philosophy, focusing on his theory of knowledge, the elements of thought, and the distinction drawn between religion and philosophy.]

I.—GENERAL VIEW.

The philosophy of Schleiermacher, while not absolutely original, is very much more than a mere repetition of the results of the critical method. It is an independent study of the problem of knowledge—a study which, although making free use of the materials of past investigators, so builds them into an organic whole that the structure represents an entirely new view of truth. It is an attempt to discover the absolute unity underlying all philosophical enquiries, and in the light of which the most diverse speculations can be harmonized. In the search after this unity—which is the never-ending task of philosophy—it naturally allies itself with the thought of the past and of the present. It claims kinship not only with Kant and Fichte and Schelling, but with Plato, Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibnitz. Its aim is to reconcile the various differences in thought and in thought-systems; to do equal justice to realism and idealism, sensationalism and intellectualism. It emphasises the contrasts that lie at the ground of being, and it endeavours to show how they can all be combined into a unity deeper than either thought or matter—a unity of which thought and matter are but the necessary, if mysterious, manifestations.

While thus related to all the great philosophical systems, the speculations of Schleiermacher cannot be summarily classified under any one of them. His view of the world of thought has an individuality distinctly its own. It may not be so brilliant or so startling as many of the post-Kantian speculative systems—and it has certainly not enjoyed the vogue that some of them have had—yet, for real suggestiveness, and for the power of adjusting itself to the development of thought, it is, perhaps, one of the most significant of recent philosophical efforts. It avoids, for example, the difficulties inseparable from such theories as those of Hegel or of Schopenhauer. At the same time it lays down the basis for a system of thought and being which is not so complicated, or so one-sided, as that advanced either in the name of a pure idealism or of a pure materialism.

One of the many services which Kant rendered to philosophy was the emphasising of the contrast existing between mind and matter. He brought scientific thought back not only to the dualistic position first clearly defined by Descartes: he accentuated in a more decisive manner than that thinker did the breach between nature and spirit. The spheres of the two were for him absolutely distinct. We can only know one—that which has its side to us; the other is beyond conscious experience, and cannot be known. Between thought and being there is an abyss over which there is no crossing. All that we can ever become cognisant of is appearance: the thing in itself—the noumenon or permanent reality behind phenomena—is inscrutable and incomprehensible.

It need not be wondered that such a conclusion, restricting, as it does, the range of knowledge within the limit of sense experience as dominated by intellect, was not accepted by succeeding thinkers. Indeed, the one aim of the later German philosophy—inspired as it has been by the movement created by Kant—was to remove, or explain away, the contrasts indicated in his system. The endeavour to break up the antithesis between thought and being, between mental representation and the universal substance, may be taken as the key to all the subsequent philosophical speculations. The theories of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Herbart, illustrate this fact. Each of these thinkers tried, in his own way, to reduce the contrast between spirit and nature; and to find an ultimate unity which could account for both. A dualistic conception of the universe was for them, as a final result, an impossibility. They abhorred it in the same way in which nature is supposed to abhor a vacuum. And yet, in attempting to get rid of this conception, they scarcely made any advance towards the solution of the problem of knowledge. All they really did was to explain the one side of the contrast in terms of the other. If they start with the rational element, as the ground of thought and being, they either ignore matter altogether, or show that it is conditioned by mind. If, on the other hand, they begin with the irrational, as the principle from which everything is to be deduced, nothing is easier than to prove that mind is the product of matter. That is to say, they acted pretty much in the same way as if they sought to explain the negative pole of a magnet by the positive, and the positive by the negative.

Schleiermacher did not, however, deal with the problem in this arbitrary and one-sided fashion. He freely accepted the distinction between mind and matter. That for him was a fact clear and indisputable; and no solution which interpreted mental activity by material conditions, or material conditions by mental activities, was deemed conclusive, He could rest neither in materialism nor in idealism, as such. He was content to acknowledge, in the widest sense, the truth in each; but he felt that to assign to either the supremacy, or the originating power was clearly unscientific—was, in fact, a relapse into that very dogmatism from which the new criticism strove to emancipate thought.

Still, sharply as Schleiermacher defined the opposite poles of thought and being, he did not regard the antithesis which they constituted as being absolute and unresolvable. In the life of each there is a relative unity. We are in our own self-conscious existence not only thought, we are also being. The individual ego is the expression, in the form of contrast, of the identity of the real and the ideal. The world further represents another and wider aspect of the same thing. Here is a unity embracing the totality of all contrasts and relations. But just because it does—because it is the sum of the contrasted—it is limited, and cannot be the highest unifying principle. This, according to Schleiermacher, must be sought for neither in the empirical consciousness nor in the cosmological unity, but in the idea of God, or the Absolute. In this final identity there are no relations or distinctions, no within or without, no subject or object. God is the eternal indifference and neutralization of all the antitheses in the universe.

Of this absolute unity, from which every kind of contrast is excluded, we can know nothing. It transcends the limits of experience. It is timeless and spaceless. It cannot be apprehended either by thought or by will. Even feeling, or the immediate self-consciousness, fails to give adequate expression to this transcendent ground of all. Nevertheless, though it is, from its nature, unknowable, it is the necessary presupposition of knowledge and of action. It is the basis of all experience, all consciousness. Without it the unity of the world would be as inconceivable as the unity of life were there no individual Ego. Without it, matter and mind would be for ever incommensurable, lying outside each other's range; and knowledge and certainty would alike be impossible. Without it, in short, there would be, on the one hand, mere chaos; and, on the other, empty abstractions.

The way in which Schleiermacher reached this result is very similar to that by which Spinoza was led to the central thought in his system. Spinoza set before him the perfecting of the Cartesian doctrine by reducing the opposed substances of thought and extension into one substance of which thought and extension were the two necessary attributes. Schleiermacher, starting with the antithesis of thought and being—which had, again, been brought into prominence by the critical philosophy—tried to reach the unifying principle presupposed by each, and demanded by a consistent theory of knowledge. The one developed Cartesianism in the line of its logical issues; the other did the same thing for Kantianism. They both sought for the entity at the ground of appearance and reality, and they both found it in the same idea—the idea of God.

This resemblance between the aim and results of these two great thinkers has given rise to the charge that the philosophy of the one is only a kind of spiritualized representation of the other. This charge, which was made early, and was popularised by Strauss, has been often repeated since, and that by those who have evidently not inquired into its truth. Schleiermacher himself, who was, from his wide knowledge, the best witness in such a case, repudiated, in the strongest terms, the assertion that his system was identical with that of Spinoza. And the more the philosophies of the two are compared, the more clearly will it appear how widely they differ. God, the world and man, and their mutual relations, are the ideas peculiar to each; yet the meaning which they severally assign to them is fundamentally distinct. Spinoza defines God as the infinitely absolute being, or substance, which is the immanent and necessary cause of all things. He makes no distinction between God and Nature; and the world is merely a mode of the divine being. The absolute substance, with its attributes and modes, whether it be taken as conscious or unconscious, as abstract or real, is the One and All, moving for ever blindly in its separate lines of thought and extension, from higher to lower, the one to the many, the existent to the non-existent. Schleiermacher, on his part, does not conceive the Absolute as entering into, and constituting, the existence of all finite things. God is not simply represented as either the highest Power or Causality; neither is He called substance, nature, or Natura naturans. He and the world are distinct; yet they are not to be separated. God is immanent in the world, as the unity of all the contrasts that exist in time and space; but He is also the transcendental basis, timeless and spaceless, which makes these contrasts of the real and ideal possible. In the Glaubenslehre this relation between God and the world is further described as corresponding to creation and preservation. Again, in Spinoza's view, thought and extension are essential attributes of substance, existing as distinct and without causal relation. In Schleiermacher's system, thought and extension are not regarded as attributes existing apart and without causal relation: they are real contrasts that can act upon each other, and modify each other. Extension without intellect is nothing, and intellect without extension is nothing. It is as the one is related to, and acts upon, the other, that there can be any knowledge, any certainty. It is as reason brings order, differentiation, and light into the vague, chaotic multiplicity of finite things that there can be an intelligible world. Matter, as the organic stimulus, is naturally the prius; but, in the self-conscious life of man, the real primacy must ever be assigned to reason. What Schleiermacher found was not matter and mind asserting themselves, each necessarily and apart; but matter and mind existing, as if by a pre-ordained harmony, for each other, and acting upon one another; yet so related, and so acting, that there is an ever-increasing supremacy of reason over matter, the intellectual over the organic. The individual, he maintained, was a self-determining, self-authenticating product of the creative reason—the image of God, the mirror of the universe, the midpoint and centre of finite being. Here, in man's rational will, he discovered not only a sure basis for the ethical, but the true explanation of the entire cosmical process. In Spinoza's thought, the individual, as a mode of substance, is nothing but a necessary sequence, a mere accident; a passing wave on the universal sea of being, appearing for a moment, then sinking into the depths whence it arose. In Schleiermacher's system, man, instead of being a necessary accident, like everything else in nature, is the ethical end, the teleological goal of the universe. Thus, although Schleiermacher has many points in common with Spinoza, it is impossible to equate his position, either in philosophy or in theology, in terms of Spinoza, as Strauss had early attempted, and as Professor Otto Pfleiderer has more recently tried to do.¹ Spinoza, notwithstanding the decided issues raised by his system, does not get beyond the old, dogmatic dualism of Descartes. Schleiermacher, on the contrary, though deeply penetrated by the Spinozistic spirit, is a true representative of the modern critical philosophy. While refusing to ignore the plains of realism—and here we see his kinship with Plato, Spinoza, and Leibnitz—he nevertheless stood on the heights occupied by Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, and Schelling. The task he set before him was to discover the unifying principle at the base of all contrasts, the real not less than the ideal; and, in the quest of this principle—whatever we may think of the final result—he helped to enlarge and correct the prevailing philosophy, created by Kant, in two of its most important positions: its theory of knowledge, and its idea of the ethical.

II.—STARTING-POINT AND SCOPE OF THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE.

Schleiermacher starts, in his analysis of knowledge, with thought (Denken) as a given fact. This is for all the most certain and the clearest phenomenon of mental experience—a phenomenon whose existence requires no proof. Whenever mind and matter, the inner and the outer, are brought into relation there, as a necessary result, thought is produced. How this conscious state—this new condition different from both mind and matter—originates, he does not attempt to show. There may be—it is almost certain there is—a point in the development of human life where all is chaos; and where men are immediately one with every form of existence. But of such a stage of undetermined manifoldness, we can know nothing; for thought only comes into existence when the I and the not I, the one and the many, are consciously distinguished. It is then that outward objects, affecting the senses, leave a more or less vivid impression, and that this impression is seized upon by the intellectual activity, and converted into thought or language—for the two are really one and the same. Only at this stage, when sense impressions become transformed into concepts, expressed or unexpressed, is the mysterious process of the genesis of thought completed. Language is thus, according to Schleiermacher, not only identical with thought; it is the first definite evidence of its existence.²

But important as thought is, it is not the only form of mental or conscious activity; in addition to it, there are the activities of will and of feeling. These are not separate faculties, which act each in its own independent sphere; they are manifestations of the one common activity of mind. Will has its intellectual as well as its volitional side; for he who does not know what to will can only will imperfectly. Yet, though will is thought, it differs from thought principally in its direction. In will, there is a movement from within outward; in thought, the movement is reversed. In the one, the outer world is acted upon by the conscious subject; in the other, the outer world acts upon the conscious subject. Feeling, too, is not specifically distinct from thought, as if it were an absolutely new capacity. It is, in fact, the harmony of thought and will, the element in which both become relatively one. Only in feeling, can there be for us an identity of these otherwise antithetic and all comprehensive factors of life.

Corresponding to these great movements of the human intellect, or consciousness, are the lines which Schleiermacher lays down in his investigation of the problem of knowledge. His critique is not simply a critique of reason, as such, but of reason in active manifestation. It is not a single but a triple analysis. He traverses the entire course marked out by Kant; and he sums up in one whole, the result of his findings.

He first analyses thought in the hope of discovering the “transcendent ground” of the real and the ideal.³ All that he finds here is the presupposition of its existence, as the explanation of thought and being, the nexus, without which mind and matter must remain apart and inexplicable. He next subjects will to a similar scrutiny. But, instead of will yielding a result different from what thought yields, Schleiermacher proves that its conclusions are exactly similar. Will, he maintains, possesses no reality, no content, that thought does not already possess. Finding in neither the transcendent unity which he knew must exist—if knowledge is not to be altogether chaotic and illusive—he sets out once more in the path of investigation. This time, in his analysis of feeling, he meets with more success. In the form of feeling, known as “immediate self-consciousness,” he finds that the idea of God is immediately given; and he consequently concludes that the “indwelling being of God” is the final principle both of knowledge and of volition.

In thus taking thought, or the empirical consciousness in active process, as the starting-point of his investigation, Schleiermacher accepts the conclusion that all knowledge of reality is limited by experience. But his empiricism is much more comprehensive than that of Kant. For him thought and will stood exactly on the same plane. On this account he rejected the leading results of the Critique of Practical Reason. Will cannot, any more than thought, find, or postulate, God. That predicate of all thought and being lies “behind the veil.” It is unique. It can neither be willed nor known. It must simply be accepted as the necessary principle of real knowledge—of volition not less than of intelligence.

The philosophy of Schleiermacher is principally contained in his Dialectic, Psychology, and Æsthetics. The Dialectic is divided into two parts, the Transcendental which considers the idea of knowledge generally, and the Technical, or Formal part, which regards the same idea in movement, or in the process of construction. This work is of the utmost value as explaining Schleiermacher's fundamental philosophical conceptions. The Psychology must also be studied, if one would obtain an intelligent view of his ideas regarding body and soul, the activities of sense and of thought, the function of consciousness in relation to the Ego and the non-Ego, and such like. It is full of large, illuminating thoughts, and the study of it forms a bracing and healthful discipline. The Æsthetic, though dealing with Art, in its principles and in its relation to Ethics, incidentally explains many points in Schleiermacher's peculiar view of self-consciousness, and its connection with the material world.

The present representation of Schleiermacher's theory of knowledge is based on the Dialectic. This imparts to the study a unity which it might otherwise lack. When, however, the Psychology or the Æsthetic helps to illustrate, or to supplement the Dialectic, they are either quoted, or reference is made to them.

III.—CRITERIA OF KNOWLEDGE.

Knowledge (Wissen) is thought; but it is thought of a clearly defined nature. Free or arbitrary thought, as when one forms the conception of a griffin or a fairy, has no title to be called knowledge. It does not set forth anything really existing in being; it is a creation purely subjective and indeterminate. The same thing holds good of the images built up in sleeping or waking dreams. However vivid these may be, they have no real object corresponding to them. They are the accidental products of the intellectual activity, and cannot be classed among the normal facts of cognition. The wide range of thought, known as religions, must also be placed in the same category. Its scope lies entirely outside the field of knowledge. Religion, in its various forms, takes to do with the individual, whether a person or a community, as determined by feeling; whereas knowledge occupies itself with reason and with being—quantities that have not an individual, but a universal significance.⁴

Schleiermacher did not, however, attempt—in seeking to distinguish between knowledge and the products of fancy, imagination, and faith—to compare, in a general way, every phase of thought so as to mark off what is knowledge from what is not knowledge. Instead of entering upon such an endless task, he sought to define knowledge according to its fundamental characteristics; and, in this way, to draw a line, clear and distinct, between the thought that is knowledge and the thought that is not knowledge. The characteristics he enumerates are two: (1) Knowledge is that type of thought which is produced in a uniform manner by all thinking subjects; and (2) Knowledge is that type of thought which must correspond to being (Sein).⁵ These criteria, the one conditioned by the other, are regarded as embracing all that is most essential and distinctive in knowledge.

1. The first of these criteria—that which demands the uniformity of the production of thought—raises knowledge at once above the individual to the universal self-consciousness. Man, as thinking, must, no doubt, begin, in the first instance, with personal experience; but man, as knowing, must be considered as an individual of the race; and his knowledge is only knowledge as it is related to the uniform cognition of all individuals. What we may think in a merely particular or singular way may or may not be true; but it is not knowledge: it is opinion. One can only be said to know anything when he has the conviction that all think regarding it as he thinks. Given a certain object to be known; all, who are capable of having any knowledge of it, must not only know it as it is, but must obtain their knowledge of it in precisely the same manner. That is, the thinking process is identical in all, and the results of such a process must necessarily be the same for all.

This criterion of knowledge is really founded on the identity in all of the elements that are at the root of knowledge—the elements that constitute its typical form and content. These, on the one side, are the activities of intellect, or the reason; and, on the other, the system of sense impressions, or the organic function. In the building up of knowledge, these two co-related factors are universal. They are the same, and they act in the same way, in the case of every rational being. Viewed in this light, knowledge “is that kind of thought which is the product of the reason and of the organization in their universal type.”⁶

Knowledge is, therefore, not the isolated and fragmentary view of a single individual looking out upon the world; it is the common view of the race. It is what all men think. As contrasted with the crudity of personal opinion it is what might be called scientific thought. It is what is true for all; because it has its ground in the permanent laws of the human reason and of organic being. As such, it is—although not absolutely perfect—something very different from partial or accidental knowledge. It is the agreement of ideas with ideas. It is that which renders the historical development of thought possible. Without it there could be neither certainty nor advance in the process of thinking.

It may, indeed, be objected that this characteristic of knowledge is defective in that it applies as readily to a universal system of error as to a universal system of truth. Men have, in the course of the ages, accepted as true many ideas which were afterwards proved not to be in accordance with reality. In the pre-Copernican times, for example, utterly erroneous notions as to the form of the earth and the course of the sun were universally believed. If, however, no amount of consensus in such cases can be taken as normative and final, it may be concluded that the principle of the universality of thought fails to bring with it certainty as to truth or reality; and must, consequently, be rejected as not an absolutely trustworthy criterion.

This objection would, no doubt, be perfectly valid, if the test of the universality of thought were the only test of knowledge; or if it stood alone. But Schleiermacher is specially careful to show that it must not be so understood. He declares that the two characteristics, “the uniformity of the production of thought and the identity of the same with being, only constitute knowledge when taken together. If any one thinks about a thing as it really is, there is truth in such a thought. Still if he has not along with the thought the consciousness that all men must think as he thinks, he in fact knows nothing. Again, if we could conceive it possible that all men should formulate in the same manner a thought which, nevertheless, did not correspond to being, such a thought could not be knowledge, but universal error. Or, on the other hand, even if thought really agreed with being, but did not possess, in living manifestation, subjective uniformity, it would not be knowledge, but a correct opinion.”⁷

2. Schleiermacher's second criterion—which requires the correspondence of thought with being—is, however, something more than a mere supplement to the first; it is the fundamental characteristic of knowledge. In knowledge it is a necessity of the universal consciousness that there be not only a thought but an object of thought. This object of thought must not be confounded with the thought itself, or with any of its modifications. It is not “ideas existing in the mind, or impressions, or phenomena, or qualities of matter: it is being; it is what Kant, using a somewhat barbarous phraseology, described as thing-in-itself.”⁸ The separation of thought and being is thus the first necessary presupposition of knowledge. But, as necessary as it is that thought and being should have a separate existence, so necessary is it that, in every act of knowledge, the one should consciously correspond with the other. What is given on the side of being, as undeterminate manifoldness, must coincide with what appears in thought, under the form of unity and plurality. While the two factors are, as Sigwart expresses it, “independent of each other, they yet exist for each other, in the whole and in the individual, so that the totality of what is perceived is the same as the totality of thought, and the outer substance corresponds in every particular to the inner form.”⁹ In other words, the world as interpreted by intellect is the world as it is. Knowledge is not purely subjective, or the creation of one's individual brain; it is thought corresponding to what has objective existence. Where there is no such correspondence—as when one thinks of a centaur or a wraith—there can be no knowledge. Even as there can be no shadow without a substance, so there can be no thought without an object.¹⁰

Being, it may here be noticed, is used by Schleiermacher in a twofold sense, according to the manner in which it is apprehended. If the knowledge of it comes from without—if it is conveyed to the mind through impressions and perceptions—it may be defined as that which exists outside our thought and which can affect the sensory system. It is that which, not originating in intellect, has yet the power of so influencing our organism as to enter into thought. It is, in short, the aggregate of external objects—the outer universe—all that exists in time and space.

If, on the other hand, our knowledge of being comes not from without but from within, if it comes from thought, finding expression in the determination and activity of the will, it may be defined as “thinking, human being, or intelligence.” It is that inner, rational being, which can act upon and modify outer objects. It is ethical, as contrasted with physical, being. It is what exists within us—that which we are—and which can become the object of thought, not less than the form of being that is without.

Distinct as these aspects of being may seem, not only as to our knowledge of them, but as to their nature, the distinction is more apparent than real. “There is no difference between the knowledge that we have concerning our inner life movements, and that which we have concerning what has its being outside of us. Consequently, the twofold being to which this knowledge corresponds is not different; that is, being which is object of thought, in as far as it becomes will, is not different from being which is object of thought, in so far as it proceeds from perception. Indeed, the two taken together constitute the totality of being, even as they also constitute the totality of knowledge.”¹¹ Physical and ethical being are quantitatively different; qualitatively they are the same. Both forms exist for thought; and we know them precisely in the same way. But, although thought corresponds as well to the being without as to the being within, Schleiermacher, in his theory of knowledge, invariably uses the word in the first of these senses, as signifying what lies outside of the conscious mind.

That thought corresponds to being is a proposition which is apparently incongruous and impossible. Thought and being are quantities so opposite as to seem absolutely heterogeneous and incommensurable. How then can there be any correspondence or unity between them?

Schleiermacher answers this question by a direct appeal to the facts of consciousness. There thought and being are immediately given. At the same moment we are both, and we cannot be otherwise. The intellectual and the organic—that which thinks and that which is the object of thought—are implied in every act of self-consciousness. We are never pure thought, any more than we are pure being: our empirical self, or Ego, is always the result or the combination of the two. “We are something more,” Schleiermacher affirms, “than mere thought, and all that we are thus otherwise, nay, even thought itself, can become for us the object of thought. Now, if we call that concerning which we think being, we are at once being and thought.”¹²

This does not after all, it may be said, carry us far. Self-consciousness gives subject and object, thought and the thing thought; but self-consciousness is simply a process which has its existence within us. It rests upon a subjective basis—it is phenomenal, not real. If, however, we would prove that thought corresponds to being we must get beyond being as idea; we must get at it objectively, and as it is. Is such knowledge of objective existence possible?

Schleiermacher knew well the difficulty of this question. Yet, instead of allowing himself to get involved in abstract reasonings about it, he took his stand on the ground of experience, and showed that our knowledge of the objective—if obtained not immediately, but by a process of inference—is as sure and certain as our knowledge of the subjective. As soon as we arrive at the stage of self-consciousness we perceive that we are a unity composed of the intellectual and the organic, mind and body. These two sides of our nature are distinctly opposite—opposite as thought and being—yet in our conscious life they exist not in isolation but in combination. At each moment of existence we are organization as well as intelligence, being as well as thought. But our physical organization—and this is the path by which Schleiermacher would lead us to objective being—is immediately one with external being. The human organism and the world without are identical. They are parts of one whole. If, however, self-conscious existence is the immediate unity of mind and body, the inference is inevitable that our thought must be directly related to, and correspond with, external being; even as it is related to and corresponds with our own organism. “The correspondence of thought and being is,” Schleiermacher therefore asserts, “brought about through the real relation in which the totality of being stands to organization; and it may be said that all thought is knowledge which expresses accurately the relations of determinate being with reference to organization.”¹³

Thus far Schleiermacher, in his solution of the problem as to the possibility of knowledge, keeps within empirical lines. He does not enter into the deep, speculative questions lying behind the problem: he takes the facts of consciousness as they are, and brings them into evidence with regard to the relation of thought and being. The result—though conclusive within its range—suffers from the limitations of such a method. The empirical self-consciousness, if it is the only form of consciousness, can give no adequate explanation of the difficulties connected with thought and the world, mind and matter—difficulties old as the first reasonings of the human race. No one knew this better than Schleiermacher did. How he attempted a profounder solution of the problem, by claiming for knowledge a basis wider and more assured than that of the empirical consciousness of the individual or of the race, will appear in the subsequent exposition.

IV.—ELEMENTS OF THOUGHT.

Schleiermacher having indicated broadly the two distinctive marks of knowledge, next undertakes the particular consideration of each, and the principles involved in them.

Starting with the first characteristic, or the universal validity of thought, he sets about to analyse a simple act of knowledge so as to reduce it to its ultimate elements. In this analysis he finds that two factors are absolutely indispensable to the production of thought—the organic and the intellectual. The organic, or sense activity, is that which connects us with the outer world. It is that which gives to thought its content, or which supplies it with objects. Without the organic function, there could be no sensation or perception, no arriving at the being without us, and no real data of knowledge. It is the starting-point of thought, the medium through which external existence mirrors itself in us. In sense the first necessary moment of knowledge must begin. Apart from it there can be no perception of objective being—no realization of the world in its infinite manifoldness.¹⁴

The part acted by the organic function in Schleiermacher's theory of knowledge is almost identical with that which Kant assigns to sensibility (Sinnlichkeit). In each case the materials that go to form thought are supplied by the senses. The mind cannot, in any other way, reach what is without; or even be conscious of its existence. The organic is the medium through which objects are given—the capacity whereby the affection of the organization becomes a co-agent in the production of thought; and, without it, there can be, for us, no such thing as knowledge.¹⁵

But the organic function alone is not sufficient to constitute knowledge. The very lowest forms of animals possess, in a high degree, the activities of sense; yet they have no real knowledge. The world is to them a vague and manifold externality—without beauty or order or distinction. In addition, therefore, to the organic, there is required, in the production of actual thought, the intellectual function. This seizes hold of the confused and chaotic impressions that come through the organic affection, and imparts to them unity and plurality. It invests them with form and character. Even as the senses are the channels through which objects are conveyed to us, so the intellect, or the reason, is that regulating principle by means of which objects can become thought. The one is the source of manifoldness; the other is the source of unity. The one furnishes the stuff that goes to make thought; the other imparts to this vague and undefined material the specific distinction that characterises thought. The one, in short, supplies the necessary complement to the other. “Without unity and plurality the manifoldness is undetermined, without manifoldness the determined unity and plurality are void.”¹⁶ In the better known phraseology of Kant, perceptions without conceptions are blind, and conceptions without perceptions are empty.

In every act of knowledge the material and the formal are thus present as constitutive elements. There can be no thought where they do not both co-exist, or where they are not implied. The organic, or the intellectual, taken alone is voiceless. It can give no message, it can impart no light. Without reason there can be no harmonising of objects, without organisation there can be no intelligence. Organisation can only give a confused manifoldness of impressions, while reason is the simple indetermined unity. But these are states outside the sphere of thought; and their silence is, for us, as the silence of the dead.

Every kind of thought must then be regarded as the product of the organic and the intellectual. This is true even of that kind of thought which is commonly regarded as having an existence not derivable from the data of experience. Universal real concepts—whether physical, ethical, or logical—though not directly existing through the organic activity, indirectly involve such an activity. They are originally based on lower concepts, which from their very nature possess organic elements. And the reason why we at all assign a purely intellectual character to them is that we “do not immediately associate them with a particular experience, but with the tradition of an alien experience which is no longer fully realised.” Universal formal concepts—which belong to the same type of thought—likewise contain an organic element. They can only be thought in as far as they are related to their content, which content is inseparably connected with organic activity. In subject and object, examples of universal formal ideas, we have illustrations of this fact; since in the one there is, what Schleiermacher calls “organic spontaneity;” and, in the other, what he describes as “organic receptivity.” Thought, even the most universal and abstract, has a material or empirical basis. If it had not, it would be unthinkable; for it is only in the transcendental sphere—in the idea of God—that thought, with the absolute exclusion of organic activity, is possible.¹⁷

In the history of philosophy the almost invariable custom has been to confound the organic and intellectual moments of thought; or to deduce the one from the other. This is the πρ[UNK]τον ψε[UNK]δος alike of materialism and of idealism. Materialism maintains that the activity called intellectual is not only associated with certain conditions of matter, but has a purely material origin. Idealism, on the other hand, regards matter either as mind asleep, or as a mere illusion. In the view of Schleiermacher, both theories are equally arbitrary and insufficient. Matter and mind are, according to him, distinct and independent quantities. Yet the one apart from the other is an empty abstraction. He never ceases insisting that matter without mind is chaos, and that mind without matter is meaningless. The one finds its realization only in the other. The manifoldness of the material comes to unity in the intellectual, and the intellectual becomes active only in the manifoldness of the material.¹⁸

This inter-relation of the natural and the spiritual, of organisation and reason, in all real thought, cannot be explained by anything existing in either. It is the primitive and necessary ground of cognition. And if the distinction between empirical knowledge and undetermined thought is to be maintained—if we are to have an idea of self as opposed to the activity of divided being, of the world as different from the conscious Ego, and of life with its contrasted states and relations—it must be accepted immediately and without proof. “This presupposition of the interdependence of the two poles (the organic and the intellectual), and the relation of a somewhat in the one to a somewhat in the other, is not capable of proof. He who doubts it must surrender thought; since every act of thought really implies its existence. It is the co-relation of the world and the thought-activity of the human spirit. The world expresses itself in the type of the human spirit, and this type represents itself in the world.”¹⁹

Although we cannot, however, account for the necessary combination of the elements that go to the production of thought, we can indicate its relation to the highest of all the world's contrasts—the contrast between the ideal and the real. “The activity of reason is grounded in the ideal; and the organic, as dependent on the impressions of objects, in the real. Being is thus posited ideally as well as really; and the ideal and the real run parallel as modes of being. There is no other positive explanation of this highest contrast but that which regards the ideal as that in being which is the principle of every activity of reason that does not in any way spring from the organic; and the real as that in being which becomes the principle of organic activity, in as far as this is not in any way derived from the activity of reason.” This highest contrast—which may be called the cosmological—embraces all other contrasts. It is the utmost boundary of thought—the sphere within which knowledge ever moves, but can never transcend. Yet this contrast of the ideal and the real is in itself “an empty mystery.” We cannot rest in it. We must get beyond it to that one Being from which it, and all contrasts, are developed. This final unity is the Absolute Being, the identity of the real and the ideal, the transcendental ground of both knowing and being. It lies behind all knowledge, on the other side of the veil; yet though it cannot become the object of direct knowledge it must be always presupposed as the identity of thought and being. This unity, binding together all contrasts, though itself never appearing within the sphere of the contrasted, is God, or the Absolute Unity of nature and spirit.²⁰

From the foregoing account of the constitution of thought, it might be inferred that individuals can only know what calls into play their own organic and intellectual activities. Such a conclusion, were it true, would be destructive of the idea of knowledge, for it would break it up into fragments, so that there could be neither breadth nor community of outlook. But the position of Schleiermacher is the very opposite of this. He maintains that the organic and the intellectual are the same in all; and that there can be, in the case of individuals, a substitution of the activity of these functions. It is this that gives to thought its universal character, and that makes it possible for one to know what has never affected his organism, and never can. “In virtue of the identity in all of the reason and of the organisation there exist among all men, in the idea of knowledge, a community of experience and a community of principle.”²¹

This identity of thought must not, however, be so understood as to leave no room for the mental peculiarity or idiosyncrasy of individuals and of nations. This is as much a fact as the other; and exists side by side with it. In thought there is the particular as well as the universal. Men are not only individuals expressing the common typical life of the race, they are also personalities giving expression to their own distinct and original character. As such, they present striking differences, both in the form of their thought and of their speech. These differences—which Schleiermacher assigns to quantitative variations in organization—are more marked in the case of those who are sprung from different races, and speak different languages. Still, however great the maximum diversity, it is never so great as to be inconsistent with the idea of knowledge. The identical character of thought is never lost, even in those instances where the organic variations are most pronounced. This follows from what has already been described as the first criterion of knowledge: the universal identity and validity of the reasoning principle.²²

Nevertheless, the very existence of subjective differences in thought proves that “there is in reality no pure knowledge, but only distinct concentric spheres of community of experience, and of principles.”²³ Knowledge, in the individual and in the whole, is partial and relative. Its range is limited alike by the chaos of impressions, from which it sets out, and by the absolute unifying principle towards which it rises. It can, thus, never perfectly correspond to being—for, in that case, it would embrace all existence—neither can it be perfectly identical in the empirical consciousness, for, then, it would reflect the entire reason. It is a never-ceasing approximation towards the totality of thought and being. But, from the very nature of the human mind, it can never be anything else than an approximation which, while correct and uniform, as far as it goes, is still only relatively uniform and correct.

The necessary presence of the organic and the intellectual in thought and knowledge, supplies Schleiermacher with a principle for the classification of mental phenomena. According as the one or the other prevails, he divides all real thought into the three following grades:—Perception, commencing with and having a preponderance of the organic element; Thought Proper, beginning with and having a preponderance of the intellectual element; and Intuition, or the highest form of knowledge, in which there is a more or less perfect equipoise between the organic and the intellectual.²⁴

In this division there is no dignity assigned to thought but what it derives from its constitutive factors, and from the various stages of its onward movement. The classification is a generalized, or scientific, description of the conscious life in its development from the unconscious to the conscious, from the receptive to the spontaneous, and from the individual to the universal. No other arrangement of the facts of consciousness, or of thought in its becoming, was possible for Schleiermacher: starting, as he did, with the empirical self-consciousness as it exists in living process, and accentuating, consistently throughout, both sides of its manifestation—the conceptual unity and the temporal plurality.

V.—THE FORMS OF THOUGHT.

That this world, seemingly so real and tangible, can only be known through certain potential, or a priori, forms existing in the human mind, so that nothing is known directly as it is, but only as it is for us, is one of the oldest dreams of philosophic speculation. We find traces of it in all the chief centres of the world's thought. It appears in the Indian doctrine of Mâyâ, in the eternal flux of Heraclitus, in the shadow-world of Plato, and in the idealism of Berkeley. But the honour of being the first to raise this conception to a scientific standing in philosophy must always be assigned to the immortal Kant. The leading purpose of his great work, the Critique of Pure Reason, is to prove that intellect ever comes between us and things as they are, that it imposes its own forms on the objective world, and that all we can know is phenomenal appearance, as conditioned by the original apparatus of mind.

To many, this view has come as a new revelation, bringing light into the universal darkness. On the other hand, there are those who, while willing to follow Kant as a teacher, refuse to accept implicitly his theory of knowledge, with its cumbrous machinery of forms of sensory intuition, categories of the understanding, and what not. Among these, Schleiermacher occupies a chief place. Although at one with Kant in distinguishing between the matter and the form of thought, he still found it impossible to rest either in his principles or in his results. He refused to receive the view that space and time are the primary forms of our apprehension of things—the intuitions a priori which are the necessary conditions of empirical knowledge. For him space and time had an objective, as well as a subjective, meaning—they were the real forms of the existence of things, not less than the ideal forms of perception. In like manner, too, he dispensed with the twelve categories as builders of thought. The categories were, he maintained, nothing but the relations of empirical concepts. The notion, therefore, that they were pure concepts which rendered ordinary thought possible was the merest assumption; and he felt that to introduce it as an explanation of the origin of the formation of thought was only to complicate instead of simplifying the problem to be solved. Schopenhauer, in his trenchant criticism of Kant, characterized the categories as “blind windows”; and in this characterization Schleiermacher, though otherwise altogether opposed to the conclusions of the great pessimist, would readily acquiesce. The categories might, no doubt, give an appearance of symmetry to the Kantian system; but as philosophical media for the transmission of light, they were regarded as entirely inadequate.

Schleiermacher's own idea of the forms of thought is not only simpler than that elaborated by Kant; it is, in some respects, a distinct advance on the older view. As knowledge, according to him, can only exist in correspondence with being, so the only forms of thought are those which correspond to the forms of being. “Knowledge as thought exists under no other form than that of the Concept and of the Judgment.”²⁵

1. The Concept (Begriff) may be defined as that form of thought which represents the manifoldness of being as a definite unity and plurality. It is the combination of the general and the special—a combination which oscillates between the universal and the particular, the higher and the lower. This combination—which is a general or a particular concept according as the contrasts included in it are many or few—is produced by the union of sense and of reason in their relation to the outer world and its impressions. It is the consistent whole, or identity, which exists as the result of the activity of each of these ingredients in building up knowledge.

In the formation of the concept we have, first of all, the activity of sense. The great function of sense is to convey to the brain impressions of the external world. These it conveys, as they arise, without order or definiteness. It has no power either to distinguish, to fix, or to unite them. Images come and go, according to the infinitely kaleidoscopic nature of the world's constantly varying objects. They have no natural permanence; for each succeeding impression blots out the one that went before. They have no faculty of distinguishing or recollecting; for they are blind and incoherent. Their sphere is the sphere of simple perception; and the world which they represent is the world as it stands disclosed to the consciousness of the brute creature—the world of chaos and confused sensation.

But, if it is the part of sense-activity to convey general impressions, it is equally the part of reason to give to these impressions the character of unity and determination. Reason particularizes the vague content of cognition. It gives distinctness and fixity to the indefinite and chaotic manifoldness of the world. It separates between one object and another, between one impression and another impression.

Reason does not, however, exhaust its function when it separates and fixes the content of sense; it further raises it from the particular to the universal. It represents single individual images of objects as the general images of the same objects. That is, reason does not rest in the separate and distinct images conveyed by means of sensation or perception; it goes beyond these to higher and more generic images which embrace the lower and more particular. “There can be no such thing as a concept until the individual thing with its difference from its genus or class (Art) is at the same time posited. The general image is the image of the class, and the individual image can only exist when the generic image likewise exists. The universal image is really the individual image, but regarded as displaceable (Verschiebbarkeit); that is, as being replaceable by another of the same kind. For example, one who had never seen a tower, but who had seen many other buildings, would at the first sight have no difficulty in subsuming it under the concept ‘building.’ The individual tower would also in its turn become to the spectator an image of every kind of tower, and he on his part would have to think how he could vary this image of the tower without going outside its generic kind. This, then, is contained in sense; but only through the intellectual function is it the general image, which, however, only arises along with the individual image.”²⁶

The generalizing of the particular images represented in sense Schleiermacher calls the “Schema,” and the process by which it is developed through the agency of reason the “Schematizing Process.”

The schematizing process, which corresponds to induction, is never, at any one stage, a completed and final form of the development of knowledge. Beginning with a particular sense-image, it conceives it as a general image; but this general image can again become the starting-point for a further generalization, and so on through all the multiplicity of being until the absolute universality, or the concept of the world, is reached. There is, thus, always in this process something more or less accidental and empirical. Its results lack absoluteness and independence. At most they can only be regarded as schemata, or general images, in which the organic factor is dominant, and where the intellectual acts a subordinate and accessory part.²⁷

This schematizing, or inductive, process is not, however, the only one that enters into the production of the concept. In addition to it there is needed the process of deduction, which begins where induction ends. Its course is thus the antithesis of the other. It begins with the universal, or the world as unity, and it resolves this into the great contrasts that are included therein—the contrasts of the ideal and the real, subject and object, the intellectual and the organic. It next shows that each side of these contrasts—the formal not less than the material—can be postulated as a separate unity, which can again be resolved into its contrasts. And so, the process goes on, from unity to diversity and from diversity to unity interminably.²⁸

Schleiermacher designates the result of each process of deduction by the title “Formula.” If, in the schema, the organic is the primary principle and the intellectual the subordinate, the case is reversed in the formula. Here reason assumes the initiative, and the objective world of impressions, which it determines, may be characterized as passive. Still, although the formula is intellectually in advance of the schema, it does not, any more than the schema, constitute the concept proper. This, in the view of Schleiermacher, can only come into existence when the schema and the formula—induction and deduction—are perfectly united. The two processes must run into and complete each other. The particular must be deduced from the universal, and the universal must be induced from the particular. Until this takes place, the separate results of induction and of deduction are not real concepts at all; they are only concepts in the process of becoming.²⁹ The Hegelian dialectic, and the philosophy of identity, are, therefore, at fault when they regard the process of deduction as in itself independent and complete. A deduction a priori, a self-originating of pure thought, is an absolute impossibility.

The existence of the concept in consciousness is, then, the definite union of sense and reason. Sense pictures the world as a confused and undefined plurality; reason brings to this plurality the character of order and distinctiveness. The one finds its fulfilment in reason, the other finds its determination in sense. It is only through the coalescence of the two that the true concept can be produced. “The first fixed point prior to the production of all concepts is the presence of reason as an impulse and the realization of sense as an influence.”

But, although the sensuous is a necessary ingredient in the formation of the concept, it must not, on that account, be inferred that Schleiermacher supposed that concepts come from without, or that consciousness is the mere result of sense-experience. His view is the very opposite of this. He held that concepts exist in the reason in a timeless manner, even as the plant is present in a spaceless manner in the seminal germ. The reason, he maintained, is the potentiality, the living force, needed for the production of all true concepts, the lower not less than the higher. It is the place of all real concepts in the sense in which the ancients declared the Godhead to be the place of all living forces.³⁰

This view of Schleiermacher is not to be understood as if it implied that there were innate concepts in the mind; or, as if they simply slumbered in the reason until awakened by the organic impression. Schleiermacher rejected, in the most emphatic manner, the distinction made by Leibnitz between innate and acquired ideas, and he showed that there could be no such thing as ready-made concepts existing a priori in reason. Concepts, according to his theory, can only exist where there is a definite combination of the organic and the intellectual. Yet, necessary as both sides of this combination are, the principle that gives to the contents of the organic, or to sensations, their true conceptual character is reason. The whole range of concepts—higher and lower, ethical and physical—exist in reason, as to their possibility and disposition, prior to their emergence into actual consciousness. “This timeless existence of all concepts in the reason, if regarded merely as a denial of the view that concepts are the secondary product of organic affection, is the truth contained in the doctrine of ‘innate ideas.’ But if it is taken to mean that concepts actually exist in the reason antecedent to all organic function, then it is altogether a false notion, since concepts can only come into being through the union of both functions.”³¹

2. The judgment (Urtheil), or second form of knowledge, also occupies itself with the interpretation of being. Like the concept, it seeks to bring light and order into the world of chaos. Only, in doing so, it follows its own course and employs its own method. While it is the function of the concept to represent being as it is, unchangeable and at rest, it is the office of judgment to represent being in motion—being as acting or as suffering. The one has a regard to the manifold mass of being as a definite unity and plurality; the other takes this unity and plurality, and shows how they are connected in the relations of actual existence. The one is a combination of characteristics; the other, a combination of concepts. The judgment, in fact, represents the relations of individual actions and things. Its sphere is that of the organic or the real, as distinguished from the intellectual, or the ideal—which is the sphere of the concept.

As the objects on which the judgment pronounces are not equally definite, it consequently follows that the judgments themselves must vary in character. Some are clear and perfect, others are vague and imperfect. The nearer a judgment is to the starting-point of knowledge, as in the conceptions of children, it assumes the nature of what Schleiermacher calls a “primitive judgment.” Such judgments have for their subject chaos, or the vast undetermined world, and are expressed impersonally in the statements: “it thunders,” “it glances,” and the like. On the other hand, the judgment that is based on the highest concept—the concept of the world—is termed “the absolute judgment.” This judgment embraces the sum of all subjects and all predicates, or, what is the same thing, the totality of objects and their actions. Between these extremes—between the primitive and the absolute judgments—all other real judgments must find a place, either as perfect or imperfect judgments. “The imperfect judgment leans to the primitive, and is more analytic in character; the perfect judgment approaches the absolute, and is of a more synthetic nature. The imperfect posits the sphere of co-existence in an undefined manner; the perfect forms, from the subject and the object, a joint higher sphere; and so approximates towards the formation of the world-concept, since it always transcends the simple concept of its subject.” Knowledge, under the form of judgment, is thus a development from the primitive to the absolute, from the undefined to the defined, from chaos to the world as idea.³²

The concept and the judgment are mutually dependent upon each other. Into the construction of the concept the judgment enters as a necessary factor; so that the higher the concept is the more it rests upon a series of judgments; and the judgment, on its part, presupposes the concept, and attains its greatest completeness when the concepts, on which it is founded, are themselves perfectly formed. But, however perfect, neither the concept nor the judgment can reach the transcendental ground of being. This is closed against them by a twofold barrier. The concept is bounded above by the absolute unity of being, and below by the infinite undeterminateness of impressions, or the world as chaos. It cannot pass into the one or the other of those unknown regions. In like manner, the judgment is limited above by the highest being, the absolute subject, or the totality of causal relations, and below by chaotic being, which is an infinitude of predicates without determined subjects. The theory of Schleiermacher, by thus correlating and limiting the forms of thought, avoids the one-sidedness alike of idealism and of realism.

Regarded as knowledge, both the concept and the judgment must correspond with the forms of being. The uniform production of thought presupposes, as we have seen, the identity in all of the reasoning principle; it is to the same cause that we must attribute the universal uniformity of the production of the concepts. Though the concepts only come into existence through the medium of sense-activity, yet they exist timelessly in the reason. “Wherever there is knowledge, the system of concepts constituting this knowledge must exist in a timeless way in the all-indwelling reason.” The concepts are grounded timelessly in reason in the same way in which plants may be said to be in the seed-germ; only in the one case we have an event taking place in space, in the other a fact existing in a spaceless manner.

But, in addition to this sameness of the intellectual process, another explanation of the uniformity of the production of concepts is to be found in the correspondence of the forms of the concept with the forms of being. The essential contrasts of the higher and the lower, the universal and the particular—which are indispensable to the building up of the concept—occur also in being. Here they are present as the substantial forms of force and phenomenon, which are related to each other as the universal to the particular. The concept, therefore, corresponds to being in virtue of these permanent forms—the higher concept answering to force, and the lower to the phenomena of force.³³

The judgments are likewise produced similarly in all, and correspond to being; but in both of these respects there is a difference between them and the concepts. The universal uniformity of judgments is caused, not by the identity either of the intellectual or of the material process—though, in a certain sense, these are necessary to every judgment—but by the sameness of the relation between the organic function and external being as embracing the sum of organic movement. This relation expresses the truth in the doctrine of an outer world, the same for all; and from which each, according to the activity of his reason, develops his own system of judgments.³⁴

There is also a difference between the judgment and the concept in the way in which they are related to being. While the concept answers to being as such, the judgment corresponds to things in their co-existence, or to individual being. In the one we have being as permanent, in the other as in a state of flux. The concept expresses being in the form of force and its appearance, whereas the judgment represents the same being in the form of particular objects and their actions. “All finite being constitutes a system of causes and effects as well as a system of substantial forms, and it is the same being which corresponds to the form of the concept and to the form of the judgment.”³⁵

Schleiermacher further distinguishes between the concept and the judgment according to the two dominating forms which they assume. “Knowledge, in its two great aspects, has the same object, and it is, as to its form, only relatively contrasted. When the conceptual form predominates, and judgment is only present as its necessary condition, we have speculative knowledge. But when the form that is supreme is judgment, and the concept appears simply as an indispensable requisite, the result is empirical or historical knowledge.”³⁶ The speculative thus conforms to the concept, and the empirical to the judgment. As, however, the concept presupposes the judgment, so the speculative must presuppose the empirical. They must not be isolated; as if each, taken singly, could reach the true conception of knowledge. It is only in the interpenetration and identity of both that the highest idea of philosophy, which is the resolving of all contrasts, can be attained. Yet, for us, the perfect identity of the two—the real world-wisdom—is impossible. We can never, either by means of the concept or of the judgment, comprehend the totality of being; and nothing short of this is necessary in order to bring about the complete interpenetration of the speculative and empirical elements in thought. All that is within our reach is scientific criticism, or a description of the relation subsisting between the empirical and the speculative. “But if the pure idea of knowledge is nowhere realised, have we any substitute for it? Yes, in criticism, or the comparison of knowledge, as it is, with the highest idea of knowledge; and this principle of criticism occupies in the scientific sphere the same place that conscience occupies in the sphere of the moral life.” “This is the relative form of philosophy as criticism; not as criticism of pure reason, but merely as criticism of the self-representation of reason in real knowledge.”³⁷

And so, at length, we are led to the conclusion that the forms of thought and of being are alike limited and relative. Even as, in the sphere of thought, we cannot think of a concept without a judgment, a judgment without a concept, or the speculative without the empirical, “so we cannot”—to quote the paraphrase of Bender—“conceive, in being, a cause without an effect, a force without its phenomenon, or a substance without an accident, and vice versa. We must, on the contrary, regard being as at once unity and plurality, force and appearance, cause and effect, as at rest not less than in motion, as free not less than necessary—free as the self-existing unity of force and phenomena; necessary as conditioned through the joint-whole of existence. Accordingly the difference between the distinct forms of thought and being turns out, at all points, to be relative; and the contrast between thought and being remains as a unique and seemingly unresolvable antithesis.”³⁸

VI.—THE FUNCTION OF THE WILL.

In the foregoing analysis the outer world, or physical being, acts what may be termed the principal part. It is the supreme condition without which consciousness can neither obtain its material nor come into light. Everywhere it is the same all-dominating might, giving shape to spirit, and compelling it to submit to its rude, aggressive sway. In the production of knowledge it constitutes the real and active factor, while mind is the formal and passive element.

But knowledge does not by itself constitute the whole of conscious life: the co-related, and equally wide sphere of will, has also to be taken into account. Now, in will there is an entire reversal of the process that obtains in knowledge. In knowledge the outer is primary, the inner is secondary: the one acts, the other is acted upon. But in will, thought is no longer receptive and passive; it becomes spontaneous and initiative. It seizes upon external objects, so as to modify them, and render them subservient to its purpose. Thought can do this, but only in as far as it is will; that is, thought receiving its content from the inner being of spirit, or ethical being. For, even as it is the nature of physical being to affect the thinking Ego, and to find its representation there, so it is the nature of ethical being to influence the outer world, and in it to attain its realization. Universal being thus presents, according to the way in which it acts, a double contrast: there is the being which precedes thought, and is the object of thought, and there is the being which succeeds thought, the being that is the purpose of thought. Hence, will, not less than knowledge, is the definite expression of the causal relations between nature and mind, organization and intellect; with the predominance, in the one case of the ethical, in the other, of the physical. “In both, there is the relation between thought and being: in knowledge, being is the active, in will, it is the passive side; in knowledge, thought is the passive side, in will, it is the active side.”³⁹

Schleiermacher did not think it necessary to give an extended analysis of will; as, in his view, knowledge and will were but different aspects of the one universal process of the activity of mind. Not only do the organic and the intellectual concur in will as they do in thought; there can further be no real thought without the presence of will, and no real exercise of will into which the element of intelligence does not enter. Both factors are inseparably interwoven into the common texture of conscious life. We are never will alone, or thought alone. The one is always the necessary predicate of the other; so that every free product of reason implies a volition, and every act of will implies a thought. Indeed, the more a thought rests upon a volitional basis the clearer and more distinctive does it become; and, on the other hand, the more decisive an impulse of will is the more directly does it proceed from an intelligent ground.

If, however, knowledge and will are not separate faculties of mind, but different processes of the general movement of thought, it follows that the difference between ethical and physical being, between mind and nature, is not absolute but relative, not qualitative but quantitative. The two are related as the ideal and the real—the ideal being mind and matter, with the first predominating; the real being also mind and matter, but with the predominance of the last. In man the ideal reaches its highest stage; but it is also present in nature, though with diminishing grades of distinctness down to the lowest form of inorganic life. The real finds its fullest expression in the inorganic; and from this, up to man, all other forms of being are only successively diminishing phases of the real. We can, therefore, represent the ideal and the real as constituting a single line of development. “The ethical and the physical may be viewed, in each of two ways, as forming a single series; yet the point where the contrast emerges in man is always a turning-point—(the point at and through which the physical passes through man's action into the ethical). Below man the contrast between the inner and the outer is blunted, and there is no such thing as determined thought or determined will. These belong essentially to the human self-consciousness, and are denied to the lower creation. But, since there exists in animal and plant life a relation analogous to that of thought and will, we can picture all life as a chain of progressive development of the ideal, with man, and his whole being, as the last link of the chain, and thus the ethical coalesces with the physical only in man. But, conversely, we can conceive a complete reversion of the process, so that the real is evolved from the ideal. In that case the activity of man, which is a simple modification of the real, would occupy the lowest stage in the process; whereas higher developments of the real take place in animals, whose productive energy is purely material—(real and non-ethical)—and in plantlife, which only produces material germs. And, thus, the whole reality, which is the object of physics, appears as the ethical sphere of the irrational beings.” (“So dass die ganze Physik als die Ethik des unbeseelten erscheint.”)⁴⁰ That is, the ethical process may be viewed from either side of the contrast given in consciousness—the physical, or intellect as acted on by nature, and the will, as acting upon nature. In the one case we get a preponderance of the ideal with a minimum of the real (man); in the other a preponderance of the real with a minimum of the ideal (plants). The first is the “turning-point” of the ethical, the other the “turning-point” to the fulness of the real.

Still, although the physical and the ethical are so related, that the physical is a limited ethical, and the ethical a limited physical, it is in the region of humanity alone that a true ethic prevails. “In the animal world the contrast between the ideal and the real is wanting in accentuation, and consequently the activity of the ideal principle, in its essential nature, finds no place there. Man is then the only “turning-point” from which being can issue under the form of the activity of the ideal upon the real.” … “Within the range of the earthly being that surrounds us, man is the efflorescence of the ideal. He is the highest volitional being; a lesser grade of will exists in animals; and in the vegetable creation will is entirely hidden, and we enter upon the inorganic.”⁴¹

Schleiermacher's identification of knowledge and will recalls the similar doctrine of Spinoza.⁴² Yet, though both are agreed, at the threshold, in characterizing will as being permeated by intelligence, they differ entirely in the scope of activity which they separately assign to it. Spinoza, bound by the logical connection of his system, was forced to limit the activity of the will to the conceptual sphere. Schleiermacher avoided this one-sided determinism by ascribing the phenomena of will to the self-determining purpose of the relatively independent individuality of each. With him, will is thought; but it is thought as the deliberate movement of the inner being, not thought as determined, or called into existence, by outer being.

Knowledge and will being, then, in the estimation of Schleiermacher, two relatively independent factors emerging into conscious unity in man, it follows that we as much need a common basis of certainty with respect to will as we do with respect to knowledge. Even as thought is the same for all, so there must be a form of will which is the same and identical for all.

Now, what makes it possible for the individual to determine in the same manner as the whole of humanity determines, is, Schleiermacher asserts, the universal will. “The cause why another can will as we will is not grounded in us as individuals—since it is the basis of the identity of the universal and the particular—but rather in the living force of the race, upon which the essential ethical deduction rests.”⁴³ This “living force of the race,” or the universal will—the antithesis of the substantial forces of the world—is the moral law, and it enters the individual will as a necessity of the human spirit in its relation to the race. It is only when this universal will develops itself in individuals, according to their peculiar disposition, that will becomes distinctly moral.

This relation of the will of all to the will of each is not to be conceived as if it were an accidental relation: it is founded on the nature of the human spirit. The ethical forms through which we act upon being exist in the reason in the same way in which the forms of the outer world, by which we represent being, lie typified in the conceptual sphere. “The determinations of will that are viewed as imperative (Sollen) have their impulse in the collective consciousness dwelling in us—that is, the consciousness of the race—which embraces in itself the universal assent, because therein all is given as one. The determinations that are viewed as obligation (Dürfen), and which are only secondarily determined through the conscience, have their impulse in our individual consciousness. Yet we can only posit both as one—the “ought” as the manifestation of the “shall.” The co-existence in us of the consciousness of the race and the consciousness of the individual is, therefore, the presupposition of all real will.”⁴⁴

Further, will, not less than thought, must agree with being. Our conscious will can pass beyond the limits of subjectivity, and can transform itself into a form of outer being. Now, the ground of the conformity of our will to this outer being lies not in the consciousness of the race, but in “the pure transcendental identity of the ideal and the real.” For will, as for knowledge, the ultimate basis is the same. “The ground of the one is not different from that of the other; for if they were different, not only would thought and will be differently conditioned, but also each would be double, inasmuch as each is likewise the other. There would, in that case, exist a duality (Duplicität) which must either be explained by a higher unity—and this would be the true transcendental ground—or the duality must be regarded as bisecting existence; so that, instead of certainty, confusion would once more prevail.”⁴⁵

Will and knowledge accordingly represent two contrasted functions which must be referred to the same speculative basis. To this they both clearly point; but neither singly, nor together, can they lead us to the common source from which they spring. They cannot discover the absolute, or that which lies beyond all contrast. And yet, in the search for this transcendental ground, they are not to be separated; for both are equally related to the solution of the great problem. They are inseparably connected in their origin and activity; and as far as the one can bring us on our way, so far, and not further, can the other. In discussing the ultimate basis of knowing and being, it is, therefore, entirely unphilosophical to accentuate thought or will, as if either, taken by itself, held the key to this profoundest of all speculative questions. “To regard the one, and to neglect the other, as is done by the natural theology that attempts to prove the existence of God by the function of thought alone, is one-sided and partial. But not less one-sided are the attempts of Kant, who seeks to establish the same fact by the mere function of the will—and of Fichte, who, following in the line of this method, endeavours to reduce the order of the world to a single formula.”⁴⁶

VII.—FEELING, OR THE UNIFYING PRINCIPLE.

Thought and will, as we have hitherto followed them, have failed to reach the final ground of knowledge. The sphere of thought is the sphere of the contrasted, or the conditioned. It expresses the causal relations between being and us, between the organic and the intellectual. Pure thought, or thought without an object which excites it, is an absurdity. But thought into which the finite and conditioned must necessarily enter as constitutive elements cannot comprehend the absolute and the unconditioned—the unity at the foundation of thought and being. That unity—the Being of all beings—must, from the nature of the case, be raised above all contrasts or opposites; and to think of it theistically, as a personality; or pantheistically, as a natura naturans, is to think of it by contrast, or in a finite anthropomorphic and conceptual fashion.

Equally unfitted, too, is will for the attainment of philosophical knowledge of the absolute. The will—apart from the contrasts of subject and object, form and content, which are common to it not less than to thought—is also conditioned or determined. That which is willed must be something definite, something known—a virtue, a duty, or an end. Without this definiteness, which implies relation, volition cannot exist. If, however, in will, we always will the definite or the determinate, it is impossible that the Absolute can ever come within its sphere. This is, as to its very essence, indefinite, pure being; and we cannot in any way determine it. It lies outside the range of our conscious activity; and it cannot become the purpose of our thought. We cannot act upon it, or modify it, as we please. “An impulse of will directed towards the Absolute is a mere blank, since it leads to no definite action, as we see exemplified in the phenomena of quietism.”⁴⁷ The being of God can, therefore, be as little apprehended through the moral side of our nature as through the intellectual, as little through ethical knowledge as through physical, or emperical, knowledge.

As, however, the Absolute is the postulate both of thought and of will there must be some way of apprehending it. Such a way, Schleiermacher tells us, is to be found in the next, or highest, stage in the development of the human spirit—in feeling, or the immediate self-consciousness (Gefühl, unmittelbares Selbstbewusstsein). As this principle of feeling occupies an important place in the doctrine of Schleiermacher, it may be well to endeavour to obtain a clear conception of its nature and content.

Self-consciousness is represented by Schleiermacher as having three stages. First, there is primitive or confused consciousness, where the contrasts of subject and object, inner and outer, remain undeveloped. This vague and distinctionless condition is the state in which the child finds itself before it begins to laugh or to speak—before it becomes conscious either of itself or of things. Its world is the world of chaos, where there is neither totality nor individuality, division nor unity. In this lowest stage—essentially one with the animal sphere of existence—the personal, human consciousness is only latent. Yet, as the real life of man is but a continuous development of consciousness, from lower to higher—a constantly-increasing knowledge on the part of the Ego in relation to itself and objects, humanity and the world—it may be said there is no specific difference between the consciousness of the child and that of the greatest philosopher. The difference is a difference of degree; for, as we cannot deny knowledge to the child, even should it exist only in germ, so, regarding the philosopher, we cannot say that his knowledge is entirely perfect. Reason, the active, combining principle, is present in the spirit of each; since without that presence there could not come into existence, in the case of either, the type of thought that is characterized as rational knowledge.

The second grade is called the sensuous, or individual consciousness (das sinnliche Bewusstsein). Here the confused, animal consciousness gives place to the distinctly human consciousness. The vague and manifold state of chaos is broken up into the contrasts of subject and object, I and not I. The inner thought-activity, the essential human unity, begins to know and to distinguish itself from the multiplicity of things. It differentiates between subjective and objective consciousness; between sensations, the inner feelings we have when acted upon by the world, and perceptions, which express the manner in which objective being mirrors itself in us. But, with this advance from the indifferent and contrastless state of chaos, the living unity of the Ego becomes conscious of its own existence and independence in the midst of the infinite flux of finite things. Man becomes conscious of himself as the active, unifying principle in the world. He distinguishes his own definite, thinking being from the indefinite, non-thinking objects by which he is surrounded. This is the first great step in the universal process of spiritual existence, or the development of reason in the human consciousness. Man, amidst the totality of outer being, knows and feels himself as no longer one with the vague and universal whole: he knows and feels himself to be a separate and independent being, “a living unity,” an intellect, in contradistinction to the world and its “dead unities”—which are but so many points of transition to the essential evolution of the soul's life.

This awakening of intellect prepares us, on the supposition of Schleiermacher that “each extension of consciousness implies a progressive development of life,”⁴⁸ for a further advance of thought and inner life. And so we find that, even as man comes to the knowledge of himself through thought, or “the constant repetition of the fact of consciousness,” he now raises himself, a step yet higher still, by means of speech—in this case no longer nomenclature, or the naming of things, but a necessity of intercommunication with fellow-beings. Through the use of language—the organic side of thought—he knows and feels himself to be a man, a member of the human race. He becomes conscious of the family and tribe, the nation and humanity. In this connection there are developed in him the social and moral feelings, such as fellowship, love and compassion. These, though arising from the inter-relations of the race, are not given as direct objects of knowledge, or as postulates of the will: they are more or less immediate in their character. The moral feelings “can only exist in their integrity when the contrast between one's existence and that of the existence of others is reduced to a minimum.” Contrasted conditions are the presupposition of all empirical knowledge; so that this effort to rise above the contrasted is the first real indication of a movement on the part of intellect towards the higher, or immediate self-consciousness. In the next advance of the individual consciousness this movement is even more pronounced. Man, the restless, thinking being, cannot rest either in himself or in the race: he stretches out further still to that unity which embraces the individual, and humanity and nature. He finds himself immediately one with the world, and feels the unity of all existence. The feelings that represent this oneness with the world are the æsthetic feelings—our feelings for the beautiful, the harmonious, and the sublime. These, though we cannot justify their existence on the ground of real knowledge—any more than we can justify the social and ethical feelings—have a certainty of their own, and act a supreme part in the culture and development of the race. As they express themselves in Art, through the agency of fancy, the active and interpretive side of feeling, they create, as it were, a new world, without which life would be poor and earth-bound.

But the spirit of man cannot rest in its consciousness of the world, as the final goal of its ever onward movement. The world itself is a contrast in unity, and is consequently only the presupposition and condition of a further impulse towards a still higher stage of feeling. This stage is attained when God, the real Unity, behind all and binding all, is immediately given in the inner consciousness. Immediately given, not in the sense that it is pure feeling—such a state being, according to Schleiermacher, as much an impossibility as pure thought. It is immediate in the sense that the consciousness of God is not formed in us, like the concept or the judgment, through the intervention of an object, or the medium of reflection. In feeling, the contrasts upon which thought rests are suppressed. What we feel is not something external or finite, not the totality of being or the highest power: what we feel is our own individual self-consciousness as essentially related to God. Feeling is the form of subjective knowledge corresponding to the Absolute. It is not wrought in us: it is the immediate relation of the soul to the transcendental Unity appearing and revealing itself in finite things, and it simply comes to existence in the individual consciousness.

This is the utmost reach possible to the human spirit, the bloom and product of all its manifold development. Here, in the Absolute Ground and Unity of the infinite and all-producing life, it finds rest; for here it not only knows but is one, in living contact, with the object of its mysterious and necessary search, from lower to higher, from outer to inner, from division to unity. This immediate feeling of God, as distinguished from the moral and æsthetic feelings, is the distinctly religious feeling. Religion has not only its psychological but its essential basis in this immediate consciousness of God; and, as this consciousness is common to all men—being the characteristic element in the active and living development of the race—it is as natural and necessary that man should be religious as it is that he should think or act.

The immediate self-consciousness is thus the highest stage in the evolution of subjective consciousness. It rests on the earlier stages, and without them it could never come into existence. Without finding the unity of our own life, and without the feeling of our oneness with humanity and the world, we could never rise to the consciousness of the Absolute Unity. “The religious feeling comprehends the feeling for nature and the social feelings, for it is developed from these; and its natural tendency may be described as the removal of the contrast between being, as it is consciousness, and being, as it is given in consciousness—subject and object. This removal of the contrast is to be understood as taking place only on the subjective side of consciousness.” And the more truly we develop ourselves, and our objective knowledge, the more perfectly will the immediate consciousness be developed in us. “There is no isolated view of the Deity; but we view it only through, in, and with the entire system of view. (Es giebt keine isolirte Anschauung der Gottheit, sondern wir schauen sie nur an in und mit dem gesammten System der Anschauung.) Consequently our knowledge of God is first attained through our view of the world. It is as we find a clue to the meaning of the one that the characteristic features of the other appear. If our view of the world is defective our notions of Deity will not advance beyond the mythological stage.” … “My position is, that, as the Absolute is the basis of all thought, we must accept the idea of God as being present in every real thought. For this reason I find myself in conflict with those who separate God from the world. There is no other way of having the idea of God than in our real knowledge; and this idea is perfected through the perfection of real knowledge. The idea of God does not exist apart from our knowledge as to the world.” But in all knowledge the life of the soul is one in all its phases of higher and lower. As ice, water, and vapour are different forms of one and the same substance, H2 O, and not separate substances, each having its principle in itself; so thought and feeling and will are not distinct and separate organs, or capacities, of mind: they are all manifestations of the one spiritual life of the conscious Ego. Feeling, not less than the reflective consciousness, is knowledge, is an activity of reason. In feeling, knowledge is predominantly individualistic; in thought it assumes a predominantly universal type. In the one, the subject is related to its object immediately, without contrast or intermediation; in the other, contrast and reflection are absolutely necessary to the existence of thought and will. In the reflective self-consciousness the opposition between the outer and the inner, the ideal and the real is never wholly removed. It can, therefore, never reach the Absolute ground of being—that ground which science ever postulates, and philosophy always strives to attain, as the rational unity underlying all thought and being, force and appearance. On the other hand, feeling, as a form of the universal activity of reason, finds and represents, in its own way, that Absolute Unity. What knowledge, in the early stages of sensation and perception, concept and judgment, fails to reach, knowledge, in the final stage, as immediate self-consciousness, attains as a sure and certain possession. The last stage of the individual self-consciousness is thus the necessary continuation and development of the strivings and postulates of the earlier and ever-advancing stages of the human spirit.⁴⁹

Schleiermacher next distinguishes between the immediate self-consciousness and sensation (Empfindung). Sensation he defines as a subjective personal state existing in a distinct moment, and arising in virtue of organic excitation, or affection. This state, which corresponds to the confused animal self-consciousness, is akin to the immediate self-consciousness in one thing, only that it is the negation of thought and will. For sensation, the subjective consciousness and its phenomena, have not yet come into existence; for the immediate self-consciousness they do exist; only not as real thought, and will, and the subjective consciousness, but as the identity, or indifference, of these. Feeling, as sensation, is the lowest stage in the development of the human spirit; feeling, as immediate self-consciousness, is the last and highest stage in the same development.

One of the principal objections adduced by Hegel against Schleiermacher's doctrine of immediate self-consciousness—and one that has frequently since been made—is that feeling is the lowest grade in the intellectual process, and is not even distinctly human, being also possessed by the brutes as the sense-form of their consciousness. This objection, in itself psychologically false, fails to apprehend Schleiermacher's view, and confounds his representation of sensation with that of feeling. Sensation, it is true, needs to be supplemented by perception and thought; for it is the non-existence, or rather the prophecy of these. It is not so with feeling. This is not a subordinate stage of consciousness existing prior to the more advanced stages: it is the final stage of all—the stage which, while implying the highest contrasted states of the conscious Ego, is itself higher than these, because reducing them to a unity present, immediate, and without contrast.⁵⁰

And, here, it may be noted that Schleiermacher further describes feeling as “the relative identity of thought and will.” “We have no other identity of the two than feeling, which becomes, by turns, the last step in thought, and the first in will; but this identity is always only relative—both terms being never in exact equipoise.”⁵¹ Again, “regarding life as a process, we find that it is a transition from thought to will, and from will to thought—both of these moments being taken in their relative significance. The point of transition is thought as vanishing, and will as beginning, and these two must be identical. In thought, the being of things is posited in us, after our fashion; in will, we posit our being in things, also after our fashion. Therefore, only in so far as the being of things becomes posited in us, can our being become posited in things. But, our being is that which posits; and, as this falls back into the indifference point, our being, as positing, consequently relapses into the indifference of both forms. This is the immediate self-consciousness, or feeling.”⁵² In other words, the contrasts of thought and will are united in feeling. We are always that which thinks, and that which wills—what is acted upon, as well as what acts; but, just because we are, there must exist in our consciousness a point of equipoise, or of transition, where the activities of the two forms are at rest, and by which we can pass from the one to the other. Such a point is feeling. Here the antitheses of willing and knowing are removed; and the conscious subject, as such, without objective and contrasted relations, alone remains.

Feeling is accordingly the bond by which the coherence and continuity of our consciousness is secured. It is the unity of our being. It is the Ego in its innermost essence, and considered apart from its connection with objects, in knowing and willing. Without it, thought and volition would not only stand separate and apart: they would become disintegrated, and fall asunder. As to either, there could be no stability and no certainty. But feeling is the permanent potency behind both; and through it the actions of each are constantly renewed. It ensures their continuity, and it gives validity to their determinations. “The immediate self-consciousness,” says Schleiermacher, “is not only present in transition (from one intellectual phase to another), but inasmuch as thought is will, and will is thought, it must also be present in each moment. And, so, we find feeling always accompanying each moment; whether it be prevailingly intellectual or prevailingly volitional. It seems to vanish when we allow ourselves to become completely engrossed in an intuition or an action; but this is only apparently the case. It always accompanies us. At times it seems to emerge, alone, into existence; and then thought and action appear to sink out of view. This, too, is only apparently so; for, however much they may seem to have vanished, feeling ever bears in itself traces of will and germs of thought.”⁵³

Such, then, being Schleiermacher's account of feeling; how, it may be enquired, is the idea of God given to us through this activity of consciousness? In answer to this question, Schleiermacher replies: “We have knowledge only as to the being of God in us and in things, but not as to a being of God external to the world, or in itself. The being of Ideas (Ideen) is a being of God in us, not because the Ideas as determined representations fill up a moment in consciousness, but because they express in the same manner in all (therefore in human nature generally) the essence of being, and because, owing to the certainty attaching to them, they indicate the identity of the real and the ideal, which identity is posited in us neither as individuals nor as the whole of humanity. In the same way, the being of Conscience (Gewissen) is a being of God in us. Not, inasmuch as it exists in individual representations—in that case subject to error not less than is the individual application of Ideas—but inasmuch as it pronounces with moral certainty the correspondence of our will with the law of outer being, and is, on that account the same identity.” “The being of Ideas”—the realism of the concepts—is to be understood in the sense that the forms of thought are identical with the forms of being; concept agreeing with force and judgment with appearance. The same correspondence of the forms of thought and being is also present in “the being of Conscience.” We can then say that, in as far as man is the unity of the real and ideal, the being of Ideas, the pure principles, from which consciousness starts, along with the principle of Will, or of action, represent the being of the Absolute in him. “In the unity of physical and ethical knowledge—knowledge as to the world and man—is the unity of world-order (Weltordnung) and law, as both, in their separate movements, establish themselves in each of these spheres. This Unity is what men generally mean by the expression God … If we represent the ethical under the potency of the physical, we can say the basis of the world-order is likewise the basis of law; if we represent the physical under the potency of the ethical, we can say the basis of law is likewise the principle of the world-order. In our consciousness of God we have the identity of both. He is the transcendental ground in the separate movements of both functions, and in the unity of self-consciousness in its passages from the one to the other. This is the point from which all enquiry as to the rules of procedure in thought must start.”

“Ideas can only be the source of truth in proportion as they picture being, and the Conscience can only be the source of right, in so far as it describes the relation of man to the world. But the Absolute is found only in the identity of both; and this identity represents the highest unity of life, which can never be posited in us in a personal manner, neither can it belong entirely to the human race. It is the unity of Truth and of Conscience; the first as moved by the will, the other as it is influenced through thought. The unity of thought and being in this unity (of truth and Conscience) is the highest self, the Absolute. The relation of will to thought, and vice versa, and the unity thereof, are the divine in us. Religion manifests this divine in life; speculation manifests it in reflection; but both manifest it only in something else, not as it is in itself.”

“Since, therefore, Ideas and Conscience form a permanent unity amidst the fluctuations of consciousness, God must be given to us as the condition of our inner life. The, to us, innate being of God constitutes our real essence, for, without Ideas and without Conscience, we would sink to the level of the brutes.” … “But, although the being of God is present in our Ideas and Conscience, these two are not to be supposed as existing, in Him; since in Him there is no contrast of concept and object, or of will and shall. Ideas and Conscience thus fail to express the being of God as it is in itself.” … “Knowledge of the being of God, in itself, can be nothing else than a concept. But it is all along taken for granted that, in the idea of the highest, the contrast of the concept and of the object is suppressed. The concept of God can only exist in Himself; and in us only in as far as the being of God is posited in us. He is, however, in us simply as the condition of our self-consciousness—not as He is in Himself, but only as He is in relation to another (to the consciousness of man regarding himself, or his definite human relations). Our concept of God is, therefore, always bound up with that to which our concept is related. If we had a complete concept of Him, the concept would exist in us and the object without us (as happens in thought).” … “In that case, the affection of the organic function would be directly connected with God Himself as object, which is an impossibility. Hence we cannot really apprehend the being of God; and the Absolute, the highest unity, the identity of the ideal and the real, are only schemata. If these conceptions are to become instinct with life, they must again enter the sphere of the finite, and the contrasted; as when God is thought of as a natura naturans, or as a conscious absolute personality.”⁵⁴

This description of God as given in feeling is both negative and positive. As the Absolute is indefinable and indeterminate being lying outside the sphere of phenomena—we are not here to think of Kant's das Ding an sich and its appearances—it is evident that it cannot be known. We cannot cognise it as a being external, and separate from the world. To attempt to do so would be to bring it within the limits of thought, and to destroy its essential character. Neither can we, for the same reason, regard God as the absolute force, or the absolute causality. These, though they cannot be classified as phenomena, can only be conceived as having a distinct and determined existence. They consequently come within the sphere of the conceptual, or the contrasted, and cannot represent the highest of all beings. Yet, while we cannot know God as an object, or as He is, Schleiermacher maintains that we can know Him as He becomes conscious in us. In feeling, we are the unity of the ideal and the real, of thought and being. But this unity is the consciousness, or being, of God in us. What feeling represents subjectively, as the indifference of all determinate functions, corresponds to the objective being of God, as manifested in the universe. The divine is posited in us by means of feeling, even as external being is posited in us through perception. Still, we must not forget, that this absolute ground of thought and being is given in the immediate self-consciousness, not directly, and as it is, but only as the form and principle of the rational and moral order of the universe. The Urgrund, the primal source, the “whence,” of all our dependence, we can never really know: we have it ever in us, and we are conscious of its presence as the condition of our intellectual and moral life.

Thus far consciousness presents us with an immediate knowledge of the being of God. But there is also a further knowledge of the same being as it exists in things. “The being of God is given in our knowledge as to things; for in each individual thing, in virtue of the fact of being and co-existence—the whole as embracing its parts—there is not only posited the totality of all being, but the transcendental Ground of the same. And, since things correspond to the system of concepts, there is also posited in our consciousness of things the identity of the ideal and the real, and therewith the transcendental Ground.” Thus, because of the “totality and unity” of all finite things, each act of knowledge as to individual things brings us into contact not only with the world, but with God as its transcendental cause. This knowledge of God in things is, like our knowledge of Him in Ideas and Conscience, relative and formal. It tells us nothing of what He is in Himself, and apart from the world; it simply represents Him as existing in the world, as its underlying ground and perfect unity. He is the explanation of its being, and the principle of its endless movement and combination.

By the “world” is here meant the totality of being in its manifold plurality. It is the sum of contrasted existence—nature not less than spirit. The earth and the star-worlds, with their ethical and physical systems—thought and being, the real and the ideal—these are the elements that go to form the idea of the world. If, however, the world is so wide and comprehensive as this—if it embraces all contrasts and differences—we can, at once, see that it, too, must more or less lie outside the sphere of real knowledge. “The idea of the world is the limit of our knowledge. We are bound by the earthly. All the operations of thought and the entire system of the formation of our concepts must be grounded therein.”⁵⁵ We cannot then form a complete representation of the world's vast whole. Indeed, its true being can no more be conceived by us than the being of God. The totality of determinate existence is, not less than the Absolute, transcendental in its character; and we can never perfectly grasp the boundlessness of its being. The history of our knowledge is only an approximation towards the understanding of the world; hence our views regarding it are as inadequate and figurative as those which we entertain concerning the deity.

The world is thus for our knowledge transcendental; but it is transcendental in a sense otherwise than God is. It is transcendental as the limit of thought, but not as the ground of being. It is the terminus ad quem, not the terminus a quo. It is the goal towards which our conscious life is ever pressing; it is not the starting-point from which that life has set out. “The idea of the Godhead is the transcendental terminus a quo, and is the principle of the possibility of knowledge; the idea of the world is the transcendental terminus ad quem, and the principle of the reality of knowledge in its becoming.”⁵⁶ The one is the transcendental of absolute being, towards which—in all our endeavours—we can never get any nearer; the other is the transcendental of finite being, towards which we are ever approaching through the extensive and intensive perfection of our knowledge. The one is apprehended uno actu, for it possesses no plurality or distinction; the other, as far as we know it, is perceived by organic thought. The one, while it is the necessary postulate of the forms of knowledge, is for ever inaccessible to thought; the other, constituting, as it does, the ground of progressive knowledge, constitutes the limits, or bounds, of our thought.

Both these ideas, the world and God, are necessary correlates. The one, for us, cannot exist without the other. The formula expressing their inseparable relation, is “no world without a God, no God without a world.” (Die Welt nicht ohne Gott, Gott nicht ohne die Welt.) To think of the world without God, would be to think of it as chaos. So also to think of God without the world, would be to regard Him as the principle of non-existence, or as an empty phantasm. The world would, in that case, be purely accidental; even as in the former case, it would be the result of a blind fate. It is, therefore, evident that the two cannot otherwise be conceived than as co-existing in eternal relation. Without losing their identity, they inter-penetrate each other. If God stood outside of the world, there would be something in Him not world-conditioning; and if the world stood outside of God, there would be something in it not God-conditioned. “God is the postulate of the world, even as the world is the postulate of God. God is the primary source of all the forces in activity in the universe, even as the universe is the natural and necessary manifestation of the primitive force which is in God. Indifference and difference, the infinite and the finite, God and the world, these are the two constitutive elements of things, the double postulate of universal existence.”⁵⁷

And yet, closely as the world and God are related, they must not be thought of in a pantheistic fashion, or, as if they were identical. Both ideas represent the same being; but they represent it in a totally different way. The world is unity in plurality, God is unity without plurality; the world occupies time and space, God is timeless and spaceless; the world is the totality of contrasts, God is the positive negation of all contrasts. The one is unity—absolute, and without distinction; the other is unity—with distinctions, and finite. “God is unity, with the exclusion of all contrasts; the world is unity, with the inclusion of all contrasts.”⁵⁸

It may be objected that this representation of the Absolute, as distinctionless and without contrast, is an empty unity, equivalent to zero, and that the real unity is the world. It is not so, however. God is the full and positive unity which embraces all within itself. As the Absolute, nothing can exist independently of Him. He is the source of life, and the life from which all contrasts are developed—the productive ground whence the finite and its antitheses arise—but, as this takes place in Him timelessly, He Himself never comes within the region of the contrasted. Even the world itself does not stand opposed to Him as an independent being. Its parallel modes of the ideal and the real, find their unity in Him; just as the organic and the intellectual functions are united in the conscious Ego. How God and the world are thus related, Schleiermacher does not attempt to show. The question as to the manner in which the world has come into existence had no living significance for him, as not coming within the range of practical knowledge. “He sought,” to use the words of Sigwart, “no explanation of the world from the Absolute, no cosmogony or theogony, no theory of creation, or of the final return of all things into God.” He tried to take account of both God and the world, as they appeared in self-consciousness; and what he found was that the two ideas, though distinct, always co-existed. The one cannot be thought of in isolation from the other; yet they are not identical. God, as transcendent and unknowable, is still immanent in the world; and the world, as finite multiplicity, exists only in God.

Schleiermacher did not seek to define any more closely the relation between God and the world, than as a relation of co-existence. The various efforts that had hitherto been made in that direction—notably, by the theistic theologians, and by Spinoza, Kant and Schelling—he regarded as insufficient, because they failed to reach, or to conserve, in its purity, the idea of God. They simply conceived God as the highest force, or the highest thing. But, in doing so, they limited His being, and brought it within the bounds of the finite and the antithetic. His own view, though not, perhaps, throwing any new light on the matter, is of the greatest philosophic value, as showing that no one need attempt a solution of the problem unless he accepts, in the fullest sense, the separate existence, and the inseparable co-existence, of both God and the world.

As related to knowledge, both these ideas are regulative principles. The idea of God, as the ground of knowing and being, is the necessary presupposition of all real thought, or the principle of the very possibility of knowledge. “Every act of knowledge, whether as concept or as judgment, is only completed when it is raised to the unity of the universal and the particular, the ideal and the real, being and doing; and this unity can only be thought through the absolute unity.”⁵⁹ As Schleiermacher otherwise expresses it, “the idea of God is the form of all knowledge as such.”⁶⁰ It is that without which the unity of thought and being would be for ever impossible.

On the other hand, the idea of the world is the principle of the reality of knowledge in its becoming. It is the principle of the combination of thought. All knowledge is a process, an advance. As such, it is grounded not in the Absolute, but in the world. This gives it a distinct content, and an impulse towards an ever onward movement. The theistic and cosmic ideas are thus regulative principles; but they are regulative in a different sense. The one constitutes our real being. It exists, to our consciousness, as the foundation of our thought, as that which gives unity and certainty to its various determinations. The other, as the reality of contrasted being, is the incentive to knowledge. It gives to thought its ever-widening content. It is the principle of its realization and progress.

God and the world are, therefore, inseparably connected in the production of knowledge. They are correlative; the one cannot be thought or posited without the other. “For, since God is the ground of the common law, dwelling alike in spirit and in nature, we cannot otherwise conceive Him than in relation to both; therefore, as the ground of that which, taken together, constitutes the world.”⁶¹ In real cognition, God cannot be predicated without the world, any more than unity can be predicated without plurality. So, too, the idea of the world, isolated and alone, is a mere vague multiplicity, having no connection or order. Each taken separately, leads to no result; yet the two, in co-existence, are the indispensable factors in the actual process of knowledge. It is only when thus necessarily, though relatively, related—the one more as the principle of construction, the other more as the principle of combination—that knowledge can be said to be perfected.

Schleiermacher's famous distinction between religion and philosophy—first instituted by Spinoza in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, though with a very different purpose—is based upon these views as to feeling and knowing. Religion and knowledge he regarded as belonging to different spheres of the human spirit. Religion is not evolved by a process of speculative reason, neither is it, like science, deduced from any universal principle or principles; it is an immediate fact of the inner self-consciousness. It is not rooted in knowledge or in action, but in the determination of feeling as directly related to the Absolute. It is its distinctive peculiarity that it is immediately founded in the consciousness and presence of this highest of all unities.

On the other hand, the province of philosophy is the knowable. It occupies itself with the phenomena of thought and being, the connection of the ideal and the real. Its legitimate sphere is the field of empirical consciousness. When it goes outside of this province, and tries to find the Absolute, its results are purely negative. To that original ground of all, it can be only indirectly related. It cannot discover, or produce, the idea of God. All that it can do, is to show the necessity why this idea must be postulated as the form and presupposition of all thinking and willing.⁶²

From the above description, it would seem as if religion were the highest potentiality of the human spirit, and that philosophy must be subordinated to it. In the clearest manner, Schleiermacher admits the truth of the first part of this statement. Religion, according to him, is not the lowest form of consciousness—not what Spinoza, and those who regard philosophy and science as alone supreme and valid for reason, would characterize as ignorance, superstition, or myth—it is the highest subjective moment in conscious experience, the factor that most perfectly develops the highest rational and volitional in man, the solution and the goal of all human development. Yet, while it is so, religion claims no primacy over philosophy. Both are co-ordinate, and equally valid functions. Religion, as the highest subjective state of consciousness, is to man as natural, universal, and trustworthy as thinking is; as perceptions, conceptions, and judgments are. Philosophy, on the other hand, as the highest objective moment in conscious experience, has its own sphere and interest. The one derives its content from the world, as formulated by reason, in sense and perception, thought and will; the other is immediately related to the ground of all being, through feeling—not in the sense of pure feeling, but feeling as the indifference of thought and will—feeling as the highest content of both. Here, there can be no question either of primacy or of subordination: it is simply a matter of the interpretation, definition, and classification of the facts of consciousness, as we find them in the evolution of man's nature.

These views of Schleiermacher have been characterized as pure mysticism, veiled Spinozism, and what not; yet I cannot help thinking that the distinction he here makes is, both for philosophy and religion, one of the most important and fruitful that has been enunciated in modern times. Philosophy has its own defined sphere—the facts of empirical consciousness—and it can never get beyond them. When it tries to do so, as when it discourses on the being of God and its relations—unless, indeed, to find in this conception both the ground and possibility of all knowledge—it is untrue to its function. But it is equally true that religion, dealing as it does with the facts of immediate self-consciousness, must be true to its own data. These are not ideas or volitions, philosophies or actions, dogmas or creeds: they are the direct feelings which we have of God in the world, in the soul, and in the inner human life. No doubt these feelings must be expressed in a definite, scientific, or philosophical form, but never in the form of any defined philosophical or ethical system. When religion does that, it empties itself of its true content, and ceases to have any real worth for the human spirit.

Very significant, too, in this connection, is the idea of Schleiermacher that religion, dealing, as it does, with what is behind all knowledge—the Absolute, or ground and explanation of the world—is the highest and most essential factor in human development: the goal towards which all consciousness—the empirical, rational, and ethical—ever tends. In the actual processes of life, religion—subjective, ultra-rational, supernatural—has ever exercised the foremost place in the intellectual, social, and ethical development of the race. More than intellect, more than morality, it has been the chief actor in the civilization and betterment of the nations. Especially is this so, when we think not of the positive religions, but of religion in its ideal aspect—religion in Jesus Christ. By the might of His sinless life, and perfectly divine consciousness, He does for men what the positive religions never did: He raises them above the tyranny of the sensuous, sinful experience, and brings them into the blessed fellowship, and the redeeming love of God. The world in Christ is a new creation, a unique and miraculous fact, for which there is no explanation or validity in the ordinary processes of life and thought. Yet, supra-rational as Christianity must ever be, it has transformed the world; and contains the hope both of the present and the future. The nations that are, to-day, the most intelligent, active, civilizing, and triumphant, are the Christian nations—or, rather, the nations that are truest to the historical idea in Christ: the distinctly Protestant nations. Benjamin Kidd, in his works on Social Evolution, and Principles of Western Civilization, and, less directly, the late Henry Drummond, in The Ascent of Man, have recently given scientific expression, in a most interesting manner, to this great, fundamental thought of Schleiermacher, that religion is the essential and creative potency in the evolution of the human race—the factor that has, since the dawn of our era, ever lifted man to the highest development on the intellectual, ethical, and spiritual sides of his nature, and that is still destined to raise him to an ever fuller and richer life.

We can thus see that Schleiermacher distinguished between philosophy and religion, science and faith, not because of the influence of Spinoza, as some are never weary of telling us, but because of the inner necessity of his own peculiar view of the world. Schleiermacher in working out, to their logical issues, the principles laid down by Kant, was the first to see that in the sphere of the empirical self-consciousness there can be no rational theology, no scientific development of the idea of God and His attributes. All that we can ever get in that line, are the temporal plurality and the conceptual unities—the knowable—human consciousness as the correlate of being. Will, or the practical reason, can no more predicate God than the intellect can; for both occupy the same plane, and are explained in the same way, as being the causal relations of organization and reason. It is in another way than by the empirical consciousness that Schleiermacher sought to reach the absolute ground of all our conscious relations—by the way of feeling, or the unity of the rational and the volitional. In feeling, we have a direct and immediate consciousness of God, and this consciousness is religion. Its source and certitude depend neither upon the principles of universal reason, nor upon the mere verbal authority of Scripture: they are grounded in the living consciousness of the redeemed in Christ, and their validity is independent of all logical or historical proof.

Yet, clearly as Schleiermacher emphasised the fact, that the basis of Christianity lies outside the province of philosophy, he was very far, indeed, from thinking that theology was given in the same immediate and direct way in which feeling is given. Theology, as the expression of the facts of spiritual experience, is purely human in its form, and subject to the laws of human thought and expression. The historical facts of Christianity must be judged by the general laws of evidence; the articulation of the different phases of the inward spiritual life must proceed on philosophic or scientific lines; and all such articulations must conform to the historical ideal in Christ, and the universal type of doctrine as formulated in the Confessions. In this sense, theology and philosophy are indirectly related; for theology, if it is to be a clear expression of facts, must necessarily adopt the most correct philosophic or scientific form. The separation of the philosophic form from the Christian content has, as in the case of the Eastern Church, resulted in stagnation and decay. Yet the facts themselves, the contents of theology, are not deducible from the speculations of philosophy, or the articles of any creed or symbol. They are the product of the religious self-consciousness; and find there, and there alone, their source and authority.

By thus clearly defining the spheres of philosophy and of faith, and indicating the specific task of each, Schleiermacher has done more for the development of a scientific theology, on the grounds of Protestant principles than any single thinker, since the time of the Reformation. He was the first to show that religion has a distinct basis lying outside of all rationalism and dogmatism—a basis resting on the facts of the inner human experience. He was also the first to show that theological doctrines are not once for all fixed and stereotyped in written records or rigid formulas, but that they must ever be the outcome of the living, personal, progressive, spiritual consciousness of the Church. On those lines, all that is memorable in theological literature, since his time, has proceeded; and on those lines, too, lies the hope of the future. Theology has, or ought to have, no quarrel with either philosophy or science. Each has its own distinct sphere, and each will fulfil its purpose best when it sets out, free and unfettered on its own pathway—the one giving us the highest objective, the other the highest subjective knowledge and certainty.

Notes

1. Vide, The Development of Theology in Germany Since Kant, pp. 110-120, where this effort to re-translate the leading principles of Schleiermacher into the formulæ of Spinoza is much more pronounced than in the earlier work by the same author on The Philosophy of Religion. The more recent estimate seems to indicate, on the part of Professor Pfleiderer, a certain lack of appreciation, not only of the several stages in Schleiermacher's mental development, but of the distinct and individual place he occupies in the history of philosophical and religious thought.

2. Vide, Psychologie, hrsg. von George, 1864, pp. 132-182, for a singularly suggestive discussion on the identity of thought and language. This view has more recently been advocated, among others, by Helmholtz, Taine, and Max Müller. In Greek and Italian, speech and reason are expressed by the same word: [UNK] λόγος, il discorso.

3. “Transcendent” and “transcendental” are used by Schleiermacher as interchangeable words.

4. Dialektik, hrsg. von Jonas, pp. 109-110; Psychologie, p. 12.

5. Dial., pp. 43, 316, 386, 484, etc.

6. Dial., p. 47.

7. Dial., p. 44.

8. Schleiermacher always translates Ding-an-sich, or thing-in-itself, as Sein, or being.

9. Jahrbücher für Deutsche Theologie, ii., 294.

10. Dial., pp. 48-57, 183-184, 386, 484-488.

11. Dial., p. 49.

12. Dial., p. 54.

13. Dial., p. 54.

14. Dial., pp. 47, 57, 387, 451.

15. “Sinn = Vermögen, wodurch die Affection der Organization Mitursach des Denkens werden kann.”—Dial., 63.

16. Dial., p. 64.

17. Dial., pp. 58-60, 368-369, 492, etc.

18. Dial., pp. 63, 454, 494; Psychol., pp. 9-10, 31-33.

19. Dial., p. 457.

20. Dial., pp. 75-9, 87, 121, 461-2.

21. Dial., pp. 65-66.

22. Psych., pp. 171-182.

23. Dial., p. 68.

24. Dial., pp. 61, 372, 454, 498; Psych., pp. 70-83.

25. Dial., p. 81.

26. Dial., p. 213.

27. Dial., pp. 84, 205-6.

28. Dial., pp. 203, 232-239.

29. Dial., pp. 241, 250.

30. Dial., pp. 104, 106, 413-14, 500, 515; Psych., pp. 155-56.

31. Dial., p. 105. Psych., p. 155-56.

32. Dial., pp. 82-85, 261-287, 561-567.

33. Dial., pp. 111-112, 116.

34. Dial., pp. 122-124.

35. Dial., p. 127.

36. Dial., p. 130.

37. Dial., pp. 142-144.

38. Schleiermacher's Theologie: Die philosophischen Grundlagen, p. 80.

39. Dial., p. 519; Psych., p. 170.

40. Dial., p. 149.

41. Dial., pp. 149, 150.

42. For Spinoza's view consult the Ethica, ii. 48, 49; iii. 9. See further, the admirable chapter on Intelligence and Will in Principal Caird's Spinoza. The modern philosophy of evolution also identifies the physical and the ethical. One of the most interesting of recent attempts in the same direction is that made by the late Professor Henry Drummond in his Natural Law in the Spiritual World.

43. Dial., p. 150.

44. Dial., p. 523.

45. Dial., pp. 150-151.

46. Dial., p. 428.

47. Dial., p. 156.

48. “Jede Erweiteruug des Bewussteins ist Lebenserhöhung.”—Psych., p. 133.

49. Dial., pp. 28-29, 150-153, 322, 329, 413-431; Psych., pp. 81-97, 212-236; Æsthetik, pp. 67-79; Der Christliche Glaube, pp. 21-29. Vide also Balfour's Foundations of Belief for an interesting chapter on Æsthetics in relation to the findings of critical philosophy and modern science.

50. Dial., pp. 151-154, 524; Psych., pp. 182-216; Æsth., p. 67.

51. Dial., p. 157.

52. Dial., pp. 428-429.

53. Dial., p. 429; cf. Psych., p. 213.

54. Dial., pp. 154-158; v. also Psych., pp. 182-216.

55. Dial., p. 333.

56. Dial., p. 164.

57. Dial., pp. 162-9, 431-3, 526, etc.

    Vide Bonifas: La Doctrine de la Rédemption dans Schleiermacher, p. 89, for quotation with which the paragraph ends.

58. Dial., p. 433.

59. Dial., p. 170.

60. Dial., p. 169.

61. Dial., p. 526.

62. Professor H. Ulrici, whose philosophical and religious views seem to have been influenced by Schleiermacher, has tried to prove, in Gott und die Natur, that “God is the absolute presupposition of natural science.”