Chapter 2

[1]Hegel'sLeben(Rosenkranz), p. 555.

[2]'Das Bekannte überhaupt ist darum, weil es bekannt ist, nicht erkannt.'Phenomenologie des Geistes,p. 24.

[3]Vermischte Schriften,vol. ii. p. 474.

[4]e. g.DaseinandExistenz: WirklichkeitandRealität:WesenandSubstanz.It is the same habit of curiously pondering over the tones and shades of language which leads him to something very like playing on words, and to etymologising, as one may call it, on unetymological principles: e. g. the play onMeinandMeinung(vol. ii. 32: cf.Werke, ii. 75): the literal rendering ofErinnerung(Encycl.§§ 234 and 450); and the abrupt transitions, as it would seem, from literal to figurative use of such a term asGrund.At the same time it is well not to be prosaically certain that a free play of thought does not follow the apparently fortuitous assonance of words.

[5]Hegel'sLeben(Rosenkranz), p. 553.

'But,' it is urged, 'though it be well to let the stream of foreign thought irrigate some of our philosophical pastures, though we should not for ever entrench ourselves in our insularity—why try to introduce Hegel, of all philosophers confessedly the most obscure? Why not be content with the study and the "exploitation" of Kant, whom Germans themselves still think so important as to expound him with endless comment and criticism, and who has at length found, after some skirmishes, a recognised place in the English philosophical curriculum? Why seek for more Teutonic thinking that can be found in Schopenhauer, and found there in a clear and noble style, luminous in the highest degree, and touching with no merely academic abstruseness the problems of life and death? Or—as that song is sweetest to men which is the newest to ring in their ears—why not render accessible to English readers the numerous and suggestive works of Eduard von Hartmann, and of Friedrich Nietzsche—not to mention Robert Hamerling[1]? Or, finally, why not give us more and ever more translations of the works in logic, ethics, psychology, or metaphysics, of those many admirable teachers in the German universities, whom it would beinvidious to try to single out by name? As for Hegel, his system, in the native land of the philosopher, is utterly discredited; its influence is extinct; it is dead as a door-nail. It is a pity to waste labour and distract attention, and that in English lands, where there are plenty of problems of our own to solve, by an attempt, which must perforce be futile, to resuscitate these defunctitudes?'

That Hegelianism has been utterly discredited, in certain quarters, is no discovery reserved for these later days. But on this matter perhaps we may borrow an analogy. If the reader will be at the trouble to take up two English newspapers of opposite partisanship and compare the reports from their foreign correspondents on some question of home politics, he may, if a novice, be surprised to learn that according to one, the opinion e. g. of Vienna is wholly adverse to the measure, while, according to the other, that opinion entirely approves.

It is no new thing to find Hegelianism in general obloquy. Even in 1830 the Catholic philosopher and theologian Günther[2]—an admirer, but by no means a follower of Hegel—wrote that, 'for some years it had been the fashion in learned Germany to look upon philosophy, and above all Hegelian philosophy, as a door-mat on which everybody cleaned his muddy boots before entering the sanctuary of politics and religion.' What is true as regards the alleged surcease of Hegelianism is that in the reaction which from various causes turned itself against philosophy in the two decennia after 1848, that system, as the most deeply committed part of the 'metaphysical' host, suffered most severely. History and science seemed to triumph along the whole line. But it may be perhaps permissible to remark that Hegelianism had predictedfor itself the fate that it proved had fallen on all other philosophies. After the age of Idealism comes the turn of Realism. The Idea had to die—had to sink as a germ in the fields of nature and history before it could bear its fruit. Above all it is not to be expected that such a system, so ambitious in aim and concentrated in expression, could find immediate response and at once disclose all its meaning. His first disciples are not the—truest interpreters of any great teacher. What he saw in the one comprehensive glance of genius, his successors must often be content to gather by the slow accumulation of years, and perhaps centuries, of experience. It is not to Theophrastus that we go for the truest and fullest conception of Aristotelianism; nor is Plato to be measured by what his immediate successors in the Academy managed to make out of him. It is now more than a century since Kant gave his lesson to the public, and we are still trying to get him focussed in a single view: it may be even longer till Hegel comes fully within the range of our historians of thought. Aristotelianism too had to wait centuries till it fully entered the consciousness even of the thinking world.

It is to be said too that without Hegel it would be difficult to imagine what even teachers, like Lotze, who were very unlike him, would have had to say. It does not need a very wide soul, nor need one be a mere dilettantist eclectic, to find much of Schopenhauer's work far from incompatible with his great, and as some have said, complementary opposite. It is not indeed prudent as yet for a writer in Germany who wishes to catch the general ear to affix too openly a profession of Hegelian principles, and he will do well to ward off suspicion by some disparaging remarks on the fantastic methods, the overfondness for system, the contempt for common sense and scientific results which, as he declares, vitiate allthe speculations of the period from 1794 to 1830. But under the names of Spinoza and of Leibniz the leaven of Hegelian principles has been at work: and if the Philistines solve the riddle of the intellectual Samson, it is because they have ploughed with his heifer,—because his ideas are part of the modern stock of thought,—not from what they literally read in the great thinkers at the close of the seventeenth century. Last year saw appear in Germany two excellent treatises describable as popular introductions to philosophy[3], one by a thinker who has never disguised his obligations to Hegel, the other by a teacher in the University of Berlin who may in many ways be considered as essentially kindred with our general English style of thought. But both treatises are more allied in character to the spirit of the Hegelian attempts to comprehend man and God than to the formalistic and philological disquisitions which have for some years formed the staple of German professorial activity. And, lastly, the vigorous thinker, who a quarter of a century ago startled the reading public by the portent of a new metaphysic which should be the synthesis of Schelling and Schopenhauer, has lately informed us[4]that his affinity to Hegel is, taken all in all, greater than his affinity to any other philosopher'; and that that affinity extends to all that in Hegel has essential and permanent value.

But it is not on Eduard von Hartmann's commendation that we need rest our estimate of Hegelianism. We shall rather say that, till more of Hegel has been assimilated, he must still block the way. Things have altered greatly in the last twenty years, it is true; and ideas ofmore or less Hegelian origin have taken their place in the common stock of philosophic commodities. But it will probably be admitted by those best qualified to speak on the subject, that the shower has not as yet penetrated very deeply into the case-hardened soil, still less saturated it in the measure most likely to cause fruitful shoots to grow forth. We have to go back to Hegel in the same spirit as we go to Kant, and, for that matter, to Plato or Descartes: or, as the moderns may go back—to borrow from another sphere—to Dante or Shakespeare. We do not want the modern poet to resuscitate the style and matter ofKing Learor of theInferno.Yet as the Greek tragedian steeped his soul in the language and the legend of Homeric epic, as Dante nurtured his spirit on the noble melodies of Mantua's poet; so philosophy, if it is to go forth strong and effective, must mould into its own substance the living thought of former times. It would be as absurd, and as impossible to be literally and simply a Hegelian,—if that means one for whom Hegel sums up all philosophy and all truth—as it is to be at the present day in the literal sense a Platonist or an Aristotelian. The world may be slow, the world of opinion and thought may linger:e pur si muove.We too have our own problems—the same, no doubt, in a sense, from age to age, and yet infinitely varying and never in two ages alike. New stars have appeared on the spiritual sky; and whether they have in them the eternal light or only the flash and glare of a passing meteor, they alter the aspects of the night in which we are still waiting for the dawn.

A new language, born of new relations of ideas, or of new ideas, is perforce for our generation the vehicle of all utterances, and we cannot again speak the dialect, however imposing or however quaint, of a vanished day.

And for that reason there must always be a new philosophy, couched in the language of the age, sympathetic with its hopes and fears, conscious of its beliefs, more or less sensible of its problems—as indeed we may be confident there always will be. But, perhaps, the warrior in that battle against illusion and prejudice, against the sloth which takes things as they are and the poorness of spirit which is satisfied with first appearances, will not do wisely to disdain the past. He will not indeed equip himself with rusty swords and clumsy artillery from the old arsenals. But he will not disdain the lessons of the past,—its methods and principles of tactics and strategy. Recognising perhaps some defects and inequalities in the methods and aims of thought most familiar to him and current in his vicinity, he may go abroad for other samples, even though they be not in all respects worth his adoption. And so without taking Hegel as omniscient, or pledging himself to every word of the master, he may think from his own experience that there is much in the system that will be helpful, when duly estimated and assimilated, to others. There is—and few can be so bigotedor so positive-minded as to regret it—there is unquestionably a growing interest in English-speaking countries in what may be roughly called philosophy—the attempt, unprejudiced by political, scientific, or ecclesiastical dogma, to solve the questions as to what the world really is, and what man's place and function is. 'The burthen of the mystery, the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world' is felt—felt widely and sometimes felt deeply. To the direct lightening of that burthen and that mystery it is the privilege of our profoundest thinkers and our far-seeing poets and artists to contribute. To the translator of Hegel there falls the humbler task ofmaking accessible, if it may be, something of one of the later attempts at a solution of the enigma of life and existence,—an attempt which for a time dazzled some of the keenest intellects of its age, and which has at least impressed many others with the conviction, born of momentary flashes from it of vast illuminant power, that—si sic omnia—there was here concealed a key to many puzzles, and a guard against many illusions likely to beset the inquirer after truth.

[1]A book by V. Knauer published last year (Hauptprobleme der Philosophie), a series of popular lectures, gives one-sixth of its space to the 'Atomistic of Will' by the Austrian poet Hamerling.

[2]Hegel'sBriefe, ii. 349.

[3]J. Volkelt,Vorträge zur Einführung in die Philosophie der Gegenwart(München 1892): F. Paulsen,Einleitung in die Philosophie(Berlin 1892).

[4]E. v. Hartmann,Kritische Wanderungen, p. 74.

Although we need not take too seriously Hegel's remark (vol. ii. p. 13) on the English conception of philosophy, it may be admitted that, by the dominant school of English thought, philosophy, taken in the wide sense it has predominantly born abroad, was, not so very long ago, all but entirely ignored. Causes of various kinds had turned the energy of the English mind into other directions, not less essential to the common welfare. Practical needs and an established social system helped—to bind down studies to definite and particular objects, and to exclude what seemed vague and general investigations with no immediate bearing on the business of life. Hence philosophy in England could hardly exist except when it was reduced to the level of a special branch of science, or when it could be used as a receptacle for the principles and methods common to all the sciences. The general term was often used to denote the wisdom of this world, or the practical exhibition of self-control in life and action. For those researches, which are directed to the objects once considered proper to philosophy, the more definite and characteristic term came to be Mental and Moral Science.

The old name was in certain circles restricted to denote the vague and irregular speculations of those thinkers, who either lived before the rise of exact science, or who acted in defiance of its precepts and its example. One large and influential class of Englishthinkers inclined to sweep philosophy altogether away, as equivalent to metaphysics and obsolete forms of error; and upon the empty site thus obtained they sought to construct a psychological theory of mind, or they tried to arrange and codify those general remarks upon the general procedure of the sciences which are known under the name of Inductive Logic. A smaller, but not less vigorous, school of philosophy looked upon their business as an extension and rounding off of science into a complete unification of knowledge. The first is illustrated by the names of J. S. Mill and Mr. Bain: the second is the doctrine of Mr. Herbert Spencer.

The encyclopaedic aggregate of biological, psychological, ethical and social investigation which Mr. Spencer pursues, under the general guidance of the formula of evolution by differentiation and integration, still proceeds on its course: but though its popularity—as such popularity goes—is vast and more than national, it does not and probably cannot find many imitators. Very differently stand matters with the movement in psychology and logic. Here the initiative has led to divergent and unexpected developments. Psychology, which at first was partly an ampler and a more progressive logic, a theory of the origin and nature of knowledge, partly a propaedeutic to the more technical logic and ethics, and pursued in a loosely introspective way, has gravitated more and more towards its experimental and physiological side, with occasional velleities to assume the abstractly-mathematical character of a psycho-physical science. Logic, on the other hand, has also changed its scope. Not content to be a mere tool of the sciences or a mere criterion for the estimation of evidence, it has in one direction grown into a systematic effort to become an epistemology—a system of the first principles of knowledge and reality—a metaphysic of science; andin another it has sought to realise the meaning of those old forms of inference which the logicians of half a century ago were inclined to pooh-pooh as obsolete. Most remarkable—and most novel of all—is the vast increase of interest and research in the problems of ethics and v of what is called the philosophy of religion—subjects which at that date were literally burning questions, apt to scorch the fingers of those who touched them. In all of this, but especially marked in some leading thinkers, the ruling feature is the critical—the sceptical, i. e. the eager, watchful, but self-restrained—attitude towards its themes. Ever driving on to find a deeper unity than shows on the surface, and to get at principles, the modern thinker—and in this we see the permanent and almost overwhelming influence of Kant upon him—recoils from the dogmatism of system, at the very moment it seems to be within his grasp.

Thus the recent products of English thought have been, as Mr. Spencer has taught us to say, partly in the line of differentiation, partly of integration. At one moment it seems as if the ancient queen of the sciences sat like Hecuba,exul, inops,while her younger daughters enjoyed the freedom and progress of specialisation. The wood seems lost behind the trees. And at another, again, the centripetal force seems to preponderate: every department, logic, ethics, psychology, sociology, rapidly carries its students on and up to fundamental questions, if not to fundamental principles. Philosophy—the one and undivided truth and quest of truths—emerges fresh, vigorous, and as yet rather indeterminate, from the mass of detailed investigations. That the position is now altered from what it was in times when knowledge had fewer departments, is obvious. The task of the 'synoptic' mind—which Plato claims for the philosopher—grows increasingly difficult: butthat is hardly a reason for performing it in a more perfunctory way. It seems rather as if in such a crisis one of the great reconstructive systems of a preceding age might be in some measure helpful.

If we consult history, it is at once clear that philosophy, or the pursuit of ultimate reality and permanent truth, went hand in hand with scientific researches into facts and their particular explanations.

In their earlier stages the two tendencies of thought were scarcely distinguishable. The philosophers of Ionia and Magna Graecia were also the scientific pioneers of their time. Their fragmentary remains remind us at times of the modern theories of geology and biology,—at other times of the teachings of idealism. The same thing is comparatively true of the earlier philosophers of Modern Europe. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in spite of Bacon and Newton, endeavoured to study the mental and moral life by a method which was a strange mixture of empiricism and metaphysics. In words, indeed, the thinkers from Descartes to Wolff duly emphasise, perhaps over-emphasise, the antithesis between the extended and the intellectual. But in practice their course is not so clear. Their mental philosophy is often only a preliminarymedicina mentisto set the individual mind in good order for undertaking the various tasks awaiting a special research. They are really eager to get on to business, and only, as it were, with regret spend time in this clearance of mental faculty. And when they do deal with objects, the material and extended tends to become the dominant conception, the basis of reality. The human mind, thatnobilissima substantia, is treated only as an aggregate, or a receptacle, of ideas, and themens,—with them all nearly as with Spinoza,—is only anidea corporis,and that phrase not taken sohighly as Spinoza's perhaps should be taken. In the works of these thinkers, as of the pre-Socratics, there is one element which may be styled philosophical, and another element which maybe styled scientific,—if we use both words vaguely. But with Socrates in the ancient, and with Kant in the modern epoch of philosophy, an attempt was made to get the boundary between the two regions definitively drawn. The distinction was in the first place accompanied by something like turning the back upon science and popular conceptions. Socrates withdrew thought from disquisitions concerning the nature of all things, and fixed it upon man and the state of man. Kant left the broad fields of actually-attained knowledge, and inquired into the central principle on which the acquisition of science, the laws of human life, and the ideals of art and religion, were founded.

The change thus begun was not unlike that which Copernicus effected in the theory of Astronomy. Human personality, either in the actualised forms of the State, or in the abstract shape of the Reason,—that intellectual liberty, which is a man's true world,—was, at least by implication, made the pivot around which the system of the sciences might turn. In the contest, which according to Reid prevails between Common Sense and Philosophy, the presumptions of the former have been distinctly reversed, and Kant, like Socrates, has shown that it is not the several items of fact, but the humanity, the moral law, the thought, which underlies these doctrines, which give the real resting-point and true centre of movement. But this negative attitude of philosophy to the sciences is only the beginning, needed to secure a standing-ground. In the ancient world Aristotle, and in the modern Hegel (as the inheritor of the labours of Fichte and Schelling), exhibitthe movement outwards to reconquer the universe, proceeding from that principle which Socrates and Kant had emphasised in its fundamental worth.

Mr. Mill, in the closing chapter of his Logic, has briefly sketched the ideal of a science to which he gives the name of Teleology, corresponding in the ethical and practical sphere to aPhilosophia Prima, or Metaphysics, in the theoretical. This ideal and ultimate court of appeal is to be valid in Morality, and also in Prudence, Policy and Taste. But the conception, although a desirable one, falls short of the work which Hegel assigns to philosophy. What he intended to accomplish with detail and regular evolution was not a system of principles in these departments of action only, but a theory which would give its proper place in our total Idea of reality to Art, Science, and Religion, to all the consciousness of ordinary life, and to the evolution of the physical universe. Philosophy ranges over the—whole field of actuality, or existing fact. Abstract principles are all very well in their way; but they are not philosophy. If the world in its historical and its present life develops into endless detail in regular lines, philosophy must equally develop the narrowness of its first principles into the plenitude of a System,—into what Hegel calls, the Idea. His point of view may be gathered from the following remarks in a review of Hamann, an erratic friend and fellow-citizen of Kant's.

Hamann would not put himself to the trouble, which in an higher sense God undertook. The ancient philosophers have described God under the image of a round ball. But if that be His nature, God has unfolded it; and in the actual world He has opened the closed shell of truth into a system of Nature, into a State-system, a system of Law and Morality, into the system of the world's History. The shut fist has become an openhand, the fingers of which reach out to lay hold of man's mind, and draw it to Himself. Nor is the human mind a self-involved intelligence, blindly moving within its own secret recesses. It is no mere feeling and groping about in a vacuum, but an intelligent system of rational organisation. Of that system Thought is the summit in point of form: and Thought maybe described as the capability of going beyond the mere surface of God's self-expansion,—or rather as the capability, by means of reflection upon it, of entering into it, and then when the entrance has been secured, of retracing in thought God's expansion of Himself. To take this trouble is the express duty and end of ends set before the thinking mind, ever since God laid aside His rolled-up form, and revealed Himself[1].'

Enthusiastic admirers have often spoken as if the salvation of the time could only come from the Hegelian philosophy. 'Grasp the secret of Hegel,' they say, 'and you will find a cure for the delusions of your own mind, and the remedy which will set right the wrongs of the world.' These high claims to be a panacea were never made by Hegel himself. According to him, as according to Aristotle, philosophyas suchcan produce nothing new. Practical statesmen, and theoretical reformers, may do their best to correct the inequalities of their time. But the very terms in which Bacon scornfully depreciated one great concept of philosophy are to be accepted in their literal truth. Like a virgin consecrated to God, she bears no fruit[2]. She represents the spirit of the world, resting, as it were, when one step in the progress has been accomplished, and surveying the advance which has been made. Philosophy is not,' says Fichte, 'even a means toshapelife:for it lies in a totally different world, and what is to have an influence upon life must itself have sprung from life. Philosophy is only a means to theknowledgeof life.' Nor has it the vocation to edify men, and take the place of religion on the higher levels of intellect. 'The philosopher,' Fichte boldly continues, 'has no God at all and can have no God: he has only a concept of the concept or of the Idea of God. It is only in life that there is God and religion: but the philosopher as such is not the whole complete man, and it is impossible for any one to beonlya philosopher[3].' Philosophy does not profess to bring into being what ought to be, but is not yet. It sets up no mere ideals, which must wait for some future day in order to be realised. Enough for it if it show what the worldis,if it were what it professes to be, and what in a way it must be, otherwise it could not be even what it is. The subject-matter of philosophy is that which is always realising and always realised—the world in its wholeness as it is and has been. It seeks to put before us, and embody in permanent outlines, the universal law of spiritual life and growth, and not the local, temporary, and individual acts of human will.

Those who ask philosophy to construe, or to deducea prioria single blade of grass, or a single act of a man, must not be grieved if their request sounds absurd and meets with no answer. The sphere of philosophy is the Universal. We may say, if we like, that it is retrospective. It is the spectator of all time and all existence: it is its duty to view thingssub specie aeternitatis. To comprehend the universe of thought in all its formations and all its features, to reduce the solid structures, which mind has created, to fluidity andtransparency in the pure medium of thought, to set free the fossilised intelligence which the great magician who wields the destinies of the world has hidden under the mask of Nature, of the Mind of man, of the works of Art, of the institutions of the State and the orders of Society, and of religious forms and creeds:—such is the complicated problem of philosophy. Its special work is to comprehend the world, not try to make it better. If it were the purpose of philosophy to reform and improve the existing state of things, it comes a little too late for such a task. 'As the thought of the world,' says Hegel, 'it makes its first appearance at a time, when the actual fact has consummated its process of formation, and is now fully matured. This is the doctrine set forth by the notion of philosophy; but it is also the teaching of history. It is only when the actual world has reached its full fruition that the ideal rises to confront the reality, and builds up, in the shape of an intellectual realm, that same world grasped in its substantial being. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, some one shape of life has meanwhile grown old: and grey in grey, though it brings it into knowledge, cannot make it young again. The owl of Minerva does not start upon its flight, until the evening twilight has begun to fall[4].'

[1]Vermischte Schriften, vol. ii. p. 87.

[2]De Augm. Scient.iii. 5.

[3]The passages occur in some notes (written down by F. in reference to the charge of Atheism) published in hisWerke,v. pp. 342, 348.

[4]Philosophie des Rechts, p. 20 (Werke,viii).

Even an incidental glance into Hegel's Logic cannot fail to discover the frequent recurrence of the name of God, and the discussion of matters not generally touched upon, unless in works bearing upon religion. There were two questions which seem to have had a certain fascination for Hegel. One of them, a rather unpromising problem, referred to the distances between the several planets in the solar system, and the law regulating these intervals[1]. The other and more intimate problem turned upon the value of the proofs usually offered in support of the being of God. That God is the supreme certitude of the mind, the basis of all reality and knowledge, is what Hegel no more put in question, than did Descartes, Spinoza, or Locke. What he often repeated was that thematterin these proofs must be distinguished from the imperfectmannerin which the arguers presented it. Again and againin his Logic, as well as in other discussions more especially devoted to it, he examines this problem. His persistence in this direction might earn for him that title of 'Knight of the Holy Ghost,' by which Heine, in one of the delightful poems of his 'Reisebilder,' describes himself to the maid of Klausthal in the Harz. The poet of Love and of Freedom had undoubted rights to rank among the sacred band: but so also had the philosopher. Like the Socrates whom Plato describes to us, he seems to feel that he has been commissioned to reveal the truth of God, and quicken men by an insight into the right wisdom. Nowhere in the modern period of philosophy has higher spirit breathed in the utterances of a thinker. The same theme is claimed as the common heritage of philosophy and religion. A letter to Duboc[2], the father of a modern German novelist, lets us see how important this aspect of his system was to Hegel himself. He had been asked to give a succinct explanation of his standing-ground: and his answer begins by pointing out that philosophy seeks to apprehend in reasoned knowledge the same truth which the religious mind has in its faith.

Words like these may at first sight suggest the bold soaring of ancient speculation in the times of Plato and Aristotle, or even the theories of the medieval Schoolmen. They sound as if he proposed to do for the modern world, and in the full light of modern knowledge, what the Schoolmen tried to accomplish within the somewhat narrow conceptions of medieval Christianity and Greek logic. Still there is a difference between the two cases. While the Doctors of theChurch, in appearance at least, derived the form of exposition, and the matter of their systems, from two independent and apparently heterogeneous sources, the modern Scholastic of Hegel claims to be a harmonious unity, body finding soul, and soul giving itself body. And while the Hegelian system has the all-embracing and encyclopaedic character by which Scholastic science threw its arms around heaven and earth, it has also the untrammeled liberty of the Greek thinkers. Hegel, in short, shows the union of these two modes of speculation: free as the ancient, and comprehensive as the modern. His theory is the explication of God; but of God in the actuality and plenitude of the world, and not as a transcendent Being, such as an over-reverent philosophy has sometimes supposed him, in the solitude of a world beyond.

The greatness of a philosophy is its power of comprehending facts. The most characteristic fact of modern times is Christianity. The general thought and action of the civilised world has been alternately fascinated and repelled, but always influenced, and to a high degree permeated, by the Christian theory of life, and still more by the faithful vision of that life displayed in the Son of Man. To pass that great cloud of witness and leave it on the other side, is to admit that your system is no key to the secret of the world,—even if we add, as some will prefer, of the world as it is and has been. And therefore the Hegelian system, if it is to be a philosophy at all, must be in this sense Christian. But it is neither a critic, nor an apologist of historical Christianity. The voice of philosophy is as that of the Jewish doctor of the Law: 'If this council or this work be of men, it will come to nought: but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it, Philosophy examines what is, and notwhat, according to some opinions, ought to be. Such a point of view requires no discussion of the 'How' or the 'Why' of Christianity. It involves no inquiry into historical documents, or into the belief in miracles: for to it Christianity rests only incidentally on the evidence of history; and miracles, as vulgarly explained, can find no reception in a philosophical system. For it Christianity is 'absolute religion': religion i. e. which has fully become and realised all that religion meant to be. That religion has, of course, its historical side: it appeared at a definite epoch in the annals of our race: it revealed itself in a unique personality in a remarkable nation. And at an early period of his life Hegel had tried to gather up in one conception the traits of that august figure, in his life and speech and death. But, in the light of philosophy, this historical side shrivels up as comparatively unimportant. Not the personality, but the 'revelation of reason' through man's spirit: not the annals of a life once spent in serving God and men, but the words of the 'Eternal Gospel are henceforth the essence of Christianity.

Thus the controlling and central conception of life and actuality, which is the final explanation of all that man thinks and does, has a twofold aspect. There is, as it were, a double Absolute—for under this name philosophy has what in religion corresponds to God. It is true that in the final form of his system the Absolute Spirit has three phases—each as it were passing on into and incorporated with the next—Art working out its implications till it appears as Religion, and Religion calling for its perfection in Philosophy. But in thePhenomenology, his first work, the religion of Art only intervenes as a grade from 'natural' religion to religion manifest or revealed; and in the first edition of theEncyclopaediawhat is subsequently called Art isentitled the Religion of Art. It is in entire accordance with these indications when in the Lectures on Aesthetics[3]it is said 'the true and original position of Art is to be the first-come immediate self-satisfaction of Absolute Spirit'; though in our days (it is added) 'its form has ceased to be the highest need of the spirit.' It is hardly too much then to say that, for Hegel, the Absolute has two phases, Religion and Philosophy.

The Hegelian view presents itself most decisively, though perhaps with a little lecture-like over-insistance, in the Philosophy of Religion[4]. 'The object of religion as of philosophy is the eternal truth in its very objectivity,—God and nothing but God,—and the "explication" of God. Philosophy is not a wisdom of the world, but cognition of the non-worldly: not a cognition of the external mass of empirical existence and life, but cognition of what is eternal, what is God, and what flows from His nature. For this nature must reveal and develop itself. Hence philosophy "explicates" itself only when it "explicates" religion; and in explicating itself it explicates religion.... Thus religion and philosophy coincide: in fact, philosophy is itself a divine service, is a religion: for it is the same renunciation of subjective fancies and opinions, and is engaged with God alone.'

Again, it may be asked in what sense philosophy has to deal with God and with Truth. These two terms are often synonyms in Hegel. All the objects of science, all the terms of thought, all the forms of reality, lead out of themselves, and seek for a centre and resting-point. They are severally inadequate and partial, and they crave adequacy and completeness. They tend to organise themselves; to call out moreand more distinctly the fuller reality which they presuppose,—which must have been, otherwise they could not have been: they reduce their first appearance of completeness to its due grade of inadequacy and bring out their complementary side, so as to constitute a system or universe; and in this tendency to a self-correcting unity consists their progress to truth. Their untruth lies in isolation and pretended independence or finality. This completed unity, in which all things receive their entireness and become adequate, is their Truth: and that Truth, as known in religious language, is God. Rightly or wrongly, God is thus interpreted in the Logic of Hegel.

Such a position must seem very strange to one who is familiar only with the sober studies of English philosophy. In whatever else the leaders of the several schools in this country disagree, they are nearly all at one in banishing God and religion to a world beyond the present sublunary sphere, to an inscrutable region beyond the scope of scientific inquiry, where statements may be made at will, but where we have no power of verifying any statement whatever. This is the common doctrine of Spencer and Mansel, of Hamilton and Mill. Even those English thinkers, who show some anxiety to support what is at present called Theism, generally rest content with vindicating for the mind the vague perception of a Being beyond us, and differing from us incommensurably. God is to them a residual phenomenon, a marginal existence. Outside the realm of experience and knowledge there is not-nothing—a something—beyond definite circumscription: incalculable, and therefore an object, possibly of fear, possibly of hope: the reflection in the utter darkness of a great What-may-it-not-be? He is the Unknown Power, felt bywhat some of these writers call intuition, and others call experience. They do not however allow to knowledge any capacity of apprehending in detail the truths which belong to the kingdom of God. Now the whole teaching of Hegel is the overthrow of the limits thus set to religious thought. To him all thought, and all actuality when it is grasped by knowledge, is from man's side, an exaltation of the mind towards God: while, when regarded from the divine standing-point, it is the manifestation by God of His own nature in its infinite variety.

It is only when we fix our eyes clearly on these general features in his speculation, that we can understand whyheplaces the maturity of ancient philosophy in the time of Plotinus and Proclus. Not that these Neo-Platonists are, as thinkers, of power equal to their master of Athens. But, in the realm of the blind the one-eyed may be king. The later thinkers set their vision more distinctly and persistently on the land that is eternal—'on the further side of being,' to quote Plato's phrase. It is for the same reason Hegel gives so much attention to the religious or semi-religious theories of Jacob Böhme and of Jacobi, though these men were in many ways so unlike himself.

[1]Hegel'sLeben, p. 155. It was in his dissertationde Orbitis Planetarum,that the notorious contretemps occurred, whereby, whilst the philosopher, leaning to a Pythagorean proportion, hinted—in a line—that it was unnecessary to expect a planet between Mars and Jupiter, astronomers in the same year discovered Ceres, the first-detected of the Planetoids. A good deal has been made out of this trifle; but it has not yet been shown that the corroboration was anything but theluckof the other hypothesis.

[2]Vermischte Schriften, vol. ii. p. 520. Duboc was a retired hatter, of French origin, who had settled at Hamburg (Hegel'sBriefe, ii. 76 seqq.).

[3]Werke, x. I, p. 131.

[4]Werke,xi. p. 21.

It is hazardous to try to sum up the net result of a philosophy in a few paragraphs. Since Aristotle separated the pure 'energy' of philosophy from the activities which leave works made and deeds done behind them, it need scarcely be repeated that the result of a philosophical system is nothing palpable or tangible,—nothing on which you can put your finger, and say definitely: Here it is. The spirit of a philosophy always refuses to be incarcerated in a formula, however deftly you may try to charm it there. The statement of the principle or tendency of a philosophical system tells not what that system is, but what it is not. It marks off the position from contiguous points of view; and on that account never gets beyond the borderland, which separates that system from something else. The method and process of reasoning is as essential in knowledge, as the result to which it leads: and the method in this case is thoroughly bound up with the subject-matter. A mere analysis of the method, therefore, or a mere record of the purpose and outcome of the system, would be, the one as well as the other, a fruitless labour, and come to nothing but words. Thus any attempt to convey a glimpse of the truth in a few sentences and in large outlines seems foreclosed.The theory of Hegel has an abhorrence of mere generalities, of abstractions with no life in them, and no growth out of them. His principle has to prove and verify itself to be true and adequate: and that verification fills up the whole circle of circles, of which philosophy is said to consist.

It seems as if there were in Hegel two distinct habits of mind which the world—the outside observer—rarely sees except in separation. On one hand there is a sympathy with mystical and intuitional minds, with the upholders of immediate knowledge and of innate ideas, with those who find that science and demonstration rather tend to distract from the one thing needful—who would 'lie in Abraham's bosom all the year,'—those who would fain lay their grasp upon the whole before they have gone through the drudgery of details. On the other hand, there is within him a strongly 'rationalising' and non-visionary intellect, with a practical and realistic bent, and the full scientific spirit. Schelling, in an angry mood, could describe him as 'the quintessence of all that is prosaic, both outside and in[1].' Yet, seen from other points of view, Hegel has been accused of dreaminess, pietism, and mystical theology. His merging of the ordinary contrasts of thought in a completer truth, and what would popularly be described as his mixing up of religious with logical questions, and the general unfathomableness of his doctrine,—all seem to support such a charge. Yet all this is not inconsistent with a rough and incisive vigour of understanding, a plainness of reason, and a certain hardness of temperament. This philosopher is in many ways not distinguishable from the ordinary citizen, and there are not unfrequent moments when his wife hears him groan over the providence that condemned him to be aphilosopher[2]. He is contemptuous towards all weakly sentimentalism, and almost brutal in his emphasis on the reasonableness of the actual and on the folly of dreaming the might-have-been; and keeps his household accounts as carefully as the average head of a family. And, perhaps, this convergence of two tendencies of thought may be noticed in the gradual maturing of his ideas. In the period of his 'Lehrjahre,' or apprenticeship, from 1793 to 1800, we can see the study of religion in the earlier part of that time at Bern succeeded by the study of politics and philosophy at Frankfort-on-the-Main.

His purpose on the whole may be termed an attempt to combine breadth with depth, the intensity of the mystic who craves for union with Truth, with the extended range and explicitness of those who multiply knowledge. 'The depth of the mind is only so deep as its courage to expand and lose itself in its explication[3]. It must prove its profundity by the ordered fullness of the knowledge which it has realised. The position and the work of Hegel will not be intelligible unless we keep in view both of these antagonistic points.

The purpose of philosophy—as has been pointed out—is, for Hegel—to know God, which is to know things in their Truth—to see all things in God—to comprehend the world in its eternal significance. Supposing the purpose capable of being achieved, what method is open to its attainment? There is on one hand the method of ordinary science in dealing with its objects. These arethings,found as it were projected into space before the observer, lying outside one another inprima facieindependence,though connected (by a further finding) with each other by certain 'accidents' called qualities and relations. Among the objects of knowledge, there are included, by the somewhat naïve intellect that accepts tradition like a physical fact, certain 'things' of a rather peculiar character. One of these is God: the others, which a historical criticism has subjoined, are the Soul and the World. And whatever may be said of the thinghood, reality, or existence of the World, there is no doubt that God and the Soul figure, and figure largely, in the consciousness of the human race as entities, differing probably in many respects from other things, but still possessed of certain fundamental features in common, and thus playing a part as distinct realities amongst other realities.

Given such objects, it is natural for a reflecting mind to attempt to make out a science of God and a science of the Soul, just as of other 'things.' And to these, a system-loving philosopher might add a science of the world (Cosmology)[4]. It was felt, indeed, that these objects were peculiar and unique. Thus, for example, as regards God, it was held necessary by the logician who saw tradition in its true light to prove His existence': and various arguments to that end were at different times devised. With regard to the human Soul, similarly, it was considered essential to establish its independent reality as a thing really separate from the bodily organism with which its phenomena were obviously connected,—to prove, in short, its substantial existence, and its emancipation from the bodily fate of dissolution and decay. With reference to the World, the problem was rather different: it was felt that the name suggested problems for thought rather than denotedreality. How can we predicate of the whole what is predicable of its parts? This or that may have a beginning and a cause, may have a limit and an end: but can the totality be presented under these aspects, without leading to self-contradiction? And the result of these questions in the case of 'Cosmology' was to shed in the long run similar doubts on 'Rational' Theology and 'Rational' Psychology.

Practically this metaphysical science—which is so called as dealing with a province or provinces of beingbeyondthe ordinary or natural(physical)realities—treated God and the Soul by the same terms (orcategories) as it used in dealing with 'material' objects. God e. g. was a force, a cause, a being; so, too, was the Soul. The main butt of Kant's destructiveCriticism of pare Reasonis to challenge the justice of including God and the Soul among the objects of science,—among the things we can know as we may know plants or stars. To make an object of knowledge (in the strict sense), to make a thing, the prerequisite, Kant urges, is perception in space and time. Without a sensation—and that sensation, as it were, laid out in place and duration—an object of science is impossible. No mere demonstration will conjure it into existence. And with that requirement the old theology and psychology, which professed to expound the object-God and the object-soul, were ruled out-of-order in the list of sciences, and reduced to mere dialectical exercises. The circle of the sciences, therefore, does not lead beyond the conditioned,' beyond the regions of space and time. It has nothing to say of a 'first cause' or of an ultimate end.

Such was the result that might fairly be read from Kant'sCriticism of pare Reason,—especially if read without its supplementary sequels, and, above all, if read by those in whom feeling was stronger thanthought, or who were by nature more endowed with the craving for faith than with the mind of philosophy. Such a personality appeared in J. H. Jacobi, the younger brother of a poet not undistinguished in his day. Amid the duties of public office and the cares of business, he found time to study Spinoza, the English and Scotch moralists, and above all to follow with interest the development of Kant from the year 1763 onwards. His house at Düsseldorf was the scene of many literary reunions, and Jacobi himself maintained familiar intercourse with the leaders of the literary and intellectual world, such as Lessing, Hamann, Goethe. His first considerable works were two novels, in letters,—Allwill, begun in a serial magazine in 1775, and Woldemar, begun in another magazine in 1777; both being issued as complete works in 1781. Both turn on a moral antithesis, and both leave the antithesis as they found it.Herepleads the advocate of the heart: 'it is the heart which alone and directly tells man what is good': 'virtue is a fundamental instinct of human nature': the true basis of morals is an immediate certainty; and the supreme standard is an 'ethical genius' which as it were discovered virtue and which still is a paramount authority in those exceptional situations in life when the 'grammar of virtue' fails to supply adequate rules, and where, therefore, the immediate voice of conscience must in a 'licence of sublime poesy[5]' dare, as Burke says, to 'suspend its own rules in favour of its own principles.'There, on the other hand, is the champion of reason, who declares all this sentimentalism 'a veritable mysticism of antinomianism and a quietism of immorality[6]': 'To humanity,' he says, 'and to every man (every complete man) principles, and some systemof principles, are indispensable.' Woldemar concludes with the pair of mottoes: 'Whosoever trusts to his own heart is a fool,' and 'Trust love: it takes everything, but it gives everything.'

In 1780 Jacobi had his historic conversation with Lessing at Wolfenbüttel[7]. The talk turned on Spinoza. For many years the philosophy of Spinoza had seemed to vanish from the world. His name was only heard in a reference of obloquy, as if it were dangerous to be even suspected of infection with the taint of Atheism. But both Lessing and Jacobi had found him out. The former saw in him an ally in that struggle for higher light and wider views which he undertook in a spirit and with a scope hardly surmised by those he usually wrought with. Jacobi, on the contrary, saw in him personified the conjunction of all those irreligious tendencies which all philosophy in some degree exhibited: the tendency to veil or set aside God and personality. 'I believe,' says Jacobi, as he began the conversation 'in an intelligent personal cause of the world.' 'Then I am going,' replied Lessing, 'to hear something quite new': and he dryly put aside the other's rhapsody on the 'personal extra-mundane deity with the remark 'Words, my dear Jacobi, words.' Jacobi's workLetters on the doctrine of Spinoza(it appeared in 1785) was the beginning of a controversy in which Mendelssohn and Herder took part, and in which Goethe took an interest under Herders tutorship. To the exact philological study of Spinoza it did not contribute much: for the Spinoza whom Herder and Goethe saw as their spiritual forefather was transfigured in their thought to a figure to which Leibniz had almost an equal right to give his name. He upheld to them the symbol of the immanence of the divine in nature: he was theleader in the battle against 'philistine' deism and utilitarianism.

With the Kantian criticism of the pseudo-science of theology Jacobi had in one way no fault to find. That reasoning by its demonstration cannot find out God, was to him an axiomatic belief. But the 'man of feeling' felt uneasy at the trenchant methods of the Königsberg man of logic. He seemed to see the world of men and things passing under Kant's manipulation into a mere collection of phenomena and ideas of the mind. Still more was he sensible to the loss of his God. That surrogate of an argument for theism which Kant seemed to offer in the implications of the Moral Law did not give what Jacobi wanted. Mere morality is a cold and mechanical principle—he thinks—compared with that infinite life and love which we deem we have in God. The son of man, he felt, was, in virtue of an indwelling genius of conscience, supreme over the moral law: how much more, then, the Absolute and Eternal on a higher grade of being than its mechanical regularities!

If the way of reasoning will not carry us to the Absolute, still less (and that is whither Jacobi wishes to reach) to God, there must be another way: for something in him, which may be called Faith or Feeling, Spiritual Sense or Reason, proclaims itself certain of the reality both of God and Nature. Thereisan objective reality—outside and beyond him—yet somehow to be reached by a daring leap,—whereby, out of sheer force of will, he, shutting his eyes to the temporal and the mechanical, finds himself carried over the dividing gulf into the land of eternal life and love.

'I appeal' he says in his latest utterances[8]'to an imperative, an invincible feeling as the first and underived ground of all philosophy and all religion,—toa feeling which lets man become aware of and alive to the fact that he has a sense for the supersensuous.' 'As it is religion which makes man man,' he continues, 'and which alone lifts him above the animals, so it also makes him a philosopher.' Such an organ for the supersensuous is what in his later writings he callsVernunft(Reason) and distinguishes fromVerstand(Understanding). 'This reason,' says Coleridge (to whom we owe this use of the terms in English) in theFriend,'is an organ bearing the same relation to spiritual objects as the eye bears to material phenomena,' It is 'that intuition of things which arises when we possess ourselves as one with the whole and is opposed to that 'science of the mere understanding' in which 'transferring reality to the negations of reality (to the ever-varying framework of the uniform life) we think of ourselves as separated beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind, as object to subject, thing to thought, death to life.' But this Reason is even more than this. It is the direct contact with reality, which it affirms and evenis.It apprehends themeand thethee,it apprehends above all the greatThee,God: apprehends, and we may even say appropriates[9]. And it apprehends them at one bound—in onesalto mortale—because it is really in implicit possession of them. Call the step a miracle, if you will: you must admit, he adds, that 'some time or other every philosophy must have recourse to a miracle[10].'

And yet the asseveration rings false—it shows a womanish wilfulness and weakness in its reiteration. He has the reality; yet he has it not. 'Were a God known,' he says in one place, 'He would not be God.' He yearns with passionate longing to find the livingand true: he feels himself and the Eternal clasped in one: his faith effects the reality of things hoped for. But, he adds, 'We never see the Absolute': the primal light of reason is but faint. It is but a presage—a pre-supposition—of the Everlasting. This reason, in short, needs discipline and development, it needs the ethical life to raise it: 'without morality no religiosity,' he says. 'Light,' he complains, 'is in my heart,' but at the moment I want to bring it into the understanding, the light goes out.' And yet he knows—and Coleridge repeats—'the consciousness of reason and of its revelations is only possible in an understanding.'

'There seem to be one or two motives acting upon Jacobi. The 'plain man,' especially if he be of high character and of 'noble' religiosity, has a feeling that the lust of philosophising disturbs the security of life, and endangers things which are deservedly dear to him. In such an one the 'enthusiasm of logic'—the calm pursuit of truth at all costs, so characteristic of Lessing—is inferior to the 'enthusiasm of life,'—a passion in which the terrestrial and the celestial are inextricably blended, where one clings to God as the stronghold of self, and sets personality—our human personality—in the throne of the Eternal. He will be all that is noble and good, if only he be not asked utterly to surrender self. So, too, Jacobi's God—or Absolute (for he leaves his 'non-philosophy' so far as to use both names), is rather the final aim of a grand, overpowering yearning, than a calm, self-centred, self-expanding life which carries man along with it. It would be, he feels, so very terrible, if at the last there were no God to meet us—to find the throne of the universe vacant. Avaunt philosophy, therefore! Let us cling to the faith of our nature and our childhood, and refuse her treacherous consolations!With the central proposition of Jacobi, Hegel, for one, is not inclined to quarrel. He too, as he asks and answers the question as to the issues of this and of the better life, might say

'Question, answer presupposeTwo points: that the thing itself which questions, answers,—is,itknows;As it also knows the thing perceived outside itself—a forceActual ere its own beginning, operative through its course,Unaffected by its end,—that this thing likewise needs must be;Call this—God, then, call that—Soul, and both the only facts for me.Prove them facts? that they o'erpass my power of proving provesthem such:Fact it is, I know, I know not something which is fact as much.'

But when Jacobi goes on to say that it is the supreme and final duty of the true sage 'to unveil reality,'—meaning thereby that, given the feeling, he has only to

'Define it wellFor fear divine PhilosophyShould push beyond her mark and beProcuress to the Lords of Hell,'

Hegel withdraws. It is the duty of philosophy to labour to make the perception—the fleeting, uncertain, trembling perception—of faith, a clear, sure, inwardly consistent knowledge: to show, and not merely to assert, that 'the path of (this world's) duty is the way to (that world's) glory.' There is, Hegel himself has said more than once, something opposed to ordinary ways of thinking in the procedure of the philosopher. To the outsider, it seems like standing on your head. It involves something like what, in religious language, is termed conversion—a new birth—becoming a new man. But though such a change always seems to culminate in a moment of sudden transformation,—as if the continuity of old and new were disrupted, the process has a history and a preparation. Of thatpilgrim's progress of the world-distracted soul to its discovery of its true being in God, philosophy is the record: a record which Hegel has written both in thePhenomenology of Mind, and, more methodically, in hisEncyclopaedia.The passage from nature to God—or from man's limitations to the divine fullness—must be made, he urged, in the open day and not in the secret vision when sleep falls upon men. When the aged Jacobi read these requirements of Hegel, he wrote to a friend: 'He may be right, and I should like once again to experiment with him all that the power of thinking can do alone, were not the old man's head too weak for it[11].'

'For a philosophy like this,' says Hegel[12], 'individual man and humanity are the ultimate standpoint:—as a fixed invincible finitude of reason, not as a reflection of the eternal beauty, or as a spiritual focus of the universe, but as an ultimate sense-nature, which however with the power of faith can daub itself over here and there with an alien supersensible. Let us suppose an artist restricted to portrait-painting; he might so far idealise as to introduce in the eye of a commonplace countenance a yearning look, and on its lips a melancholy smile, but he would be utterly debarred from depicting the Gods, sublime over yearning and melancholy—as if the delineation of eternal pictures were only possible at the cost of humanity. So too Philosophy—on this view—must not portray the Idea of man, but the abstraction of a humanity empirical and mingled with short-comings, and must bear a body impaled on the stake of the absolute antithesis; and when it clearly feels its limitation to the sensible, it must at the same time bedeck itself with the surface colour of a supersensible, and point the finger of faith to a something Higher.

'But the truth cannot be defrauded by such a consecration if finitude be still left subsisting; the true consecration must annihilate it. The artist, who fails to give actuality the true truth by letting fall upon it the ethereal illumination and taking it completely in that light, and who can only depict actuality in its bare ordinary reality and truth (a reality however which is neither true nor real) may apply the pathetic remedy to actuality, the remedy of tenderness and sentimentality, everywhere putting tears on the cheeks of the commonplace, and an O God! in their mouth. No doubt his figures in this way direct their look over the actual heavenwards, but like bats they belong neither to the race of birds nor beasts, neither to earth nor heaven. Their beauty is not free from ugliness, nor their morals without weakness and meanness: the intelligence they haply may show is not without banality: the success which enters into it is not without vulgarity, and the misfortune not without cowardice and terror; and both success and misfortune have something contemptible. So too philosophy, if it takes the finite and subjectivity as absolute truth in the logical form habitual to her, cannot purify them by bringing them into relation with an infinite: for that infinite is not itself the true, because it is unable to consume finitude. But where a philosophy consumes the temporal as such and burns up reality, its action is pronounced a cruel dissection, which does not leave man complete, and a forcible abstraction which has no truth, above all no truth for life. And such an abstraction is treated as a painful amputation of an essential piece from the completeness of the whole: that essential piece, and absolute substantiality being believed to consist in thetemporal and empirical, and in privation. It is as if a person, who sees only the feet of a work of art, were to complain, should the whole work be unveiled to his eyes, that he was deprived of the privation, that the incomplete was decompleted.'

Jacobi has been spoken of as the leader of this 'Un-philosophy' of faith. As such his allies lie on one side among philosophers who hold by the deliverances of 'common sense,' by the consciousness of the unsophisticated man shrinking from the waywardness of an idealism that deprives him of his solidest realities. The type of such a philosopher has been drawn by Hegel[13]in Krug. But, on the other side, Jacobi touched hands—though not in a sympathetic spirit—with a somewhat motley band which also had set its face to go to the everlasting gates, but had turned aside to aimless wandering on the Hill Difficulty, or sought too soon the repose of the Delectable Mountains, without due sojourn in the valley of Humiliation or descent under the Shadow of Death. Like Wordsworth, they felt that the world is too much with us: that our true self is frittered away into fragments and passing stages, in which we are not ourselves,—whereby we also lose the true perception of the essential life of nature. Gradually we have sunk into the deadening arms of habit, reduced ourselves to professional and conventional types, and lost the freer and larger mobility of spiritual being. We have grown intoverständige Leute—people of practical sense and worldly wisdom. To such, philosophy would come—if it could come—as the great breath of life—of 'reason' (Vernunft) which transcends the separations inevitable in practical will and knowledge. But to this band—which has been styled the Romantic School of Germany—the liberation came in ways moreanalogous to that craved for by Jacobi. Their way was the way of Romance and Imagination. The principle of Romance is the protest against confining man and nature to the dull round of uniformities which custom and experience have imprisoned them in. Boundless life, infinite spontaneity is surging within us and the world, ready to break down the dams convention and inertia have established. That inner power is an ever-fresh, ever-restless Irony, which sets up and overthrows, which refuses to be bound or stereotyped, which is never weary, never exhausted,—free in the absolute sense. It is the mystic force of Nature, which they seemed to see ever on the spring to work its magic transformations, and burst the bulwarks of empirical law. It is the princelyjus aggratiandi,the sportive sovereignty of the true artist, who is able at any moment to enter into direct communion with the heart of things.

The beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany, as well as in England, was a period of effervescence:—there was a good deal of fire, and naturally there was also a good deal of smoke. Genius was exultant in its aspirations after Freedom, Truth, and Wisdom. The Romantic School, which had grown up under the stimulus of Fichte's resolve to enact thought, and had for a time been closely allied with Schelling, counted amongst its literary chiefs the names of the Schlegels, of Tieck, Novalis, and perhaps Richter. The world, as that generation dreamed, was to be made young again,—first by drinking, where Wordsworth led, from the fresh springs of nature,—afterwards when, as often has happened, doubts arose as to where Nature was really to be found, by an elixir distilled from the withered flowers of medieval Catholicism and chivalry,

'Since the Mid-Age was the Heroic Time'

and even from the old roots of primeval wisdom. Thegood old times of faith and harmonious beauty were to be brought back again by the joint labours of ideas and poetry.—

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