CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY FROM Cornell University Library =2523 .H46 1882 olin 3 1924 029 017 650 DATE DUE , -'.f-_ifJl— * 4i^ 5"T3T7w i'S .gtec h.^. / Ai '"■*WHfr'nii/i/„,^ PUVv ^^?wi*" mm QSSm ,idU8e^ ftt^^^ GAyUORD PRINTED IN U.S.A. The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029017650 ft-***"* i<^ ^ '' ENGLISH AND FOREIGN PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY. )V^^,,.-/-i^'i--'^<- Philosophical Inquiry is essentially the chief intellectual study of our age. It is proposed to produce, under the title of " The English and Fokeign Philosophical Library," a series of works of the highest class connected with that study. The English contributions to the series consist of original works, and of occasional new editions of such productions as have already attained a permanent rank among the philosophical writings of the day. 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The volumes will follow in succession, at no fixed periods, but as early as is consistent with the necessary care in their production. THE FOLLOWIITG HAVE ALREADY APPEARED:— Vols. I.-III.] In Three Yolumes, post 8vo, pp. 350, 406, and 384, with Index, cloth, ;^i, us. 6d. A HISTORY OF MATERIALISM. By Professor F. A. LANGE. Authorised Translation from the German by Ernest C. Thomas, " This is a T^ork which has long and impatiently been expected by a large circle of readers. It has been well praised by two eminent scientists, and their words have created for it, as regards its appearance in our English tongue, a sort of ante-natal reputation. The reputation is in many respects well deserved. The book is marked throughout by singular ability, aboimds in striking and suggestive refiections^ subtle and profound discussions, felicitous and graphic descriptions of mental and social move- ments, both in themselves and in their mutual relations."— ^ScofAmaTi. 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A CANDID EXAMINATION OP THEISM. By PHYSICUS. " An essay of marked ability that does not belie its title." — Mivd. " On the whole a candid, acute, and honest attempt to work out a problem which is of vast and perpetual interest" — Scotsman. " It is impossible to go through this work without forming a very high opinion of his speculative and argumentative power, and a sincere respect for his temperance of state- ment and his diligent endeavour to make out the best case he can for the views he rejects.'* — Academy. " This is a telliog contribution to the question of questions. The author has pushed a step further than any one before him the bearing of modem science on the doctrine of Theism." — Sxaminer. Vol. X.] Post 8vo, pp. xli. — 282, cloth, loa. 6d. THE COLOUK SENSE : Its Origin and Development. AN ESSAT IN COMPARATIVE PSTCHOLOQT. By GEAUT AIiIiEN, B.A., Author of " Physlolosrloal .aSathetios." '• The book is attractive throughout, for its object is pursued with an earnestness and singleness of purpose which never fail to maintain the interest of the reader."— SaiMrday Semew. "A work of genuine research and bold originality."— 7re«vas no discord between matter and spirit. To call him a spiritualist, therefore, would be as erroneous as to call him a sensualist. How shall I describe him ? He had in him something primordial, incomprehensible, miraculous, such as we find in all providential men ; some- thing naively terrible, something boorishly wise, something lofty yet circumscribed, something invincibly dsemoniacal.T Luther's father was a miner at Mannsf eld, and the boy was often with him in his subterranean workplace, in the laboratory of the giant metals, where are the gurgling sources of the great fountains. Perhaps the young heart unconsciously absorbed something of the mysterious forces of. Nature, or was bewitched by the pixies. This may have been the cause, too, why so much earthy matter, so much of the dross of passion remained adhering to him, which has so often been made a reproach against him. But the reproach is unjust, for without that earthy ad- mixture he could not have become a man of action. Pure spirit cannot act. Do we not learn from Jung Stilling's " Theory of Ghosts," * that spirits can indeed make them- selves visible in distinct form and colour, and can walk, and run, and dance, and otherwise comport themselves like human creatures, but that they are powerless to move any material object, even the smallest table, from its place ? QPraise to Luther ! eternal praise to the dear man whom we have to thank for the deliverance of our most precious possessions, and on whose benefits our life still depends ! It little becomes us to complain of the narrowness of his views. The dwarf standing on the shoulders of the giant can indeed see farther than his supporter, especially if he puts on spectacles ; but to such a lofty survey is wanting ■ the elevated feeling, the giant-heart, to which we cannot lay claim. Still less does it become us to pronounce an * " Theorie der Geisterkunde." — Tn. 48 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. austere judgment on his failings; these failings have profited us more than the virtues of a thousand others. Neither the subtilty of Erasmus, nor the benignity of Melancthon, would ever have brought us so far as the divine brutality of Brother Martin. Yea, these very errors to which I have already referred have borne the most pre- cious fruits — fruits that are still a solace to all humanity. Prom the date of the Diet at which Luther disowned the authority of the Pope, and publicly declared that "his doctrine could be refuted only by an appeal to the autho- rity of the Bible itself, or on grounds of reason," a new era dawned in Germany. The chain by which the holy Boni- face had bound the German Church to Eome was that day severed. This Church, which had hitherto formed an integral portion of the great hierarchy, broke up into reli- gious democracies. Eeligion itself underwent a change ; the Indo-Gnostic element disappears, and we see the Judaic - Deistic element again rising into prominence. Evangelical Christianity emergi^^pAThenever the most essential claims of matter are nofe^erely recognised, but legitimised, religion once more becdnies a truth ^^ the priest becomes a man, and takes a wife and begets>.!children as God has ordained. On the other hand, God becomes once more a celestial celibate; the legitimacy of His Son is disputed ; the saints are relieved of their saintship ; the angels have their wings clipped ; the Mother of God loses all claim to the crown of heaven, and is forbidden to work miracles. In fine, from this time forward, especially since the natural sciences have made such great progress, mi- racles cease. Be it that God is chagrined to find natural philosophers watching His manipulations with such an air of suspicion, or be it from some other motive ; certain it is, that even in these latter days, wherein' religion is in so great peril. He has disdained to support it by any striking miracle. Perhaps the new religions that He may hence- RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY, 49 forth establish on earth are to be based solely on reason, which indeed will be much more reasonable. At least in the case of Saint Simonianism, which is the newest reli-r gion, no miracle has occurred, with this exception, per- haps, that an old tailor's bill left owing by Saint Simon himself, was paid by his disciples ten years after his death, I still see before me the worthy P^re Olinde rising with enthusiasm in the salle Taibout, and exhibiting to the astonished congregation the receipted tailor's bill. Young grocers were amazed at such supernatural testimony ; but the tailors began at once to believe ! Yet, if we in Germany, with the loss of miracles through the triumph of Protestantism, also lost much else that was poetic, we have, still obtained manifold compensa- tion. Men have become more virtuous, more noble-souled. Protestantism has most favourably influenced that purity of manners and that rigorous performance of duties usually called morality ; nay, Protestantism in many communities has taken a direction that identifies it completely with morality. In the lives of the clergy especially do we see a gratifying change. With the abolition of vows of celibacy disappeared likewise the vices and debaucheries of the monks. Amongst the Protestant clergy are often to be found men of such exemplary virtue that even the old Stoics would have had respect for them. One must have travelled on foot as a poor student through North Germany in order to know how much virtue, and, to qualify the word virtue by a really beautiful epithet, how much evangelical virtue is frequently to be found in an unassuming parsonage. How often of a winter evening have I found therein a hospitable welcome — I, a stranger, whose only recommendations were hunger and weariness ! When I had well eaten and slept soundly, and was pre- paring on the morrow morning to set forth again, the old pastor was sure to appear in his dressing-gown to bestow so RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. his blessing on my journey — a good act that never brought me misfortune. His kindly and loquacious wife would thrust into my pocket several slices of buttered bread, which proved not less comforting. Behind the mother stood in modest silence the fair daughters of the pastor, with their ruddy cheeks and violet eyes, and the recollec- tion of their timid glances kept my heart warm through- out the whole winter day, Q^n declaring that his doctrine could be refuted only by an appeal to the Bible or on grounds of reason, Luther conceded to human intelligence the right to explain the Scriptures, and reason was acknowledged as the supreme judge in all religious controversies. Thus was established in Germany spiritual freedom, or, as it is also called, free- dom of thought."] Thought became a right, and the deci- sions of reason became legitimate. No doubt for several centuries back men had been permitted to think and to speak with tolerable freedom, and the scholastics had dis- puted about matters that we can hardly conceive possible to have been mooted in the Middle Ages. But the explanation of this is to be found in the distinction that was made between theological and philosophical truth, a distinction whereby the disputants explicitly guarded themselves against heresy. Besides, such controversies were confined to the lecture-rooms of universities, and were held in a Gothic and abstruse Latin of which the people could not understand a word. The Church had, therefore, little to fear from such discussions. Yet the Church had never expressly sanctioned these proceedings, and so, now and then, by way of protest, she caused a poor scholastic to be burnt. But since Luther's time no such distinction between theological and philosophical truth has been recognised, and men have disputed in the market-place, in the German popular tongue, without reserve or fear. The princes who accepted the Eeforma- RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 51 tion legitimised this freedom of thought, of which one of the most important results is German philosophy. In fact nowhere, not even in Greece, was the human intellect permitted to develop itself and to express its thought so freely as in Germany from the middle of last century till the French Eevolution. In Prussia espe- cially an unrestrained liberty of thought prevailed. The Marquis of Brandenburg perceived that, in becoming the legitimate king of Prussia by mere strength of the Protestant principle, he must maintain in its integrity Protestant freedom of thought. Truly since those days the state of affairs has changed, and the natural protector of our Protestant liberty has come to an understanding with the Ultramontane party to stifle that liberty, and to this end has traitorously availed himself of a weapon devised and first directed against us by the Papacy : the censorship. Singular! We Germans are the strongest and most ingenious of nations. Princes of our race sit on every European throne; our Eothschilds govern the exchanges over the whole earth ; our learned men are sovereigns in all the sciences; we have invented gunpowder and the printingrpress ; and yet whoever fires off a pistol in our country is subjected to a fine of three thalers'; and if any of us wishes to insert in the Hamburg Correspondent these words : " My dear spouse has given birth to a daughter beautiful as Freedom ! " straightway Dr. Hoffmann * seizes his red pencil and strikes out " Freedom." Will this continue much longer ? I know not. But I know that the question of freedom of the press, at present so vfehemently discussed in Germany, is significantly asso- ciated with all the questions of which I have just spoken ; * The Hamburg censor. As a ing, are not to be found in the early matter of course, this paragraph, the German editions. — Tb. ■ one preceding it, and the one follow- 52 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. and I believe its solution will not be difficult, if we reflect that freedom of the press is nothing else than a conse- quence of freedom of thought, and therefore a Protestant right. Germany has already given its best blood for rights of this kind, and she may yet again be called upon to enter the lists in defence of the same cause. This remark is applicable to the question of academical freedom, at present so passionately rousing men's minds in Germany. Since the supposed discovery was made that political agitation, that is to say the love of liberty, is most rampant in the universities, it has on all sides been insinuated to the sovereigns that these institutions ought to be suppressed, or at least converted into ordinary schools of instruction. New schemes have been devised, and the pfo and contra eagerly discussed. But the avowed adversaries of the universities do not seem to have under- stood any better than such avowed defenders as have hitherto presented themselves, the fundamental principles of the question. They do not comprehend that youth everywhere, and under all forms of discipline, is animated by enthusiasm for liberty ; and that, though the univer- sities were closed, this enthusiasm of the young would assert itself all the more energetically elsewhere, and this, perhaps, in coalition with the youth of the commercial and of the industrial classes. The defenders of the uni- versities content themselves with showing that, with the closing of the universities, German scientific learning also would be swept away; that it is precisely freedom of academic study that is of value, as affording to the youno- the best opportunity for varied development : as if a few Greek vocables, or a few rude customs, more or less, had aught to do with the matter ! And what do princes care about science, study, and culture if the sacred security of their thrones is imperilled ! They would be heroic enou^ to sacrifice all such relative benefits for a single absolute RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 53 good, for absolute sovereignty. For this possession has been intrusted to them by God, and where Heaven com- mands, all earthly considerations must give place. There is also misunderstanding of the question on the part of the poor professors, who defend, as well as on the part of the delegates of authority, who attack, the universities. It is only the Catholic propagandists in Germany that rightly comprehend the matter. These pious obscurantists are the most dangerous enemies of our university system, assailing it by lying and fraud; and, when one of them assumes the semblance of taking an affectionate interest in the universities, some Jesuitical intrigue is speedily revealed. Well do these cowardly hypocrites know how much is to be won in the game. For with the fall of the universities would fall the Protestant Church, the Church . that since the Eeformation has been so dependent on the universities that the whole Protestant Church history of these last centuries consists almost exclusively of the records of theological discussions of the learned at Witten- berg, Leipzig, Tiibingen, and Halle. The consistories pre^ sent but a feeble reflection of the theological faculty ; with the disappearance of the latter they would lose all support and all character, and sink into a desolate dependence on the ministryj or even on the police. But let us not indulge too freely in such melancholy reflections, especially as we have still to speak of the providential man by whom so great things were wrought for the German people. I have already shown how through him we attained the widest liberty of thought. [For Martin Luther gave us not only freedom of move- ment, but also the means of movement. To the spirit he gave, a body ; he gave word to the thought ; he created the German language. ^ This he did by translating the Bible. The Divine Author of this book seems to have known 54 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. as well as we do that the choice of a translator is by no means a matter of indifference. He himself chose His translator, and endowed him with the marvellous faculty of translating out of a dead and already buried language, into a tongue that had not as yet come into existence. We had, it is true, the Vulgate, which was understood, and the Septuagint, which men were beginning to under- stand ; but the knowledge of Hebrew was quite extinct throughout the Christian world. Only the Jews, who managed to conceal themselves here and there in corners of the earth, still preserved the traditions of this language. Like a ghost that keeps watch over some treasure in- trusted to it during its lifetime, so this massacred nation, this ghost-like people cowering in its obscure ghettos, kept watch there over the Hebrew Bible. Into these evil- reputed hiding-places German men of learning might be seen secretly stealing down in order to discover the treasure, to acquire a knowledge of Hebrew. As soon as the Catholic priesthood perceived the danger that thus threatened them, 'that the people might by such a side- way attain an acquaintance with the true Word of God, and thereby discover the Eomish falsifications, they would fain have suppressed Jewish tradition, and they set to work to destroy all Hebrew books. Thus began on the banks of the Ehine that book-persecution, against which our admirable Doctor Eeuchlin so gloriously foughtry The theologians of Cologne, who were' active in the matter, particularly Hochstraaten, were by no means so devoid of intelligence as Ulrich von Hutten, Eeuchlin's valiant champion, represents them in his Litterce Ohscurorum ViroTum. They attempted nothing less than the sup- pression of the Hebrew language. When Eeuchlin was victorious, Luther was able to begin his work. From a letter written by him at this time to Eeuchlin, Luther seems already to have felt how important was the victory RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 55 that had been gained, — gained too by one in a dependent and difficult position, — whereas he, the Augustin monk, was perfectly independent. Very naively does Luther say in this letter : " Ugo nihil timeo, quia nihil habeo." But how Luther succeeded in creating the language into which he translated the Bible, remains a mystery to me even to this hour. The old Suabian dialect had totally disappeared, along with the chivalrous poetry of the Hohenstaufen imperial era. The old Saxon dialect, so- called low- German, was in use throughout only a por- tion of Northern Germany, and despite all efforts that have been made it has never been found possible to adapt it to literary purposes. Had Luther employed for his translation of the Bible the language that is spoken to-day in Saxony, Adelung would have been right in maintaining that Saxon, especially the dialect ,of Meissen, was the true high-German, that is to say, our literary language. But this error was long ago refuted, though I must here draw special attention to it on account of its being still quite current in France. Modern Saxon never was a dialect of the Germans, — as little was it so as Silesian ; the former like the latter, having a strong Slavonian admix- ture, tr therefore frankly confess that I know not what was the origin of the language we find in Luther's Bible. But this I know that, through his Bible which the new- born,press, the black art, scattered by thousands of copies amongst the people, the Lutheran language spread in a few years over the whole of Germany, and was raised to the rank of a written tongue. This written tongue holds its place to this day in Germany, and gives to that politi- cally and religiously dismembered nation a literary unity. Such an inestimable gain may well make amends to us for any loss in the later development of the language of that internal expressiveness we are accustomed to find in languages having their origin in a single dialect. There S6 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. is no want, however, of such expressiveness in the lan- guage of Luther's Bible, and this old book is a perennial source of rejuvenescence for our tongue. Every expres- sion and every idiom to be found in Luther's Bible is essentially German ; an author may unhesitatingly employ it ; and as this book is in the hands of the poorest classes, they have no need of any special learned instruction to enable them to express themselves • in a literary style. This circumstance will, when the political revolution takes place in Germany, result in strange phenomena. Liberty will everywhere be able to speak, and its speech will be Biblical. Luther's original writings have also contributed to fix the German language. Owing to their polemical passion- ateness, they pierced deeply into the heart of his time. Their tone is not always delicate ; but not even a religious revolution can be made with orange blossom. Of tentiines the stubborn tree root can be cleft only by the stubborn wedge. In the Bible Luther's speech is always restrained within the bounds of a certain dignity by reverence for the ever-present Spirit of God. In his controversial writings, on the contrary, he abandons himself to a plebeian vulgarity that is often as repulsive as it is grandiose. His expres- sions and his metaphors resemble the colossal stone images to be seen in Hindoo or Egyptian temple grottos; their gaudy colouring and fantastic hideousness both repel and fascinate us. By reason of this uncouth granite style the daring monk often appears like a religious Danton, a preacher of the Mountain, who from his lofty elevation hurls down his strange word-blocks on the heads of his adversaries. But more remarkable and more significant than these prose works are Luther's poems, the hymns that budded forth in his soul amidst the conflicts and troubles of his days. Oftentimes they resemble a flower blooming on a RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 57 bare rock; oftentimes, they are like a moonbeam shim- mering across a tossing sea. Luther loved music ; he even wrote a treatise on the art ; and his songs are extremely melodious. In this respect also he merits the name of the Swan of Eisleben. He was, however, anything but a mild swan in many of the songs in which he rouses the courage of his followers and inspires himself with fiercest ardour for the combat. A true war-song was that defiant lay with which he and his companions entered Worms. The old cathedral trembled at such unwonted strains, and the ravens were terrified in their obscure nests up in the church towers. This song — the Marseillaise Hymn of the Eeformation — preserves even yet its power of inspir- ing men, and perhaps we may ere long have need in similar combats of the old mail-clad words : — A strong tower is the Lord our God, A trusty shield and weapon ; He frees us in our mighty need From all the ills that happen. The old and wicked fiend Now earnestly has meaned ; Great power, much deceit, His dreadful armour meet ; On earth is not his fellow. For our own power could not avail, We soon should find an ending ; Yet bravely for us will prevail The man of God's own sending. Seek'st, who this may be t Jesus Christ, 'tis He, The Lord Sabaoth, And sure no other God For us the field maintaineth. And though the devils filled all lands, Seeking our soul's devouring ; We need not greatly fear their bands, Our help is overpowering. 58 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. The prince of this earth, Though full of grim wrath, Must yet fail of his plan ; He lieth under a ban, A mere word can o'erthrow him. This word they may not take away, Nor yet have thanks for leaving ; God's on our side with grace and power. To Him our souls are cleaving. Take, if ye choose, our life. Goods, honour, child, and wife, Let go as they may ; Your gain's hut small, we say, — The Kingdom ours remdineth.*. I have shown how we have to thank our dear Doctor Martin Luther for the intellectual freedom that was needed for the development of modern literature. I have shown how he also created for us the word, the speech wherein this new literature might express itself. I have still to add that he was himself the precursor of this literature ; that our polite literature properly so-called begins with Luther; that his spiritual songs prove themselves to be its first important monument and already reveal its distinctive character. Whoever would speak of modern German literature must therefore begin with Luther, and not with that narrow-souled citizen of Nuremberg called Hans Sachs, as has been done through the bad faith of certain writers of the Eomantic school. Hans Sachs, the trou- badour of the honourable guild of shoemakers, whose master-song is but a crude parody of the ancient lays of minstrelsy, and his dramas mere clumsy travesties of the old mysteries; — this pedantic buffoon, with his painful aping of the free simplicity of the Middle Ages, may perhaps be regarded as the last poet of the olden time, but can in no sense be considered the earliest poet of the new age.^ PART SECOND. In the first part of this book we have treated of the great religious revolution represented in Germany by Martin Luther. We have now to speak of the philosophic revo- lution which, as the offspring of the religious revolution, is nothing else than the last consequence of Protestantism. But before proceeding to relate how this revolution found its outburst through Immanuel Kant, it is necessary to refer to the philosophical events that preceded it abroad, to the significance of Spinoza, to the fate of the philosophy of Leibnitz, to the mutual relations between this philo- sophy and religion, and to their discords. We shall, how- ever, keep constantly in view those questions of philosophy to which we attach a social significance, and towards whose solution the social co-operates with the religious element. We have here to deal with the question of the nature of God. God is the beginning and the end of all wisdom, say believers in their humility, and the philosopher in all the pride of his knowledge is compelled to assent to this pious axiom. Not Bacon, as we are accustomed to be taught, but Eene Descartes is the father of modern philosophy, and we shall proceed to demonstrate very clearly the degree of affinity between him and German philosophy. Een6 Descartes is a Frenchman, and to great France belongs the fame of the initiative. But great France, the noisy, stirring, talkative land of the French, has never been 6o RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. a fitting abode for philosophy, which perhaps will never flourish on French soil. So assuredly felt Een6 Descartes, who betook himself to Holland, to the peaceful, silent land of track-boats and Dutchmen. Here he wrote his philoso- phical works. Only in that country was it possible for him to free his intellect from traditional formalism, and to construct a complete system of philosophy out of pure thought, indebted neither to faith nor to empiricism — a condition ever since demanded of all true philosophy. Only in such a country could he plunge deeply enough into the intellectual abyss to be able to surprise thought in the ultimate grounds of self-consciousness, and thus establish self-consciousness through the process of thought in the world-famed axiom, Cogito, ergo sum. But perhaps nowhere else than in Holland could Des- cartes have ventured to teach a philosophy that conflicted openly with every tradition of the past. To him is due the honour of having established the autonomy of .philo- sophy : philosophy no longer needed to solicit from theo- logy permission to think for itself ; it could now take its place alongside the latter as an independent science. I do not say in opposition to the latter ; for, in Descartes' time, it was an acknowledged principle that the truths at which we arrive through philosophy are ultimately iden- tical with those transmitted by religion. The. scholastics, as I have already remarked, had, on the contrary, not only conceded to religion the supremacy over philosophy, but had also declared the latter, from the moment it came into conflict with the dogmas of religion, to be mere futile pastime, mere wordy contention. The prime object of the scholastics was to express their thoughts, no matter under what conditions. They said, " Once one is one ; " but they added with a smUe, "yet this is only another error of human reason, which is always at fault when it leads to contradiction of the decisions of the Ecumenical Councils; RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 6i 'Once one is three,' and that is the absolute truth, long since revealed to us in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost ! " The scholastics secretly formed a philosophic opposition to the Church ; publicly, however, they feigned the meekest submissiveness ; in many in- stances they even fought the battles of the Church, and paraded as attendants at its processions, somewhat as the French deputies of the opposition did at the ceremonies of the Eestoration. . The comedy of the scholastics lasted more than six centuries, and it became more and more trivial. In de- stroying scholasticism Descartes likewise destroyed the effete opposition of the Middle Ages ; the old brooms were worn out with long usage, they were too thickly covered with offscourings, and the new age had need of new brooms. After every revolution the former opposition must abdi- cate, otherwise great follies will be perpetrated. We have had experience of such things. In the times of which I speak, it was not so much the Catholic Church herself as her old adversaries, the rearguard of scholasticism, that took up arms against the Cartesian philosophy. For not till 1663 did the Pope anathematise this philosophy. I may presuppose that Frenchmen are sufficiently acquainted with the philosophy of their great countryman, and it is here unnecessary for me to show how two doc- trines, the most directly opposed, have both derived from that phUdsophy. the necessary framework of their systems. I refer to the doctrines of Idealism and Materialism. ■ As these two doctrines have usually been designated, especially in France, Spiritualism and Sensualism, and as I am accustomed to employ these latter terms in a different acceptation, it is necessary, in order to prevent con- fusion of ideas, that I should more clearly define these expressions. Since the earliest times two opposite views have existed 62 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN. GERMANY. regarding the nature of human thought, that is to say, concerning the ultimate sources of intellectual cognition, concerning the origin of ideas. Some hold that we receive ideas only from without, that the mind is merely an empty alembic wherein the impressions gathered in by the senses are elaborated, much as the food we partake of is assimi- lated in the stomach. To employ a better metaphor, this class of thinkers considers the mind as a tabula, rasa, whereon experience is daily writing something new in accordance with certain determined rules of caligraphy. Others, holding the opposite view, assert that ideas are born with man, that the human mind is the primary seat of ideas, and that the external world, experience, and the intermediary senses only bring us to the knowledge of what was already present in the mind, only awaken there the dormant ideas. The former view has received the name of sensualism, sometimes that of empiricism ; the latter has been called spiritualism, sometimes also rationalism. But misconcep- tions may easily result from this nomenclature. Por these two names, spiritualism and sensualism, have for some time been employed to designate two social systems that assert themselves in every manifestation of existence. We assign, then, the name spiritualism to that outrageous assumption of the human spirit, which, striving after ex- . elusive glorification of itself, endeavours to trample under foot, or at least to stultify, matter. We bestow the name sensualism on that opposition, which, revolting against this pretension, has for its aim the rehabilitation of matter and the vindication of the inalienable rights of the senses, without thereby denying to the spirit its rights or even its supremacy. These two systems have stood opposed as far back as human memory can reach. For in all ages are to be found men in whom the capacity for enjoyment is incomplete. RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 63 men witli stunted senses and compunctious frames, for whom all J, the grapes in this garden of God are sour, who see in every paradise-apple the enticing serpent, who seek in abnegation their triumph, and in suffering their sole joy. On the other hand, we find in all ages men of robust growth, natures filled with the pride of life, who fain carry their heads right haughtily; all the stars and the roses greet them with sympathetic smile ; they listen delightedly to the melodies of the nightingale and of Eossini ; they are enamoured of good fortune and of the flesh of Titian's pictures ; and to their hypocritical companions for whom such things are a torment, they answer, in the words of Shakespeare's character, '" Dost thou- think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale ? " * I leave, then, to these two social systems the names Spiritualism and Sensualism. But when speaking of the philosophical opinions regarding the origin of our know- ledge I prefer the terms Idealism and Materialism, desig- nating by the former the doctrine of innate ideas, of ideas a priori, and by the latter the doctrine of cognition through experience, through the senses, the doctrine of ideas a posteriori. It is a very significant fact that the idealistic side of the Cartesian philosophy has never been successfully followed up in Trance. Some celebrated Jansenists pursued for a time this direction ; but they quickly lost themselves in Christian spiritualism. It may have been this circum- stance that brought discredit on idealism amongst the French.' Nations have an instinctive presentiment of what they require in order to fulfil their mission. The * This oharaoteristio paragraph covered ty Dr. Strodtmann, who does not appear in any but the most suggests as the "cause of its omission recent German editions of Heine's that the quotation with which it con- works. Heine had himself deleted eludes is employed in a different ap- it in the original manuscript re- plication further on.' — Tr. 64 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. French were already on the march towards that political revolution which did not break out till the close of the eighteenth century, and for which they had need of a headsman's axe and of a materialistic philosophy equally cold and keen. Christian spiritualism was a combatant in the ranks of their enemies ; sensualism therefore became their natural ally, French sensualists being ordinarily materialists, the erroneous notion came to obtain that sen- sualism was but a product of materialism. ISTo ; sensualism may with equal right claim to be the result of pantheism, and as such it appears beautiful and imposing. Yet we would not seek in the least to detract from the services rendered by French materialism. It was an efficacious antidote against the evil of the past, a desperate remedy for a desperate disease, a sovereign panacea for an infected people. French philosophers chose John Locke as their master ; he was the saviour of whom they had need. His " Essay on the Human Understanding " became their gospel ; they were ready to swear by it. John Locke had gone to the school of Descartes, and from him had learned all that an Englishman can learn — mechanics, analytical method, and the art of reckoning. There was but one thing that he could not understand ; namely, innate ideas. He therefore brought to perfection the doctrine according to which all our knowledge is derived from without by means of experience. He reduced the human mind to a species of calculating machine ; in his hands the whole man became a piece of English mechanism. This also applies to man as constructed by the disciples of Locke, though they sought tp distinguish themselves from their master under various denominations. They had a perfect dread of the ultimate results of their leading principle, and the disciple of Condillac was horror-stricken at being classed in the same category with Helvetius, even with Holbach, or possibly with Lam^trie. Yet such a classifi- . RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 65 cation was inevitable, and I may therefore give to one and all of the French philosophers of the eighteenth century, and to their successors in our time, the name of materialists. Z'homme machine is the most consistent result of French philosophy, and the title of this book betrays it at once as the last word of this conception of the universe. Most of these materialists were also partisans of deism ; for a machine presupposes a mechanician, and the highest perfection of such a machine consists in its capacity for recognising and appreciating the technical skill of such an artificer, as ftisplayed either in its own construction or in his other works. Materialism has fulfilled its mission in France. It is perhaps at the present m'oment busy accomplishing the same task in England ; and it is on the system of Locke that the revolutionary sects in that country, especially the Benthamites, the apostles of utility, take their stand. These latter are men of powerful intellect ; they have pos- sessed themselves of the right lever with which John Bull may be set in motion. John Bull is a born materialist, and his Christian spiritualism is for the most part tradi- tional hypocrisy, or even mere material dulness ; his flesh resigns itself because the spirit does not come to its aid. In Germany it is quite otherwise, and German revolu- tionists deceive themselves in supposing that a material- istic philosophy is favourable to their projects. Germany has always manifested a repugnance towards materialism; hence she remained during a century and a half the true home of idealism., The Germans also went to the school of Descartes, whose great disciple is called Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz. As Locke pursued the materialistic tendency of his master, so Leibnitz followed the idealistic tendency. In Leibnitz we find the doctrine of innate ideas in its most decisive form. In his " Wew Essays on the Human Understanding " he combated the E 66 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. principles of Locke. With Leibnitz there sprang up amongst Germans a great ardour for philosophical studies. He awakened the minds of men, and led them into new paths. On account of the natural suavity, the religious sentiment that animated his writings, his opponents became partially reconciled to the boldness of his views, and the effect was prodigious. The hardihood of this thinker exhibited itself especially in his theory of Monads, one of the most remarkable hypotheses that have ever proceeded from the brain of a philosopher. It is also the best service he has rendered, for it embodies a presenti- ment of the most important laws that have been accepted by modern philosophy. The theory of monads was but a crude method of formulating those laws that are now proclaimed in better formulas by natural philosophers. But here, instead of the word " law," I ought, properly speaking, to employ the word " formula ; " for Newton observes with great truth that what we call law in nature has no real existence, and that it is merely formulas that come to the aid of intelligence as explaining a succession of phenomena in nature. Of all the works of Leibnitz, the "Theodicee" is the one most spoken of in Germany. Yet it is his feeblest production. This book, like several other writings in which Leibnitz expresses his religious sentiments, has obtained for its author an evil reputation, and has caused him to be cruelly misunderstood. His enemies have accused him of maudlin sentimentality and weakness of intellect; his friends, in defending, have proved him an accomplished hypocrite. The character of Leibnitz was for long a subject of controversy amongst us : the most partial critics could not absolve him from the accusation of duplicity; his most eager detractors were the freethinkers and the men of enlightenment. How could they pardon in a philosopher defence of the Trinity, eternal punishment, and the divinity of Christ! Their RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 67 tolerance did not extend so far as that. But Leibnitz was neither fool nor knave, and by the lofty harmOny of his intellect he was well able to defend Christianity in its integrity. I say, in its integrity, for he defended it against semi-Christianity. He established the consistency of the orthodox as opposed to the inconsistency of their adversaries. More than this he never attempted. He thus stood at that point of indifference where diverse systems appear as merely different sides of the same truth. Schelling afterwards acknowledged this standpoint, and Hegel has scientifically established it as a system of systems. In a similar manner Leibnitz engaged in an attempt at a. harmony between Plato and Aristotle. In these latter days the attempt has been often enough renewed. Is the problem solved ? No, assuredly not ! . for this problem is nothing less than an adjustment of the c[uarrel between idealism and materialism. Plato is a thorough idealist and knows only inborn, or rather imth-'hovn ideas ; man brings his ideas with him into the world, and when he becomes conscious of them, they appear to him as recollections of a former state of existence. Hence the vagueness and mysticism of Plato : he merely recollects more or less clearly. With Aristotle, on the contrary, everything is clear, intelligible, certain ; for his cognitions are not reminiscences of a pre- mundane state; he receives everything from experience, and knows how to classify everything in the most precise manner. He stands out therefore as the model for all empiricists ; and the latter cannot sufficiently thank God that He made him the teacher of Alexander, whose con- quests afforded him so many opportunities for the advance- ment of science ; and that his victorious scholar should have presented him with so many thousand talents of gold for zoological researches. The old master employed the money very conscientiously, and was thereby enabled to 68 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. dissect numerous specimens of mammals, and to obtain a great collection of stuffed birds; all which afforded him scope for the most important observations. But the great biped which he had right before his eyes, which he had himself reared, and which was far more remarkable than all the rest of the world-menagerie, he unfortunately over- looked and omitted to investigate. In fact, he has left us totally without information regarding the nature of that youthful king, the wonder and enigma of whose life and deeds still awaken our amazement. What was Alexander ? What sought he ? Was he a madman or a god ? To this day we cannot tell. But Aristotle's information is all the more complete concerning Assyrian quadrupeds, Indian parrots, and Greek tragedies, which latter he also dissected. Plato and Aristotle ! They are not merely the repre- sentatives of two systems, they are the types of two dif- ferent species of humanity, which since time immemorial, under every variety of garb, have stood opposed to each other in more or less hostile attitude. Especially throucrh- out the Middle Ages, and down to our own time, has the conflict been maintained ; and the progress of this conflict forms the essential part of Christian Church history. The talk is always of Plato and Aristotle, though disguised under other names. Dreamy, mystical, Platonic natures find revealed in the depths of their being the Christian idea and its corresponding symbols. Practical, methodical, Aristotelian natures construct out of this idea and its symbols a definite system, a dogma, and a worship. The Church in the end embraces within its pale both classes — the one taking its position as a secular clergy, the other intrenching itself in a monastic life, yet each continuing to wage incessant warfare upon the other. In the Pro- testant Church the same conflict exhibits itself in the schism between pietists and the followers of orthodoxy, who correspond in a certain degree to the mystics and the RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 69 dogmatists of Catholicism. The Protestant pietists are mystics without imagination, and the Protestant orthodox are dogmatists without intelligence. "We find these two Protestant parties engaged in desperate conflict in the time of Leibnitz, whose philosophy after- wards intervened when Christian Wolf, having made him- self master of it, adapted it to the necessities of the time, and, what was of the utmost importance, lectured on it in the German language. But before speaking of this pupil of Leibnitz, of the results of his labours, and of the later destiny of Lutheranism, we must make mention of the providential man who, simultaneously with Locke and Leibnitz, formed himself in the school of Descartes, who was for long regarded with derision and hatred, but who in our day has been raised to the throne of intellectual supremacy. I speak of Benedict Spinoza. One great genius forms itself from another less by assimilation than by friction. One diamond polishes another. Thus the philosophy of Descartes in no sense originated, it merely advanced that of Spinoza. Hence we find in the disciple the method of the master ; this is a great gain. We also find in Spinoza, as in Descartes, a mode of demonstration borrowed from mathematics; this is a grievous fault. The mathematical form gives to Spinoza's writings a harsh exterior. But this is like the hard shell of the almond ; the kernel is all the more agree- able. In reading Spinoza's works we become conscious of a feeling such as pervades us at the sight of great Nature in her most life-like state of repose ; we behold a forest of heaven-reaching thoughts whose blossoming topmost boughs are tossing like waves of the sea, whilst their im- movable stems are rooted in the eternal earth. There is a peculiar, indescribable fragrance about the writings of Spinoza, We seem to breathe in them the air of the future* 70 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. Perhaps the spirit of the Hebrew prophets still hovered over their late^born descendant. There is, withal, an earnestness in him, a self-conscious bearing, a solemn grandeur of thought that certainly seems as though it were inherited; for Spinoza belonged to one of those martyr-families driven into exile by the most Catholic kings of Spain. Added to this was the patience of the Dutchman, which never belies itself either in the life or in the writings of the man. I It is beyond a doubt that the whole course of Spinoza's jlife was free from blame, and pure and spotless as the life of his divine cousin, Jesus Christ. Like him, too, he suffered for his doctrine ; like him he wore the crown of Ithorns. Wherever a great spirit utters its thought, there is Golgotha. Dear reader, if ever thou shouldst visit Amsterdam, bid some cicerone show thee the Spanish synagogue. It is a beautiful building, having its roof resting on four colossal pillars. In the midst stands the pulpit from which was pronounced the curse on the despiser of the Mosaic law, the Hidalgo don Benedict de Spinoza. On such an occa- sion, a buck'S-horn, called the Shofar, was blown. There must be something quite terrible about this horn ; for, as I once read in the life of Solomon Maimon, as the Eabbi of Altona was endeavouring to lead him, the pupil of Kant, back to the old faith, and as he stubbornly persisted in his philosophical heresies, the Eabbi resorted to threats and, holding up the Shofar, inquired in tones of awe, " Know'st thou what this is ? " But when the pupil of Kant replied with calm indifference, " It is the horn of a buck," the horror-stricken Eabbi fell backwards on the ground. At the excommunication of Spinoza there was a solemn accompaniment on this horn ; he was ceremoniously ex- pelled the communion of Israel, and declared unworthy henceforth to bear the name of Jew. His Christian RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 71 enemies were magnanimous enough to leave him the name. But the Jews, the Swiss-guard of Deism, were inexorable, and the spot is still pointed out in front of the Spanish synagogue at Amsterdam where they attempted to stab Spinoza with their long daggers. I could not refrain from drawing special attention to these personal misfortunes of the man. He ' was trained not merely in the lessons of the school, but also in those of life. Herein is he distinguished from most philosophers, • and in his writings we recognise the indirect influence of his life-training. Theology was for him something more than a mere science. So also was politics ; for with this too he made practical acquaintance. The father of his be- trothed was hung for political offences in the Netherlands ; and nowhere else in the world are people so badly hung as in the Netherlands. You have no idea with what pre- parations and ceremonies the operation is accompanied. The delinquent is already dead with ennui, and the spectator has abundant leisure for reflection. I am per- suaded, then, that Benedict Spinoza reflected very deeply on the execution of the old Van Ende, and as previously he had comprehended religion with its daggers, so now he comprehended politics with the cord. Evidence of this is to be found in his " Tractatus Politicus." My task consists merely in pointing out how these phi- losophers come to be more or less nearly related, and I , confine myself to indicating their degrees of relationship and their genealogy. The philosophy of Spinoza, third son of Een6 Descartes, as he enunciates it in his principal work, the " Ethics," is as widely different from the mate- rialism of his brother Locke as from the idealism of his brother Leibnitz. Spinoza does not torment himself with' analytical inquiry into the ultimate grounds of our cogni- tions. He gives us his grand synthesis, his explanation of Deity. 72 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. Benedict Spinoza teaches : there is but one substance, which is God. This one substance is infinite ; it is abso- lute : all finite substances emanate from it, are contained in it, emerge out of it, are submerged in it ; they have only a relative, transient, accidental existence. The absolute substance reveals itself to us as clearly in the form of infinite thought as in the form of infinite extension. These two, infinite thought and infinite extension, are the two attributes of the absolute substance* We recognise only these two attributes; but God, the absolute substance, has perhaps many other attributes that we do not know. " iVoji dico, me Deum omnino cognoscere, sed me gucedam ejus attrihuta, non autem omnia, neque maodmam intelligere partem'.' Nothing but sheer unreason and malice could bestow on such a doctrine the qualification of " atheism." No one Has ever spoken more sublimely of Deity than Spinoza. Instead of saying that he denied God, one might say that he denied man. All finite things are to him but modes of the infinite substance ; all finite substances are contained in God ; the human mind is but a luminous ray of infinite thought ; the human body but an atom of infinite exten- sion : God is the infinite cause of both, of mind and of body, natura naturans. In a letter to Madame du Deffant, Voltaire professes himself quite charmed at a sally of this lady's^ who had said that everything that man cannot know is assuredly of such a nature that it would profit him nothing to know. I might apply this remark to the passage from Spinoza just quoted in his own words, according to which, besides the two knowable attributes of thought and extension, there may pertain to Deity other attributes that cannot be known. What we cannot know has no value for us, at least no value from a social point of view, where it is a question of realising in sensible fact what the intellect RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 73 perceives. In our explanation of the teing of God, we have therefore regard only to these two knowable attri- butes. And, besides, everything that we call attribute of Deity is, after all, but a different form of our intuition, and these different forms are identical in the absolute substance. Thought is, after all, but invisible extension, and extension is but visible thought. Here we come into contact with the leading axiom of the German Philosophy of Identity, which in reality does not differ from the doc- trine of Spinoza. Let Schelling protest as eagerly as he may that his philosophy is something else than Spinozism, that it is rather " a living amalgam of the ideal and the real," that it is distinguishable from Spinozism " as the per- fection of Greek statuary is distinguishable from the rigid Egyptian originals ; " I must none the less emphatically declare that in his first period, at the time when he was still a philosopher, Schelling is not to be distinguished in the slightest degree from Spinoza. He has only taken a different road to arrive at the same philosophy. I have yet to elucidate this when I come to explain how Kant opened up a new path, how Fichte followed him, how Schelling, in pursuing still further the footsteps of Kchte, having gone astray in the gloomy forest of the Philosophy of Nature, at last found himself face to face with the great figure of Benedict Spinoza. The only merit of the modern Philosophy of Nature lies in demonstrating, in the clearest manner, the eternal paral- lelism that exists between spirit and matter. I say spirit and matter, and I employ these expressions as equivalents for what Spinoza calls thought and extension; I also regard these expressions as synonymous with what our German philosophers call spirit and nature, or the ideal and the real. In what follows I shall designate by the word Pan- theism, not so much the system as the point of vieW of 74 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY.' Spinoza. Pantheism, like Deism, assumes the iinity of God ; but the God of the pantheists is in the world itself, not by informing it with his divinity, as St. Augustia endeavoured to explain by comparing God to a great lake and the world to a sponge floating in the middle of it and absorbing Deity : no, the world is not merely God- distended, God-impregnated, it is identical with God. God, called by Spinoza the Sole Substance, and by Ger- man philosophers the Absolute, " is All that is ; " He is matter as weU as spirit, both are equally divine, and he that insults the sanctity of matter is as impious as he that sins against the Holy Ghost. The God of the pantheists, then, is distinguished from the God of the deists by being in the world itself, whereas the latter is outside of, or, what is the same thing, is above the world. The God of deism governs the world from above as an establishment apart from him. It is only with regard to the mode of this government that deists differ among themselves. The Hebrews conceive God as a tyrant armed with thunder ; Christians, as a loving father ; the disciples of Eousseau and the whole Genevese school regard him as a skilful artist, who has fashioned the world somewhat as their fathers constructed watches, and as experienced critics they admire the work and praise the celestial workman. In the eyes of the deist, who assumes an extra-mundane or supra-mundane God, the spirit alone is holy, because he regards it as the divine breath which the Creator of the universe has breathed into the human body, the work of his hands formed of the dust of the earth. Hence the Jews looked on the body as a despicable thing, as the pitiful en- velope of the Bouach hakodasch, of the divine breath, of the spirit ; and to the latter only would they accord considera- tion, reverence, and worship. The Jews are therefore in quite a fecial sense the people of the spirit, chaste, temperate, RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 75 serious, abstract, stiff-necked, fit to be martyrs; and their sublimest flower is Jesus Christ. He is, in the true sense of the word, the incarnate spirit ; and full of deepest signi- ficance is the beautiful legend that he is the offspring of a pure virgin conceived by the sole operation of the Spirit. But if the Jews regarded the body merely with con- tempt. Christians, the Ultras of spiritualism, have gone much farther on the same road, and look upon the body as something to be reprobated, as wicked, as the evil thing itself. Thus, several centuries after the birth of Christ we see a religion arise that will form an eternal subject of astonishment to the historian, and that will compel the shuddering amazement of latest generations. Yes, Christianity is a grand, a holy religion, full of infinite blessedness, a religion that seeks to conquer for the spirit the most absolute domination on earth. But such a religion was far too subjlime, far too pure, far too good for this world, where its idea could only be proclaimed in theory, but could nevel- be realised in practice. The attempt to realise it- has produced in human history an infinite number of heroic deeds, which will afford to poets of all ages ample themes for story and song. But the endeavour to realise the Christian idea has, as we at last come to see, most lamentably failed, and the abortive attempt has cost humanity incalculable sacrifices ; sacri- fices whose calamitous effects are visible in the social dis- temper that afflicts all Europe at the present day. If, as many believe, humanity is still in its adolescence, then Christianity is doubtless one of the most generous illu- sions of youth, though it does far more honour to the heart than to the head. Christianity having abandoned to Csesar and to his Jewish chamberlains matter and all temporal things, contented itself with denying the supre- macy of the former, and with stigmatising the latter in public opinion. But lo ! the detested sword and the 76 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. despised ricHes obtain in the end supreme power, and the representatives of spiritualism are obliged to come to an understanding with them. Yes, and this understanding has even become a mutual alliance. Not the priests of Eome only, but those also of England and of Prussia, in short, all privileged priesthoods have associated them- selves with Csesar and his confederates for the oppression of the peoples. The result of this alliance is but to hasten the overthrow of the religion of spiritualism. A portion of the priesthood already comprehends this, and in order to save religion they assume the pretence of renouncing the pernicious alliance and seek to range themselves in our ranks by adopting our colours. Vain efforts, futile endeavours ! Humanity yearns after more solid food than the symbolic blood and flesh of the Eucharist. Humanity smiles compassionately at the ideals of its youth, that have failed in realisation in spite of all its painful attempts ; and it grows manfully prac- tical. Humanity in our day worships a system of earthly utility ; it has serious thoughts about establishing itself in citizen prosperity, about a reasonably ordered household, about securing comfort for its old age. The thing of prime importance at the moment is its restoration to health, for we still feel a great weakness in all our members ; the holy vampires of the Middle Ages have sucked out of us so much life-blood ! And after this it will still be neces- sary to offer grand expiatory sacrifices to matter, in order to atone for old offences against it. It might even be expedient to institute holy-day revels, arid to indemnify matter for its past sufferings ; for Christianity, unable to annihilate, has on all occasions sought to brincr disgrace upon matter : it has depreciated the noblest delights, the senses have been forced to become hypocritical, and everywhere there has been deceit and sin. We must reclothe women in new chemises and in new sentiments. RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 77 and all our emotions must be passed through a process of disinfection as after having undergone the ravages of a plague. Thus the immediate aim of all our modern institutions is the rehabilitation of matter, its .restoration to former dignity, its moral recognition, its religious sanctification, its reconciliation with . the spirit ; Purusa is re- wedded to Pakriti ; from their violent separation, as the Indian myth so ingeniously symbolises, the great laceration of the world, Evil, has arisen. Can you tell us, then, what the evil of the world signi- fies ? The spiritualists have always made it a reproach against us that, in the pantheistic view, the distinction between good and evil is lost. But evil is in part merely an erroneous conception of the world by the spiritualists ; and in part it is an actual product of their arrangement of mundane affairs. According to their view, matter is in itself an evil thing; which is surely nothing less than a calumny and fearful blasphemy against God. Matter becomes evil only when it is forced into secret conspiracy against the usurpation of the spirit, when it is stigmatised by the spirit and then degrades itself through loss of self- respect, or when with the hatred of despair it avenges itself on the spirit ; and thus evil is a result of the arrange- ment of the world by the spiritualists. God is identical with the world : he manifests himself in plants, which unconsciously live a cosmic-magnetic life ; he manifests himself in animals which, in the dream of their sensuous life, experience an existence more or less torpid. But he manifests himself most gloriously in man, who feels and thinks at the same time, who is capable of distinguishing his own individuality from objective nature, whose intellect already bears within itself the ideas that present themselves to him in the phenomenal world. In man Deity reaches self-consciousness, and this self-con-r. 78 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. sciousness Deity again reveals through raan. But this revelation does not take place in and through individual man, but in and through collective humanity ; and this in such wise that each man comprehends and represents but a portion of the God-universe ; whereas collective humanity comprehends and represents in idea and in reality the whole God-universe. Every nation is perhaps endowed with the mission of recognising and manifesting a portion of this God-universe, of comprehending a series of facts and of realising a series of ideas, and of transmitting the result to succeeding races on whom a like mission is imposed. God is therefore the real hero of universal history : history is but his eternal thought, his eternal action, his word, his deed ; and of entire humanity we may justly say it is an incarnation of God. It is an error to suppose that this religion, Pantheism, leads men to indifference. On the contrary, the conscious- ness of his divinity will inspire man with enthusiasm for its manifestation, and from this moment will the really noble achievements of true heroism glorify the earth. The political revolution, based on the principles of French materialism, will find in the pantheists not opponents but allies ; allies, however, who have drawn their convictions from a deeper source — from a religious synthesis. We promote the welfare of matter, the material happiness of nations, not, like the materialists, from a contempt for the spirit, but because we know that the divinity of man reveals itself also in his corporeal form, that misery destroys or debases the body, God's image, and that thereby the spirit likewise is involved in ruin. The great word of the revo- lution pronounced by St. Just, "Bread is the right of the people," is translated by us, " Bread is the divine right of man." We are fighting not for the human rights of the people, but for the divine rights of humanity. In this and in much else we differ from the men of the revo- RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 79 lution. We do not wish to be ^ans-culottists, nor frugal citizens, nor unassuming presidents ; we are for founding a democracy of terrestrial gods, equal in glory, in blessed- ness, and in sanctity. You demand simple modes of dress, austere morals, and unspiced pleasures ; we, on the con- trary,desire nectar and ambrosia, purple mantles, costly per- fumes, luxury and splendour, dances of laughing nymphs, music and comedies. Be not therefore angry with us, yirtuous republicans ! To your censorious reproaches we reply in the words of Shakespeare's character: — " Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale 1 " The_SaiBt_Simx)ni*ns comprehended and desired some- thing analogous ; but the soil was unfavourable, and they were repressed, for the time at least, by the surrounding, materialism. They have been better appreciated in Ger- many, for Germany is now the fertile soil of pantheism. This is the religion of our greatest thinkers, of our best artists, and in Germany deism, as I shall presently explain, was long ago theoretically destroyed. No one says it, but every one knows it : pantheism is the open secret of Ger- many. We have, in fact, outgrown deism. We are free, and we want no thundering tyrants; we have reached majority and can dispense with paternal care. Neither are we the work of a great mechanician. Deism is a religion for slaves, for children, for Genevese, for watch- makers. Pantheism is the occult religion of Germany, and this result was foreseen by those German writers who, fifty years ago, let loose their zealotry against Spinoza. , The most furious of these adversaries of Spinoza was F. H. Jacobi, who is occasionally honoured by being ranked among German philosophers. He was but a gossiping old woman, disguised in the mantle of philosophy, who, having insinuated himself amongst philosophers, began by whin- 8o RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. ing to them about his affection and his sensibility, and ended by inveighing against reason. His perpetual refrain was, that philosophy, knowledge acquired by reason, was a vain illusion ; that reason herself knew not whither she led ; that she but conducted mankind into a dark labyrinth of error and contradiction ; and that faith alone was their sure guide. Mole ' that he was, he saw not that reason, like the eternal sun, whilst pursuing in the heavens an appointed course, illumines its path with its own rays. Nothing can compare with the fanatical hatred of the little Jacobi towards the great Spinoza. It is curious to observe how the most opposite parties arrayed themselves against Spinoza. The aspect of this army of adversaries is highly amusing. Near a swarm of black and white Capuchins bearing cross and censer, marches the phalanx of the Encyclopsedists, who also take aim at this " daring thinker " (penscur temeraire) ; by the side of the Eabbi of the synagogue of Amsterdam, who sounds the attack with the sacred buck's-horn, ad- vances Arouet de Voltaire playing obligate on the shrill pipe of irony for the benefit of deism ; in the midst whimpers the old woman Jacobi, the sutler of this army of the faith. Let us escape as quickly as possible from this charivari. Keturning from our pantheistic excursion we come back to the Leibnitzian philosophy, of whose ulterior destiny in Germany we have now to speak. In writing his works, which are familiar to you, Leibnitz employed partly the Latin and partly the French language. Christian Wolf is the name of the admirable man who not only systematically taught the ideas of Leibnitz, but did so in the German language. His real merit consists not in having formulated Leibnitzian ideas in' a solid system, still less does it consist in rendering them accessible to a wider public by translation into German : RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 8i his special merit lies in having incited us to philosophise in our mother-tongue. Till Luther's time we were unable to treat of theology except in Latin ; till the time of Wolf we were obliged to philosophise in that language. The example of a few rare scholars, who had previously essayed to teach such subjects in German, led to no re- sult, Yet the literary historian must accord to these few a special eulogy. In particular, we recall John Tauler,^ a Donunican monk, who was born at the beginning of the fourteenth century on the banks of the. Ehine, and died at Strasburg in 1361, He was a pious man, one of that body of mystics whom I have designated the Platonic party of the Middle Ages. In the last years of his life this man, renouncing all pride of learning, was not ashamed to preach in the humble language of the people ; and these sermons, which he committed to writing, as well as Gerinan translations of some of his former homilies in Latin, are to be reckoned amongst the monuments of the German language. For this language already proved itself not only appropriate for metaphysical' investigations, but also far better adapted for this purpose than Latin. This latter, the language of the Eomans, can never belie its origin. It is a language of command for generals ; a language of decree for administrators; an attorney lan- guage for usurers; a lapidary speech for the stone-hard Eoman people. It became the appropriate language of Materialism. Though Christianity, with true Christian patience, tormented itself for more than a thousand years with the attempt to spiritualise this tongue, its efforts remained fruitless ; and when John Tauler sought to fathom the awful abysses of thought, and his heart over- flowed with religious emotion, he was impelled to speak German. His speech is like a mountain spring that wells forth from the granite rock, marvellously impregnated with strange aroma and mysterious metallic virtues. It 83 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. was not, however, till recent times that the rare appro- priateness of German for philosophic purposes became fully apparent. In no other language than in our dear German mother-tongue could Nature have revealed her most intimate secret. Only on the robust oak can the sacred mistletoe thrive. This would indeed be Ihe fitting place to speak of Paracelsus, or, as he styled himself, Aureolus Theophrastus Paracelsus Bombastus of Hohenheim; for he also wrote chiefly in German. But I shall have occasion to speak of him later on from a still more important standpoint. His philosophy was what in our day we call the Philo- sophy of N"ature ; and this doctrine of a nature animated by ideas, so mysteriously according with the spirit of German thought, would have taken root amongst us in the time of Paracelsus, had not the lifeless and mecha- nical theories of the Cartesians, through foreign influence, usurped universal authority. Paracelsus was a greaS charlatan, always tricked himself out in scarlet coat and breeches, red stockings and a red hat, and asserted that he had power to create little men, homunculi ; at any rate he stood on the most familiar footing with the invisible beings that people the various elements. Yet he was also one of the prof oundest of naturalists, who, with an ardour for investigation altogether German, comprehended pre- Christian popular beliefs, German pantheism, and what he did not know he very accurately divined. Of Jacob Bohme I ought also to say something. He too applied the German language to philosophical demon- strations, for which he has been much praised. But I have never yet been able to bring myself to read his works. I do not like being made a fool of. I have, in fact, a suspicion that the panegyrists of this mystic have a desire to mystify the public. As regards the nature of his speculations. Saint Martin has given you a RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 83 taste in French. In England also his works have been translated. Charles I. had so high an opinion of this theoSophical shoemaker that he sent expressly a man of learning to Gorlitz in order to study him. This learned man was more fortunate than his royal master ; for whilst the latter lost his head at Whitehall under Cromwell's axe, the former merely lost his reason at Gorlitz through the theosophy of Jacob Bohme.* As I have said, Christian Wolf first successfully applied the German language to philosophy. His least merit was the reducing to a system and the popularising of Leib- nitzian ideas. In both of these respects he has incurred the gravest censure, a censure that must not be passed over in silence. His systematising was merely a deceptive appearance and the most important element of the philo- sophy of Leibnitz — the best part of the theory of monads — was sacrificed to this appearance. Leibnitz had, it is true, left behind him no systematic edifice, only the necessary ideas towards its construction. It needed the might of a giant to fit together the colossal blocks and columns that a giant had raised from the deep marble quarries of thought and had hewn into symmetrical form. The result might have been a magnificent temple; but Christian Wolf was far too short of stature, and was unable to possess himself of more than a portion of the materials, with which he patched together a miserable tabernacle of deism. Wolf's intellect was more encyclo- psedic than systematic ; he could not comprehend the unity of a doctrine except as a completed whole. He was content with the construction of a cabinet in which the compartments were arranged in the most orderly manner, conveniently fUled, and legibly ticketed. In this way he has given us an Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences. As descended from Descartes through Leibnitz, it is easy to understand that he inherited from his grandfather 84 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. the mathematical form of demonstration. I have already reprobated this mathematical form in Spinoza. In the hands of Wolf it became a source of great mischief; amongst his disciples it degenerated into insufferable methodising and a ludicrous mania for demonstrating everything in mathematical fashion. Thus arose the so- called dogmatism of Wolf. All profound investigation ceased and was replaced by wearisome zeal for perspi- cuity; the philosophy of Wolf became more and more aqueous and finally inundated all Germany. The traces of this deluge are visible even down to our own day, and here and there on our most sterile academical summits may still be found old fossils of the Wolfian school. Christian Wolf was born at Breslau in 1679, and died at Halle in 1754. His intellectual supremacy in German lasted during more than half a century. His relation to German theologians deserves special attention, and a notice of it forms the complement to our sketch of the fate of Lutheranism. No field in the whole history of the Church is more perplexing than the quarrels of Protestant theologians since the Thirty Years' War. They can only be compared with the puerile wranglings of the Byzantines. Yet the latter were less wearisome, for behind them were con- cealed political interests and court intrigues, whereas Protestant polemics were traceable, for -the most part, to the pedantry of narrow-minded dons and freshmen. The universities,' especially Tiibingen, Wittenberg, Leipzic, and Halle, are the arenas of these theological combats. The two parties, whom we have seen contending in Catholic costume throughout the entire Middle. Ages — the Platonists and the Aristotelians — have merely changed their mode of dress, and continue to wrangle as before. These are the pietists and the orthodox, of whom I have already spoken, and whom I designated as mystics without imagi- RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 85 nation and as dogmatists without intelligence* Philipp Jakob Spener* was the Scotus Erigena of Protestantism j and as the latter, by his translation of the legendary Dionysius the Areopagite, became the founder of Catholic mysticism, the former by his Conventicles for Edification, Collegia pietatis,irom. which, perhaps, the name "Pietists" stQl remains amongst his followers, founded Protestant piet- ism. He was a godly man, — reverence be to his memory. A Berlin Pietist, F. Horn, has written an excellent bio- graphy of him. The life of Spener was an incessant martyr- dom for the Christian idea. In this respect he was pre- eminent among his contemporaries. He enforced the merits of godliness and good works ; he was a preacher of the spirit rather than of the word. His homilies are very laudable, considering his time ; for, all theology, as taught in the universities just mentioned, consisted in mere strait-laced dogmatism and hair-splitting polemic : exe- gesis and the study of Church history were completely ignored. One of Spener's pupils, Hermann Pranke, began to lecture at Leipzic after the example and method of his teacher. He read in German, a merit we are always ready to acknowledge with gratitude. The approbation with which these lectures were received excited the envy of his colleagues, and thus caused much bitterness in the life of our poor Pietist. Obliged to quit the field, he betook himself to Halle, where he taught Christianity by word and deed. His memory is there imperishable, for he was the founder of the Orphan Institute of HaUe. The university of Halle soon became the headquarters of the * In all the German editions, manner in which his works were and even in the latest edition of the printed ; and his letters to Campe, Trench version, the founder of the the publisher, are full of reproaches Pietists is erroneously called Jo- on the subject. Collegia pietaiis is Jlannes Spener. Heine had frequent transformed in all the editions into occasion to complain of the careless CoUoguia pietatis. — Tb. 86 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. Pietists, who were called " the Sect of the Orphanage " (" Waisenhauspartei "). Let it be said, in passing, that this sect flourishes there till the present day; Halle is stm the mole-hill of the Pietists, whose quarrels with the rationalist Protestants created but a few years ago a scandal that became noised abroad throughout the whole of Germany. Happy Frenchmen, who have heard ' nothing of all this ! You have remained ignorant of even the existence of those tattling evangelical journals in which the pious fishwives of the Protestant Church so lustily abused one another. Happy Frenchmen, who can form no idea of the malice, the pettiness, the bitterness with which our evangelical clergy can traduce one another ! You know that I am no partisan of Catholicism. In the present state of my religious convictions there stUl survives, not indeed the dogmatism, but the spirit of Pro- testantism.* I still retain, therefore, my partiality for the Protestant Church ; and yet must I honestly confess that nowhere in the annals of the Papacy have I discovered anything so contemptible as might be found in "The Berlin Evangelical Church Eecord" during the progress of this quarrel, j^he most dastardly knavery of the monks, the meanest intijigues of the cloister, are noble and gene- rous compared to the Christian exploits of our pietist and orthodox Protestants during their combat with the hated Eationalists. You Frenchmen have no idea of the hatred * In the French Tersion the fol- Protestantism consists in the fact lowing is substituted for this sen- that I was inscribed as an evangelical tence : — " Protestantism was for me Christian in the church registers of more than a religion, it was a mis- the Lutheran communion. But a sion ; and for fourteen years I have secret predUeotion for the cause in been fighting in its interests against which we formerly fought and suf- the machinations of the German fered always continues to nestle in Jesuits. My sympathy for dogma our hearts, and my present religious has, it is true, of late become ex- convictions are still animated by the tinguished, and I have frankly de- spirit of Protestantism."— Tb. clared in my writings that my whole RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 87 that is displayed on such, occasions ; for the Germans are more vindictive than the peoples of Latin origin. The reason is, they are idealists even in their hatred. We do not hate each other as you French do about outward things, because of wounded vanity, on account of an epigram, or of an unre turned visiting-card ; no, we hate in our enemies the deepest, most vital possession they have, their thought. As in your love so> in your hatred, you French are hasty, superficial. We Germans hate , thoroughly, lastingly. Too honest, perhaps too unskilful, to revenge ourselves by speedy perfidy, we hate till our last breath. " I have had experience, sir, of this German tranquillity," said a lady to me not long ago, regarding me at the same time with a look of open-eyed incredulity and horror; " I know that in your language you employ the same word for begging pardon and for poisoning." And indeed she was right,' the word vergeben has this twofold meaning. It was, if I mistake not, the orthodox of Halle who, in their disputes with the Pietist refugees, called to their assistance the philosophy of Wolf ; for religion when it can no longer burn us comes to beg from us an alms. Yet all our gifts profit it but little. The mantle of mathe- matical demonstration in which Wolf affectionately in- vested poor Eeligion fitted her so badly that she felt more straitened than before, and made herself very ridiculous through her discomfort. ■ Weak seams gave way at all points. Original sin especially showed itself in its most glaring nakedness. No logical fig-leaf could avail it anything. Christian-Lutheran original sin and Leibnitz- Wolfian optimism are incompatible. French persiflage, at the expense of optimism, was therefore the least displease ing to our theologians. Voltaire's wit came to the aid of original sin, but the German Pangloss lost much by the overthrow of optimism, and he searched long for a doc- trine equally consoling until the Hegelian axiom, " All 83 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. that is, is reasonable ! " afforded him some slight com- pensation. From the moment that a religion solicits the aid of philosophy its ruin is inevitable. In the attempt at defence it prates itself into destruction. Eeligion, like every absolutism, must not seek to justify itiself. Prome- theus is bound to the rock by a silent force. Yea, ^schyltis permits not personified power to utter a single word. It must remain mute. The moment that a religion ventures to print a catechism supported by arguments, the moment that a political absolutism publishes an oflBcial news- paper, both are near their end. But therein consists our triumph : we have brought our adversaries to speech, and they must reckon with us. It is certainly indisputable that religious, as well as political, absolutism has found powerful organs of expres- sions. Still do not let this alarm us. If the word lives, it may be carried by dwarfs ; if it is dead, no giant can hold it upright. Now, as I have just said, since Religion took to seeking aid from philosophy, German scholars, besides the pro- viding of new garments, have made all sorts of experi- ments with her. They conceived the idea of bestowing oh her a new youth, and they attempted this somewhat after the manner of Medea with the old king iEson. First a vein was opened and all superstitious blood allowed to trickle slowly out. To speak without meta- phor, an endeavour was made to empty Christianity of all historical content, and thus leave nothing but morality. , By this process Christianity was reduced to pure deism. Christ ceased to be co-regent with God ; he was in a sense mediatised, and only as a private 'person did becoming reverence continue to be paid him. His moral character was extolled beyond measure, nor could eulogy strong enough be found to express what an excellent man he RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 89 must have teen. As regards the miracles he wrought, they were either explained according to physical theories, or people made as little to do' as possible about them. Miracles, said some, were necessary in those superstitious times, and a sensible man having a truth of any kind to proclaim, made use of miracles as an advertisement. Those theologians that sought entirely to eliminate the historical element from Christianity were called Eation- alists, and upon them was poured out the wrath alike of Pietists and of the Orthodox. These sects are now less hostile to one another, and frequently even become con- federates. "What Christian love could not do was effected by a common hatred — hatred towards the Eationalists. This tendency in Protestant theology * began with the peaceful Semler, whom you do not know, rose to a dis- quieting height with the 'clear-sighted Teller, whom also . you do not know, and reached its culminating point with the shallow-brained Bahrdt, in the loss of whose acquaint- ance you have nothing to regret. The strongest impetus came from Berlin, where ruled Frederick the Great, and bookseller Nicolai. As regards the first^crowned Materialisru — you are sufficiently informed. You know that he composed French verses, played very well on the flute, won the battle of Rossbach, was a prodigious snuffer, and believed in nothing but cannon. Some of you have doubtless visited Sans-Souci, and the old pensioner who attends at the castle has pointed out to you in the library the French novels which Frederick when crown prince used to read in church, and which he caused to be bound in black morocco in order that his stern father might suppose him to be reading the Lutheran hymnal. Ye know him, that royal worldly-wise-man, whom you have named the Solomon of the North. France was the Ophir of this northern * The French version has, " This reform of Protestant theology." — Te. go RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. Solomon, -whence he obtained his poets and philosophers, for whom he cherished great favour, just like the Solomon of the South, who, as we read in the tenth chapter of the First Book of Kings, got his friend Hiram to bring from Ophir whole shiploads of gold and silver, ivory, poets, and philosophers* This preference for foreign talent certainly hindered Frederick the Great from gaining any consider- able influence over the German spirit. On the contrary, he insulted and wounded German national feeling. The contempt shown by him for our literature cannot but offend us the descendants of these writers. Except old Gellert none of them had reason to enjoy any mark of Frederick's most gracious favour. Gellert's interview with him is remarkable. But if Frederick the Great jeered at lis without offer- ing to protect us, so much the more did we receive the protection of bookseller Nicolai, without having on that account any scruple about scoffing at him. This man was during his whole life incessantly active for the welfare of his country. He spared neither money nor pains where he hoped to further a good cause ; and yet never has any one in Germany been so cruelly, so unre- lentingly, so utterly ridiculed as this same man. Although we, the later-born, know right well that old Nicolai, the friend of enlightenment, was in the main in the right ; though we know that it was chiefly our own enemies, the Obscurantists, that quizzed him to death, yet we cannot think of him with perfectly grave faces. Old Mcolai tried to do in Germany what the French philosophers had done in France : he endeavoured to destroy the past in * In the Trench' version Heine elephantornm, et simias et pavos." here quotes the Vulgate : " Classis For the " apes and peacocks," sought regis per mare cum olasse Hiram after by the wise king, Heine sub- semel per tres annos ibat, deferens stitutes (French) " poets and philo- inde aurum et argentum, et dentes sophers." — Te. RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 91 the spirit of the people ; a praiseworthy preparatory task, without which no radical revolution is possible. But in vain ; he was not robust enough for such a labour. The old ruins still stood too securely, and the phantom of the past arose out of them, and mocked his efforts ; then, losing his temper, he struck blindly at them, and the spec- tators laughed as the bats whizzed about his ears and got entangled in his powdered wig. Sometimes it happened that he mistook windmills for giants, . and valiantly attacked them. But it fared worse with him when he mistook real giants for windmills, — a Wolfgang Goethe for example. He wrote a satire on Werther in which he utterly misapprehended its author's intentions. Yet, after all, he was right in the main. If he did not exactly understand Goethe's real object in Werther, he at least comprehended very clearly the tendency of ■ that work — the effeminate dreaminess, the barren sentimentality it brought into vogue, which were in complete contradic- tion to every rational feeling of which we stood in need. Here Nicolai was entirely at one with Lessing, who wrote to a friend the following estimate of Werther : — " In order that such an impassioned production may not be the means of producing more evil than good, do you not think it should have been provided with a short but very chilling epilogue, a few hints as to the causes -that produced in Werther such a strange character, a contrast with some other young man on whom nature had bestowed a like temperament but who has power to over- rule it ? Do you suppose that a Greek or Eoman youth would ever have killed himself in such a manner and from the same cause ? Assuredly not. The latter knew how to protect themselves in quite a different fashioh from the extravagancies of love. It was reserved for Christianity, which can so beautifully transform a phy- .sicaL necessity into a spiritual perfection, to give birth to 92 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. eccentricities at once so mean ' and so great, so con- temptible and so estimable. And so, dear Goethe, let us have a short concluding chapter, and the more cynical the better." The -worthy Mcolai has actually given us an edition of Werther amended in accordance with this suggestion. In. this version the hero does not commit suicide, but only smudges himself with chicken blood; for the pistol, instead of being charged with lead, is loaded with nothing more deadly than a blood-clot. Werther renders himself ridiculous, continues to live, marries Charlotte, in short, ends even more tragically than in Goethe's original. " The Universal German Library " was the name of the journal founded by ISTicolai, wherein he and his friends did battle with superstition, the Jesuits, the court lackeys, &c. It cannot be denied that many a blow aimed at superstition unfortunately fell on poetry. It was thus, for example, that Nicolai made war on the nascent en- thusiasm for old German popular poetry, and in the main here again he was right ; for these songs, with all possible excellences, contained many reminiscences that were unseasonable; these old strains, the ranz des vaches oi the Middle Ages, had power to entice back the sensibilities of people to the cowshed's of the past. Like Ulysses, he tried to stop the ears of his companions that they might not hear the song of the Syrens, heedless whether hence- forth they remained deaf also to the innocent warbling of the nightingale. In order radically to clear the soil of the present from old weeds, this practical man concerned himself little whether with the weeds he also uprooted the flowers. Bat the party of the flowers and the night- ingales, with all that belonged to that party, beauty, grace, wit, and pleasantry, indignantly rose up against him, and poor Nicolai had to succumb. In our day circumstances in Germany are changed, and RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 93 the party of the flowers and the nightingales is intimately allied with the revolution. The future belongs to us, and already the rosy morn of victory begins to dawn. If ever this beautiful day should shed its light over the whole Fatherland, then shall we call to mind the dead ; we shall think of thee too, old Nicolai, poor martyr of reason ! We shall bear thy ashes to the German pantheon in the midst of a triumphant procession accompanied by a choir of music, and amongst the wind instruments shall certainly be no shrill fife ; we shall lay upon thy bier a befitting crown of laurel, and as we perform this act we shall do our utmost not to smile. As it is my desire to give an idea of the philosophic and religious condition of those times, I must here refer to the thinkers who laboured at Berlin in more or less intimate association with Nicolai, and who occupied a sort of mean between philosophy and polite literature. They had no special system, only a special tendency. They resembled the English moralists as to their style and in their first principles. They wrote without observing strict scientific form ; and moral consciousness was the sole origin of their knowledge. Their tendency is precisely that which we. find in the French philanthropists. In religion they are rationalists, in politics cosmopolitans ; in morals they are men, noble and virtuous men, severe towards themselves, indulgent towards others. In respect of talent, Mendels- sohn, Sulzer, Abt, Moritz, Garve, Engel, and Blester may be named as the most distinguished amongst them. I have a peculiar liking for Moritz ; he did good service in experimental psychology; his artlessness was charming, though but little appreciated by his friends ; his memoirs • form one of the most remarkable landmarks of the time. Mendelssohn,* however, has a social significance far be- * For what is by far the best cessible to English readers, we are account of Moses Mendelssohn ac- indebted to " German Life and Lite- 94 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. yond all the others. He was the reformer of the German Israelites, his co-religionists ; he destroyed the authority of the Talmud; he founded pure Mosaism. This man, whom his contemporaries called the German Socrates, and whom they so reverently admired for his nobility of soul and force of intellect, was the son of a poor sacristan of the synagogue at Dessau. In addition to this misfortune of birth, Providence sent him into the world hunchbacked, as if to teach the rabble in a striking manner that men are to be judged, not by their external appearance, but by their intrinsic worth. Or, did Providence allot him a hunchback in order that he might ascribe many an insult of the rabble to a misfortune for which a wise man readily consoles himself ? As Luther had overthrown the Papacy, so Mendelssohn overthrew the Talmud; and he did so after the same fashion, namely, by rejecting tradition, by declaring the Bible to be the source of religion, and by translating the most important part of it. By these means he shattered Judaic, as Luther had shattered Christian, Catholicism ; for the Talmud is, in fact, the Catholicism of the Jews. It is a Gothic cathedral, overladen no doubt with childish and superfluous ornament, yet awakening Our astonish- ment by its heaven- aspiring, gigantic proportions. It is a hierarchy of religious laws, often relating to the most fanciful and ridiculous subtilties, but so ingeniously superimposed and subordinated, each part sustaining and supporting another, and so terribly consistent as to form an awe-inspiring, colossal whole. Christian Catholicism once overthrown, the Catholicism rature in a Series of Biographical besides accurate biography, con- Studies," by Alexander Hay Japp, tains much sound criticism, and the LL.D. Marshall, Japp, & Co., Lon- author's enthusiasm for his subject don. No better introduction to the never betrays him into mere hero- study of modern German literature worship. — Te. could be desired. Dr. Japp's book, RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 95 of the Jews, the Talmud, must also succumb: for the Talmud had henceforth lost its significance; it served merely as a bulwark against Eome, and it enabled the Jews to offer as heroic a resistance to Christian Eome as formerly they had offered to Pagan Eome. And they have not only resisted ; they have been victorious. The poor Eabbi of Nazareth over whose dying head the Pagan Eoman inscribed the scoffing words, " King of the Jews," even this King of the Jews in mockery, thorn-crowned ' and clad in ironical purple, became at last the God of the Eomans, and before him they had to bend the knee ! As heathen Eome had been, so Christian Eome was van- quished and has even become tributary. If you have a mind, dear reader, to betake yourself on one of the first days of the quarter to the Eue Laffitte, No. 15, you will there see a lumbering carriage draw up before the high door- way, and from it steps down a stout man. He mounts a staircase leading to a small room in which is seated a younger fair-haired man, though he is really older than he looks — a man with the distinguished, negligent air of k grand seigneur, underlying which, however, there is something so solid, so positive, so absolute, that he might be thought to have all the world's wealth in his pocket. And truly he has aU the world's wealth in his pocket, for his name is Mr. James Eothschild, and the stout man is Monsignor Grimbaldi, legate of his holiness the Pope, in whose name he brings the interest on the Eoman loan, the tribute of Eome. Of what use, now, fhe Talmud ? Moses Mendelssohn, then, deserves the highest praise for having destroyed in Germany, at any rate, Jewish Catholicism ; for what is superfluous is injurious. But in rejecting tradition he endeavoured to maintain as a reli- gious duty the Mosaic ceremonial law. "Was this timidity or was it prudence? Was it the sorrowful constraint of 96 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. lingering affection that forbade his laying destructive hands on objects that had been the most sacred in the eye's of his forefathers, and for which so much blood and so many martyr tears had flowed ? I do not believe it. Like the sovereigns of material kingdoms, the sovereigns of the spirit must harden their hearts against family affec- tions; and on the throne of thought men dare not give Way to tender sensibilities. I am much rather of opinion therefore that Moses Mendelssohn saw in pure Mosaism an institution that might serve as a last intrenchment of deism ; for deism was his inmost faith, his most profound conviction. When his friend Lessing died and was accused of Spinozism, he defended him with the most anxious zeal, and fretted himself to death over the accu- sation. I have already, for the second time, mentioned a name that no German can pronounce without waking in his bosom an echo more or less loud. Since Luther, Germany has produced no greater, no better man than Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. These two men are our pride and our joy. Amidst the gloom of this present time we look upwards towards these consoling figures, and they beckon to us with signs of glorious promise. Yea, the third man will also come, who will complete what Luther began, what Lessing carried forward, and of whom the German Fatherland has such dire need, the third emancipator ! I see already the gleam of his golden armour shining through his imperial purple mantle, like the sun through the ruddy dawn ! Like Luther's, Lessing's work consisted not merely in positive achievement, but in rousing to its very depths the German nation, and in giving a beneficial impulse to intellectual movement- by his criticism and by his polemic. Lessing was the living criticism of his time, and his whole life was a polemic. His criticism made RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 97 itself felt throughout the whole range of thought and of feeling — in religion, in science, in art ; his polemic over- came every adversary and waxed stronger with every victory. As he himself avowed, conflict was necessary to his mental development. He resembled the legendary Norman, who inherited the talents, the skill, and the vigour of the enemies slain by him in combat, and thus at last became endowed with every possible advantage and excel- lence. We may well suppose that such an unwearied champion caused no small stir in Germany, in that tran- quil Germany where, in those days, an even greater Sabbath stiUness reigned than in our time. The majority were struck dumb by such literary daring. But his hardihood stood Lessing in good stead; for to dare is the secret of success in literature as well as in revolution and in love. Lessing's sword inspired terror in every breast ; no head was secure from its strokes. Yea, he struck off many a skull out of pure wantonness, and then was malicious enough to pick it up again and to show the public that it was quite empty. Him whom he could 'not reach with the sword of his logic he slew with the arrows of his wit. Priends admired the gay feathers with which his arrows were winged; enemies felt their points rankling in their breasts. Lessing's wit had nothing in common with that playfulness, that gaiety, those bounding sallies that French- men so well know. His wit was no little French spaniel chasing its own shadow ; it was more like a great German tomcat playing with a mouse before strangling it. Polemic was truly Lessing's delight, and therefore he never considered very attentively whether his opponent was worthy of him. Thus it comes that by his polemic many a name has been snatched from well-merited obli- vion. He has enveloped with the most spiritual irony, with the most delicious humour, not a few paltry scribblers, who are preserved for all future time in Lessing's works, G 98 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. like insects embedded in a piece of amber. In the act of putting Ms adversaries to death he has bestowed on them immortality. Who amongst us would ever have heard anything of that Klotz on whom Lessing lavished so much derision and acumen ? The granite blocks that he hurled dojvn upon this miserable antiquary, and with which he crushed him to atoms, form an indestructible monument to the object of his satire. It is remarkable that this man, the most redoubtable wit in Germany, was also our most honest man. There is nothing comparable to his love of truth. He would not grant the slightest concession to a lie, even though by doing so, after the manner of the wise men of the world, he might promote the triumph of truth. He dared do everything for the truth except lie. Whoever, he once said, supposes that he may bring truth to market under all sorts of artifices and disguises, may indeed be the pander, biit he has never been the lover, of truth. The admirable saying of Buffon, " The style is the man himself," finds in Lessing its best exemplification. His manner of writing is, like his character, truthful, firm, without ornament, beautiful and imposing by reason of inherent strength. His style is altogether like that of Eoman architecture ; it combines the greatest solidity with greatest simplicity ; the sentences rest one upon another like blocks of square-hewn masonry. As for the latter the law of gravity, so in Lessing's writings logical sequence, is the invisible binding power. In his prose, therefore, there are but few of those redundancies and artificial turns of expression which we employ as mortar in the construction of our periods. Still less do we find in it any of those caryatides of thought which you French caU la helle phrase. That such a man as Lessing could never be happy you will readily understand. Even though he had not loved truth, RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 99 though he had not obstinately defended it on all occasions, he would still have been unhappy, for he was a genius. Men will forgive you everything, said a poet lately, with a sigh: they will forgive you wealth, they will forgive you noble birth, they will forgive you a handsome form, they will even admit that you are talented ; but they are inexorable in their enmity towards genius. And alas ! even though it encounter no malignant enemy from with- out, genius will be sure to find within itself an enemy ready to bring calamity upon it. This is why the history of great men is always a martyrology ; when they are not sufferers for the great human race, they suffer for their own greatness, for the grand manner of their being, for their hatred of phUistinism, for the discomfort they feel amidst the pretentious commonplaces, the mean trivialities of their surroundings — a discomfort that readily leads them to extravagances, to the playhouse, for example, or even to the gambling-house, as happened to poor Lessing. But evil rumour could find no other reproach to lay to his charge than this, and all we learn from his biography on the subject is, that pretty, actresses seemed to him more amusing than Hamburg clergymen, and that mute cards afforded him better entertainment than the prating of Wolfian philosophers. It is heartrending to read in his biography how fate denied this man every source of joy, and would not even permit him to find solace in the peace of family life at the close of his daily conflicts. Once only did fortune appear desirous of smiling on him by bestowing on him a beloved wife and a child. Yet this joy was but as the sunbeam that gilds the wing of a bird in passing flight. Even as quickly did it disappear. His wife died from the effects of her confinement, and his child -immediately after its birth. Of his child he wrote to a friend those words of bitter irony : — , loo RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. " My joy was but brief, and I lost him with such regret, this son ! For he showed so much intelligence — so much intelligence ! Do not suppose that my few hours of paternity had already made me an ape of a father. I know what I say. Did it not show intelligence on his part that they had to bring him into the world by means of iron forceps, and that he so quickly perceived what a troublous world it is? Was it not intelligence that caused him to seize the first opportunity of making his escape out of it again ? I too wanted for once to be as highly favoured as other men; but I have come badly out of it." There was one misfortune about which Leasing never spoke to his friends : this was his terrible isolation, his intellectual solitariness. A few of his contemporaries loved him; none understood him. Mendelssohn, his dearest friend, defended him with zeal against the charge of Spinozism. Defence and zeal were as ridiculous as they were superfluous. Eest in peace in thy grave, old Moses! Thy Lessing was indeed on the highroad to- wards that dreadful heresy, that pitiful misfortune called Spinozism ; but the Almighty, the Father in heaven, saved him through death at the right moment. Eest in peace ! thy Lessing was no Spinozist, as calumny asserted; he died a good deist, like thyself, and Nicolai, and Teller, and " The Universal German Library " ! Lessing was but the prophet pointing out the way from the second to the third Testament. I have called him the continuator of Luther, and it is specially in this rel0,tion that I have now to speak of him. Of his importance as influencing German art I shall afterwards deal. In art, not merely by his criticism but also by his example, he effected a wholesome reform, and this side of his activity is the one usually illustrated and brought into prominence. We, however, regard him from. another standpoint, and his RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. loi pWlosophical and theological contests are of more import- ance to us than his dramaturgy and his dramas. Yet the latter, like all his writings, have a social significance, and " Nathan the Wise " is in reality not only a good comedy but also a philosophico-theological treatise in favour of pure deism. Art was for Lessing also a tribune, and when thrust from the pulpit or driven from the philosopher's chair, he sprang upon the boards of the theatre and spoke there in still plainer language, and gained a still more numerous audience. I say that Lessing continued the work of Luther. After Luther had emancipated us from the power of tradition and set up the Bible as the only source of Christianity, there arose a frigid literalism, and the letter of the Bible became as great a tyranny as tradition had formerly been. From this tyranny of the letter Lessing was our great liberator. As Luther was certainly not alone in the combat with tradition, so Lessing was not indeed the only, though by far the most valiant, combatant of the letter. It is in this conflict that his battle-cry resounds most loudly; it is here that he wields his sword with most vigorous delight, and it is a sword that flashes and slays. But it is here also that he is most sorely beset by the black phalanx, and in the midst of such straits he once cried out : — " sancta simplicitas ! But I have not yet come to the place where the good man who thus exclaimed could utter only this exclamation. (These were the words pronounced at the stake by John Huss.) We must first be heard ; we must first be judged by those who can and will hear and judge us. " Oh, that he might do so, he whom I would most gladly have as my judge I Luther! thou great misunderstood man ! and misunderstood by none more than by those ob- stinate ones who, with thy shoes in their hand, clamorous 102 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. but indifferent, go jogging along the road thou hast opened for them ! Thou hast redeemed us from the bondage of tradition : who shall redeem us from the more intolerable bondage of the letter ? Who shaU at length bring to us a Christianity such as thou wouldst teach to-day, such as Christ himself would teach ? " Yes, the letter, said Lessing, is the last husk that en- velops Christianity, and only after its destruction will the spirit of Christianity stand revealed. This spirit, however, is nothing else than what the philosophy of Wolf undertook to demonstrate, what philanthropists feel in their hearts, what Mendelssohn found in Mosaism, what Preemasons have chanted, what poets have sung, what was in Lessing's day making itself felt under every variety of form throughout Germany — pure Deism. Lessing died at Brunswick in 1781, misunderstood, hated, and decried. In the same year appeared at Konigs- berg Immanuel Kant's " Critique of Pure Eeason." With this book (which through a singular delay did not become generally known till the close of the decade) there begins in Germany an intellectual revolution which offers the most striking' analogies to the material revolution in France, and which must to the deeper thinkers appear of at least as great importance as the latter. It developed itself in the same phases, and between both revolutions there exists the most remarkable parallelism. On each side of the Ehine we see the same breach with the past ; all respect for tradition is withdrawn. As here, in France, every privilege, so there, in Germany, every thought, must justify itself ; as here, the monarchy, the keystone of the old social edifice, so there, deism, the keystone of the old intellectual regime, falls from its place. Of this catastrophe, the 21st of January,* for deism, we shall speak in the concluding part of this volume. * Louis XVI. was beheaded on the 21st of January 1793, — Tb. RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 103 A peculiar awe, a mysterious piety, forbids our writing more to-day. Our heart is full of shuddering compassion : it is the old Jehovah himself that is preparing for death. "We have known him so well from his cradle in Egypt, where he was reared among the 'divine calves and crocodiles, the sacred onions, ibises, and cats. We have seen him bid farewell to these companions of his childhood and to the obelisks and sphinxes of his native Nile, to become in Palestine a little god-king amidst a poor shepherd people, and to inhabit a temple-palace of his own. We have seen him later coming into contact with Assyrian-Baby- lonian civilisation, renouncing his all-too-human passions, no longer giving vent to fierce wrath and vengeance, at least no longer thundering at every trifle. We have seen him migrate to Eome, the capital, where he abjures all national prejudices and proclaims the celestial equality of all nations, and with such fine phrases establishes an op- position to the old Jupiter, and intrigues ceaselessly till he attains supreme authority, and from the Capitol rules the city and the world, urbem et orhem. We have seen how, growing still more spiritualised, he becomes a loving father, a universal friend of man, a benefactor of the world, a philanthropist ; but all this could avail him nothing ! Hear ye not the bells resounding ? Kneel down. They are bringing the sacraments to a dying god! PART THIRD. It is related that an English mechanician, who had already invented the most ingenious machines, at last took it into his head to construct a man ; and that he succeeded. The work of his hands deported itself and acted quite like a human heing ; it even contained within its leathern breast a sort of apparatus of human sentiment, differing not greatly from the habitual sentiments of Englishmen; it could conimunicate its emotions by articulate sounds, and the noise of wheels in its interior, of springs and escape- ments, which was distinctly audible, reproduced the genuine English pronunciation. This automaton, in short, was an accomplished gentleman, and nothing was wanting to render it completely human except a soul. But the English mecha- nician had not the power to bestow on his work this soul, a.nd the poor creature, having become conscious of its imperfection, tormented its creator day and night with supplication for a soul. This request, daily repeated with growing urgency, became at last so insupportable to the poor artist that he took to flight in order to escape from his own masterpiece. But the automaton also took the mail coach, pursued him over the whole continent, travelled incessantly at his heels, frequently overtook him, and then gnashed and growled in his ears. Give me a soul ! These two figures may now be met with in every country, and he only who knows their peculiar relationship to each other can comprehend their unwonted haste and their haggard io6 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. anxiety. But as soon as we are made aware of their strange relationship, we at once discover in them something of a general character ; we see how one portion of the English people is becoming weary of its mechanical existence, and is demanding a soul, whilst the other portion, tormented by such a request, is driven about in all directions, and that neither of them can endure matters at home any longer. The story is a terrible one. It is a fearful thing when the bodies we have created demand of us a soul ; but it is a far more dreadful, more terrible, more awful thing when we have created a soul, to hear that soul demanding of us a body, and to behold it pursuing us with this demand. The thought to which we have given birth is such a soul, and it leaves us no rest until we have endowed it with a body, until we have given it sensible reality. Thought strives to become action, the word to become flesh, and, marvellous to relate, man, like God in the Bible, needs only to express his thought and the world takes form; there is light or darkness ; the waters separate themselves from the dry land ; or it may even be that wild beasts are brought forth. The -^^orld is the sign-manual of the word. Mark this, ye proud men of action : ye are nothing but unconscious hodmen of the men of thought who, often in humblest stillness, have appointed you your inevitable task. Maximilian Eobespierre was merely the hand of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the bloody hand that drew from the womb of time the body whose soul Eousseau had created. May not the restless anxiety that troubled the life of Jean Jacques have caused such stirrings within him that he already foreboded the kind of accoucheur that was needed to bring his thought living into the world ? * Old Fontenelle may have been right when he said : " If * This paragraph is wanting in the French version, — Tb. RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 107 I held all the truths of the -universe in my hand, I would be very careful not to open it." I, for my part, think otherwise. If I held all the truths of the world in my hand, I might perhaps beseech you instantly to cut off that hand ; but, in any case, I should not long hold it closed. I was not born to be a gaoler of thoughts; by Heaven! I would set them free. What though they were to incarnate themselves in the most hazardous realities, what though they were to range through all lands like a mad bacchanalian procession, what though they were to crush with iheir thyrsus our most innocent flowers, what though they were to invade our hospitals ,and chase from his bed the old sick world — my heart would bleed, no doubt, and I myself would suffer hurt thereby ! For alas ! I too am part' of this old sick world, and the poet says truly, one may, mock at his crutches yet not be able to walk any better for that. I am the most grievously sick of you all, and am the more to be pitied since I know what health is ; but you do not know it, you whom I envy ; you are capable of dying without perceiving your dying condition. Yea, many of you are already long since dead, though maintaining that your real life is just beginning. When I try to dispel such a delusion, then you are angry with me and rail at me, and, more horrible still, the dead rush upon and mock at me, and more loathsome to me than their insults is the smell of their putrefaction. Hence, ye spectres ! I am about to speak of a man whose mere name has the might of an exorcism; I speak. of Immanuel Kant. It is said that night-wandering spirits are filled with terror at sight of the headsman's axe. With what mighty fear, then, must they be stricken when there is held up to them Kant's " Critique of Pure Eeason " ! This is the sword that slew deism in Germany. To speak frankly, you Trench have been tame and moderate compared with us Germans. At most, you could io8 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. but kill a king, and he had already lost his head before you guillotined him. Por accompaniment to such deed you must needs cause such a dramming and shrieking and stamping of feet that the whole universe trembled. To compare Maximilian Eobespierre with Immanuel Kant is to confer too high an honour upon the former. Maxi- milian Eobespierre, the great citizen of the Eue Saint Honore, had, it is true, his sudden attacks of destructive- ness when it was a question of the monarchy, and his frame was violently convulsed when the fit of regicidal epilepsy was on ; but as soon as it came to be a question about the Supreme Being, he wiped the white froth from his lips, washed the blood from his hands, donned his blue Sunday coat with, silver buttons, and stuck a nosegay in the bosom of his broad vest. The history of Immanuel Kant's life is difficult to por- tray, for he had neither life nor history. He led a mecha- nical, regular, almost abstract bachelor existence in a little retired street of Konigsberg, an old town on the north- eastern frontier of Germany. I do not believe that the great clock of the cathedral performed in a more passion- less and methodical manner its daily routine than did its townsman, Immanuel Kant. Eising in the morning, coffee-drinking, writing, reading lectures, dining, walking, everything had its appointed time, and the neighbours knew that it was exactly half-past three o'clock when Immanuel Kant stepped forth from his house in his grey, tight-fitting coat, with his- Spanish cane in Ms hand, and betook himself to the little linden avenue called after him to this day the " Philosopher's Walk." Summer and winter he walked up and down it eight times, and when the weather was dull or heavy clouds prognosticated rain, the townspeople beheld his servant, the old Lampe, trudg- ing anxiously behind him with a big umbrella under his arm, like an image of Providence. RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 109 What a strange contrast did this man's outward life present to his destructive, -world-annihilating thoughts ! In sooth, had the citizens of Konigsberg had the least presentiment of the full significance of his ideas, they would have felt a far more awful dread at the presence of this man than at the sight of an executioner, who can but kUl the body. But the worthy folk saw in him nothing more than a Professor of Philosophy, and as he passed at his customary hour, they greeted him in a friendly manner and set their watches by him. But though Immanuel Kant, the arch-destroyer in the realm of thought, far surpassed in terrorism Maximilian Eobespierre, he had' many similarities with the latter, which induce a comparison between the two men. In the first place, we find in both the same inexorable, keen, poesyless, sober integrity. We likewise find in both the same talent of suspicion, only that in the one it mani- fested itself in the direction of thought and was called criticism, whilst in the other it was, directed against man- kind and was styled republican virtue. But both pre- sented in the highest degree the type of the narrow-minded citizen. Nature had destined them for weighing out coffee and sugar, but fate decided that they shpuld weigh out other things, and into the scales of the one it laid a king, into the scales of the other a God. . . . And they both gave the correct weight ! The " Critique of Pure Eeason " is Kant's principal work ; and as none of his other writings is of equal im- portance, in speaking of it we must give it the right of preference. This book appeared in 1781, but, as already said, did not become generally known till 1789. At the time of its publication it was quite overlooked, except for two insignificant notices, and it was not till a later period that public attention was directed to this great book by the articles of Schiitz, Schultz, and Eeinhold. The cause no RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. • of this tardy recognition undoubtedly lay in the unusual form and bad style in which the work is written. As regards his style, Kant merits severer censure than any other philosopher, more especially when we compare this with his former and better manner of writing. The recently published collection of his minor works contains his first attempts, and we are surprised to find in these an excellent and often very witty style. These little treatises were trilled forth while their author ruminated over his great work. There is a gleefulness about them like that of a soldier tranquilly arming for a combat in which he promises himself certain victory. Especially remarkable amongst them are his " Universal Natural History ■ and Theory of the Heavens," composed as early as 1/55 ; " Ob- servations on the Emotions of the Sublime and Beautiful," written ten years later; and " Dreams of a Ghostseer," full of admirable humour after the manner of the French essay. Kant's wit as displayed in these pamphlets is of quite a peculiar sort. The wit clings to the thought, and in spite of its tenuity is thus enabled to reach a satis- factory height. Without such support wit, be it ever so robust, cannot be successful; like a vine- tendril wanting a prop, it can only creep along the ground to rot there with all its most precious fruits. But why did Kant write his " Critique of Pure Eeason " in such a colourless, dry, packing-paper style ? I fancy that, having rejected the mathematical form of the Cartesio- Leibnitzo-Wolfian school, he feared that science might lose something of its dignity by expressing itself in light, attractive, and agreeable tones. He therefore gave it a stiff, abstract form, which coldly repelled all familiarity on the part of intellects of the lower order. He wished haughtily to separate himself from the popular philosophers of his time, who aimed at the most citizen-like "clearness, and so clothed his thoughts in a courtly and frigid official RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY, in dialect. Herein lie shows himself a true philistine. But it might also be that Kant needed for the carefully measured march of his ideas a language similarly precise, and that he was not in a position to create a better. It is only genius that has a, new word for a new thought. Immanuel Kant, however, was no genius. Conscious of this defect, Kant, like the worthy Maximilian, showed himself all the more mistrustful of genius, and went so far as to maintain, in his " Critique of the Faculty of Judgment," that genius has no business with scientific thought, and that its action ought to be relegated to the domain of art. The heavy, buckram style of Kant's chief work has been the source of much mischief ; for brainless imitators aped him in his external form, and hence arose amongst us the superstition that no one can be a philosopher who writes well. The mathematical form, however, could not, after the days of Kant, reappear in philosophy ; he has mercilessly passed sentence of death upon it in his "Critique of Pure Eeason." The mathematical form in philosophy, he says, is good for nothing save the building of houses of cards, in the same way that the philosophic form in mathematics produces nothing but twaddle, for in philosophy there can be no definitions such as those in mathematics, where the definitions are not dispursive but intuitive, that is to say, capable of being demon- strated by inspection ; whilst what are called definitions in philosophy are only tentatively, hypothetically put forth, the real definition appearing only at the close, as result. How comes it that philosophers display so strong a predilection for the mathematical form ? This predilec- tion dates from the time of Pythagoras, who designated the principles of things by numbers. This was the idea of a genius : all that is sensible and finite is stripped off 112 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. in a number, and yet it denotes something determined, and the relation of this thing to another determined thing, which last, designated in turn by a number, re- ceives the same insensible and infinite character. In this respect numbers resemble ideas that preserve the same character and relation to one another. We can indicate by numbers in a very striking manner ideas, as they are produced in our mind and in nature ; but the number still remains the sign of the idea, it is not the idea itself. The master is always conscious of this distinction, but the scholar forgets it, and transmits to other scholars at second hand merely a numerical hieroglyph, dead ciphers, which are repeated with parrotrlike scholastic pride, hut of which the living significance is lost. This applies likewise to the other methods of mathematical demonstration. The intellect in its eternal mobility suffers no arrest ; and just as little can it be fixed down by lines, triangles, squares, and circles, as by numbers. Thought can neither be calculated nor measured. As my chief duty is to facilitate in France the study of German philosophy, I always dwell most strongly on the external difficulties that are apt to dismay a stranger who has not already been made aware of them. I would draw the special attention of those who desire to make Frenchmen acquainted with Kant to the fact, that it is possible to abstract from his philosophy that portion which serves merely to refute the absurdities of the Wolfian philosophy. This polemic, constantly reappear- ing, will only tend to produce confusion in the minds of Frenchmen, and can be of no utility to them. The "Critique of Pure Eeason" is, as I have said, Kant's principal work, and his oth^r writings are in a measure superfluous, or may at least be considered as commentaries. The social importance that attaches to his chief work will be apparent from what follows. RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 113 The philosophers who preceded Kant reflected, doubt- less, on the origin of our cognitions, and followed, as we have seen, two different routes, according to their view of ideas as a priori or as a posteriori ; but concerning the faculty of knowing, concerning the extent and limits of this faculty, they occupied themselves less. Now this was the task that Kant set before himself ; he submitted the faculty of knowing to a merciless investigation, he sounded all the depths of this faculty, he ascertained all its limits. In this investigation he certainly discovered that about many things, wherewith formerly we supposed ourselves to be most intimately acquainted, we can know nothing. This was very mortifying; but it has always been useful to know of what things we can know nothing. He who warns us against a useless journey performs as great a service for us as he who ' points out to us the true path. Kant proves to us that we know nothing about things as they are in and by themselves, but that we have a knowledge of them only in so far as they are .reflected in our minds. We are therefore just like the prisoners of whose condition Plato draws such an afflicting picture in the seventh book of his Eepublic. These wretched beings, chained neck and thigh in such a manner that they cannot turn their heads about, are seated within a roofless prison, into which there comes from above a certain amount of light. This light, however, is the light from a fire, the flame of which rises up behind them, and indeed is separated from them only by a little wall. Along the outer side of this wall are walking men bearing all sorts of statues, images in wood and stone, and con- versing with one another. Now the poor prisoners can see nothing of these men, who are not tall enough to overtop the wall ; and of the statues, which rise above the wall, they see only the shadows flitting along the side of the wall opposite them. The shadows, however, they take H 114 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. for real objects, and, deceived by the echo of their prison, believe that it is the shadows that are conversing. With the appearance of Kant former systems of philo- sophy, which had merely sniffed about the external aspect of things, assembling and classifying their characteristics, ceased to exist. Kant led investigation back to the human intellect, and inquired wiiat the latter had to reveal. Not' without reason, therefore, did he compare his philosophy to the method of Copernicus. Formerly, when men con- ceived the world as standing still, and the sun as revolv- ing round it, astronomical calculations failed to agree accurately. But when Copernicus made the sun stand still and the earth revolve round it, behold ! everything accorded admirably. So formerly reason, like the sun, moved round the universe of phenomena, and sought to throw light upon it. But Kant bade reason, the sun, stand still, and the universe of phenomena now turns round, and is illuminated the moment it comes within the region of the intellectual orb. These few words regarding the task that presented itself to Kant will suffice to show that I consider that section of his book wherein he treats of phenomena and noumena as the most important part, as the central point, of his philo- sophy. Kant, in effect, distinguishes between the appear- ances of things and things themselves. As we can ktiow nothing of objects except in so far as they manifest them- selves to us through their appearance, and as objects do not exhibit themselves to us as they are in and by them- selves, Kant gives the name phenomena to objects as they appear to us, and noumena to objects as they are in themselves. We know things, therefore, only as pheno- mena ; we cannot know them as noumena. The latter are purely problematic ; we can neither say that they exist nor that they do not exist. The word noumena has been correlated with the word phenomena merely to enable us. RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 115 to speak of things in so far as they are cognisable by uSj without occupying our judgment about things that are not cognisable by us. Kant did not therefore, as do many teachers whom I will not name, make a distinction of objects into phenomena and noumena, into things that for us exist and into things that for us do not exist. This would be an Irish bull in pliilosophy. He wished merely to express a notion of limitation. God, according to Kant, is a noumen. . As a result of his argument, this ideal and transcendental being, hitherto called God, is a mere fiction.* It has arisen from a natural illusion. Kant shows that we can know nothing regarding this noumen, regarding God, and that all reason- able proof of his . existence is impossible. The words of Dante, " Leave all hope behind ! " may be inscribed over this portion of the " Critique of Pure Reason." My readers will, I think, gladly exempt me from at- tempting a popular elucidation of that portion of his work in which Kant treats " of the arguments of speculative reason in favour of the existence of a Supreme Being." Although the formal refutation of ■ these arguments occu- pies but a small space, and is not taken in hand till the second part of the book is reached, there is already a very evident intention of leading up to this refutation, which forms one of the main points of the work. It connects itself with the " Critique of all Speculative Theology," wherein the last phantoms of deism are put to iiight. I cannot help remarking that Kant, in attacking the three principal kinds of evidence in favour of the existence of God, namely, the ontological, the cosmological, and the physico-theological, whilst successful, according to my ' opinion, in refuting the latter two, fails with regard to the first. I am not aware whether the above terms are under- stood in this country, and I therefore quote the passage * In the i^rench version, " is only an assumption."^ — Te. Ii6 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. from the " Critique of Pure Eeason " in which Kant for- mulates the distinction between them. " There are but three kinds of proof possible to specu- lative reason of the existence of God. All the routes that may be selected with this end in view start, either from definite experience and the peculiar properties of the external world, as revealed by experience, and ascend from it according to the laws of causality up to the supreme cause above the world ; or, they rest merely on an indefi- nite experience, as, for example, on an existence or being of some kind or other ; or, lastly, they make an abstraction from all experience, and arrive at a conclusion entirely a priori from pure ideas of the existence of the supreme cause. The first of these is the physico.-theological proof, the second the cosmological, and the third the ontological. Other proofs there are none, nor can other proofs exist." After repeated and careful study of Kant's chief work, I fancied myself able to recognise everywhere visible in it his polemic against these proofs of the existence of God ; and of this polemic I might speak at greater length were I not restrained by a religious sentiment. The mere discussion by any one of the existence of God causes me to feel a strange disquietude, an uneasy dread such as I once experienced in visiting New Bedlam in London, when, for a moment losing sight of my guide, I was sur- rounded by madmen. " God is all that is," and doubt of His existence is doubt of life itself, it is death. The more blameworthy any dispute regarding the exist- ence of God may be, the more praiseworthy is meditation on the nature of God. Such meditation is a true worship of God ; the soul is thereby detached from the perishable and finite, and attains to consciousness of innate love and of the harmony of the universe. It is this consciousness that sends a thrill through the heart of the emotional man in the act of prayer or in the contemplation of the sacred RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 117 symbols'; and the thinker realises this holy fervour in the exercise of that sublime faculty of the mind called reason, a faculty whose highest function is to inquire into the nature of God. Men of specially religious temperament concern themselves with this problem from childhood upwards; they are mysteriously troubled about it even at the first dawnings of reason.* The author of these pages is most joyfully conscious of having possessed this early primitive religious feeling, and it has never forsaken him. God was always the beginning and the end of all my thoughts. If I now inquire: What is God? what is his nature? — as a little child I had already inquired: How is God ? what is he like ? In that childish time I could gaze upwards at the sky during whole days, and . was sadly vexed at evening because I never caught a glimpse of God's most holy countenance, but saw only the grey silly grimaces of the clouds. I was quite puzzled over the astronomical lore with which in the " enlighten- ment period " even the youngest children were tormented^ and there was no end to my amazement on learning that all those thousand mUlions of stars were spheres as large and as beautiful as our own earth, and that over all this glitter- ing throng of worlds a single God ruled. I recollect once seeing God in a dream far above in the most distant firmament. He was looking contentedly oixt of a little window in the sky, a devout hoary-headed being with a small Jewish beard, and he was scattering forth myriads of seed-corns, which, as they fell from heaven, burst open in the infinitude of space, and expanded to vast dimen- sions till they became actual, radiant, blossoming, peopled worlds, each one as large as our own globe. I could never forget this countenance, and often in dreams I used to see the cheerful-looking old man sprinkling forth the * The remainder of this paragraph, with the first two sentences of the succeeding one, is omitted in the French version. — Tb. ii8 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. world-seeds from his little window in the sky; once I even saw him clucking like our maid when she threw down for the hens their barley. I could only see how the falling seed-corns expanded into great shining orbs ; but the great hens that may by chance have been waiting about with eager open bills to be fed with the falling orbs I could not see. You smile, dear reader, at the notion of the big hens. Yet this childish notion is not so very different from the view of the most advanced deists. In the attempt to provide a conception of an extra-mundane God, orient and Occident have exhausted themselves in hyperbole. The imagination of deists has, however, vainly tormented itself with the infinitude of time and space. It is here that their impotence, the inadequacy of their cosmology, and the untenableness of their explanation of the nature of God becomes fully apparent. We are not greatly dis- tressed, therefore, at beholding the subversion of their explanation. Kant has actually wrought this affliction upon them by refuting their demonstration of the exist- ence of God. Nor would the vindication of the ontological proof specially benefit deism, for this proof is equally available for pantheism. To render my meaning more intelligible, I may remark that the ontological proof is the one em- ployed by Descartes, and that long before his time, in the Middle Ages, Anselm of Canterbury had expressed it in the form of an affecting prayer. Indeed, St. Augustin may be said to have already made use of the ontological proof in the second book of his work, " De Libero Arbi- trio." , I refrain, as I have said, from all popular discussioq of Kant's polemic against these proofs. Let it suffice to give an assurance that since his time deism has vanished from the realm of speculative reason. It may, perhaps, be RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 119 several centuries yet before this melancholy notice of decease gets universally bruited about ; we, however, have long since put on mourning. De Profundis ! ' You fancy, then, that we may now go home! By my life, no ! there is yet a piece to be played ; after the tragedy comes the farce. Up to this point Immanuel Kant has pursued the path of inexorable philosophy ; he has stormed heaven and put the whole garrison to the edge of the sword; the ontological, cosmological, and physico-theological bodyguards lie there lifeless; Deity itself, deprived of demonstration, has succumbed ; there is now no All-mercifulness, no fatherly kindness, no other- world reward for renunciation in this world, the immorta- lity of the soul lies in its last agony— you can hear its groans and death-rattle ; and old Lampe is standing by with his umbrella under his arm, an afflicted spectator of the scene, tea:5s and sweat-drops of terror dropping from his countenance. Then Immanuel Kant relents- and shows that he is not merely a great philosopher but also a good man; he reflects, and half good-naturedly, half ironically, he says : " Old Lampe must have a God, otherwise the poor fellow can never be happy. Now, man ought to be happy in this world ; practical reason says so;— wesll, I am quite willing that practical reason should also guarantee the existence of G-od." As the result of this argument, Kant distinguishes between the theoretical reason and the practical reason, and by means 'of the latter, as with a magician's wand, he revivifies deism, which theoretical reason had killed. But is it not conceivable that Kant brought about this resurrection, not merely for the sake of old Lampe,- b'at tlirough fear of the police ? Or did he act from sincere conviction ? Was not his object in destroying aU evidence for the existence of God to show us how embarrassing it might be to know nothing about God ? In doing so, he :i2o RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. acted almost as sagely as a Westphalian friend of mine, •who smashed all the lanterns in the Grohnder Street in Gottingen, and then proceeded to deliver to us in the dark a long lecture on the practical necessity of lanterns, which he had theoretically broken in order to show how, without them, we could see nothing. I have already said that on its appearance the " Critique of Pure Eeason " did not cause the slightest sensation, and it was not till several years later, after certain clear-sighted philosophers had written elucidations of it, that public attention was aroused regarding the book. In the year 1789, however, nothing else was talked of in Germany but the philosophy of Kant, about which were poured forth in abundance commentaries, chrestomathies, interpretations, estimates, apologies, and so forth. We need only glance through the first philosophic catalogue at hand, and the innumerable works having reference to Kant will amply testify to the intellectual movement that originated with this single man. In some it exhibited itself as an ardent enthusiasm, in others as an acrid loathing, in many as a gaping curiosity regarding the result of this intellectual revolution. We had popular riots in the world of thought, just as you had in the material world, and over the demoli- tion of ancient dogmatism we grew as excited as you did at the storming of the Bastille. There was also but a handful of old pensioners left for the defence of dogmatism, that is, the philosophy of Wolf. It was a revolution, and one not wanting in horrors. Amongst the party of the past, the really good Christians showed least indignation at these horrors. Yea, they desired even greater, in order that the measure of iniquity might be full, and the counter-revolution be more speedily accomplished as a necessary reaction. We had pessimists in philosophy as you had in politics. As in France there were people who maintained that Eobespierre was the agent of Pitt, with us RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 121 there were many who went so far in their wilful blindness as to persuade themselves that Kant was in secret alliance with them, and that he had destroyed all philosophic proofs of the existence of God merely in order to convince the world that man can never arrive at a knowledge of God by the help of reason, and must therefore hold to revealed religion. Kant brought about this great intellectual movement less by the subject-matter of his writings than by the critical spirit that pervaded them, a spirit that now began to force its way into all sciences. It laid hold of all constituted authority. Even poetry did not escape its influence. Schiller, for example, was a strong Kantist, and his artistic views are impregnated with the spirit of the philosophy of Kant. By reason of its dry, abstract character, this philosophy was eminently hurtful to polite literature and the fine arts, Fortunately it did not inter- fere in the art of cookery. The German people is not easily set in motion ; but let it be once forced into any path and it will follow it to its termination with the most dogged perseverance. Thus we exhibited our character in matters of religion, thus also we now acted in philosophy. Shall we continue to advance as consistently in politics? Germany was drawn into the path of philosophy by Kant, and philosophy became a national cause. A brilliant troop of great thinkers suddenly sprang up on German soil, as if called into being by magical art. If German philosophy should some day find, as the French revolution has found, its Thiers and its Mignet, its history will afford as remarkable, reading as the works of these authors. Germans will study it with pride, and Frenchmen with admiration. Among the followers of Kant, John Gottlieb Fichte soon rose into pre-eminence. 122 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. I almost despair of being able to convey an accurate impression of this man. In the case of Kant we had merely a book to examine ; but here, besides the book, we have to take account of the man. In this man thought and purpose are one, and in this splendid unity they affect the contemporary world. We have therefore to investi- gate not a philosophy merely, but also the type by which that philosophy is conditioned, and in order thoroughly to comprehend this twofold influence we should have to pass in review the situation of this epoch. What a wide- reaching task ! We shall, no doubt, be readily excused for offering merely an imperfect outline. At the outset there iS' the greatest difficulty in stating explicitly the nature of Fichte's ideas. We have here to encounter peculiar obstacles, obstacles connected not only with the subject - matter but also with the form and method of its presentation — two things with which we are specially desirous of making foreigners accLuainted. Let us begin, then, with the method of Fichte. At first he borrowed the method of Kant, but it soon underwent a change, resulting from the nature of the subject. Kant had merely to produce a critique, that is to say, some- thing negative ; whilst Fichte had by and by to develop a system, that is, something positive. This want of a defi- nite system in the philosophy of Kant was the reason why it was sometimes refused the name philosophy. As regards Immanuel Kant himself, there was justice in this ; but not as regards the Kantists, who constructed from Kant's propositions quite a sufficient number of definite systems. In his earlier writings, Fichte remained, as I have said, quite faithful to the method of his master, so much so that his first treatise, which was published anonymously, was attributed to Kant. But when Fichte afterwards produced a system he was seized with an ardent and per- sistent passion for construction, and after constructing the RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 123 universe he sets about demonstrating, in all its aspects, with the same ardour and persistency, that which he has constructed. Whether constructing or demonstrating, Fichte manifests, so to speak, an abstract passion. As in his system, so, soon afterwards in his exposition, subjec- tivity is dominant. Kant, on the other hand, stretches out thought before him, analyses it, dissects it down to its minutest fibrils, and his " Critique of Pure Eeason " is a kind of anatomical theatre of the human intellect ; he himself, however, stands by, cold and insensible, like a true surgeon. The form of Kchte's writings resembles his method ; it is living, but it has also all the faults of life : it is restless and confused. That he may always remain thoroughly animated, Fichte disdains the customary terminology of philosophers, which seems to him a dead thing ; but the effect of this is to make him still less comprehensible. About intelligibility in general he had quite a peculiar caprice. As long as Eeinhold was of the same opinion with him, Fichte declared that no one understood him better than Eeinhold. But when the latter differed from him in opinion, Fichte declared that he had never been understood by him. When he himself took a different view from Kant, he had it put in print that Kant did not understand himself. I am here touching upon the comical aspect of our philosophers, who are perpetually lamenting that they are misunderstood. When Hegel was lying on liis deathbed, he said : " Only one man has understood me," but shortly afterwards he added fretfully : " And even he did not understand me."' Considered as to its substance, its intrinsic value, the philosophy of Fichte is of no great significance. It has afforded society no result. Only in so far as it exhibits above all other systems one of the most remarkable phases of German philosophy, only in so far as it attests the 124 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. sterility of idealism in its last Consequences, and only in so far as it forms the necessary transition to the philosophy of our day, does the substance of Fichte's doctrine possess a certain interest. This doctrine, being then of more im- portance in an historical and scientific than in a social aspect, I shall merely indicate it in a few words. The question proposed by Fichte is, "What grounds have we for assuming that our conceptions of objects* correspond with objects external to us ? And to this question he offers the solution : All things have reality only in our mind. The " Critique of Pure Eeason " was Kant's chief work, the " Theory of Knowledge " * was the chief work of Fichte. The latter book is a kind of continuation, of the former. The " Theory of Knowledge " likewise refers the intellect back to itself. But where Kant analyses, Fichte constructs. The " Theory of Knowledge " opens with an abstract formula (1 = 1); it re-creates the world out of the recesses of mind ; it fits the disjointed parts together again ; intelligence retraces its steps over the road it had travelled towards abstraction till it regains the world of phenomena. Thereafter reason is .enabled to declare the phenomenal world to be a necessary operation of intelli- gence. The philosophy of Fichte also presents the peculiar difficulty that it requires the mind to observe itself in the midst of its activity; the Ugo is to investigate its own intellectual acts during the process of thinking ; thought is to play the spy on itself whilst it thinks, whilst it grows gradually warmer until at last it is boiling. This opera- tion reminds us of the monkey seated on the hearth before a copper kettle cooking its own tail; for it is of opinion that the true art of cookery consists not merely in the objective act of cooking, but also in the subjective consciousness of the.proce'ss of cookino-. RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 125 It is a singular circumstance that the philosophy of Tichte has always had to endure much from satire. I once saw a caricature representing a Fichtean goose. The poor bird has a liver so large that it no longer knows whether it is goose or liver. On its belly is inscribed /-/. Jean Paul has most wickedly quizzed the Fichtean philosophy in a book entitled Clavis Fichfeana. That idealism pursued to its ultimate consequences should end by denying even the reality of matter seemed, to the great mass of the public, to be carrying the joke too far. We grew rather merry over the Fichtean Ego, which produced by its mere thinking the whole external world. The laughter of our wits was increased through a misappre- hension that became too popular to permit of my passing it over in silence. The great mass really supposed that the Fgo of Fichte was the Ego of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and that this iadividual Ego implied a negation of all other existences. What an impertinence ! exclaimed the worthy folk ; this fellow does not believe that we exist, we who are much more corpulent than himself, and who, as burgomasters and bailiffs, are actually his superiors ! The ladies inquired. Does he not at least believe in the existence of his wife ? No ! And Madam Fichte suffers this! The Ego of Fichte, however, is not the individual but the universal Ego, the world-Ego awakened to self-con- sciousness. The Fichtean process of thought is not the thinking act of an individual, of a certain person called Johann Gottlieb Fichte ; it is rather the universal thought manifesting itself in an individual. As we say, " It rains," " it lightens," and so on ; so Fichte ought not to say, " I think," but, "it thinks," "the universal world-thought thinks in me." In a parallel between the French revolution and Ger- man philosophy I once compared, more in jest than in 126 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. earnest, Fichte to Napoleon. But there are, in fact, certain remarkable analogies between them. After the Kantists had accomplished their work of terrorism and destruction, richte appeared, as Napoleon appeared after the Conven- tion had demolished the whole past by the help of another sort of Critique of Pure Eeason. Napoleon and Fichte represent the great inexorable Ego for which thought and action are one ; and the colossal structures raised by both men testify to a colossal will. But through the bound- lessness of this will their structures soon fall to the ground, and both the " Theory of Knowledge " and the Empire crumble to pieces and disappear as quickly as they were reared. The Empire is now nothing more than matter of history, but the commotion caused by the emperor in the world has not yet calmed down, and from this commotion our present Europe draws its vitality. It is the same with the philosophy of Fichte ; it has completely perished, but men's minds are still agitated by the thoughts that found a voice in Fichte, and the after-effect of his teaching is incalculable. Even supposing all transcendental idealism to be an error, still the writings of Eichte are animated by a proud independence, by a love of liberty, by a virile dignity that have exercised, especially on the young, a wholesome influence. The Ego of Eichte was in complete accord with his inflexible, stubborn, stern character. The notion of an Ego so all-powerful could perhaps germinate only in such a character, and such a character intertwin- ing its roots about such a doctrine could not but become more inflexible, more stubborn, more stern. "With what aversion must this man have been reo^arded by aimless sceptics, by frivolous ecclectics, and by mode- rates of all shades ! His whole life was a combat. The story of his youth, like that of almost all our distinguished men, is the record of a series of afflictions. Poverty sits RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 127 by their cradle and, rocks them up to manhood, and this meagre, nurse remains their faithful companion through life. Nothing is more touching than the sight of the proud- willed Fichte struggling miserably through the world by the aid of tutorship. Nor can he obtain even thus the bitter bread of servitude in his own country, but has to migrate to Warsaw. There the old story repeats itself ; the tutor displeases the gracious lady of the house, or perhaps only the ungracious lady's-maid. He cannot scrape a leg with sufficient gentility, is not French enough, and is no longer judged worthy to superintend the educa- tion of a young Polish squire. Johann Gottlieb Fichte is dismissed like a lackey, receives from his dissatisfied master hardly the rneagre expenses of his journey, leaves Warsaw and betakes himself, full of youthful enthusiasm, to Konigsberg, in order to make the acquaintance of Kant. The meeting of these two men is in every respect note- worthy. Perhaps I can present no clearer idea of their everyday life and circumstances than by citing a frag- ment from Fichte's journal, to be found in a biography of him, recently published by his son.* . " On the twenty- fifth of June I set out for Konigsberg with a carrier of this town, and arrived there, without experiencing any remarkable incident, on the first of July. The fourth. — Visited Kant, who did not, however, receive me with any special distinction, I attended his lecture as an invited stranger, and again my expectation was- dis- appointed. His delivery is drowsy. Meantime I have begun this journal. " I have long felt a desire for a more serious interview with Kant, but could find no means of bringing this about. At last I hit upon the plan of writing a ' Critique of all * " Eiohte's Life and Literary Correspondence," by Immanuel Hermann yon Fiohte, published in 1 830-1 8.3 1 .-:-Tb. 128 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. Eevelation,' and of presenting it to him instead of a lettfer of introduction. I made a beginning with it about the thirteenth, and have since worked at it without inter- mission. — On the eighteenth of August I at last sent my finished work to Kant, and on the twenty-fifth paid him a visit in order to hear his opinion of it. He received me with the most marked kindness, and appeared very well satisfied with my dissertation. We did not come to any close philosophical discourse. With regard to my philo- sophical doubts, he referred me to his ' Critique of Pure Eeason,' and to the court chaplain, Schulz, whom I shall at once find out. On the twenty-sixth I dined with Kant in the company of Professor Sommer, and I found Kant to be a very pleasant and very intellectual man. I now for the first time recognised in him traits worthy of the great intellect that has found embodiment in his writings. — " On the twenty-seventh I brought this journal to a close, after completing the excerpts from Kant's lectures on anthropology, lent to me by Herr von S. I also make a resolution henceforth regularly to continue this journal every evening before going to bed, and to record therein everything of interest that occurs to me, but especially noting all characteristic traits and observations. — "The twenty-eighth; evening. Yesterday I began to revise my Critique, and fell upon right good and- profound ideas, which, however, made me unhappily conscious that my first ^treatment of the subject was exceedingly super- ficial. To-day I was desirous of continuing the new line of investigation, but found myself so carried away by my imagination that I have not been able to do anything all day. In my present position this is, unfortunately, not to be wondered at. I have calculated that, counting from to-day, my means of subsistence wiU not suffice me here for more than fourteen days. I have, it is true, already RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 129 experienced the like embarrassment, but it was in my own country; and, besides, with increase of years and a more acute sense of honour, the case is always a harder one. I have formed no resolution, nor can form any. To Pastor Borowski, to whom Kant addressed me, I shall not reveal my situation : if I reveal it to any one, it will be to no other than to Kant himself. " On the twenty-ninth I visited Borowski, in whom I found a truly good and honourable man. He made me a proposal of a situation, but it is not yet quite an assured •one ; and besides, it is one for which 1 have no great liking. At the same time, by his frankness of manner he extorted from me the admission that it was urgent for me to obtain an appointment. He advised me to see Professor W . Work has been an impossibility for me. On the following day I did in fact caU on W , and afterwards visited the court chaplain, Schulz. The prospects held out by the former are very uncertain ; stiU he spoke- of a tutorship in Courland, which certainly nothing but the direst neces- sity will induce me to accept ! Later, I went to the house of the court chaplain, where I was at first received by his wife. Her husband by and by appeared, but he was absorbed in mathematical circles. Afterwards, when he understood more distidctly who I was, Kant's recom- mendation rendered him very friendly. He has an angular Prussian countenance, but the very spirit of loyalty and good-heartedness shines through its features. I also made the acquaintance at his house of Herr Braun- lich, and of his charge, Count Danhof, of Herr Biittner, the court chaplain's nephew, and of a young savant of Niirnberg, Herr Ehrhard, a youth of good and excellent parts, though wanting in manners and without knowledge of the world. " On the first of September I formed a decided resolu- tion, which I wished to communicate to Kant. A situa- 1 130 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. tion as tutor, however regretfully I might be obliged to accept it, is not to be had, and the uncertainty of my position hinders me from working with freedom of mind, and from profiting by the instructive intercourse of my friends. I must away, then, back to my own country! The small loan of which I stand in need for this purpose may perhaps be obtained through the mediation of Kant ; but as I was in the act of going to him with the object of declaring my intention, courage failed me. I decided to write to him. For the evening I was invited to the house of the court chaplain, where I spent a very pleasant evening. On the second I finished my letter to Kant and despatched it." Despite the remarkableness of this letter, I cannot bring myself to give it here. I fancy the red blopd is mounting to my cheeks, and I feel as though I were relating in the presence of strangers the most shamefaced miseries of my own family. In spite of my striving after French urbanity, in spite of my philosophic cosmopolitanism, old Germany, with all its Philistine sentiments, stiU holds its place in my bosom. Enough, I cannot transcribe this letter, and merely relate this much : — Immanuel Kant was so poor that, notwithstanding the pathetic, heart-rending tone of this letter, he could lend Johann Gottlieb Fichte no money. But the latter showed no trace of Hi-humour on that account, as may be gathered from the language of his journal, from which I continue to quote : — " I was invited to dine with Kant on the third of Sep- tember. He received me with his usual cordiality, telling me, however, that he had not as yet formed any resolution as to my proposition ; that he was not in a position to do so for a fortnight. What amiable frankness! For the rest, he started objections to my plans, which betrayed -that he was not sufficiently acquainted with our position in Saxony. . . : During all these days I have done nothing. RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 131 I will, however, set to work again, and simply leave the rest to God. The sixth : — I was asked to visit Kant, who proposed to me the disposing of my manuscript on ' The Critic[ue of all Eevelation' to the publisher Hartung, through the intervention of Pastor Borowski. ' It is well written,' said he, when I spoke of revising it. Is this the » case ? And yet it is Kant that says so ! For the rest, he declined the object of my first request. On the tenth I dined with Kant. Nothing said about our affair. Master of Arts Gensichen was there, and, though only general, the conversation was in part very interesting. Kant's dis- position towards me remains quite unchanged. . . . The thirteenth : — I was anxious to work to-day, and yet I get nothing done. I am overcome by dejection. How will this end ? How will it be with me eight days hence ? My money will then be quite exhausted." After much wandering about, after a long sojourn in Switzerland, Fichte at last finds a settled position at Jena, and from this time dates his period of splendour. Jena and "Weimar, two little Saxon towns lying within short distance of each other, were then the central points of the intellectual life of Germany. At Weimar were the court and poetry ; at Jena, the university and philosophy. There were the greatest poets, here the most learned men of Germany. In the year 1794 Fichte commenced his lectures at Jena. The date is significant, and explains the spirit of his writings at this period, as well as the tribulations to which he was henceforth exposed, and to which four years later he succumbed. For in the year 1798 were raised those accusations of atheism that drew down upon him insufferable persecutions, and occasioned his departure from Jena. This, the most noteworthy event in the life of Fichte, possesses also a general significance, and we cannot pass it over in silence. 132 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. Here, too, is naturally the place to speak of Fichte's views concerning the nature of God. In the periodical called The Philosophical Journal, at that time edited by himself, Fichte published an article entitled " Development of the Notion of Eeligion," sent to him by a certain Forberg, a schoolmaster at Saalfield. To this article Fichte added a short explanatory disserta- tion, under the title, " On the Ground of our Belief in a Divine Government of the World." Both articles were suppressed by the Government of the Electorate of Saxony, under the pretext that they were tainted with atheism. Simultaneously there was despatched from Dresden a requisition to the court of Weimar enjoining upon it the serious punishment of Pro- fessor Fichte. The court of Weimar did not, it is true, permit itself to be misled by such a demand; but as Fichte on this occasion committed the gravest blunders, amongst others that of writing an " Appeal to the Public " without .the sanction of of&cial authority, the Government of Weimar, offended at this step and importuned from other quarters, had no alternative but to administer a mild reproof to the professor who had imprudently ex- pressed his views. Fichte, however, considering himself in the right, was unwilling to submit to such reproof, and left Jena. To judge from his letters written at this time, he was especially piqued at the conduct of two persons, whose official positions lent much weight to their voice in this affair ; — these two persons were His Eeverence the President of the Consistorial Council, Herr von Herder, and His Excellence the Privy Councillor, Herr von Goethe ; but both are sufficiently excusable. It is pathetic to read in the posthumous letters of Herder how the poor man was embarrassed by the candidates of theo- logy, who, after studying at Jena, came before him at RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 133 Weimar to undergo examination as Protestant preachers. About Christ the Son he no longer dared to put a single question ; he was glad enough, to have their mere acknow- ledgment of the existence of the Father. As for Goethe, lie expresses himself in his Memoirs, regarding this occur- rence, to the following effect : — " After Eeinhold's departure from Jena, an event justly- considered a great loss for the University, the appoint- ment of successor to him was rashly, even audaciously, conferred on Fichte, who in his writings had manifested a certain grandeur, though not perhaps the requisite tact for dealing with the most important topics of morality and politics. He was a man of as strong a personality as had ever been known, and, considered in their higher aspects, there was nothing censurable in his views ; but how could he maintain himself on a footing of equality with a world that he regarded as his own created pos- session ? " The hours that he desired to set apart during week- days for his public lectures being objected to, he under- took to hold on Sundays the prelections regarding which objections were raised. The lesser adverse circumstances and the greater obstacles arising from these had scarcely been smoothed down and adjusted, when the assertions of Professor Pichte concerning God and sacred things (about which he would have done better to have maintained profound silence) attracted in outside circles troublesome observation. " Pichte had ventured in his Philosophical Journal to express himself about God and sacred things in a manner that seemed contradictory to the language customarily employed in dealing with such mysteries. He was called in question for it ; his defence did not improve matters, for it was undertaken with passion and without any sus- picion how well disposed towards him people here were, 134 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. although they knew what interpretation to put on his ideas and language — an interpretation of his opinions that could not indeed be explained to him in crude words, just as little as he could be brought to under- stand how help might be afforded him in the kindliest spirit. Discussion for and against, doubts and assertions, confirmations and resolutions, surged about the university in many-sided uncertain discourse : there was talk of ministerial remonstrance, of nothing short of a public reprimand which Fichte might have to expect. There- upon, throwing aside all moderation, he considered him- self justified in addressing to the ministry a violent letter, in which, assuming the certainty of proceedings being taken against him, he haughtily and vehemently declared that he would never submit to such treatment ; that he preferred, without more ado, to quit the university, in which case he would not do so alone, as several other influential teachers were in accord with him to leave the place. " As a result of this step, all friendly intentions that had been aroused on his behalf were now restrained, nay, even paralysed. No expedient, no compromise, was now possible, and the gentlest measure that could be adopted was to dismiss him without delay. Then, for the first time, after the affair was beyond remedy, Fichte per- ceived the turn his friends had sought to give the affair, and he was forced to regret his precipitation, whilst we had reason to compassionate him." Have we not here his very self, the ministerial Goethe with his conciliations and prudent reticences ? In reality he censures Fichte only for having said what he thought, and for not having said it with the customary disguises of expression. He does not find fault with the thought, but with the word. That deism had been annihilated in the world of German philosophy was, as I have already RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 135 said, a secret known to every one; a secret, however, that must not be proclaimed on the housetops. Goethe was as little a deist as Fichte ; for he was a pantheist. But his very position on the heights of pantheism enabled Goethe with his sharp eyes to perceive very clearly the untenableness of the Fichtean philosophy, and his gra- cious lips could not forbear to smile at what he saw. To the Jews (and every deist is, after all, a Jew) the doc- trine of Fichte was an abomination : to the great pagan it was only a folly. The " great pagan " is, you must understand, the name bestowed on Goethe in Ger- many. Yet this name is not quite appropriate. The paganism of Goethe is wonderfully modernised. His vigorous heathen nature manifests itself in • his clear penetrating conception of all external facts, of all forms and colours ; but Christianity has endowed him also with a profounder intelligence. Christianity, in spite of his militant antipathy towards it, has initiated him into the mysteries of the spiritual world; he has drunk of the blood of Christ, and this has made him comprehend the most secret voices of nature, like Siegfried, the hero of the "Nibelungen," who understood the language of the birds the instant that his lips were moistened by a drop of the slain dragon's blood. It is a remarkable thing that Goethe's pagan nature should have been so thoroughly pervaded by our modern sentimentality, that the antique marble of his temperament should have pulsated with so much modern feeling, and that he should have sympathised as deeply with the sufferings of young "Werther as with the joys of an ancient Greek god. The pantheism of Goethe differed, therefore, very widely from that of paganism. To express my ideas briefly : Goethe was the Spinoza of poetry. The whole of Goethe's poetry is animated by the same spirit that is wafted towards us from the writings of Spinoza. That Goethe paid undivided allegiance to 136 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. the doctrine of Spinoza is beyond doubt. At any rate, he occupied Himself with it throughout his life; in the in- troductory passages of his Memoirs, as in the concluding volume recently published, he has frankly acknowledged this to be the case. I cannot now recollect where I have read that Herder, losing his temper at finding Goethe perpetually engaged with Spinoza's works, once exclaimed, " If Goethe would just for once take up some other Latin book than one of Spinoza's ! " But this applies not only to Goethe ; quite a number of his friends, who afterwards became more or less celebrated as poets, devoted them- selves at an early period of their lives to pantheism ; and this doctrine assumed a practical form in German art before it attained to supremacy amongst us as a philo- sophic theory. Even in Fichte's time, when idealism was flourishing most sublimely in the domain of philo- sophy, in the region of art it was being violently de- stroyed, and there had already begun in Germany that celebrated revolt in art — a revolt not yet terminated — which traces its origin to the conflict of Eomanticism with the ancient Classical Eegime. Our first Eomanticists were, in fact, moved by a panthe- istic instinct, which they did not themselves comprehend. The sentiment, which they mistook for a yearning towards the Catholic mother Church, was of deeper origin than they suspected. Their veneration and affection for the tradi- tions of the Middle Ages, for the popular beliefs, the diablerie, the sorcery, and the witchcraft of former times, — all this was a suddenly reawakened, though uncompre- hended, predilection for the pantheism of the old Ger- mans, and, in its foully stained and spitefully mutilated form, what they really loved was the pre-christian reli- gion of their ancestors. I must here recall what was said in the first part of this book, where I showed how Chris- tianity absorbed the elements of the old Germanic religion. RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 137 — how, after undergoing the most outrageous transforma- tion, these elements were preserved in the popular beliefs of the Middle Ages in stich a way that the old worship of nature came to be regarded as mere wicked sorcery, the old gods as odious demons, and their chaste priestesses as profligate witches. From this point of view the aberra- tions of our earliest Eomanticists can be more leniently judged than is usually the case. They wished to restore the Catholicism of the Middle Ages, for they felt that in this Catholicism there still survived many sacred recollec- tions of their first ancestors, many splendid memorials of their earliest national life. It was these mutilated and defiled relics that attracted the sympathies of the Eoman- ticists, and they detested a Protestantism and a Liberalism whose aim was to destroy these relics and to efface the whole Catholic past. I shall return, however, to this subject. At present it is sufficient merely to mention that pantheism began in Fichte's time to force its way into German art ; that even Catholic Romanticists unconsciously followed this ten- dency, and that Goethe was its foremost spokesman. This is already apparent in his " Werther," wherein he aspires after a beatific identification with nature. In " Faust " he seeks to establish relationship with nature by a method daringly direct and mystical : he conjures the secret forces of the earth by the magic speU of the Hollenzwang* But it is in his songs that Goethe's pan- theism reveals itself with greatest purity and charm. The doctrine of Spinoza has escaped from its chrysalid mathematical form, and flutters about us as a lyric of Goethe. Hence the wrath displayed by our orthodox believers and pietists against Goethe's song. With their pious bears' paws they make clumsy efforts to seize this butterfly that constantly eludes their grasp ; so delicately * Influence of evil spirits over irien. — Tb. 138 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. ethereal, so lightly winged is Goethe's song. Frenchmen can form to themselves no conception of it unless they possess a knowledge of our language. These songs of Goethe's have a coquettish charm that is indescribable : the harmonious verses entwine themselves about the heart like a tenderly loved one ; the word embraces whilst the thought kisses thee. For our part, we do not see in Goethe's conduct regard- ing Fichte any of those base motives indicated in even baser language by his contemporaries. They failed to com- prehend the different natures of the two men. The most moderate amongst them misinterpreted Goethe's passive- ness when, at a later time, Fichte was sorely pressed and persecuted. They did not correctly appreciate Goethe's situation. This giant was minister in a liliputian German state. He could never indulge in natural movements. It was said of the seated Jupiter of Phidias at Olympia that, if he were suddenly to stand erect, he would shatter the', dome of the temple. This was precisely Goethe's position at Weimar ; were he suddenly to have risen from his tran- quil sitting posture, he would have shattered the gable ridge of the state, or, what is more probable, would have broken his head against it. And was he, then, to encounter this risk for a doctrine that was not merely erroneous, but actually ridiculous ? The German Jupiter remained calmly seated, and permitted himself to be tranquilly adored and perfumed with incense. It would lead me too far from my subject were I to seek from the standpoint of the artistic interests of this epoch more completely to justify Goethe'^ conduct with regard to the accusation against Fichte. In Fichte's favour there is the sole circumstance that the accusation was a mere pretext behind which political motives were concealed ; for a theologian may with reason be accused of atheism, since he has accepted the obligation of teaching RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 139 certain doctrines. A philosopher, however, does not and cannot enter into such an obligation, and his thought re- mains free as the bird of the air. It is, perhaps, unjust of me that, partly in order to spare my own, partly in order to spare the feelings of others, I have not stated here all the circumstances on which the accusation against Fichte was founded and justified. I will cite only one of the dubious passages in the incriminating treatise : — " The living and active moral order is God himself ; we need no other God, nor can we comprehend any other. There is no ground in human reason for going beyond this moral order of the universe, and for admitting, as a con- clusion from effect to cause, some special being as the source of this effect. The primitive intelligence of man certainly does not confirm this conclusion, and is ignorant of such a being ; only a philosophy capable of self-mis- apprehension can deduce it." With characteristic obstinacy, Eichte, in his " Appeal to the Public " and in his " Judicial Vindication," reiterated his views more strongly and more glaringly, and in lan- guage, too, that wounds our deepest feelings. We, who believe in a real God, a God that reveals himself to our senses in infinite space and to our spirit in infinite thought ; we, who adore in nature a visible God, and who recognise in our inmost soul his mysterious voice; we are repelled by the harsh, even ironical terms in which Fichte declares our God to be a mere chimera. It is doubtful, indeed, whether there is irony or mental extra- vagance in Fichte's endeavour to eliminate from the being of God all sentient attributes, and thus to deny his very existence, since existence is a sentient notion, and is only possible as such ! " The theory of knowledge," he says, " knows no other mode of existence than a sentient one, and, as existence is attributable only to the phenomena of I40 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. experience, this predicate cannot apply to God." Fichte's God, therefore, has no existence ; he is not ; he manifests himself only as pure action, as a sequence of events, as ordo ordinans, as the law of the universe. It is thus that idealism has filtered deity through every possible abstraction, until at last no residuum is left. Henceforth, as with you, in place of a king, with us, in place of a God, law is sovereign. But which is more absurd, a law of atheism, that is, a law without God, or a God-law, that is, a God that is only a law ? The idealism of Fichte ranks as one of the most colossal errors ever hatched in the human brain. It is more god- less and more worthy of condemnation than the coarsest materialism. What is called in France the atheism of the materialists, is, as I might easily show, an edifying and devout doctrine when compared with the consequences of Fichte's transcendental idealism. This I know : both systems are repugnant to me.. Both are- also anti-poetic. The French materialists have written quite as bad verses as the German transcendental idealists ; but the doctrine of Fichte was in no respect dangerous to the State, and stm less merited being persecuted as such. In order to be capable of being led astray by this heresy, one must have been endowed with speculative acumen in a degree to be found amongst few men. The great mass, with its thousands of thick heads, was quite impervious to this erroneous doctrine. The views of Fichte concerning God should have been attacked, therefore, by the path of reason, and not through aid of the police. The accusation of atheism in philosophy was a thing so strange in Germany, that Fichte at first really did not understand what it meant. Quite justly did he remark that the question whether a system of philosophy is atheistical or not RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 141 ■sounds to a philosopher as extraordinary as the question whether a triangle is green or red would sound to a mathematician. This accusation had, then, its secret motives, as Fichte soon perceived. Being of all men the most truthful, we may implicitly believe what he says in a letter to Eeinhold with respect to these secret motives. As this letter, dated the 22d of May 1779, depicts the character of the entire epoch, and conveys a clear idea of all the affliction of the man, we shall here quote a portion of it : — "Weariness and disgust determine me to adopt the resolution, whereof I have already spoken to you, of dis- appearing completely for a few years. From the view I took of the state of affairs, I was convinced that duty itself demanded this resolution ; for in the midst of the present ferment I shall certainly not obtain a hearing, and I should only increase the agitation ; but after a few years, when the first feelings of surprise have calmed down, I shall be able to speak with all the more emphasis. At the present moment I think differently. I ought not now to remain mute, for if I preserve silence now, I shall never again dare to speak. Since the alliance of Eussia with Austria, I have long thought probable what is now become a cer- tainty for me after recent events, and especially after the atrocious murder of the French Ambassador, an affair about which people here are jubilant, and with reference to which Schiller and Goethe exclaimed, ' Quite right ; these dogs must be slain ! ' I am convinced that from ' this time forward despotism will defend itself with the energy of despair, that it will become consistent through Paul * and Pitt, that the basis of its plan is to root out liberty of opinion, and that the Germans will not impede the attainment of this object. " Do not fancy, for example, that the court of Weimar * The Czar Paul I., 1 796-1801.— Te. 142 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. feared a diminution in the number of students at the uni- versity on account of my presence there ; it was too well assured of the contrary ; it was olliged to remove me in consequence of a general agreement, strongly supported by the Electorate of Saxony. Burscher of Leipzig, who was privy to these secrets, laid a wager of a. considerable sum so long ago as the end of last year, that I would be exiled before the expiry of the present year. Vogt was long since won over to my enemies through Burgsdorf. •The department of sciences at Dresden has made it known that no one who devotes himself to the new philosophy will receive promotion, or, if already promoted, he shall be incapable of further advancement. In the Free School at Leipzig, Eosenmiiller's ^^ ' Explanatory Criticisms ' were held to be of a suspicious tendency. Luther's Cate- chism has lately been reintroduced into this school, and the teachers have been referred back to the symbolical books. This wiU not end here, and it will extend. . . . To sum up : Nothing is more certain than the absolute certainty that, unless the French gain a tremendous ascen- dancy, and unless, within a few years, they carry through important changes in Germany, or at least in a very considerable portion of it, no man that has been known during the course of his life to have thought a free thought will be able to find in Germany a resting-place. . . . There is for me, however, one thing more certain than certainty itself, namely this, that though I were presently to find somewhere a hole wherein to conceal myself, I should, in two years at furthest, be hunted out of it a,gain, and it is a dangerous thing to run the risk of being chased from place to place : of this we have an historical example in the case of EouSseau. " Suppose I remain quite silent and write not another line ; shall I be left in peace on this condition ? I do not believe it ; and admitting that, as regards the courts, I RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 143 might hope for this, would not the clergy, wherever I might turn my steps, hound on the populace against me, suffer me to be stoned by it, and then solicit the govern- ments to banish me as a person that excited tumults ? But ought I then to be silent ? No, verily, I ought not ; for I have reason for believing that, if anything of the German spirit can be saved, it can be saved through my speech, whilst by my silence philosophy will be totally and prematurely ruined. Of those of whom I do not expect that they will leave me to exist in silence, do I still less expect that they will permit me freedom of speech. * But I shall convince them of the harmlessness of my doctrine. Dear Eeinhold, how canst thou suppose these . men- to be well-intentioned towards me ? The fairer my character is shown to be, the more innocent it appears, the blacker do these men grow, and the more aggravated does my real crime appear. I never supposed them to be persecuting me for so-called atheism : what they per- secuted in me was the free-thinker, who begins to make himself intelligible (the obscurity of his style was Kant's good fortune) ; what they persecuted in me was the decried democrat ; they were terrified as by a spectre at that in- dependence which, as they had a dim presentiment, my philosophy awakens." * . I once more remark that this letter is not of yesterday, but bears date the 22d of May 1799. The political cir- cumstances of that time present an even melancholy resemblance to the most recent condition of Germany; with this single point of difference, that during the former period the spirit of liberty flourished among the learned, among poets and men of letters generally, whereas nowa- days this spirit finds a far more ready utterance among the * The whole of the long paragraph that follows was struck out by the censor in the first German editions. It is restored in the later editions — Tb. ' 144 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. active masses, among artisans and tradespeople. During the epoch of the first revolution, whilst a leaden, altogether Teutonic somnolence weighed down the people, whilst all Germany seemed overcome by a species of brutal repose, our literary life revealed the wildest commotion and fer- ment. The most solitary author, living in the remotest nook of Germany, took part in this movement ; possessed of no accurate knowledge of political occurrences, by a kind of secret affinity he felt their social importance and he expressed it in his writings. This phenomenon reminds me of those large sea-shells sometimes placed as ornaments on the mantel-shelf, which, however distant they may be from the sea, at once begin to murmur when the hour of flood-tide arrives and when the waves are dashing against the shore. When the revolutionary tide began to flow in Paris, that great human ocean, when its waves surged and roared amongst you here, German hearts across the Ehine were resounding and murmuring in response. . . . But they were so isolated, surrounded as they were by mere unfeeling pieces of porcelain, tea-cups and cofi'ee-pots and Chinese pagods, that nodded their heads mechanically as though they understood what the talk was about ! Alas ! our poor German predecessors had to atone most bitterly for their revolutionary sympathy. Petty nobles and cant- ing priests played on them the coarsest and basest of their spiteful tricks. Some of them fled to Paris, and have disappeared or died here in poverty and misery. I lately saw an old blind compatriot who has remained in Paris since that time. I saw him at the Palais-Eoyal, whither he had come to warm himself a little, in the sun. It was pitiful to behold how pale and thin he was, and how he groped his way along the sides of the houses. They told me he was the old Danish poet Heiberg.^^ I also saw not long since the garret in which citizen George Forster ^^ died. But it would have fared even worse with the RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 145 friends of liberty who remained in Germany had not Napoleon and the French made haste to conquer us. Napoleon certainly never fancied that he had himself' been the saviour of ideology. Without his aid our philo- sophers, and with them their ideas, would have been exterminated by the gibbet and the wheel. But the German friends of liberty, too republican in their senti- ments to do homage to Napoleon, and too magnanimous to ally themselves with a foreign domination, wrapped their thoughts in profound silence. They went about sorrowfully with broken hearts and sealed lips. When Napoleon fell they were seen to smile, though it was a mournful smile, and they still remained silent. They took scarcely the slightest interest in the patriotic enthu- siasm which, with the sanction of the supreme powers, then broke forth jubilantly throughout Germany. They knew what they knew, and were silent. As these Ee- publicans lead a very chaste and simple life, they usually attain a great age, and when the Eevolution of July took place, many of them were still alive. We were not a little astonished then at beholding the old fellows, whom we had always been accustomed to see going about bowed down and in almost imbecile silence, suddenly raise their ■ heads and smile amicably at us youngsters, and seize each other's hands, and begin to tell merry tales. 1 even heard one of them singing; for he sang to us in a caf^ the Marseillaise Hymn, and we learnt the melody and the beautiful words, and it was not long till we sang it better than the old man himself; for in the middle of the best stanzas he would often laugh like a fool or weep like a child. It is always a fortunate thing when such old people remain alive to teach young ones songs. We young ones shall not forget these songs, and some of us will one day teach them by heart to grandchildren yet unborn; but many of us will have rotted by that time, K 146 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. some in the prisons of home, some in the garrets of exile. Let us speak of philosophy again ! I have shown how the philosophy of Fichte, though constructed of the most attenuated abstractions, presented a rigid inflexibility in its consequences, which were pursued to the most auda- cious extremes. But one fine morning we perceived a great change in this philosophy ; it began to blossom with innocent flowers and to weep childishly; it became tender and modest. The Titan of idealism, who had climbed up to heaven by the ladder of thought, and had groped about with daring hand in its empty chambers, now becomes a creature bowed down with Christian humility, who sighs much about love. This is Pichte's second period, and concerns us little here. His entire system of philosophy undergoes the strangest modifica- tions. About this time he wrote a book, lately translated into French, " The Destiny of Man." A book of a similar character, " Instruction towards Attaining the Celestial Life," also belongs to this period. Pichte, the opinionative man, would, of course, never admit this great transformation. He maintained that his philosophy was always the same, that it was merely its mode of expression that had undergone change and im- provement; people had never understood him. He con- tended, too, that the Philosophy of Nature, which had sprung up in Germany and which was supplanting idealism, was in principle precisely the same as his own system, and that his pupil, Herr Joseph Schelling, in detaching himself from his master and in introducing this new philosophy, had merely remodelled the nomenclature of the old philo- sophy, and had merely amplified his old doctrine by the addition of barren accessories. This brings us to a new phase of German thought. We have just mentioned the names Joseph Schelling and RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 147 Philosophy of Nature; but as the former is almost quite unknown in France, and as the expression Philosophy of Nature is not very generally understood, I must explain the significance of both names. It will certainly not be possible to do so exhaustively in this sketch ; at pre- sent we shall only utter a warning against certain insi- dious errors, and merely draw attention to the social importance of this philosophy. At the outset it may be said that Fichte was not very far wrong in contending that Herr Joseph Schelling's doctrine was in reality his own merely amplified and formulated in different terms. Precisely like Herr Joseph Schelling does Fichte teach : — there exists but one being, the Ugo, the absolute ; he also teaches the identity of the ideal and the , real. In the " Theory of Philosophy," as already shown, Fichte sought by means of an intellectual act to construct the real out of the ideal. Joseph Schelling, however, has reversed the process ; he endeavours to explain the ideal by the real. To express my meaning more clearly: Start- ing from the axiom that thought and nature are one, Fichte, by an operation of the intellect, arrives at the external world; by thought he creates nature, by the ideal the real. For Schelling, on the contrary, though he starts from the same axiom, the external world resolves itself into pure ideas; nature for him becomes thought, the real becomes ideal. Each of these tendencies, that of Fichte and that of Schelling, is to a certain extent the complement of the other. For, accepting as ultimate the . axiom just referred to, philosophy naturally falls into two parts, in one of which it would be shown how from the idea nature rises to phenomenal reality ; in the other, how nature resolves- itself into pure ideas. Philosophy may therefore be divided into Transcmdental Idealism and into Philosophy of Nature. Now both of these sides were really acknowledged by Schelling: the latter he 148 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. followed out in his "Ideas towards a Philosophy of Nature," the former in his "System of Transcendental Idealism." I refer to these works (of which one appeared in 1797, the other in 1800) merely because those two reciprocally ' complementary sides are expressed in their very titles, and not because they contain a- complete system. No; such a system is to be found in none of Schelling's works. He, unlike Kant and Fichte, has no chief work that may be regarded as the central point of his philosophy. It would be an injustice to judge Schelling by the contents of a book, and by a rigarous interpretation of the letter. One should rather read his works in chronological order, follow up the gradual development of his thought, and then take firm grasp of his fundamental idea. Indeed, it seems to me often necessary, in reading his works, to dis- tinguish where thought ceases and where poetry begins ; for Schelling is one of those beings endowed by nature with more poetic temperament than poetic power — one who, incapable of satisfying the daughters of Parnassus, has fled to the woodlands of philosophy, where he has con- tracted with abstract hamadryads a barren union. The sentiment of such natures is poetic, but the instrument, the word, is feeble ; they strive in vain after an artistic form wherein to communicate their thoughts and their knowledge. Poetry is at once Schelling's strength and his weakness. It is here that he is distinguished from Fichte as much to his advantage as to his disadvantage. Fichte is merely a philosopher ; his power consists in his dialectic, and his strength in ability to demonstrate. This, how- ever, is Schelling's weak side; he lives in a world of intuition ; he does not feel at home on the cold heights of logic ; he stretches forth eager hands towards the flowery valleys of symbolism, and his philosophical strength lies in the art of construction. But this is an intellectual RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 149 aptitude found as frequently amongst mediocre poets as amongst the best philosophers. From this last indication it becomes clear that Schellincr, in so much of his philosophy as is' pure transcendental idealism, remained, and could not but remain, a mere echoer of Fichte; whilst in the philosophy of nature, where he has to deal with flowers and stars, he cannot help blossoming and shining radiantly. Hot only he him- self, but also like-minded friends attached themselves by preference to this side of his philosophy, and the com- motion thereby aroused was only a kind of reaction of poetasters against the former abstract philosophy of the intellect. Like school-children freed from their tasks after sighing all day in close rooms under the burden of syntax and arithmetic, the scholars of Schelling rushed out of doors to nature, to the fragrant sunny world of the real, and huzzaed and turned summersaults and made a great disturbance. The expression " scholars of Schelling " must certainly not be taken in its customary sense. Schelling himself tells us it was only a school such as existed among the ancient poets that he desired to found, a school of poetry in which no one was bound to accept a particular doctrine or to submit to a special discipline, but one in which each was to obey the idea, and to manifest it in his own manner. He might also have said that he wished to found a school of prophets, where the inspired should begin to prophesy as fancy moved them, and in whatever dialect they pleased. This, indeed, was done by those disciples whom the master's spirit had deeply moved ; the most shallow-brained began to prophesy each in a different tongue, and philosophy had its great day of Pentecost. Things gravest and most sublime may be turned into masquerade and buffoonery ; a rabble of cowardly knaves and melancholy clowns is capable of compromising a great ISO RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. idea : this we see in the case of the philosophy of nature. But the ridicule brought upon this philosophy by Schel- ling's school of the prophets or school of the poets ought not really to be imputed to it, for the idea on which the philosophy of nature rests is indeed nothing else than the idea of Spinoza, than pantheism. The doctrine of Spinoza and the philosophy of nature, as explained by Schelling during his best period, are essentially one and the same thing. The Germans having reached the stage of despising the materialism of Locke, and having pursued to its last consequences the idealism of Leibnitz and found it equally unfruitful, arrived finally at the third son of Descartes — at Spinoza. Philosophy had once more described a great circle, the same, it may be said, that it had already traversed two thousand years before in Greece. But a closer comparison of these two circuits of human thought reveals an essential difference. Amongst the Greeks there were as daring sceptics as amongst ourselves ; the Eleatics were as decided in their denial of the reality of the external world as our modern transcendental idealists. Plato rediscovered the world of thought in the phenomenal world as plainly as did Schelling. But we had this advantage over the Greeks as well as over the Cartesian school : we commenced our philosophic circuit by an investigation of the sources of humati knowledge, by the " Critique of Pure Eeason " of our Immanuel Kant. The mention of Kant affords me an opportunity of adding to the foregoing observations, that one species of evidence in favour of the existence of God, the so-called moral evidence, with which Kant did not interfere, was overthrown with great Mat by Schelling. I have already remarked, however, that this evidence was not very con- clusive, and that Kant perhaps allowed it to subsist from promptings of good-nature. The' God of Schelling is the RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 151 God-universe of Spinoza — at least he was so in the year 1 801, in the second volume of the Journal of Specula- tive Physics. Here God is the absolute identity of nature and thought, of matter and mind ; and absolute identity is not the cause of the universe, but is the universe itself, consequently the God-universe. In it there exist neither opposites nor divisions. Absolute identity is also absolute totality. A year later Schelling still further developed his God in a work entitled, " Bruno ; or, Concerning the Divine and Natural Principles of Things." This title recalls the most noble martyr of our doctrine, Giordano Bruno of Nola, of glorious memory. The Italians asserted that Schelling borrowed aU his best ideas from old Bruno, and they accused him of plagiarism. They were wrong, for there is no such thing as plagiarism in philosophy. In the year 1 804 the God of Schelling appeared at last in His complete form in a work entitled " Philosophy and Eeligion." It is here that we have in its completed form the theory of the absolute expressed in three formulas. The first of these is the categorical : The absolute is neither the ideal nor the real (neither mind nor matter), but is the identity of both. The second formula is the hypothetical : When subject and object are present, the absolute is the essential equality of both. The third formula is the disjunctive : There is only one being, but this unity of being may be regarded at one and the same time, or by turns, as wholly ideal or as wholly real. The first formula is strictly negative ; the second supposes a condition more difficult to comprehend than the hypo- thesis itself ; and the third formula is exactly that of Spinoza : absolute substance is cognisable either as thought or as extension. Along the path of philosophy, then, Schelling couM proceed no further than Spinoza, since the absolute can be comprehended only under the form of these two attributes, thought and extension. But 152 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. at this point Schelling leaves the philosophical route, and seeks by a kind of mystical intuition to arrive at the con- templation of the absolute itself ; he seeks to contemplate it in its central point, in its essence, where it is neither ideal nor real, neither thought nor extension, neither sub- ject nor object, neither mind nor matter, but ... I know not what ! Here philosophy ceases with Schelling, and poetry — I may say folly — commences. But it is here that he meets with the greatest sympathy from a number of silly admirers whom it suits admirably to abandon calm reflection, and who, as if in imitation of the dancing dervishes described by our friend Jules David, continue spinning round in a circle until objective and subjective worlds become lost to them, — until both worlds melt into a colourless nothing- ness, that is neither real nor ideal, until they see things invisible, hear what is inaudible, until they hear colours and see tones, until the absolute reveals itself to them. I am of opinion that with this attempt intellectually to conceive the absolute Schelling's philosophic career comes to a close. A greater thinker now steps on the scene, one who rounds into a completed system the philosophy of nature, explains from this synthesis the whole world of phenomena, supplements the great ideas of his predeces- sors by yet greater ideas, subjects their philosophy to every form of discipline, and thus establishes it on a scientific basis. He is the scholar of Schelling, a scholar, however, who, making himself by degrees possessor of all his mas- ter's might in the realm of philosophy, outgrows his mas- ter, and finally thrusts him into obscurity. This is the great Hegel, greatest of philosophers begotten by Ger- many since Leibnitz. There can be no doubt that he far overtops Kant and Fichte. To the penetration of the for- mer and to the vigour of the latter he adds the tranquil- lity of a mind that works by constitutional methods, a RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 153 harmony of thought not to be found in either Kant or Fichte, in both of whom the revolutionary spirit is pre- dominant. No comparison is possible between this man and Joseph Schelling ; for Hegel was a man of character. And though, like Schelling, he may have given support by certain suspicious vindications to the existing order of affairs in church and state,'he did so in favour of a state that, in theory at least, rendered homage to the principle of progress, and in favour of a church that regarded the principle of unrestrained inquiry as its vital element ; and he made no secret of this ; he avowed all his intentions. Schelling, on the contrary, goes- cringing about in the , ante- chambers of practical iand theoretical absolutism, in the dens of Jesuitism he lends a hand in forging intellec- tual manacles, and all the while he tries to make believe he is still the same unperverted child of light that he once was ; he apostatises his apostasy, and to the shame of deserting his cause he adds the cowardice of lying ! We may not disguise it, either from motives of piety or of prudence ; we will make no secret of it ; the man who was once the boldest exponent in Germany of the religion of pantheism, he who proclaimed most loudly the sanc- tification of nature and the redintegration of man in his divine rights, has become apostate to his own doctrine ; he has forsaken the altar consecrated by his own hands ; he has slunk back to the religious kennels of the past ; he is now a good Catholic, and preaches an extra-mundane personal God, " who has committed the folly of creating the world." The followers of the old orthodoxy may, if they chdose, ring their church-bells and sing " Kyrie Eleison " over such a conversion ; it proves nothing, how- ever, in favour of their doctrine ; it merely proves that man turns to religion for support when he grows old and weary, when his physical and intellectual powers fail him, when he can no longer either enjoy or reason. So many free- 154 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. thinkers, you say, have been converted on their deathbed ! But, at any rate, do not boast of this ! Such stories be- ' long at best to pathology, and are very bad evidence for your case. After all, they only prove that it was impos- sible for you to convert these free-thinkers so long as they went about under God's free sky in the enjoyment of their healthy senses and in full possession of their rea- soning faculty. It is Ballanche, I think, who says, that it is a law of nature that initiators die as soon as they have completed the work of initiation. Alas! worthy Ballanche, that is only part of the truth, and I might with more reason assert that, when the work of initiation is complete, the initiator dies — or becomes apostate. And so we may, perhaps, mitigate, to a certain extent the severe judgment pronounced by intelligent Germany on Herr Schelling ; we may, perhaps, commute the heavy sentence of con- tempt under which he lies into silent commiseration ; and his desertion of his own doctrine we may explain as a consequence of the natural law in accordance with which, whenever any one has devoted all his energies to the ex- pression or to the carrying out of, an idea and has accom- plished his task, that person falls exhausted, either into the arms of death, or into the embrace of his former opponents. Such an explanation as the foregoing may enable us to understand certain other more terrible phenomena of our day which deeply afflict us. It may enable us to com- prehend why men who have sacrificed everything for their opinion, who have fought and suffered for that opinion, should, after the victory is gained, abandon it and pass over into the enemy's camp! I may be permitted also, after such an explanation, to draw attention to the fact that not Joseph Schelling only, but, in some sort, both Kant and Fichte, may likewise be accused of defection. RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 155 Fichte died opportunely enough before his desertion of his own philosophy had time to become very notorious ; but Kant is unfaithful to the " Critique of Pure Eeason," even whilst writing the " Critique of Practical Eeason." The initiator dies or becomes apostate ! I know not how it comes that this last sentence affects my soul with such a melancholy influence that I do not feel sufficient strength here to record the other bitter truths regarding the present Herr Schelling. Let us rather say something in praise of that dear former Schel- ling, whose memory blossoms perennially in the annals of German thought ; for the former Schelling, like Kant and Pichte, represents one of the great phases of our philoso- phical revolution, compared by me in these pages to the political revolution in Trance. In truth, while in Kant we see the terrorist Convention, and in Pichte the Napo- leonic Empire, in Schelling we behold the reaction of the Eestoration which followed the Empire. But it was at first a restoration in a better sense. Schelling re-estab- lished nature in its legitimate rights ; he aimed at a recon- ciliation between mind and nature; he sought to reunite them in the eternal soul of the world. He restored that great philosophy of nature which we find in the old Greek philosophers, which Socrates first drew into closer relation with the human spirit, and which thereafter flowed forth again as the ideal. He restored that great philosophy of nature which, after unobtrusively budding out of the old pantheistic religion of the Germans, displayed during the age of Paracelsus its fairest flowers, but was stifled by the introduction of Cartesianism. Alas ! he ended by restoring things whereby he may in the worst sense be compared with the French Eestoration. But public reason did not long endure such things ; he was ignominiously driven from the throne of thought. Hegel, his major- domo, carried off his crown and shaved his head, and since 156 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. then the deposed Schelling has lived as a poor shaveling in Munich, a city that preserves in its very name its monkish character, and in Latin is called Monacho mona- chorum. There I saw him, with his large pale eyes and depressed, stupefied countenance, moving about irreso- lutely like a spectre, a miserable picture of fallen royalty. Hegel, however, had himself crowned at Berlin, unfor- tunately with some slight ceremony of anointing, and he has ever since held sway over German philosophy. Our philosophical revolution is concluded; Hegel has closed its great circle. Henceforth we see only the developing and perfecting of the philosophy of nature. This philosophy has, as I have already said, forced its way into all sciences, and has produced the most extra- ordinary and the most grandiose results. Much that is distressing, as I have also indicated, has of necessity come to light. These phenomena are so numerous that the mere record of them would fill an entire book. This is the really interesting and richly coloured part of our philosophical history. I am convinced, however, that it will be more profitable for Frenchmen to know nothing about it, for knowledge of this sort could only tend to pro- duce greater confusion in French intellects ; many of the propositions of the philosophy of nature, if detached from their connection, might cause much mischief amongst you. Of this at least I am certain, had you been acquainted in the year 1830 with the German philosophy of nature, you could not have produced the Eevolution of July. There was necessary for the accomplishment of this act a con- centration of ideas and of forces, a generous partiality, a certain virtue, a self-sufficing absence of reflection such as only your old school of philosophy rendered possible. Perverse philosophical ideas, which might in case of need have served to justify legitimacy and the doctrine of the incarnation, would have damped your enthusiasm, would RELIGION" AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 157 have paralysed your courage. I regard it therefore as an important fact in the history of the world that your great eclectic * who at that epoch was desirous of giving you instruction in German philosophy, had not the slightest comprehension of the subject. His providential ignorance was salutary for Frahce and for the whole of humanity. Alas ! the philosophy of nature, which in many regions of knowledge, especially in the natural sciences strictly so called, produced the most splendid fruits, would elsewhere have brought forth the most obnoxious weeds. Whilst .Oken, one of the most highly gifted thinkers, and one of -the greatest citizens of Germany, was discovering his new worlds of ideas, and was inspiring the youth of Germany with enthusiasm for the imprescriptible rights of humanity, for freedom and equality, — alas ! at that very time Adam Miiller was lecturing on the stall-feeding of nations ac- cording to the principles of natural philosophy; at that very time Herr Gorres was preaching the obscurantism of the Middle Ages from the physical science point of view, and was declaring the state to be only a tree which ought also to have in its organic distribution a stem, branches, and leaves, all as may be beautifully seen in the hierarchic corporations of the Middle Ages ; at that very time Herr Steffens was proclaiming the law of philosophy in virtue ■of which the peasantry is distinguished from the nobility, the peasant being by nature destined to labour without enjoying, whereas the noble is entitled to enjoy without labouring; yea, only a few months since, as I am told, a dolt of a country squire in Westphalia, an arrant block- head, bearing, I believe, the cognomen Haxthausen, pub- lished a pamphlet wherein he solicited the Government of the King of Prussia to have regard to the consistent parallel demonstrated by philosophy as existing in the organisation of the world, and to mark more strictly political distinc- - *■ Victor Cousin.— [Tk.] 158 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. tions ; for as in nature there are four elements, fire, air, earth, and water, so in society there are four analogous elements, the nobility, the clergy, the burgesses, and the peasants. When such melancholy follies were seen to spring from the tree of philosophy and to expand into poisonous flowers, when in particular it was observed that young Germany, absorbed in metaphysical abstractions, was ob- livious to the most urgent questions of the time and had become unfitforpractical life, well mightpatriots andfriends of liberty feel a righteous indignation against philosophy, whilst some of them went the length of utterly condemn- ing it as a vain and profitless pursuit of shadows.^* "We shall not commit the folly of seriously confuting these malcontents. German philosophy is an important fact; it concerns the whole human race, and only our latest descendants will be in a position to decide whether we are to be praised or blamed for having first worked out our philosophy and afterwards our revolution. It seems to me that a methodical people, such as we are, must begin with the reformation, must then occupy itself with systems of philosophy, and that only after their com- pletion could it pass to the political revolution. I find this sequence quite rational. The heads that have first served for the speculations of philosophy can afterwards be struck off by the revolution for whatever object it pleases ; but philosophy would not have been able to utilise the heads struck off by a revolution that preceded it. Give yourselves no anxiety however, ye German Eepublicans ; the German revolution will not prove any milder or gentler because it was preceded by the "Critique" of Kant, by the " Transcendental Idealism " of Fichte, or even by the Philosophy of Nature. These doctrines served to develop revolutionary forces that only await their time to break forth and to fill the world with terror RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. 159 and witli admiration. Then will appear Kantians as little . tolerant of piety in the world of deeds as in the world of ideas, who will mercilessly upturn with sword and axe the soil of our European life in order to extirpate the last remnants of the past. There will come upon the scene armed Tichteans whose fanaticism of will is to be restrained neither by fear nor by self-interest; for they live in the spirit ; they defy matter like those early Chris- tians who could be subdued neither by bodily torments nor by bodily delights. Yea, in a time of social revolu- tion these transcendental idealists will prove even more pertinacious than the early Christians ; for the ' latter endured earthly martyrdom in the hope of attaining celestial blessedness, . whilst the transcendental idealist looks on martyrdom itself as a vain show, and is invul- nerable within the intrenchment of his own thought. But most of all to be feared would be the philosophers of nature were they actively to mingle in a German revolution, and to identify themselves with the work of destruction. For if the hand of the Kantian strikes with strong unerring blow, his heart being stirred by no feeling of traditional awe; if the Fichtean courageously defies every danger, since for him danger has in reality no existence ; — the Philosopher of Nature will be terrible in -this, that he has allied himself with the primitive powers ' of nature, that he can conjure up the demoniac forces of old German pantheism; and having done so, there is aroused in him that ancient German eagerness for battle which combats not for the sake of destroying, not even for the sake of victory, but merely for the sake of the combat itself. Christianity — and this is its fairest merit — subdued to a certain extent the brutal warrior ardour of the Germans, but it could not entirely quench it; and when the cross, that restraining talisman, falls to pieces. i6o RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. then will break forth again the ferocity of the old com- batants, the frantic Berserker rage whereof Northern poets have said and sung so much. The talisman has become rotten, and the day will come when it will pitifully crumble to dust. The old stone gods will then arise from the forgotten ruins and wipe from their eyes the dust of centuries, and Thor with his giant hammer will arise again, and he will shatter the Gothic cathedrals. . . . When ye hear the trampling of feet and the clashing of arms, ye neighbours' children, ye French, be on your guard, and see that ye mingle not in the fray going on amongst us at home in Germany. It might fare ill with you. See that ye take no hand in kindling the fire ; see that ye attempt not to extinguish it. You might easily burn your fingers in the flame. Smile not at my counsel, at the counsel of a dreamer, who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, Philosophers of Nature. Smile not at the fantasy of one who foresees in the region of reality the same outburst of revolution that has taken place in the region of intellect. The thought precedes the deed as the lightning the thunder. German thunder is of true Ger- man character : it is not very nimble, but rumbles along somewhat slowly. But come it wOl, and when ye hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world's history, then know that at last the German thun- derbolt has fallen. At this commotion the eagles will drop dead from the skies and the lions in the farthest wastes of Africa will bite their tails and creep into their royal lairs. There will be played in Germany a drama compared to which the French Eevolution will seem but an innocent idyl. At present, it is true, everything is tolerably quiet; and though here and there some few men create a little stir, do not imagine these are to be the real actors in the piece. They are only little curs chasing RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. i6i one another round the empty arena, barking and snapping at one another, till the appointed hour when the troop of gladiators appear to fight fctr life and death. And the hour will come. As on the steps of an amphi- theatre, the nations will group themselves around Germany to witness the terrible combat. I counsel you, ye French, keep very quiet, and, above all, see that ye do not applaud. We might readily misunderstand such applause, and, in our rude fashion, somewhat roughly put you to silence. For, if formerly in our servile, listless mood we coidd oftentimes overpower you, much easier were it for us to do so in the arrogance of our new-born enthusiasm for liberty. Ye yourselves know what, in such a case, men can do ; and ye are no longer in such a case. Take heed, then !, I mean it well with y6u ; therefore it is I tell you the bitter truth. Ye have more to fear from a free Ger- many than from the entire Holy Alliance with all its Croats and Cossacks. For, in the first place, they do not love you in Germany, which is almost incomprehensible, since ye are so amiable, and during your stay amongst us took such pains to please at least the better and fairer half of the German people. But even though this half still loved you, it is precisely the half that does not bear arms, and whose friendship, therefore, would be of little he^ to yon. What you are really accused of I could never understand. Once in a beer-cellar at Gottingen I heard a young Old-German assert that it was necessary to be revenged on France for Conradin of Hohenstaufen, whom you beheaded at Naples. Doubtless ye have long since forgotten that : we, however, forget nothing. Ye see, then, that whenever we have a mind to quarrel with you there wiU be no lack of valid grounds. In any case, I advise you to be on your guard. Happen what may in Germany, though the Crown Prince of Prussia or Dr. Wirth should attain supremacy, be ye ever armed ; remain quietly at i62 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. your post, your weapons in your hands. I mean it well with you, and I was seized with dismay when I heard it said lately that your Ministry proposed to disarm France. As ye are, despite your present romantic tendency, a born classical people, ye know Olympus. Amongst the joyous gods and goddesses quaifing and feasting of nectar and ambrosia, ye may behold one goddess, who, amidst such gaiety and pastime, wears ever a coat of mail, the helm on her head and the spear in her hand. She is the goddess of Wisdom. APPENDIX. ( i6S ) APPENDIX. ^ Page 20. In translating these introductory paragraphs, the latest edition of the French version has been followed. In the Revvx des Deux Mondes a single short paragraph stood in place of the amplified and more explicit statement in the later editions. In the German version, again, the corresponding paragraphs vary from the text of the Trench version. The book is introduced to German readers in the following manner : — " Frenchmen have lately been in the habit of supposing that an acquaintance with the productions of our polite literature is sufficient to enable them to comprehend Germany. Such an acquaintance, however, has only served to raise them from a condition of total ignorance to a condition of superficial knowledge ; for the produc- tions of our literature remain for them mere dead flowers, and the whole circle 'of German thought presents but a dreary enigma to them so long as they do no not understand the significance of Eeligion and Philosophy in Germany. " In endeavouring to elucidate to a certain extent these two subjects, I believe that I am undertaking a useful work. For me it is no light task. It is of primary im- portance to avoid the technicalities of a scholastic lan- guage with which Frenchmen are totally unacquainted. 1 66 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. Besides, I have not studied deeply enough the subtilties either of theology or of metaphysics to be in a position to formulate them in a manner sufficiently simple and brief to meet the requirements of the French public. I shall therefore deal only with the great questions that are discussed in German divinity and philosophy; I shall attempt to illustrate merely their social importance, and throughout this book I shall keep clearly in view the limited nature of my own resources as an expositor, and the capacity of French readers for comprehending the subject. " Great German philosophers who may happen to glance at these pages will haughtily shrug their shoulders at the inadequate treatment of whatever is here presented. May I beg them, however, kindly to bear in mind that the little I have to say will be quite clearly and intelligibly expressed ; whereas their works, though doubtless very erudite, vastly erudite, very profound, stupidly profound, are likewise as incomprehensible as they are profound. What do locked granaries profit the people so long as it has no key wherewith to open them ? The people hungers for bread, and is ready to thank me for the morsel of intellectual food which I honestly share with them. " I do not believe that it is want of talent that restrains most of our German men of learning from giving popular expression to their views on religion and philosophy. I believe that it is dread of the consequences of their own intellectual research that prevents them communicatino' its results to the people. I, however, do not possess this dread, for I am no man of learning ; I am myself of the people. I am no learned man, I am not among the num- ber of the seven hundred wise men of Germany. I am one of the great crowd standing before the gates of their wisdom, and should any truth chance to slip through and find its way to me, then it has come far enough : I write APPENDIX. 167 it down on paper in fair characters, and give it to the compositor ; he sets it up in leaden type and passes it to the printer, who prints it, and then it belongs to the whole world. " The religion in which we in Germany rejoice is Chris- tianity. It will be my duty then to explain what Christianity is, how it became Eoman Catholicism, how from this it became Protestantism, and how German philosophy is the offspring of Protestantism. "In beginning with the discussion of religion I pre- monish all pious souls not on any account to entertain the slightest anxiety. " Pear not, pious souls ! " &c. ^ Faffe 25. A short paragraph is here omitted in the latest Prench edition. Its omission is no doubt due to the fact that Heine's views about democracy underwent considerable change between the date when he wrote and the date when he last revised his book. " It is, perhaps, because the great ones of this earth are certain of their supremacy, and because they are at heart resolved to go on for ever abusing this supremacy by turning it to our misfortune, that they are convinced of the necessity of Christianity for their peoples ; and it is in reality a tender impulse of benevolence that prompts them to take so much trouble in upholding this religion ! " The succeeding paragraph begins with the words — " The ultimate fate of Christianity depends, then, on whether we still have need of it," altered in the latest Prench edition to : "The duration of religions," &c., as at page 25. i68 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. ^ Page 41. This paragraph reads as follows in the German ver- sion : — "I have already frequently made use of the words spiritualism and sensualism. These words, however, have here no reference, such as they have when employed by French philosophers, to the two different sources of our knowledge : I employ them, as may be gathered from the general drift of the foregoing remarks, to designate those two different modes of thought, of which one mode desires, by the destruction of matter, to glorify the spirit, whilst the other mode seeks to vindicate the natural rights of matter against the usurpations of the spirit." * Page 41. Instead of these opening sentences this paragraph in the latest German edition begins thus : — " To the above-mentioned beginnings of the Lutheran Eeformation — beginnings which already revealed the whole spirit of that event — I must draw special attention, since there are still current here in France, regarding the Eeformation the old misconceptions which were spread abroad by Bossuet through his ' Histoire des Variations,' and which are even repeated by modern writers." 5 Page 58. Luther's Hymn has found several English translators, Thomas Oarlyle being the earliest of them. Catherine Winkworth's translation — probably the one best known — is to be found in her " Christian Singers of Germany," and in various collections of hymns. The present renderino- is APPENDIX. 169 a very halting attempt to preserve the form as well as the spirit of the original. Readers of German will at once perceive how greatly superior would be a translation that accurately reproduced the rugged metre without sacrificing the fervour and vigour of the " mail-clad words " to a merely rhythmical version, however skilfully "■"Tfcbidved. But the former task would be far more diffi- cult of accomplishment than the latter. « Page 58. At this point the first part of the French version closes, but in the German version Heine goes on to draw a comparison between modern and early German literature. this comparison is made to turn chiefly on the distinc- Uon between the " Classical " and the " Eomantic " treat- ment of the subject-matter in literature. A more general / and more inclusive definition of these much-abused terms is given by Heine in his "Romantic School." For the sake of completeness, howler, a translation of what follows in the German version is here given. ["In order to show that modern German literature begins with Luther and not with Hans Sachs], it is sufiB- cient to indicate clearly the contrast between our new and our older literatures. " In surveying German literature as it flourish ed before Luther's time, we arrive at the following conclusions : — " I. Its material, its subject-matter, like the life itself of the Middle Ages, consists of a mingling of two hetero- geneous elements, which during a long period struggled with each other in such close contact that at last they became blended together: these two elements were Germanic nationality and Indo-Gnostic, so-called Catholic Christianity. 170 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. " 2. The treatment of the subject-matter, or rather the spirit in which it was treated, in this older literature, was Eomantic. The term 'Eomantic' is erroneously applied also to the material of that literature, as it is to all manifestations of the Middle Ages that spring from the blending of the two elements referred to — Germanic nationality and Catholic Christianity. For as certain poets of the Middle Ages treated Greek history and mythology in a spirit truly Eomantic, so Mediaeval customs and legends may be represented in a classical form. The terms ' Classic ' and ' Eomantic ' refer, there- fore, merely to the spirit of the treatment. The treat- ment is Classic when the form of the representation is identical with the idea to be represented, as is the case in Greek works of art in which the closest harmony exists between form and idea. The treatment is Eomantic when the form does not reveal the idea through identity with it, but leaves the idea to be conjectured paraboli- cally. I here use the word ' parabolically ' in preference to the word ' symbolically.' Greek mythology possessed an array of deities, each of whom, besides identity of form and idea, might acquire a symbolic signification. But in this Greek religion it was only the outward fashion of the divinities that presented anything definite, — all else, their Life and conduct, was left to the voluntary caprice of the poet. In the Christian religion, on the other hand, there are no such definite personalities, — there are only definite facts, definite sacred events and actions 'into which the creative faculty of man might import a para- bolic significance. It has been said that Homer invented the Greek gods; this is not true: they already existed in definite outlines; what Homer did was to invent their history. Artists of the . Middle Ages, on the other hand, never dared to invent the slightest detail in the historical part of their religion : — the fall of man, the APPENDIX. 171 incarnation, the baptism, the crucifixion, and so forth, were indisputable -facts which could not be moulded anew, but to which- the creative genius of man might impart a parabolic signification. In this parabolic spirit all the arts of the Middle Ages worked, and their treatment is Eomantic. Hence the mystical uuiversalism of the poetry of the Middle Ages; the figures are shadowy, aE. their actions are indefinite, everything about them has a twi- light aspect as if illuminated by uncertain moonlight; the idea is signified in the form only as an enigma, and we see merely vague forms such as were appropriate to a spiritualistic literature. There is not, as with the Greeks, a sunbright harmony between form and idea ; but often- times the idea towers above the given form' to which the latter strives despairingly to attain, and thus we have a fantastic and strange sublimity; oftentimes the form quite overtops the idea when some foolish paltry thought drags itself along encumbered by a colossal form, and then we have a grotesque farce; almost always do we find deformity. " 3. It was a universal characteristic of the older litera- ture of ■vyhich we speak that in all its productions it manifested the firm and settled faith that dominated all things temporal as well as spiritual during its epoch. Every opinion of the time was based on authorities ; the poet trod with the surefootedness of a mule paths that lay among the precipices of doubt, and his works are per- vaded by a daring calm, by a holy confidence that became impossible in a later age when the highest authority — the authority of the pope — was overthrown, and when all other authorities toppled down after it. All the poetry of the Middle Ages possesses the same character ; it seems as though it had not been composed by individual men, but by the whole people ; it is objective, epic, naif. " But in the literature that burst into blossom under the 172 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. influence of Luther we find quite the opposite of all this. " I. Its material, the subject- matter with which it has to deal, is the conflict between the interests and opinions of the Eeformation and the old order of things. To the new spirit of the age the mongrel creed springing from the two elements referred to — German nationality and Indo-Gnostic Christianity — is utterly repugnant. The latter element it regards as heathen idolatry, which must give place to the true religion of the Judaic-Deistic gospel. A new order of things takes shape, the spirit makes discoveries that promote the well-being of matter ; by the development of industrial pursuits and by philo- sophy spiritualism becomes discredited in public opinion ;■ the third estate emerges ; the roar of the revolution begins to echo in human hearts and heads ; and what the age feels and thinks, wliat it needs and will have, it gives expression to, and this is the material of modern literature. " 2. The spirit of treatment is no longer Eomantic, but Classic. Through the revival of ancient literature a joy- ous enthusiasm for Greek and Latin authors diffused itself over all Europe, and men of learning, the only men who in those days wrote, strove to possess themselves of the spirit of classical antiquity, or at any rate sought in their writings to imitate classical forms of art. If, unlike the Greeks, they failed to attain harmony of form and idea, all the more strictly did they hold to the externals of Greek treatment: they distinguished, according to Greek precept, the species of form ; they refrained from all Eomantic extravagance; and in this respect we call them classical. " 3. The universal characteristic of modern literature is the predominance in it of individuality and of scepticism. The authorities are dethroned; reason is now the only lamp to illumine the steps of man; conscience his only APPENDIX. 173 guiding-stafif in the dark labyrinth of this life. Man now stands face to face alone with his creator and sings to him his lay. Thus our modern literature begins with spiritual songs. Later on, however, as literature becomes secular, the intensest self-consciousness, the feeling of personality, predominates. Poetry is no longer objective, epic, and naif ; it is subjective, lyrical, and reflective." "> Page 81. John Tauler was born at Strasburg in 1 290. In 1 308 he entered the Dominican order, and for some time studied theology at Paris. On his return to his native city he came under the influence of Master Eckhart, called " the Father of German Speculation," and the most celebrated of the so-called mystics of the Middle Ages. Whilst, however, the mysticism of Eckhart led to quietism, Tauler's whole life was spent in practical religious activity. He was the greatest preacher of his time, and is even held by some writers to have been the greatest preacher of Medi- aeval times. When about fifty years of age, Tauler was brought under an influence more powerful than that of Eckhart, namely, that of Nicolas of Basle, who was styled "the Eriend of God." At the instigation of Nicolas, Tauler passed two years in religious seclusion and in the practice of the severest ascetic discipline. He then resumed his preaching, braved the interdict laid by Pope John XXII. on Strasburg, and the horrors of the " black death" that devastated the city in 1348. Obliged for a time to betake himself to Cologne, he afterwards returned to Strasburg, and died there in 1361. Besides the three volumes of sermons published at Frankfort in 1826, many of Tauler's homilies still remain unprinted. The authen- ticity of the sacred songs attributed to him is doubtful. 176 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY. ment in the French Foreign Office, and at the Eestoration he was awarded a pension. He died at Paris in 1841. Heiberg's fame rests chiefly on his comedies, of which ' Heckingborn ' is the best known. He also wrote 'Political Aphorisms,' and a 'Precis Historique et Critique de la Constitution de la Monarchie Danoise' (Paris, 1820). In imitation of the Letters of Junius, he wrote ' Lettres d'un Norv^gien de la Vielle Eoche ' (Paris, 1822). Page 144. John George Forster was born near Danzig in 1754. At an early age he accompanied his father, John Eeinhold Forster, the traveller and naturalist, to Eussia. Father and son afterwards came to England, where the former settled for a time as a teacher of languages at Warrington. In 1772 John Eeinhold Forster was appointed naturalist to Captain Cook's second expedition, and was again accompanied by his son, who in 1777 published an accouiit of the expedi- tion ("A Voyage Eound the World in His Britannic Majesty's Sloop Resolution "). After holding during several years a professorship of natural history, first at Cassel and afterwards at Wilna in Germany, John George Forster was called to Mainz, as librarian to the Elector, in 1788. On the taking of Mainz by the French in 1792, Forster, who had become deeply imbued with the principles of the Eevolution, was sent to Paris as the deputy of his like-minded fellow-townsmen to sue for the union of their city with the French Eepublic. He died at Paris in 1794. Forster's political career is treated as material by H. Hoenig in his novel " Die Clubisten in Mainz." APPENDIX. 177 ^^ Page 158. At tMs point the first German edition comes to a close. What follows was struck out by the censor. It is restored in the' later editions. A portion of Heine's remarkable pro- phecy has already been fulfilled in the events of 1870- 187 1. The fantastic and reactionary policy of Prince Bismarck seems not unlikely to aid in bringing about that catastrophe in Germany " compared to which the French revolution will seem but an innocent idyl." It is to this singular prophecy, in part already fulfilled and in part perhaps about to be fulfilled, that Heine refers in the " Preface to the Second German Edition." (See page 10 of the present volume.) PRINTED BY BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO. EDINBURGH AND LONDON. In One Volume, crown 8vo, price is. 6d. WIT, WISDOM, AND PATHOS, PBOM THE PROSE OF HEINRICH HEINE. WITS A FEW PIECES FROM TEE "BOOK OF SONGS." SELECTED AND TRANSLATED BY J. SNODGEASS. " No Englishman of culture who is unacquainted with Heine can fail to derive a new intellectual pleasure from Mr. Snodgrass's pages." — Contem- porary Review, September 1880. " The result of Mr. Snodgrass's attempt has been the production of a volume which, for variety and interest, may be pronounced one of the most successful books of the season." — Aberdeen Journal, Ma/rch 26, 1879. "Mr. Snodgrass is to be thanked for a very seasonable bit of work." — Simminer, April 26, 1879. " He has performed his task with skill, tact, and judgment ; and it is easy to perceive that he has a thorough acquaintance with his author and sympathy for his matter." — Notes and Queries, April 19, 1879. " We are bound to say that Mr. Snodgrass has done his work exception- ally well." — The Literary World, May 9, 1879. " Mr. Snodgrass has made a valuable addition to English literature in this volume, and has given us a most attractive and ejEGicient introduction to the study of Heine." — The Nonconformist, August 20, 1879. " Mr, Snodgrass has done his selection and translation admirably well, and we owe him thanks for a volume which has in it mdre wit of the highest sort, and more political insight, than any book that has lately been given to the public." — Vanity Fair, November 8, 1879. " In Heine, whose prose writings in German fill well on to a score of volumes, we find in remarkable combination the best qualities of German thought, along with the sparkle and brilliancy of an accomplished Prenph- man's style." — Aberdeen Daily Free Press, April 21, 1879. j " Mr. Snodgrass has produced a book in which lazy people will find a great deal to please them. They can take it up at any moment, and open it on any page with the certainty of finding some bright epigram ; they need not turn down the page on shutting up the volume, as it matters little where they resume. There is nothing jarring in the whole book.' — AthencBum, April 19, 1879. " The compiler of this interesting little volume, Mr. J. Snodgrass, is perfectly right in saying that Heine is chiefly known to English readers as the author of the ' Book of Songs.' "—The Week, Apnl 19, 1879. " Mr. Snodgrass has certainly done great service to English literature in presenting us with a compact little volume like that before us." — Spec- tator, August 2, 1879. " The ' English Fragments ' have a special interest for the English reader ; but the selection from Heine's prose works in general, most judi- ciously made and excellently translated by Mr. Snodgrass, gives a much completer view of the qualities of the writer's mind." — Saturday Review, May 2, 1879. " Mr. Snodgrass would appear to have saturated himself with Heine literature, to have so caught Heine's mode of thought and his turns of expression — quaint, droll, swift, and scathing by turns — that the trans- lator would appear to have had no more difBculty in presenting Heine as he was to the reader than he would have in presenting his own thoughts." — Glasgow Herald, March 31, 1879. " A word of cordial praise is due to the translator, IVxr; J. Snodgrass, for his admirable performance of a very difficult task. His book is one to welcome and to keep as a treasure of almost priceless thought and criti- cism." — Contemporary Seview, February 1881. " Mr. Snodgrass, in his ' Wit,' &c., has done a great service in this respect, presenting as it were a full-length miniature of the man, clear and effective, wherein his characteristic expression is faithfully caught, and where, if we look carefully, we can see him as he really was, for he is made to paint his own portrait." — British Quarterly Review, October 1881. " Mr. Snodgrass has not essayed to give at all an exhaustive collection of Heine's witty, wise, and pathetic sayings ; but he has selected, in the order in which they occur in the complete German edition, such extracts as have specially commended themselves to himself. He has produced very enjoyable volume, exactly adapted to the taste of lazy and luxurious persons, who can just take up the book for five minutes to read a delight- ful passage complete in itself, and not long enough to fatigue the most fastidious attention." — Academy, May 31, 1879. LONDON : TRUBNEK & CO., LUDGATE HILL. *