History of Modern Philosophy · Chapter 42Chapter XVI. (1)
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With Hegel the glorious dynasty which, with a strong hand, had guided the fate of German philosophy since the conclusion of the preceding century disappears. From his death (1831) we may date the second period of post-Kantian philosophy,[1] which is markedly and unfavorably distinguished from the first by a decline in the power of speculative creation and by a division of effort. If previous to this the philosophical public, comprising all the cultured, had been eagerly occupied with problems in common, and had followed with unanimous interest the work of those who were laboring at them, during the last fifty years the interest of wider circles in philosophical questions has grown much less active; almost every thinker goes his own way, giving heed only to congenial voices; the inner connection of the schools has been broken down; the touch with thinkers of different views has been lost. The latest decades have been the first to bring a change for the better, in so far as new rallying points of philosophical interest have been created by the neo-Kantian movement, by the systems of Lotze and Von Hartmann, by the impulse toward the philosophy of nature proceeding from Darwinism, by energetic labors in the field of practical philosophy, and by new methods of investigation in psychology.
[Footnote 1: On philosophy since 1831 cf. vol. iii. of J.E. Erdmann's History; Ueberweg, Grundriss, part iii. §§ 37-49 (English translation, vol. ii. pp. 292-516); Lange, History of Materialism; B. Erdmann, Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in the Deutsche Rundschau, vols. xix., xx., 1879, June and July numbers; (A. Krohn,) Streifzüge durch die Philosophie der Gegenwart in the Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, vols. lxxxvii., lxxxix., 1885-86; (Burt, History of Modern Philosophy, 1892), also the third volume of Windelband's Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, when it appears.]
%1. From the Division of the Hegelian School to the Materialistic Controversy.%
A decade after the philosophy of Hegel had entered on its supremacy a division in the school was called forth by Strauss's Life of Jesus(1835). The differences were brought to light by the discussion of religious problems, in regard to which Hegel had not expressed himself with sufficient distinctness. The relation of knowledge and faith, as he had defined it, admitted of variant interpretations and deductions, and this in favor of Church doctrine as well as in opposition to it. Philosophy has the same content as religion, but in a different form, i.e., not in the form of representation, but in the form of the concept—it transforms dogma into speculative truth. The conservative Hegelians hold fast to the identity of content in the two modes of cognition; the liberals, to the alteration in form, which, they assert, brings an alteration in content with it. According to Hegel the lower stage is "sublated" in the higher, i.e., conserved as well as negated. The orthodox members of the school emphasize the conservation of religious doctrines, their justification from the side of the philosopher; the progressists, their negation, their overcoming by the speculative concept. The general question, whether the ecclesiastical meaning of a dogma is retained or to be abandoned in its transformation into a philosopheme, divides into three special questions, the anthropological, the soteriogical, and the theological. These are: whether on Hegelian principles immortality is to be conceived as a continuance of individual existence on the art of particular spirits, or only as the eternity of the universal reason; whether by the God-man the person of Christ is to be understood, or, on the other hand, the human species, the Idea of Humanity; whether personality belongs to the Godhead before the creation of the world, or whether it first attains to self-consciousness in human spirits, whether Hegel was a theist or a pantheist, whether he teaches the transcendence or the immanence of God. The Old Hegelians defend the orthodox interpretation; the Young Hegelians oppose it. The former, Göschel, Gabler, Hinrichs, Schaller (died 1868; History of the Philosophy of Nature since Bacon, 1841 seq.), J.E. Erdmann in Halle (1805-92; Body and Soul, 1837; Psychological Letters, 1851, 6th ed., 1882; Earnest Sport, 1871, 4th ed., 1890), form, according to Strauss's parliamentary comparison carried out by Michelet, the "right"; the latter, Strauss, Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and A. Ruge, who, with Echtermeyer, edited the Hallesche, afterward Deutsche, Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst, 1838-42, the "left." Between them, and forming the "center," stand Karl Rosenkranz[1] in Königsberg (1805-79), C.L. Michelet in Berlin (p. 16; Hegel, the Unrefuted World-philosopher, 1870; System of Philosophy, 1876 seq.), and the theologians Marheineke (a pupil of Daub at Heidelberg) and W. Vatke (Philosophy of Religion, edited by Preiss, 1888). Contrasted with these is the group of semi- or pseudo-Hegelians (p. 596), who declare themselves in accord with the theistic doctrines of the right, but admit that the left represents Hegel's own opinion, or at least the correct deductions from his position.
[Footnote 1: K. Rosenkranz: Psychology, 1837, 3d ed., 1863; Science of the Logical Idea, 1858; Studies, 1839 seq., New Studies, 1875 seq.; Aesthetics of the Ugly, 1853; several works on the history of poetry.]
The following should also be mentioned as Hegelians: the philosopher of history, Von Cieszkowski, the pedagogical writer, Thaulow (at Kiel, died 1883), the philosopher of religion and of law, A. Lasson at Berlin, the aesthetic writers Hotho, Friedrich Theodor Vischer[1] (1807-87), and Max Schasler (Critical History of Aesthetics, 1872; Aesthetics, 1886), the historians of philosophy, Schwegler (died 1857; History of Greek Philosophy, 1859, 4th ed., 1886, edited by Karl Köstlin, whose Aesthetics appeared 1869), Eduard Zeller[2] of Berlin (born 1814), and Kuno Fischer (born 1824; 1856-72 professor at Jena, since then at Heidelberg; Logic and Metaphysics, 2d ed., 1865). While Weissenborn (died 1874) is influenced by Schleiermacher also, and Zeller and Fischer strive back toward Kant, Johannes Volkelt[3] in Würzburg (born 1848), who started from Hegel and advanced through Schopenhauer and Hartmann, has of late years established an independent noëtical position and has done good service by his energetic opposition to positivism (Das Denken als Hülfvorstellungs—Thätigkeit und als Aupassungsvorgang in the Zeitschrift für Philosophic, vols. xcvi., xcvii., 1889-90).
[Footnote 1: Vischer: Aesthetics, 1846-58; Critical Excursions, 1844 seq.; several Hefte "Altes and Neues". The diary in the second part of the novel Auch Einer develops an original pantheistic view of the world.]
[Footnote 2: Zeller: The Philosophy of the Greeks in its Historical Development, 5 vols., 3d ed., vol. i. 5th ed. (English translation, 1868 seq.); three collections of Addresses and Essays, 1865, 1877, 1884.]
[Footnote 3: Volkelt: The Phantasy in Dreams, 1875; Kant's Theory of Knowledge, 1879; On the Possibility of Metaphysics, inaugural address at Basle, 1884; Experience and Thought, Critical Foundation of the Theory of Knowledge, 1886; Lectures Introductory to the Philosophy of the Present Time (delivered in Frankfort on the Main), 1892.]
The leaders of the Hegelian left require more detailed consideration. In David Friedrich Strauss[1] (1808-74, born and died at Ludwigsburg) the philosophy of religion becomes a historical criticism of the Bible and of dogmatics. The biblical narratives are, in great part, not history (this has been the common error alike of the super-naturalistic and of the rationalistic interpreters), but myths, that is, suprasensible facts presented in the form of history and in symbolic language. It is evident from the contradictions in the narratives and the impossibility of miracles that we are not here concerned with actual events. The myths possess (speculative, absolute) truth, but no (historical) reality. They are unintentional creations of the popular imagination; the spirit of the community speaks in the authors of the Gospels, using the historical factor (the life-history of Jesus) with mythical embellishments as an investiture for a supra-historical, eternal truth (the speculative Idea of incarnation). The God become man, in which the infinite and the finite, the divine nature and the human, are united, is the human race. The Idea of incarnation manifests itself in a multitude of examples which supplement one another, instead of pouring forth its whole fullness in a single one. The (real) Idea of the race is to be substituted for a single individual as the subject of the predicates (resurrection, ascension, etc.) which the Church ascribes to Christ. The Son of God is Humanity.
[Footnote 1: Strauss: The Life of Jesus, 1835-36, 4th ed., 1840 [English translation by George Eliot, 2d. ed., 1893]; the same "for the German People," 1864 [English translation, 1865]; Christian Dogmatics, 1840-41; Voltaire, 1870; Collected Writings, 12 vols., edited by Zeller, 1876-78. On Strauss cf. Zeller, 1874 [English, 1874], and Hausrath, 1876-78.]
In his second principal work Strauss criticises the dogmas of Christianity as sharply as he had criticised the Gospel narrative in the first one. The historical development of these has of itself effected their destruction: the history of dogma is the objective criticism of dogma. Christianity and philosophy, theism and pantheism, dualism and immanence, are irreconcilable opposites. To be able to know we must cease to believe. Dogma is the product of the unphilosophical, uncultured consciousness; belief in revelation, only for those who have not yet risen to reason. In the transformation of religious representations into philosophical Ideas nothing specifically representative is left; the form of representation must be actually overcome. The Christian contraposition of the present world and that which is beyond is explained by the fact that the sensuo-rational spirit of man, so long as it does not philosophically know itself as the unity of the infinite and the finite, but only feels itself as finite, sensuo-empirical consciousness, projects the infinite, which it has in itself, as though this were something foreign, looks on it as something beyond the world. This separation of faith is entirely unphilosophical; it is the mission of the philosopher to reduce all that is beyond the world to the present. Thus for him immortality is not something to come, but the spirit's own power to rise above the finite to the Idea. And like future existence, so the transcendent God also disappears. The absolute is the universal unity of the world, which posits and sublates the individual as its modes. God is the being in all existence, the life in all that lives, the thought in all that think: he does not stand as an individual person beside and above other persons, but is the infinite which personifies itself and attains to consciousness in human spirits, and this from eternity; before there was a humanity of earth there were spirits on other stars, in whom God reflected himself.
Three decades later Strauss again created a sensation by his confession of materialism and atheism, The Old Faith and the New, 1872 (since the second edition, "With a Postscript as Preface"),[1] in which he continues the conflict against religious dualism. The question "Are we"—the cultured men of the day—"still Christians?" is answered in the negative. Christianity is a cult of poverty, despising the world, and antagonistic to labor and culture; but we have learned to esteem science and art, riches and acquisition, as the chief levers of culture and of human progress. Christianity dualistically tears apart body and soul, time and eternity, the world and God; we need no Creator, for the life-process has neither beginning nor end. The world is framed for the highest reason, it is true, but it has not been framed by a highest reason. Our highest Idea is the All, which is conformed to law, and instinct with life and reason, and our feeling toward the universe—the consciousness of dependence on its laws—exercises no less of ethical influence, is no less full of reverence, and no less exposed to injury from an irreverent pessimism, than the feeling of the devout of the old type toward their God. Hence the answer to the second question "Have we still a religion?" maybe couched in the affirmative. The new faith does not need a cultus and a Church. Since the dry services of the free congregations offer nothing for the fancy and the spirit, the edification of the heart must be accomplished in other ways—by participation in the interests of humanity, in the national life, and, not last, by aesthetic enjoyment. Thus in his last work, which in two appendices reaches a discussion of the great German poets and musicians, the old man returns to a thought to which he had given earlier expression, that the religious cultus should be replaced by the cultus of genius.
[Footnote 1: English translation by Mathilde Blind, 1873.]
As Strauss went over from Hegelianism to pantheism, so Ludwig Feuerbach[1] (1804-72), a son of the great jurist, Anselm Feuerbach, after he had for a short time moved in the same direction, took the opposite, the individualistic course, only, like Strauss, to end at last in materialism. "My first thought," as he himself describes the course of his development, "was God; my second, reason; my third and last, man." As theology has been overcome by Hegel's philosophy of reason, so this in turn must give place to the philosophy of man. "The new philosophy makes man, including nature as his basis, the highest and sole subject of philosophy, and, consequently, anthropology the universal science." Only that which is immediately self-evident is true and divine. But only that which is sensible is evident (sonnenklar); it is only where sensibility begins that all doubt and conflict cease. Sensible beings alone are true, real beings; existence in space and time is alone existence; truth, reality, and sensibility are identical. While the old philosophy took for its starting point the principle, "I am an abstract, a merely thinking being; the body does not belong to my essence," the new philosophy, on the other hand, begins with the principle, "I am a real, a sensible being; the body in its totality is my ego, my essence itself." Feuerbach, however, uses the concept of sensibility in so wide and vague a sense that, supported—or deceived—by the ambiguity of the word sensation, he includes under it even the most elevated and sacred feelings. Even the objects of art are seen, heard, and felt; even the souls of other men are sensed. In the sensations the deepest and highest truths are concealed. Not only the external, but the internal also, not only flesh, but spirit, not only the thing, but the ego, not only the finite, the phenomenal, but also the true divine essence is an object of the senses. Sensation proves the existence of objects outside our head—there is no other proof of being than love, than sensation in general. Everything is perceivable by the senses, if not directly, yet indirectly, if not with the vulgar, untrained senses, yet with the "cultivated senses," if not with the eye of the anatomist or chemist, yet with that of the philosopher. All our ideas spring from the senses, but their production requires communication and converse between man and man. The higher concepts cannot be derived from the individual Ego without a sensuously given Thou; the highest object of sense is man; man does not reach concepts and reason in general by himself, but only as one of two. The nature of man is contained in community alone; only in life with others and for others does he attain his destiny and happiness. The conscience is the ego putting itself in the place of another who has been injured. Man with man, the unity of I and Thou, is God, and God is love.
[Footnote 1: Feuerbach was born at Landshut, studied at Heidelberg and Berlin, habilitated, 1828, at Erlangen, and lived, 1836-60, in the village of Bruckberg, not far from Bayreuth, and from 1860 until his death in Rechenberg, a suburb of Nuremberg. Collected Works in 10 vols., 1846-66. The chief works are entitled: P. Bayle, 1838, 2d ed., 1844; Philosophy and Christianity, 1839; The Essence of Christianity, 1841, 4th ed., 1883 [English translation by George Eliot, 1854]; Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, 1843; The Essence of Religion, 1845; Theogony, 1857; God, Freedom, and Immortality, 1866. Karl Grün, 1874, C.N. Starcke, 1885, and W. Bolin, 1891, treat of Feuerbach.]
To the philosophy of religion Feuerbach assigns the task of giving a psychological explanation of the genesis of religion, instead of showing reason in religion. In bidding us believe in miracles dogma is a prohibition to think. Hence the philosopher is not to justify it, but to uncover the illusion to which it owes its origin. Speculative theology is an intoxicated philosophy; it is time to become sober, and to recognize that philosophy and religion are diametrically opposed to each other, that they are related to each other as health to disease, as thought to phantasy. Religion arises from the fact that man objectifies his own true essence, and opposes it to himself as a personal being, without coming to a consciousness of this divestment of self, of the identity of the divine and human nature. Hence the Hegelian principles, that the absolute is self-consciousness, that in man God knows himself, must be reversed: self-consciousness is the absolute; in his God man knows himself only. The Godhead is our own universal nature, freed from its individual limitations, intuited and worshiped as another, independent being, distinct from us. God is self objectified, the inner nature of man expressed; man is the beginning, the middle, and the end of religion. All theology is anthropology, for all religion is a self-deification of man. In religion man makes a division in his own nature, posits himself as double, first as limited (as a human individual), then as unlimited, raised to infinity (as God); and this deified self he worships in order to obtain from it the satisfaction of his needs, which the course of the world leaves unmet. Thus religion grows out of egoism: its basis is the difference between our will and our power; its aim, to set us free from the dependence which we feel before nature. (Like culture, religion seeks to make nature an intelligible and compliant being, only that in this it makes use of the supernatural instruments faith, prayer, and magic; it is only gradually that men learn to attack the evils by natural means.) That which man himself is not, but wishes to be, that he represents to himself in his gods as existing; they are the wishes of man's heart transformed into real beings, his longing after happiness satisfied by the fancy. The same holds true of all dogmas: as God is the affirmation of our wishes, so the world beyond is the present embellished and idealized by the fancy. Instead of "God is merciful, is love, is omnipotent, he performs miracles and hears prayers," the statement must be reversed: mercy, love, omnipotence, to perform miracles, and to hear prayers, is divine. In the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's supper Feuerbach sees the truth that water and food are indispensable and divine. As Feuerbach, following out this naturalistic tendency, reached the extreme of materialism, the influence of his philosophy—whose different phases there is no occasion to trace out in detail—had already passed its culmination. From his later writings little more has found its way into public notice than the pun, that man is (ist) what he eats (isst).
The remaining members of the Hegelian left may be treated more briefly. Bruno Bauer[1] (died in 1882; his principal work is the Critique of the Synoptics, in three volumes, 1841-42, which had been preceded, in 1840, by a Critique of the Evangelical History of John) at first belonged on the right of the school, but soon went over to the extreme left. He explains the Gospel narratives as creations with a purpose (Tendenzdichtungen), as intentional, but not deceitful, inventions, from which, despite their unreality, history may well be learned, inasmuch as they reflect the spirit of the time in which they were constructed. His own publications and those of his brother Edgar are much more radical after the year 1844. In these the brothers advocate the standpoint of "pure or absolute criticism," which extends itself to all things and events for or against which sides are taken from any quarter, and calmly watches how everything destroys itself. As soon as anything is admitted, it is no longer true. Nothing is absolutely valid, all is vain; it is only the criticising, all-destroying ego, free from all ethical ties, that possesses truth.
[Footnote 1: Not to be confused with the head of the Tübingen School, Ferdinand Christian Baur (died 1860).]
One further step was possible beyond Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, that from the community to the particular, selfish individual, from the criticising, therefore thinking, ego, to the ego of sensuous enjoyment. This step was taken in that curious book The Individual and his Property, which Kaspar Schmidt, who died in 1856 at Berlin, published in 1845 (2d ed., 1882), under the pseudonym of Max Stirner. The Individual of whom the title speaks is the egoist. For me nothing is higher than myself; I use men and use up the world for my own pleasure. I seek to be and have all that I can be and have; I have a right to all that is within my power. Morality is a delusion, justice, like all Ideas, a phantom. Those who believe in ideals, and worship such generalities as self-consciousness, man, society, are still deep in the mire of prejudice and superstition, and have banished the old orthodox phantom of the Deity only to replace it by a new one. Nothing whatever is to be respected.
* * * * *
Among the opponents of the Hegelian philosophy the members of the "theistic school," who have above been designated as semi-Hegelians, approximate it most closely. These endeavor, in part retaining the dialectic method, to blend the immanence of the absolute, which philosophy cannot give up and concerning which Hegel had erred only by way of over-emphasis, with the transcendence of God demanded by Christian consciousness, to establish a theism which shall contain pantheism as a moment in itself. God is present in all creatures, yet distinct from them; he is intramundane as well as extramundane; he is self-conscious personality, free creative spirit, is this from all eternity, and does not first become such through the world-development. He does not need the world for his perfection, but out of his goodness creates it. Philosophy must begin with the living Godhead instead of beginning, like Hegel's Logic, with the empty concept of being. For the categories—as Schelling had already objected—express necessary forms or general laws only, to which all reality must conform, but which are never capable of generating reality; the content which appears in them and which obeys them, can only be created by a Deity, and only empirically cognized. This is the standpoint of Christian Hermann Weisse[1] in Leipsic (1801-66), Karl Philipp Fischer[2] in Erlangen (1807-85), Immanuel Hermann Fichte[3] (1797-1879; 1842-65 professor in Tübingen), and the follower of Schleiermacher, Julius Braniss in Breslau (1792-1873). The following hold similar views, influenced, like Weisse and K. Ph. Fischer, by Schelling: Jacob Sengler of Freiburg (1799-1878; The Idea of God, 1845 seq.), Leopold Schmid of Giessen (1808-69; cf. p. 516, note), Johannes Huber (died 1879), Moritz Carrière[4] (born 1817), both in Munich, K. Steffensen of Basle (1816-88; Collected Essays, 1890), and Karl Heyder in Erlangen (1812-86; The Doctrine of Ideas, vol. i. 1874). Chalybaeus at Kiel (died 1862), and Friedrich Harms at Berlin (died 1880; Metaphysics, posthumously edited by H. Wiese, 1885), who, like Fortlage and I.H. Fichte, start from the system of the elder Fichte, should also be mentioned as sympathizing with the opinions of those who have been named.
[Footnote 1: Weisse: System of Aesthetics, 1830; The Idea of the Godhead, 1833; Philosophical Dogmatics, 1855. His pupil Rudolf Seydel has published several of his posthumous works; H. Lotze also acknowledges that he owes much to Weisse. Rud. Seydel in Leipsic (born 1835), Logic, 1866; Ethics, 1874; cf. p. 17.]
[Footnote 2: K. Ph. Fischer: The Idea of the Godhead, 1839; Outlines of the System of Philosophy, 1848 seq.; The Untruth of Sensationalism and Materialism, 1853.]
[Footnote 3: I.H. Fichte: System of Ethics, 1850-53, the first volume of which gives a history of moral philosophy since 1750; Anthropology, 1856, 3d ed., 1876; Psychology, 1864.]
[Footnote 4: Carrière: Aesthetics, 1859, 3d ed., 1885; The Moral Order of the World, 1877, 2d ed., 1891; Art in connection with the Development of Culture, 5 vols., 1863-73.]
The same may be said, further, of Hermann Ulrici[1] of Halle (1806-84), for many years the editor of the Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, founded in 1837 by the younger Fichte and now edited by the author of this History, which, as the organ of the theistic school, opposed, first, the pantheism of the Young Hegelians, and then the revived materialism so loudly proclaimed after the middle of the century. This Zeitschrift of Fichte and Ulrici, following the altered circumstances of the time, has experienced a change of aim, so that it now seeks to serve idealistic efforts of every shade; while the Philosophische Monatshefte (founded by Bergmann in 1868, edited subsequently by Schaarschmidt, and now) edited by P. Natorp of Marburg, favors neo-Kantianism, and the Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie (begun in 1877, and) edited by R. Avenarius of Zurich, especially cultivates those parts of philosophy which are open to exact treatment.
[Footnote 1: Ulrici: On Shakespeare's Dramatic Art, 1839, 3d ed., 1868 [English, 1876]; Faith and Knowledge, 1858; God and Nature, 1861, 2d ed., 1866; God and Man, in two volumes, Body and Soul, 1866, 2d ed., 1874, and Natural Law, 1872; various treatises on Logic—in which consciousness is based on the distinguishing activity, and the categories conceived as functional modes of this—on Spiritualism, etc.]
The appearance of materialism was the consequence of the flagging of the philosophic spirit, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the dissatisfaction of the representatives of natural science with the constructions of the Schelling-Hegelian school. If the German naturalist is especially exposed to the danger of judging all reality from the section of it with which he is familiar, from the world of material substances and mechanical motions, the reason lies in the fact that he does not find it easy, like the Englishman for example, to let the scientific and the philosophico-religious views of the world go on side by side as two entirely heterogeneous modes of looking at things. The metaphysical impulse to generalization and unification spurs him on to break down the boundary between the two spheres, and, since the physical view of things has become part of his flesh and blood, psychical phenomena are for him nothing but brain-vibrations, and the freedom of the will and all religious ideas, nothing but illusions. The materialistic controversy broke out most actively at the convention of naturalists at Göttingen in 1854, when Rudolph Wagner in his address "On the Creation of Man and the Substance of the Soul" declared, in opposition to Karl Vogt, that there is no physiological reason for denying the descent of man from one pair and an immaterial immortal soul. Vogt's answer was entitled "Collier Faith and Science." Among others Schaller (Body and Soul, 1855), J.B. Meyer in a treatise with the same title, 1856, and the Jena physicist, Karl Snell,[1] took part in the controversy by way of criticism and mediation. A much finer nature than the famous leaders of materialism—Moleschott (The Circle of Life, 1852, in answer to Liebig's Chemical Letters), and Louis Büchner, with whose Force and Matter (1855, 16th ed., 1888; English translation by Collingwood, 4th ed., 1884) the gymnasiast of to-day still satisfies his freethinking needs—is H. Czolbe (1819-73; New Exposition of Sensationalism, 1855; The Limits and Origin of Human Knowledge, 1865), who, on ethical grounds, demands the exclusion of everything suprasensible and contentment with the given world of phenomena, but holds that, besides matter and motion, eternal, purposive forms and original sensations in a world-soul are necessary to explain organic and psychical phenomena.
[Footnote 1: Snell (1806-86): The Materialistic Question, 1858; The Creation of Man, 1863. R. Seydel has edited Lectures on the Descent of Man, 1888, from Snell's posthumous writings.]
%2. New Systems: Trendelenburg, Fechner, Lotze, and Hartmann%.
The speculative impulse, especially in the soul of the German people, is ineradicable. It has neither allowed itself to be discouraged by the collapse of the Hegelian edifice, nor to be led astray by the clamor of the apostles of empiricism, nor to be intimidated by the papal proclamation of the infallibility of Thomas Aquinas.[1] Manifold attempts have been made at a new conception of the world, and with varying success. Of the earlier theories[2] only two have been able to gather a circle of adherents—the dualistic theism of Günther (1783-1863), and the organic view of the world of Trendelenburg (1802-72).
[Footnote 2: In 1879 a summons was sent forth from Rome for the revival and dissemination of the Thomistic system as the only true philosophy (cf. R. Eucken, Die Philosophic des Thomas von Aquino und die Kultur der Neuzeit, 1886). This movement is supported by the journals, Jahrbuch für Philosophie und spekulative Theologie, edited by Professor E. Commer of Münster, 1886 seq., and Philosophisches Jahrbuch, edited, at the instance and with the support of the Görres Society, by Professor Const. Gutberlet of Fulda, 1888 seq. While the text-books of Hagemann, Stoeckl, Gutberlet, Pesch, Commer, C.M. Schneider, and others also follow Scholastic lines, B. Bolzano (died 1848), M. Deutinger (died 1864) and his pupil Neudecker, Oischinger, Michelis, and W. Rosenkrantz (1821-74; Science of Knowledge, 1866-68), who was influenced by Schelling, have taken a freer course.]