SOURCE: "The Year 1800 in the Development of German Idealism," in The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. I, No. 4, June, 1948, pp. 1-31.

[In the excerpt that follows, Kroner recounts the history of German Idealism, focusing "on the year 1800 in which the period of Kant and Fichte waned and the period of Schelling and Hegel began."]

I

The general import of the year 1800 as the turning point in the development of German Idealism

1. Introduction

The year 1800 was a fateful year in the philosophical movement which we are wont to call "German Idealism." "O'er what place does the moon hang to your eye, my dearest Sara? To me, it hangs over the left bank of the Elbe . . ."¹ Coleridge wrote to his wife on September 19 in 1798. His famous visit to Germany in this and the following year has not only a biographical but also a general historical significance. Coleridge and through him the English world became acquainted with the rising star of German Idealism. The years in which Coleridge stayed in Germany were years of a tremendous philosophical and spiritual struggle that reached its climax in 1800 when Schelling published his System of Transcendental Idealism, the title and charter of Philosophic Romanticism.

The Critique of Pure Reason had appeared in 1781; almost twenty years later it was completely forgotten and pushed aside by a movement that though originating from Kant's important work nevertheless came to results extremely alien to the intentions and the spirit of its initiator. How could this happen in such a short time? How could the epoch-making philosophic revolution brought about by Kant take such a strange turn? How could the critical principles be perverted to such a degree as to be completely denied eventually?

The term "German Idealism" usually suggests the great philosophic movement that was inaugurated by Kant and developed by his successors, particularly by Joh. Gottlieb Fichte, Fr. Wilh. Joseph Schelling and Georg Wilh. Fredr. Hegel. But we should not forget that the same period also generated composers and poets like Mozart and Beethoven. Schiller and Goethe; important critics like the two Schlegels, theologians like Schleiermacher, historians and philologists like W. v. Humboldt and Niebuhr. All these men and a large host of minor but still noted poets and scholars shared in the same German Idealism. "The secret of this golden age," Windelband says in his History of Modern Philosophy, "is to be found in the close cooperation of philosophic thought and poetic imagination."

When Coleridge travelled in Germany he had the impression that Kant and Fichte were the outstanding figures in the field of metaphysics, and that all universities were affected by the new philosophic fashion. "Throughout the universities of Germany," he wrote, "there is not a single professor who is not either a Kantian or a disciple of Fichte whose system is built on the Kantian and presupposes its truth; or lastly who, though an antagonist of Kant as to his theoretical work, has not embraced wholly or in part his moral system . . ."²

This statement is confirmed by all reports we know about this time. Everyone who had studied the Critique of Practical Reason was overpowered and transported by the moral gravity and sublimity of Kant's ideas; the whole nation admired and applauded the author. Every serious reader of Kant's works felt what Coleridge himself experienced and what he in his spiritual autobiography expressed in the following words: "The originality, the depth, and the adamantine chain of the lyric . . . , the clearness and evidence of those words . . . took possession of me as with the giant's hand."³

But in spite of this intense influence, or should I say, just by virtue of its enormous impetuosity, the Kantian philosophy evoked a movement which was not foreseen and even less wished for by its author. There is a certain analogy between the Kantian and the French Revolution. Both began by contesting the previous state of affairs and by introducing new points of view which thoroughly altered the face of all things. Both were driven forward by an inner dynamic impulse that modified gradually more and more the first program, and finally resulted in consequences strictly adverse to the original motives and ideals. There is indeed a striking analogy between the stages of the French Revolution and those of German Idealism. The philosophy of Kant can be compared with the opening action of the National Assembly, the philosophy of Fichte with the attitude of the Girondists and Extremists, the reaction instigated by Schelling with the constitution of the Directory and finally the all-embracing and absolute system of Hegel with the Empire of Napoleon.

It is the alarming and exciting story of this fateful course of spiritual events with which these lectures will deal. Of course, I cannot give an extensive report on all the single steps that finally led to the system of Hegel. I cannot discuss in detail all the controversies that took place between Kant and Fichte, Fichte and Schelling, Schelling and Hegel. I will concentrate on the year 1800 in which the period of Kant and Fichte waned and the period of Schelling and Hegel began. But before I refer to the works published in that year I will try to outline what was at issue between these two groups of thinkers and between these two periods of German Idealism. I will try to show that the implications of the great controversy were far reaching and of the uttermost significance.

Kant in a passage of his first Critique distinguishes the school concept of philosophy from its world concept. The school concept concerns the disputes of the students and scholars alone, the world concept the great issues of life and faith. The turning point of 1800 involved a change in philosophy, not only as a science, but as the expression of faith and as the answer to the eternal questions which ever anew stir and agitate the mind of man. The world concept of philosophy has to be taken into account, when we compare the period before 1800 with the period after that fateful year. The critical idealism of Kant underwent not only some technical or internal modifications, but the entire spirit of its principles, the style of its thought, the faith that was alive in it, altered. The world in which and for which Schelling and Hegel wrote is no more the same world in which Kant and Fichte built their systems. The year 1800 made this difference manifest.

Kant was and ever remained a child of the age of Reason or Enlightenment. Although the Critique of Pure Reason hastened the downfall of that age, it was at the same time its most mature product. Fichte's doctrine or theory of science, to be sure, foreshadows already the new century to a certain degree, but it still preserved the main principles of the Kantian philosophy. Fichte even overstressed and overemphasized the principles and thereby opened the eyes to their limit.

While Kant is still a representative of the Enlightenment, Fichte embodies the spirit of that movement which is called "Storm and Stress" in literature, and which characterizes the transition from the age of Enlightenment to the romantic period. Fichte, however, was still loyal to the banner of Kant's moral idealism. Like Kant, and even louder than Kant, he pronounced the freedom of the will as the highest of all principles, and faith in the moral order of the world as a postulate based on that principle.

Schelling resolutely left this ground. He shifted the centre of gravity from the ethical to an aesthetic idealism, from the respect of man as the moral agent to the cult of man as the creative genius in art; from a spiritually democratic to a spiritually aristocratic creed; from a position that in its religious consequences was akin to biblical theism, although of course in a rationalistic interpretation, to a position that had some affinity with naturalism and pantheism, and with the mythological religions of paganism.

What encouraged and inspired Schelling to dare this venturous leap from the place of ethical to that of aesthetic idealism was the imposing and commanding figure of his admired friend and model: Goethe. Goethe seemed to have achieved not only the perfection of classical beauty, he seemed also to represent the perfection of man, man in his consummate form.

A more radical and fundamental change can hardly be imagined, although it was the same tree of German Idealism that developed in three different appearances and forms. The metaphor of a tree may be permitted to compare Kant with its root, Fichte with its stem. Schelling with its leaves and blossoms and Hegel with its fruit. Kant indeed was the seed and root of the whole growth of German Idealism. All its thoughts, its theories, its achievements are potentially already existent in his system. Fichte sprang up from Kant as the trunk springs from the soil. This system rises in a straight and bold line striving upwards: his thought is stern, but somewhat barren, strong but somewhat tough, and hard, lofty but not pleasant. Schelling on the contrary is rich and brilliant, colorful and always delightful. For him the stem unfolds into the manifold of various shapes and colours and displays its vigour in beautiful pomp of ever new and surprising productions. In Hegel the ripe fruit of the plant appears, full of strength and savour, condensing as it were and recollecting the whole tree in itself, and representing the seed for future growth.

Of course, such an allegory should not be carried too far, or taken too literally, but it illustrates fairly well the unity and the difference between the main figures of German Idealism. It illustrates that Kant and Fichte belong to one another in a form more coherent than Fichte and Schelling, although Fichte dwells no longer in the subterranean depth of Kant. This philosophy seeks the light of a new speculative knowledge, but it does not reach it. It is only striving and longing for it. Schelling converts the strength and energy of the tree into a luminous splendour of many different systems. Hegel returns to the profundity of Kant, but now developed into a new self-sufficient and self-dependent organism.

2. Moral-aesthetic

A. Moral

When we leave the realm of comparisons and metaphors and turn to the thoughts of the German idealists, we can describe the contrast between the two main phases, that before and that after the year 1800, in different ways. I pointed out already that Kant and Fichte emphasize the ethical or moral aspect. They are idealists, because they believe in ideals as the summit and end not only of life but also of thought.

• Ideals-reality.

  The opposition between reality and the sphere of ideals is basic in their systems. Reality as the realm of objects, as the world of sense, as that world that the natural sciences explore and explain is not ultimate, it is not the All, or the Universe.

  Besides this visible or phenomenal world there is another hemisphere, the realm of aims and ends, of purposes and intentions, of duties and ideals. This practical world is by far more important, not only to us as willing and acting beings, but also to the thinking mind. For the thinking mind has to recognize and to acknowledge that duties and ideals cannot be derived from facts and events. They form a class of their own, a sphere that lies beyond the horizon and the reach of the natural sciences and of their merely theoretical knowledge. They are not objects of perception, they have to be conceived as objects of volition, as goals of the striving and longing will.

• Reflection on practical principles.

  Kant and Fichte therefore are practical idealists. The philosopher has to adopt the place and the point of view taken by the common man who pursues his tasks, discharges his duties, and who feels responsibility for his actions and deeds. The common man is the moral man, however immoral his life may be, however he may fail to comply with his duties. For philosophy has to trust the principles which underlie the consciousness of the common man.

  It is the business of philosophic thought to find out these principles, for the common man does not reflect upon them, he does not analyze his own consciousness, precisely because he is engaged in his practical affairs alone: the common man is the man of action, not the man of thought. But the philosopher, although he is obliged not to act practically but to think theoretically, nevertheless should analyze the practical consciousness and construe in theoretical terms the position of the men of practice. He cannot succeed, if he does not take into account the principles of action, and he can never exceed or transcend these principles.

• Causality-Freedom.

  There is an ultimate gulf between natural causality and moral responsibility, between natural necessity and moral freedom, between phenomenal reality and ethical ideality. No speculative artifice, no metaphysical intuition, no dialectical method can ever bridge the gulf between these hemispheres. To our insight and thought, to our philosophic knowledge the gulf is final. Therefore we must base all our reflections and conclusions, all our principles and propositions on the fundamental and original truth of this duality. All we can say is, that it is our duty to instil the ideal into reality or to make the content of the ideal efficient and powerful in our will and in our actions. The distance between the brute facts and the ideal goal cannot be diminished or even annulled by any reflection or by any conclusion; it cannot be overcome by thought. It can be overcome only by the energy and the steadfastness of the will.

B. Aesthetic

Quite a different picture prevails in the second period of German Idealism. No longer the practical issues, the ideals of the moral man, the principles of volition and action dominate thought, but instead intuition and imagination, contemplation and speculation assume supremacy. Man is a genius, is more than other mortals are. He is akin to God. he is divine himself! The marvellous spell, the splendour and mystery of a masterpiece points to the divine origin of its maker. The great poet in a particular sense is created in the image of God, he is himself a creator, as God is the poet of the world immanent in his Word. Schelling in his system of 1800 conceived of poetry as the model, measure and standard of philosophic speculation; he transformed the practical or ethical idealism of Fichte, to which he ardently adhered in the beginning of his career, into an aesthetic idealism.

In Emerson's essays we find the American echo of this romantic creed. Emerson, like Schelling, insisted that the Beautiful is supreme. "In the eternal trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty," he says, "the Transcendentalist prefers to make Beauty the sign and head . . . The beauty of Nature reforms itself in the mind, and not for barren completion, but for new creation. In art Nature works through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works. The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty. This element I call an ultimate end. Beauty in its largest and profoundest sense is one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair."

3. Intuition and Thought

The idealism of the first period of German Idealism centered in the ideal or in the ideals of striving and action; that of the second period in the idea or in the ideas of intuition and thought. This contrast did not appear for the first time in the story when it arose as a conflict between the German Idealists. It is an old struggle that was renewed on a new metaphysical level and in new conceptual forms. The contrast between Platonism and Aristotelianism is, though not exactly the same, very much akin, Plato's idealism culminated in the idea of the Good which is higher than anything that exists, and which is the idea of an ideal, the idea of a permanent goal, the model and pattern of all human planning and acting. The idealism of Aristotle, on the other hand, concerns not the ideals of action, but the structure of existence itself, the ideas which form and animate the real substances and which actualize themselves within the real processes of nature and of history.

In the Middle Ages a similar contrast and conflict divided those who held that the will of God is primary to his intellect, or in other words, that God himself is a practical idealist, from those who insisted that the intellect is superior to the will, that there is an eternal ideal order not only within the spirit of God, but also in his creation, and that this order is the highest subject of philosophical and theological speculation.

4. Devotional-Intellectual

When we consider this universal, historical antagonism, we can fully comprehend and evaluate the far-reaching consequences implied in the crisis of the year 1800. However, there is an even deeper and greater historical antagonism that reappears in the collision of the idealism of Kant and Fichte and that of Schelling and Hegel. an antagonism not only of philosophic schools, but of diametrically opposed tendencies within the Christian civilization. I might call them the devotional and the intellectual tendency. From the very beginning these two currents were present in Christianity, one represented by the life and faith of the community, the other by Christian dogma and doctrine of the theologians.

The ethical idealism of Kant and Fichte vindicates the supreme right of faith, of course in the form, not of Christianity, but of a faith based on moral reason and moral autonomy. The aesthetic and speculative idealism of the second period culminates in the theological logic of Hegel, which pretends to be the logic of that Logos who was in the beginning and was with God and was God, and by whom all things were made.⁴ Coleridge, who was strongly influenced by the ethical idealism of Kant and Fichte, but also by the aesthetic romanticism of Schelling, after a period of serious inner conflicts, finally rejected the speculative systems of Schelling and Hegel altogether precisely because he regarded theology as a danger for the life of faith. In the Aids to Reflection he says: "This was the true and first apostasy—when in council and synod the Divine Humanities of the Gospel gave way to speculative systems, and religion became a science of shadows under the name of theology."⁵

5. Reflective-Intuitive

The contrast between the two periods can be conceived still in another way which concerns the method of the systems. When transcendental idealism was first introduced to America the so-called Transcendentalists of New England, guided by Emerson, depended completely without knowing it, on the version of Schelling. Emerson was impressed by the intuitive method which corresponded best with his poetic enthusiasm and his deification of nature. But he believed that Kant himself had used this method and that the term "transcendental idealism" was coined by Kant precisely to designate this method.

Mentioning Kant as the founder of Transcendental Idealism, he writes: "The extraordinary profoundness and precision of that man's thinking have given vogue to his nomenclature in Europe and America to that extent that whoever belongs to the class of intuitive thought is popularly called at the present day Transcendental."⁶ Historically, nothing can be more remote from the truth than this statement. The character and spirit of Kant's critical philosophy is utterly opposed to any intuitive thought. In fact, Kant most definitely and explicitly excluded such a possibility. Human knowledge either rests upon sense experience or upon reflection and analysis of this experience, but it can attain to no kind of intuitive knowledge whatever. On the contrary human reason is restricted and barred from any comprehension of the things-in-themselves precisely because it is not intuitive. Kant even circumscribes the idea of a problematic divine intellect by assigning to it the capacity of intellectual intuition which the human mind does not possess.

Emerson probably never really studied Kant, but learnt about him from Coleridge, and Coleridge himself is not at all clear, when he refers to the transcendental method. Coleridge, as is well known, laid stress on the distinction between understanding and reason. Here again he confused reason and intuition as if both could be identified. But this is not the point in which the first period of German Idealism fundamentally varies from the second period.

Kant designates as reason not an intuitive power of man, but rather the capacity of conceiving the ideals or those ultimate goals of knowledge which can never actually be reached, although they determine the direction and close the horizon of all human cognition. The root of reason Kant therefore insists, is not theoretical, but practical, not intellectual, but moral, not intuitive, but active. Reason is at bottom willing and striving in the field of knowledge and science as well as in the field of volition and life.

Fichte began to speak of an intellectual intuition as the source of philosophic insight. But he did not mean a special kind of knowledge that would disclose the inner nature of things, the hidden ground of the Universe or something like this; he merely insisted that reflection and analysis is not based on outer sensation, but on inner intuition. He, even stronger than Kant, maintained the position that not intuition but action is the pith and core of the human Ego, and the only basis of the whole fabric of idealism. This idealism was therefore not intuitive, but moral, practical, and directed toward the ideal of absolute freedom.

Only Schelling in his system of Transcendental Idealism presumed that the philosopher should avail himself of an intuition which is able to grasp the original unity of all opposites in the absolute consciousness. And Hegel went even one step farther. He asserted that intuition penetrates into the core of ultimate reality, and that it can construe a system of absolute knowledge. In a way Hegel returned to Kant. For he recognized that intuition alone is helpless and that the claims of a merely intuitive knowledge cannot be vindicated by reason. He therefore synthesized the intuitive and discursive method in his dialectic. There is no insight based on intuition alone. Every immediate knowledge is also to be mediated by analysis and reflection. Hegel called this synthesis of intuitive and reflective, reason, and therefore his position that of reason, while he despised the method of Kant as that of the mere understanding. Coleridge was deeply impressed by the distinction between understanding and reason. But he did not discern that this distinction was not at all the same in Kant and his successors.

II The Conflict between Fichte and Schelling in 1800

In the foregoing lecture I delineated the general character of the contrast between the position of Kant and Fichte and that of Schelling as presented in The System of Transcendental Idealism. Today I will describe the contrast, and particularly the controversy fought out between Fichte and Schelling, more in detail. Besides the system of Schelling an important and influential book was published in the same year by Fichte, The Vocation of Man. Schelling in his system made the first comprehensive attempt to defend his own position in its distinctive peculiarity by stern methodical means over against the great system of Fichte, first published in 1794 under the very inadequate title Wissenschaftslehre. While Schelling's system was written for professional philosophers alone, Fichte on the contrary addressed himself to all readers, as he said, "who are altogether able to understand a book."

Fichte in 1800 had already passed the zenith of his historic career as a speculative thinker. Although he continued to lecture privately on the first principles, thereby transforming his metaphysical system from year to year, the books he published showed him henceforth only as an orator and educator, as a philosophic politician and a speculative prophet. Schelling, on the other hand, was just about to ascend the throne of metaphysics proper. To use the phrase of John Hutchison Stirling: "Fichte . . . had two philosophical epochs, and if both belong to biography, only one belongs to history."⁷ The year 1800 draws the line just between these two epochs. From 1794 until 1800 Fichte exercised absolute authority in the realm of metaphysics⁸ , though by 1799 he had to resign his chair as professor in Jena because of alleged atheism.

To be sure, Schelling began to rival his older and learned colleague in the University of Jena already before 1800. He lectured on the philosophy of nature, and the students were irresistibly attracted by the powerful voice of this young teacher. Nature as conceived in the mind of Schelling ceased to be the mechanical order of material molecules ruled by the principle of causality and subject to mathematical equations. It was no longer the nature investigated and interpreted by Galileo and Newton, nature as the object of the natural sciences. It became instead the object of philosophy interpreted by speculative thought. This new idea of Nature had little in common with the concepts underlying the Critique of Pure Reason. It was more akin to the picture given in Goethe's sketch bearing the title Nature. Schelling's view transfigured as with a magic wand the world of sense phenomena into a living being. No longer was mathematics the privileged instrument for deciphering the book of nature: it was rather intellectual intuition assisted by transcendental reflection. Nature was no longer opposed to the world of our human consciousness. The secret of nature and the secret of our consciousness, Schelling proclaimed, is one and the same secret, it is the central and all embracing secret of the universal soul. The human soul and the soul of the world are different not in kind, but only with respect to the stage of development in which the creative ground of all existence manifests itself.

The soul of nature forms and transforms itself according to the stages of its evolution. It strives after a certain goal as the human soul also does, and on its way it produces ever new phenomena, ever new effects as it gradually approaches its final end. There is an inner antagonism in nature as well as in the human Ego; the universal soul is alive only because it is divided against itself and endeavours to unite itself. This unity in difference or this difference in unity is the source and primeval condition of all activity and of all life. Opposite forces bear up the fundamental and original unity of nature; all processes in the universe, all movements, all changes occur only because of this inner discord, this internal strife. Nature works to reconcile herself, to overcome the antagonism of her poles, and thus to produce a perfect balance, a perfect harmony within herself. Matter and energy, magnetism and electricity, light and sound, the system of the stars as well as the chemical processes, gravitation as much as molecular forces have to be understood as manifestations of the same supreme principle that constitutes their inner soul. But the highest stage to which nature rises, is the world of organisms. Here the creative stream of productions results in a living unity in which all other natural substances and processes are bound together. The organism is the most advanced attempt of Nature to achieve her supreme end: the unity and harmony of herself.

Of course the plurality of organisms, the contrariness of the sexes, the complexity of different functions and processes within every individual organism, the struggle for self-conservation and self-propagation, the tension between the organic and the inorganic world, the exposure of all living beings to disease and death, all these features demonstrate obviously enough that even the amazing perfection of the organic structure and the wonder of life do not yet represent the final goal of the World Soul. Nature produces in the living organism her highest products. By reconciling the antagonistic poles of existence Nature achieves her most perfect form. But even so, this form is still utterly defective and imperfect. Nature is eventually compelled to transcend herself. It is on the stage of Mind that the universal soul aspires and attains to higher and ever higher good actions.

This famous philosophy of nature worked out and published by Schelling in the course of the years from 1798 to 1800 preceded The System of Transcendental Idealism. Fichte could believe and perhaps believed for a certain span of time that Schelling, who had begun to think and to write as Fichte's admirer and disciple, still adhered to the fundamental principles of the Lore of Science even at the moment when he built up his philosophy of nature. It is a matter of fact that Schelling himself, in the first rapture evoked by his new discoveries, did not yet fully recognize the abyss that opened between him and Fichte.

And yet, Schelling was already abandoning the position of Fichte when he set out to philosophize about nature. It is strange irony in the development of German Idealism that the fruit of Kant's careful and considerate restriction of human knowledge, his limitation of reason by means of reason, i.e., the main result of his critical theory, became only an incitement to the boldest adventures human reason has ever undertaken. The key to this riddle is given us by reason itself. There is an indomitable and radical impetus in all knowledge not to stop before we arrive at the absolute fulfillment of its expressions, i.e., at the full truth.

All sceptical considerations, all attempts to draw a line between the realm of what we can and of what we cannot and shall never know confront an intrinsic difficulty. If there is such a line how can we find it out, and if we cannot find it out, how can we assert that it exists? Even if it should be true that the possibilities of our human understanding are limited, the possibility of knowing this limit also seems to be excluded. We can know only what is within our compass: but to know where this compass ends would imply standing simultaneously within and without it. Only he who has transcended the frontier can become aware of the frontier, but then it is no longer a frontier for him.

This intrinsic difficulty became the motive for an ever growing enlargement of knowledge until at the end Hegel's Encyclopædia of the Philosophical Sciences proclaimed that there is no possible limit at all to our knowledge. No one has more vehemently and more passionately wrestled with the intrinsic difficulty of drawing a line between the realm accessible to knowledge and that inaccessible to it than Fichte in his Lore of Science. Fichte recognized that this task was much harder than Kant had guessed. He recognized the full scope of the contradictions in which thought engages if it dares to draw that all-important line.

Fichte envisaged the dangers looming behind his own attempt. He felt that the limit of knowledge seemed to vanish inasmuch as the effort to grasp it was increased. He also saw the consequences that would inevitably result, should human reason succumb to the temptation of denying this limit. For if man imagines he has overcome in principle all barriers of knowledge, then the gulf between humanity and deity, between finitude and infinity, between imperfection and perfection can no longer be acknowledged and respected. Man then is tempted to deify himself and to repudiate the existence of any Being higher than himself. Man's religious awe and humility thus was at stake. Faith was imperiled.

Realizing the tremendous weight of his responsibility as a thinker, as a man of conscience and of faith. Fichte strove to warn Schelling and to keep him within the limits of finite knowledge—within the confines of human possibilities. But at the same time he himself experienced the driving impulse of Schelling's speculative intuition and the persuading force of the philosophy of nature. In this mood and in this situation he wrote his little book of 1800. The trend of thought there developed is not as straight forward and clearly directed towards a definite goal as the writings before 1800. Still it is the work of a master of philosophic meditation and argumentation, and it even contains some of Fichte's most fervent and most stirring utterances.

The Vocation of Man has three parts. Fichte depicts at first the position of pre-Kantian metaphysics. He calls this chapter Doubt. Before Kant metaphysical knowledge concerned the nature of things, not the nature of knowledge itself. It was based upon the presupposition that thought can succeed in construing the structure of being and in comprehending ultimate reality. But the more successful we are in this direction, the less can we understand ourselves. To the eyes of the understanding everything is conditioned by everything. The system of knowledge, if completed, is and must be a system in which necessity rules without any restriction whatsoever. In such a system freedom and action have no place; they lose their true meaning. Therefore an "intolerable state of uncertainty and irresolution" is the consequence.

The second part of Fichte's treatise has the title Knowledge. Here Fichte outlines Kant's theory of knowledge which turns the focus of metaphysics from the objects of knowledge towards the knowledge of the objects, or in other words, which inquires no longer into the nature of things but instead into the nature of the knowing subject or the thinking self. This new type of metaphysics is sceptical therefore as to our ability to know ultimate reality, but it has an excellence and an advantage lacking in the former, pre-Kantian position: it delivers man from the bondage of necessity; it shows the ascendency of the centrality of the consciousness, and thus it defeats doubt and restores the legitimate right of will and action.

But this is not yet the whole harvest of the new position. In saving the true meaning of freedom and the right of the personality thought opens a new horizon. While it destroys the illusions of metaphysical knowledge, it rehabilitates the claims of faith. The third and last part of Fichte's book is headed: Faith. It is in this chapter that Fichte advances a good deal to meet his younger fellow thinker whose philosophy of nature incited the ambition of knowledge anew and led a path to new possibilities of reconquering the lost terrain.

Fichte insists that not knowledge but faith alone can visualize the ultimate nature of things. None the less he borrows the colours of his picture from the Schellingian palette. In a letter dated December the 27th, i.e., at the end of the fateful year 1800. Fichte writes to Schelling⁹ that he is well aware of the "needs of the time" urgently demanding an "enlargement of the Transcendental Philosophy even on its very principles," and that he has given some hints of that purpose in his Vocation of Man. He even goes so far as to concede that man as an individual originated from Nature, if we understand Nature not as the object of the natural sciences, but as the intellectual idea underlying the phenomena of sense perception.

Fichte describes the content of faith in words that strangely deviate from the frame of ethical idealism and approach the intuitive contemplation prevailing in Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism¹⁰ . But he does not completely forsake his ethical position. Faith suggests a new appeal not only of our duties and our moral activity as related to the infinite Will of God, but it grants us also a new vision of the world of sense. Whereas Fichte in all his writings before 1800 strongly emphasized that this world is ultimately nothing but the occasion of moral action for the free will of man, he now teaches (or preaches) that faith inspires us to look at the objects of sense perception with other eyes.

By faith we do not only perceive the world in the light of our duties, we penetrate through error and deformation into its inner truth and beauty. Nature is not only the raw-material of the moral edifice at which we as moral beings aim and for which we act, it is divine in itself, a living Universe that veils and reveals the life and the power of the Infinite. Fichte suddenly exchanges the style and tone of the thinker for those of the praying worshipper: "Sublime and Living Will! named by no name, compassed by no thought! I may well raise my soul to Thee, for Thou and I are not divided."

And he continues: "The life . . . clothed to the eye of the mortal with manifold sensuous forms, flows forth through me, and throughout the immeasurable universe of Nature. Here it streams as self-creating and self-forming matter through my veins and muscles, and pours its abundance into the tree, the flower, the grass. Creative life flows forth in one continuous stream, drop on drop, through all forms and into all places where my eye can follow it . . . All Death in Nature is Birth, and in Death itself appears visibly the exaltation of Life. There is no destructive principle in Nature, for Nature throughout is pure, unclouded Life . . . Death and Birth are but the struggle of Life with itself to assume a more glorious and congenial form" and so on. One would think it is no longer Fichte who speaks, that Fichte who disdained the world of sense. One would think it is Schelling or perhaps even Emerson who has written these lines, not Fichte.

While Fichte thus in the Vocation of Man tried to catch up with Schelling's Philosophy of Nature, Schelling himself finished and published the system in which he, with one daring leap, presented a solution of the problem of how the Transcendental Philosophy can be enlarged to meet the "needs of the time." He transfigured the philosophy of the knowing and willing consciousness into a philosophy of the creative genius in the realm of fine arts. Nature accomplishes her greatest and her finest product in producing the artist, for it is in the sphere of artistic beauty that the opposite poles of existence are perfectly integrated into one harmonious whole. Nature and Mind cooperate to this end. Their intrinsic identity is thereby revealed. The work of beauty therefore presents us with the moral and pattern of that perfection at which philosophy itself aims. It sets forth an image of ultimate reality.

The philosopher can accomplish his own work only by imitating the artist. He has to depart from the idea of an original consciousness in which the conflict between opposite forces necessarily arises; and he has to disclose the steps taken by that consciousness in overcoming its original disunity so as to reunify itself. In such a way philosophy can demonstrate why and how the divisions of sensation and understanding of theoretical and practical reason, of the world of sense and the world of ends, and all the contrasts within nature as well as within mind came from a primordial disintegration.

This whole method is justified ultimately by the testimony of Art, for Art shows us ostensibly that the opposites of the finite and the infinite, of the visible and the invisible, of the sensuous and the spiritual are at bottom united and can therefore be reunited by the artist in his work. This work is therefore the highest triumph of man and the greatest achievement of that universal mind which appears in all the forms of Nature. "To the philosopher," Schelling jubilantly announces, "Art is supreme, because it as it were opens to him the Holy of Holies, where in everlasting and original unity there burns, as it were in one flame, what is parted asunder in nature and history, and what in life and conduct, no less than in thinking, must forever flee apart. The view the philosopher artificially makes for himself of nature is for Art the original and natural. What we call nature is a poem which is locked up in strange and secret characters. Yet, could the riddle be disclosed, we should recognize in it the Odyssey of the mind which, strangely decisively, in seeking itself, flees from itself."¹¹

Science has therefore as far as possible to return to poetry. The means most appropriate to this purpose would be a new mythology, for in mythology science and art were originally united. "As to how," Schelling concludes," a new mythology—which cannot be the invention of the single poet but of a new generation, as it were representing only a single poet—can itself arise, is a problem the solution of which is to be expected only from the future destinies of the world and the further course of history." Schelling points here to a favourite idea of the early romantics, an idea which has today for us an ominous sound, as the destiny of the world and the course of history has been deeply and badly influenced by a new mythology opposed to biblical faith and its moral principles. It cannot be denied that there is a certain historical connection between the idea so ardently propagated by Schelling in his system of 1800 and the faith of contemporary Germany, although it would be foolish to call Schelling to account for what happens today.

The system of 1800 however has its historic significance not only in that it foreshadows the decline of the Christian faith in Germany and the insanity of Nazism, but also within the development of German Idealism. For it is the first attempt to establish that kind of idealism which would at the same time be a realism. Kant and Fichte pronounced the idealism of the Ideal, particularly the moral Ideal; Schelling and Hegel promoted the idealism of reality as such, of the ultimately Real. The absolute idea actualizes itself eternally. It is not only an ideal towards which man strives, that man labours to introduce into the real world and into his life; it is eternally realized, it is eternally present. The absolute Idea, Hegel insists, is not so weak as to represent a mere "ought", it really exists and works and is operative in all things real.

This view seems to agree better with Christian faith than the Idealism of the Ideal; it seems to be more religious than the merely moral creed. Indeed Hegel was convinced that his system had brought about the full reconciliation between philosophic speculation and religious revelation, between finite man and divine infinity. "Hegel," James Hutchison Stirling proclaims in his noteworthy book The Secret of Hegel, "is the greatest abstract thinker of Christianity and closes the modern world as Aristotle the ancient."¹² However, we have to remember the tension between the Christian faith and the Christian dogma, the life of the saints and the systems of the theologians. Even if it should prove true, that Hegel is the greatest abstract thinker of Christianity, still he cannot be called a Christian thinker for the simple reason that he regarded theology as the kernel of Christianity. Faith necessarily suffers from such an evaluation.

Moreover, one may rightly doubt whether Hegel was really a Christian theologian, for he seems to deny any distinction between God and the Logos, and pretends to construe the Logos in a merely logical way. Too much of romanticism and æstheticism is included in this attempt, to allow of it being accepted as a theological logic of Christianity.

In the year 1800 Hegel was nearer to the genuine Gospel as the original message of Christianity than he was as the author of the Logic and of the Encyclopaedia. In that year he wrote down the latest of his early theological writings.

Notes

¹Letters of S. T. Coleridge, ed. by E. H. Coleridge, Vol. I. p. 259.

²Biogr. Lit. Everyman's Libr. No. 11. p. 298.

³ibid., p. 76.

⁴ The logic, Hegel says, is "God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of Nature and of a Finite Spirit" (Vol. I. p. 60).

⁵op. cit., p. 126.

⁶ Modern Libr. Ed. p. 93.

⁷The Secret of Hegel, I, p. 21.

⁸ How great and dreaded his authority still was in 1800 can be seen from the fact that Schleiermacher in his review of The Vocation Of Man did not dare to criticise this book as severely and as ruthlessly as he condemned it privately (cp. my book Von Kant bis Hegel, vol. II, p. 68. fn. 2).

⁹ Cp. Von Kant bis Hegel. II. p. 133.

¹⁰ Cp. l.c. p. 73 f.

¹¹ Tr. by W. Wallace, in The Logic of Hegel, Prolegomena, p. 161.

¹² Vol. I. p. 116.