History of Modern Philosophy · Chapter 44Chapter XVI. (3)
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[Footnote 1: Cf. Volkelt, Ueber die Lust als höchsten Werthmassstab (in the Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. lxxxviii.), 1886, and O. Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, vol. ii. p. 249 seq.]
Religion, which, in common with philosophy, has for its basis the metaphysical need for, or the mystical feeling of, the unity of the human individual and the world-ground, needs transformation, since in its traditional forms it is opposed to modern culture, and the merging of religion (as a need of the heart) in metaphysics is impossible. The religion of the future, for which the way has already been prepared by the speculative Protestantism of the present, is concrete monism (the divine unity is transcendent as well as immanent in the plurality of the beings of earth, every moral man a God-man), which includes in itself the abstract monism (pantheism) of the Indian religions and the Judeo-Christian (mono-) theism as subordinate moments. (The original henotheism and its decline into polytheism, demonism, and fetichism was followed by—Egyptian and Persian, as well as Greek, Roman, and German—naturalism, and then by supernaturalism in its monistic and its theistic form. The chief defect of the Christian religion is the transcendental-eudemonistic heteronomy of its ethics.) The Religion of Spirit divides into three parts. The psychology of religion considers the religious function in its subjective aspect, faith as a combined act of representation, feeling, and will, in which one of these three elements may predominate—though feeling forms the inmost kernel of the theoretical and practical activities as well—and, as the objective correlate of faith, grace (revealing, redeeming, and sanctifying), which elevates man above peripheral and phenomenal dependence on the world, and frees him from it, through his becoming conscious of his central and metaphysical dependence upon God. The metaphysics of religion (in theological, anthropological, and cosmological sections) proves by induction from the facts of religion the existence, omnipotence, spirituality, omniscience, righteousness, and holiness of the All-one, which coincides with the moral order of the world. Further, it proves the need and the capacity of man for redemption from guilt and evil—here three spheres of the individual will are distinguished, one beneath God, one contrary to God, and one conformable to God, or a natural, an evil, and a moral sphere—and, preserving alike the absoluteness of God and the reality of the world, shows that it is not so much man as God himself, who, as the bearer of all the suffering of the world, is the subject of redemption. The ethics of religion discusses the subjective and objective processes of redemption, namely, repentance and amendment on the part of the individual and the ecclesiastical cultus of the future, which is to despise symbols and art.
It is to Hartmann's credit, though the fact has not been sufficiently appreciated by professional thinkers, that in a time averse to speculation he has devoted his energies to the highest problems of metaphysics, and in their elaboration has approached his task with scientific earnestness and a comprehensive and thorough consideration of previous results. Thus the critique of ethical standpoints in the historical part of the Phenomenology of the Moral Consciousness, especially, contains much that is worthy of consideration; and his fundamental metaphysical idea, that the absolute is to be conceived as the unity of will and reason, also deserves in general a more lively assent than has been accorded to it, while his rejection of an infinite consciousness has justly met with contradiction. It has been impossible here to go into his discussions in the philosophy of nature—they cannot be described in brief—on matter (atomic forces), on the mechanical and teleological views of life and its development, on instinct, on sexual love, etc., which he very skillfully uses in support of his metaphysical principle.
%3. From the Revival of the Kantian Philosophy to the Present Time.%
%(a) Neo-Kantianism, Positivism, and Kindred Phenomena.%—The Kantian philosophy has created two epochs: one at the time of its appearance, and a second two generations after the death of its author. The new Kantian movement, which is one of the most prominent characteristics of the philosophy of the present time, took its beginning a quarter of a century ago. It is true that even before 1865 individual thinkers like Ernst Reinhold of Jena (died 1855), the admirer of Fries, J.B. Meyer of Bonn, K.A. von Reichlin-Meldegg, and others had sought a point of departure for their views in Kant; that K. Fischer's work on Kant (1860) had given a lively impulse to the renewed study of the critical philosophy; nay, that the cry "Back to Kant" had been expressly raised by Fortlage (as early as 1832 in his treatise The Gaps in the Hegelian System), and by Zeller (p. 589). But the movement first became general after F.A. Lange in his History of Materialism had energetically advocated the Kantian doctrine according to his special conception of it, after Helmholtz[1] (born 1821) had called attention to the agreement of the results of physiology with those of the Critique of Reason, and at the same time Liebmann's youthful work, Kant and the Epigones, in which every chapter ended with the inexorable refrain, "therefore we must go back to Kant," had given the strongest expression to the longing of the time.
[Footnote 1: Helmholtz: On Human Vision, 1855; Physiological Optics, 1867; Sensations of Tone, 1863, 4th ed., 1877 [English translation by Ellis, 2d ed., 1885].]
Otto Liebmann (cf. also the chapter on "The Metamorphoses of the A Priori" in his Analysis of Reality) sees the fundamental truth of criticism in the irrefutable proof that, space, time, and the categories are functions of the intellect, and that subject and object are necessary correlates, inseparable factors of the empirical world, and finds Kant's fundamental error, which the Epigones have not corrected, but made still worse, in the non-concept of the thing in itself, which must be expelled from the Kantian philosophy as a remnant of dogmatism, as a drop of alien blood, and as an illegitimate invader which has debased it.
According to Friedrich Albert Lange[1] (1828-75; during the last years of his life professor at Marburg), materialism, which is unfruitful and untenable as a principle, a system, and a view of the world, but useful and indispensable as a method and a maxim of investigation, must be supplemented by formal idealism, which, rejecting all science from mere reason limits knowledge to the sensuous, to that which can be experienced, yet at the same time conceives the formal element in the sense world as the product of the organization of man, and hence makes objects conform to our representations. Above the sensuous world of experience and of mechanical becoming, however, the speculative impulse to construction, rounding off the fragmentary truth of the sciences into a unified picture of the whole truth, rears the ideal world of that which ought to be. Notwithstanding their indefeasible certitude, the Ideas possess no scientific truth, though they have a moral value which makes them more than mere fabrics of the brain: man is framed not merely for the knowledge of truth, but also for the realization of values. But since the significance of the Ideas is only practical, and since determinations of value are not grounds of explanation, science and metaphysics or "concept poetry" (Begriffsdichtung) must be kept strictly separate.
[Footnote 1: F.A. Lange: Logical Studies, 1877. Cf. M. Heinze in the Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophic, 1877, and Vaihinger in the work cited above, p. 610 note.]
Friedrich Paulsen of Berlin (born in 1846; cf. pp. 330, 332, note) sees in the Kantian philosophy the foundation for the philosophy of the future. A profounder Wolff (the self-dominion of the reason), a Prussian Hume (the categories of the understanding are not world-categories; rejection of anthropomorphic metaphysics), and a German Rousseau (the primacy of the will, consideration of the demands of the heart; the good will alone, not deeds nor culture, constitutes the worth of man; freedom, the rights of man) in one person, Kant has withdrawn from scientific discussion the question concerning the dependence of reality on values or the good, which is theoretically insoluble but practically to be answered in the affirmative, and given it over to faith. Kant is in so far a positivist that he limits the mission of knowledge to the reduction of the temporo-spatial relations of phenomena to rules, and declares the teleological power of values to be undemonstrable. But science is able to prove this much, that the belief in a suprasensible world, in the indestructibility of that which alone has worth, and in the freedom of the intelligible character, which the will demands, is not scientifically impossible. Since, according to formal rationalism, the whole order of nature is a creation of the understanding, and hence atomism and mechanism are only forms of representation, valid, no doubt, for our peripheral point of view, but not absolutely valid, since, further, the empirical view of the world apart from the Idea of the divine unity of the world (which, it is true, is incapable of theoretical realization) would lack completion, the immediate conviction of the heart in regard to the power of the good is in no danger of attack from the side of science, although this can do no further service for faith than to remove the obstacles which oppose it. The will, not the intellect, determines the view of the world; but this is only a belief, and in the world of representation, the intelligible world, with which the will brings us into relation, can come before us only in the form of symbols.—While Albrecht Krause (The Laws of the Human Heart, a Formal Logic of Pure Feeling, 1876) and A. Classen (Physiology of the Sense of Sight, 1877) are strict followers of Kant, J. Volkelt (Analysis of the Fundamental Principles of Kant's Theory of Knowledge, 1879) has traced the often deplored inconsistencies and contradictions in Kant down to their roots, and has shown that in Kant's thinking, which has hitherto been conceived as too simple and transparent, but which, in fact, is extremely complicated and struggling in the dark, a number of entirely heterogeneous principles of thought (skeptical, subjectivistic, metaphysico-work, rationalistic, a priori, and practical motives) are at which, conflicting with and crippling one another, make the attainment of harmonious results impossible. Benno Erdmann (p. 330) and Hans Vaihinger (pp. 323 note, 331) have given Kant's principal works careful philological interpretation.
Among the various differences of opinion which exist within the neo-Kantian ranks, the most important relates to the question, whether the individual ego or a transcendental consciousness is to be looked upon as the executor of the a priori functions. In agreement with Schopenhauer and with Lotze, who makes the subjectivity of space, time, and the pure concepts parallel with that of the sense qualities, Lange teaches that the human individual is so organized that he must apprehend that which is sensuously given under these forms. Others, on the contrary, urge that the individual soul with its organization is itself a phenomenon, and consequently cannot be the bearer of that which precedes phenomena—space, time, and the categories as "conditions" of experience are functions of a pure consciousness to be presupposed. The antithesis of subject and object, the soul and the world, first arises in the sphere of phenomena. The empirical subject, like the world of objects, is itself a product of the a priori forms, hence not that which produces them. To the transcendental group belong Hermann Cohen[1] in Marburg, A. Stadler[2], Natorp, Lasswitz (p.17), E. König (p. 17), Koppelmann (p. 330), Staudinger (p. 331). Fritz Schultze of Dresden is also to be counted among the neo-Kantians (Philosophy of Natural Science, 1882; Kant and Darwin, 1875; The Fundamental Thoughts of Materialism, 1881; The Fundamental Thoughts of Spiritualism, 1883; Comparative Psychology, i. 1, 1892).
[Footnote 1: Cohen: Kant's Theory of Experience, 1871, 2d ed., 1886; Kant's Foundation of Ethics, 1877; Kant's Foundation of Aesthetics, 1889.]
[Footnote 2: Stadler: Kant's Teleology, 1874; The Principles of the Pure Theory of Knowledge in the Kantian Philosophy, 1876; Kant's Theory of Matter, 1883.]
The German positivists[1]:—E. Laas of Strasburg (1837-85), A. Riehl of Freiburg in Baden (born 1844), and R. Avenarius of Zurich (born 1843)—develop their sensationalistic theory of knowledge in critical connection with Kant. Ernst Laas defines positivism (founded by Protagoras, advocated in modern times by Hume and J.S. Mill, and hostile to Platonic idealism) as that philosophy which recognizes no other foundations than positive facts (i.e., perceptions), and requires every opinion to exhibit the experiences on which it rests. Its basis is constituted by three articles of belief: (1) The correlative facts, subject and object, exist and arise only in connection (objects are directly known only as the contents of a consciousness, cui objecta sunt, subjects only as centers of relation, as the scene or foundation of a representative content, cui subjecta sunt: outside my thoughts body does not exist as body, nor I myself as soul). (2) The variability of the objects of perception. (3) Sensationalism—all specific differences in consciousness must be conceived as differences in degree, all higher mental processes and states, including thought, as the perceptions and experiences, transformed according to law, of beings which feel, have wants, possess memory, and are capable of spontaneous motion. The subject coincides with its feeling of pleasure and pain, from which sensation is distinguished by its objective content. The illusions of metaphysics are scientifically untenable and practically unnecessary. Various yearnings, wants, presentiments, hopes, and fancies, it is true, lead beyond the sphere of that which can be checked by sense and experience, but for none of their positions can any sufficient proof be adduced. As physics has discarded transcendent causes and learned how to get along with immanent causes, so ethics also must endeavor to establish the worth of moral good without excursions into the suprasensible. The ethical obligations arise naturally from human relations, from earthly needs. The third volume of Laas's work differs from the earlier ones by conceding the rank of facts to the principles of logic as well as to perception. Aloys Riehl opposes the theory of knowledge (which starts from the fundamental fact of sensation) as scientific philosophy to metaphysics as unscientific, and banishes the doctrine of the practical ideals from the realm of science into the region of religion and art. Richard Avenarius defends the principle of "pure experience." Sensation, which is all that is left as objectively given after the removal of the subjective additions, constitutes the content, and motion the form of being.
[Footnote 1: Laas: Idealism and Positivism, 1879-84. Riehl: Philosophical Criticism, 1876-87; Address On Scientific and Unscientific Philosophy, 1883. Avenarius (p. 598): Philosophy as Thought concerning the World according to the Principle of Least Work, 1876; Critique of Pure Experience, vol. i. 1888, vol. ii. 1890; Man's Concept of the World, 1891. C. Göring (died 1879; System of Critical Philosophy, 1875) may also be placed here.]
With the neo-Kantians and the positivists there is associated, thirdly, a coherent group of noëtical thinkers, who, rejecting extramental elements of every kind, look on all conceivable being as merely a conscious content. This monism of consciousness is advocated by W. Schuppe of Greifswald (born 1836; Noëtical Logic, 1878), J. Rehmke, also of Greifswald (The World as Percept and Concept, 1880; "The Question of the Soul" in vol. ii. of the Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 1891), A. von Leclair (Contributions to a Monistic Theory of Knowledge, 1882), and R. von Schubert-Soldern (Foundations of a Theory of Knowledge, 1884; On the Transcendence of Object and Subject, 1882; Foundations for an Ethics, 1887). J. Bergmann[1] in Marburg (born 1840) occupies a kindred position.
[Footnote 1: Bergmann: Outlines of a Theory of Consciousness, 1870; Pure Logic, 1879; Being and Knowing, 1880; The Fundamental Problems of Logic, 1882; On the Right, 1883; Lectures on Metaphysics, 1886; On the Beautiful, 1887; History of Philosophy, vol. i., Pre-Kantian Philosophy, 1892.]
It is the same scientific spirit of the time, which in the fifties led many who were weary of the idealistic speculations over to materialism, that now secures such wide dissemination and so widespread favor for the endeavors of the neo-Kantians and the positivists or neo-Baconians, who desire to see metaphysics stricken from the list of the sciences and replaced by noëtics, and the theory of the world relegated to faith. The philosophy of the present, like the pre-Socratic philosophy and the philosophy of the early modern period, wears the badge of physics. The world is conceived from the standpoint of nature, psychical phenomena are in part neglected, in part see their inconvenient claims reduced to a minimum, while it is but rarely that we find an appreciation of their independence and co-ordinate value, not to speak of their superior position. The power which natural science has gained over philosophy dates essentially from a series of famous discoveries and theories, by which science has opened up entirely new and wide outlooks, and whose title to be considered in the formation of a general view of reality is incontestable. To mention only the most prominent, the following have all posited important and far-reaching problems for philosophy as well as for science: Johannes Müller's (Müller died 1858) theory of the specific energies of the senses, which Helmholtz made use of as an empirical confirmation of the Kantian apriorism; the law of the conservation of energy discovered by Robert Mayer (1842, 1850; Helmholtz, 1847, 1862), and, in particular, the law of the transformation of heat into motion, which invited an examination of all the forces active in the world to test their mutual convertibility; the extension of mechanism to the vital processes, favored even by Lotze; the renewed conflict between atomism and dynamism; further, the Darwinian theory[1] (1859), which makes organic species develop from one another by natural selection in the struggle for existence (through inheritance and adaptation); finally, the meta-geometrical speculations[2] of Gauss (1828), Riemann (On the Hypotheses which lie at the Basis of Geometry, 1854, published in 1867), Helmholtz (1868), B. Erdmann (The Axioms of Geometry, 1877). G. Cantor, and others, which look on our Euclidean space of three dimensions as a special case of the unintuitable yet thinkable analytic concept of a space of n dimensions. The circumstance that these theories are still largely hypothetical in their own field appears to have stirred up rather than moderated the zeal for carrying them over into other departments and for applying them to the world as a whole. Thus, especially, the Darwinians[3] have undauntedly attempted to utilize the biological hypothesis of the master as a philosophical principle of the world, and to bring the mental sciences under the point of view of the mechanical theory of development, though thus far with more daring and noise than success. The finely conceived ethics of Höffding (p. 585) is an exception to the rule which is the object of this remark.
[Footnote 1: A critical exposition of the modern doctrine of development and of the causes used to explain it is given by Otto Hamann, Entwickelungslehre und Darwinismus, Jena, 1892. Cf. also, O. Liebmann, Analysis der Wirklichkeit; and Ed. von Hartmann (above, p. 610). [Among the numerous works in English the reader may be referred to the article "Evolution," by Huxley and Sully, Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed., vol. viii.; Wallace's Darwinism, 1889; Romanes, Darwin and after Darwin, i. The Darwinian Theory, 1892; and Conn's Evolution of To-day, 1886.—TR.]]
[Footnote 2: Cf. Liebmann, Analysis der Wirklichkeit, 2d ed., pp. 53-59. G. Frege (Begriffsschrift, 1879; The Foundations of Arithmetic, 1884; Function and Concept, 1891; "On Sense and Meaning" in the Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. c. 1892) has also chosen the region intermediate between mathematics and philosophy for his field of work. We note, further, E.G. Husserl, Philosophy of Arithmetic, vol. i., 1891.]
[Footnote 3: Ernst Haeckel of Jena (born 1834; General Morphology, 1866; Natural History of Creation, 1868 [English, 1875] I Anthropogeny, 1874; Aims and Methods of the Development History of To-day, 1875; Popular Lectures, 1878 seq.—English, 1883), G. Jäger, A. Schleicher (The Darwinian Theory and the Science of Language, 1865), Ernst Krause (Carus Sterne, the editor of Kosmos) O. Caspari, Carneri (Morals and Darwinism, 1871), O. Schmidt, Du Prel, Paul Rée (The Origin of the Moral Feelings, 1877; The Genesis of Conscience, 1885; The Illusion of Free Will, 1885); G.H. Schneider (The Animal Will, 1880; The Human Will, 1882; The Good and III of the Human Race, 1883).]
Besides the theory of knowledge, in the elaboration of which the most eminent naturalists[1] participate with acuteness and success, psychology and the practical disciplines also betray the influence of the scientific spirit. While sociology and ethics, following the English model, seek an empirical basis and begin to make philosophical use of statistical results (E.F. Schäffle, Frame and Life of the Social Body, new ed., 1885; A. von Oettingen, Moral Statistic in its Significance for a Social Ethics, 3d ed., 1882), psychology endeavors to attain exact results in regard to psychical life and its relation to its physical basis—besides Fechner and the Herbartians, W. Wundt and A. Horwicz should be mentioned here. Wundt and, of late, Haeckel go back to the Spinozistic parallelism of material and psychical existence, only that the latter emphasizes merely the inseparability (Nichtohneeinander) of the two sides (the cell-body and the cell-soul) with a real difference between them and a metaphysical preponderance of the material side, while the former emphasizes the essential unity of body and soul, and the higher reality of the spiritual side.
[Footnote 1: Helmholtz, Virchow (born 1821), Zöllner (1834-82; On the Nature of Comets, 1872), and Du Bois-Reymond (born 1818), who, in his lectures On the Limits of the Knowledge of Nature, 1872, and The Seven World-riddles, 1880 (both together in 1882, and reprinted in the first series of his Addresses, 1886), looks on the origin of life, the purposive order of nature, and thought as problems soluble in the future, but declares, on the other hand, that the nature of matter (atoms) and force (actio in distant), the origin of motion, the genesis of consciousness (of sensation, together with pleasure and pain) from the knowable conditions of psychical life, and the freedom of the will, are absolute limits to our knowledge of nature.]
%(b) Idealistic Reaction against the Scientific Spirit.%—In opposition to the preponderance of natural science and the empirico-skeptical tendency of the philosophy of the day conditioned by it, an idealistic counter-movement is making itself increasingly felt as the years go on. Wilhelm Dilthey[1] abandons metaphysics as a basis, it is true, but (with the assent of Gierke, Preussische Jahrbücher, vol. liii. 1884) declares against the transfer of the method of natural science to the mental sciences, which require a special foundation. In spite of his critical rejection of metaphysics, Wilhelm Windelband in Strasburg (born 1848; Preludes, 1884) is, like Dilthey, to be counted among the idealists. In opposition to the individualism of the positivists, the folk-psychologists—at their head Steinthal and Lazarus (p. 536); Gustav Glogau[2] in Kiel (born 1844) is an adherent of the same movement—defend the power of the universal over individual spirits. The spirit of the people is not a phrase, an empty name, but a real force, not the sum of the individuals belonging to the people, but an encompassing and controlling power, which brings forth in the whole body processes (e.g., language) which could not occur in individuals as such. It is only as a member of society that anyone becomes truly man; the community is the subject of the higher life of spirit.
[Footnote 1: Dilthey: Introduction to the Mental Sciences, part i., 1883; Poetic Creation in the Zeller Aufsätze, 1887; "Contributions to the Solution of the Question of the Origin of our Belief in the Reality of the External World, and its Validity," Sitzungsberichte of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, 1890; "Conception and Analysis of Man in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries" in the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, vols. iv., v., 1891-92.]
[Footnote 2: Glogau: Sketch of the Fundamental Philosophical Sciences (part i., The Form and the Laws of Motion of the Spirit, 1880; part ii., The Nature and the Fundamental Forms of Conscious Spirit, 1888); Outlines of Psychology; 1884.]
If folk-psychology, whose title but imperfectly expresses the comprehensive endeavor to construct a psychology of society or of the universal spirit, is, as it were, an empirical confirmation of Hegel's theory of Objective Spirit, Rudolf Eucken[1] (born 1846), pressing on in the Fichtean manner from the secondary facts of consciousness to an original real-life, endeavors to solve the question of a universal becoming, of an all-pervasive force, of a supporting unity ("totality") in the life of spirit (neither in a purely noëtical nor a purely metaphysical, but) in a noölogical way, and demands that the fundamental science or doctrine of principles direct its attention not to cognition by itself, but to the activity of psychical life as a whole.
[Footnote 1: Eucken: The Unity of Spiritual Life in the Consciousness and Deeds of Humanity, 1888; Prolegomena to this, 1885. A detailed analysis of the latter by Falckenberg is given in the Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. xc, 1887; cf. above, pp. 17 and 610.]
We have elsewhere discussed the more recent attempts to establish a metaphysic which shall be empirically well grounded and shall cautiously rise from facts.[1] In regard to the possibility of metaphysics three parties are to be distinguished: On the left, the positivists, the neo-Kantians, and the monists of consciousness, who deny it out of hand. On the right, a series of philosophers—e.g., adherents of Hegel, Herbart, and Schopenhauer—who, without making any concessions to the modern theory of knowledge, hold fast to the possibility of a speculative metaphysics of the old type. In the center, a group of thinkers who are willing to renounce neither a solid noëtical foundation nor the attainment of metaphysical conclusions—so Eduard von Hartmann, Wundt,[2] Eucken, Volkelt (pp. 590, 617). Otto Liebmann (born 1840; On the Analysis of Reality, 1876, 2d ed., 1880; Thoughts and Facts, Heft i. 1882) demands a sharp separation between the certain and the uncertain and an exact estimation of the degree of probability which theories possess; puts the principles of metaphysics under the rubric of logical hypothesis; and, in his Climax of the Theories, 1884, calls attention to the fact that experiential science, in addition to axioms necessarily or apodictically certain and empeiremes possessing actual or assertory certainty, needs, further, a number of "interpolation maxims," which form an attribute of our type of intellectual organization (i.e., principles, according to the standard of which we supplement the fragmentary and discrete series of single perceptions and isolated observations by the interpolation of the needed intermediate links, so that they form a connected experience). The most important of these maxims are the principles of real identity, of the continuity of existence, of causality, and of the continuity of becoming. Experience is a gift of the understanding; the premises, as a rule, latent in ordinary consciousness, on whose anticipatory application our experience is based throughout, assert something absolutely incapable of being experienced. If, in order to the production of a "pure experience," we eliminate all subjective additions of the understanding contained in experiential thought (all that cannot be present at the moment or locally at hand, in short, all that cannot be the direct object and content of actual observation), this breaks up into an unordered, unconnected aggregate of discontinuous perceptual fragments; in order that a complete and articulated condition of experience may result, these fragments (the purely factual content of observation, the incoherent matter of perception) must be supplemented and connected by very much that is not observed.
[Footnote 1: R. Falckenberg, Ueber die gegenwärtige Lage der deutschen Philosophie, inaugural address at Erlangen, Leipsic, 1890.]
[Footnote 2: Wundt: Essays, 1885, including "Philosophy and Science"; System of Philosophy, 1889. On the latter cf. Volkelt's paper in the Philosophische Monatshefte, vol. xxvii. 1891; and on the Essays a notice by the same author in the same review, vol. xxiii. 1887.]
Further, a reaction against crude naturalism is observable in the practical field, though political economists (Roscher) and jurists take a more active part in it than the philosophers. Personally R. von Jhering (1818-92; Purpose in Law, 2 vols., 1877-83, 2d ed., 1884-86) stands on idealistic ground, although, rejecting the nativistic and formalistic theory, he is in principle an adherent of "realism," of the principle of interest and social utility (the moral is that Which is permanently useful to society).
Finally, similar motives underlie the growing interest in the history of philosophy. The idealistic impulse seeks the nourishment which the un-metaphysical present denies to it from the great works of the past, and hopes, by keeping alive the classical achievements of previous times, to enhance the consciousness of the urgency and irrepressibleness of the highest questions, and to awaken courage for renewed attempts at their solution. Thus the study of history enters the service of systematic philosophy.
%(c) The Special Philosophical Sciences.%—The more the courage to attack the central problems of philosophy has been paralyzed by the neo-Kantian theory of knowledge and the coming-in of the positivistic spirit, the more lively has been the work of the last decades in the special departments: the transfer of the center of gravity from metaphysics to the particular sciences is the most prominent characteristic of the philosophy of the time. Logic sees century-old convictions shattered and new foundations arising. Psychology has entered into competition with physiology in regard to the discovery of the laws of the psychical functions which depend on bodily processes, while metaphysical questions are forced into the background and there is a growing distrust of the reliability of inner observation. The philosophy of religion is favored with undiminished interest and aesthetics, after long neglect, with a renewal of attention; the philosophy of history is about to reconquer its former rights. There is, moreover, an especially lively interest in ethics; and the investigation of the history of philosophy is more widely extended than ever before. We will close our sketch with a short survey of the particular disciplines.