LECTURE III.

THE GERMAN SUCCESSION.

A reaction.

THE startling conclusion which Spinoza had reached, and from which he could not be driven by Cartesianism, was followed by a general revolt from that philosophy. Thinkers gave up their faith in consciousness as the basis of a system of truth, and began to build more and more on experience. The a-priori method yielded to the a-posteriori. Deduction was exchanged for induction. Sensuous observation took the place of spiritual conviction.

Empiricism.

Thus a fresh impulse was given to the philosophy expounded by Bacon, and which had been carried forward into the realm of mind by Gassendi and Locke. Bacon wrote a century earlier than Spinoza, Gassendi just before him, and Locke was his contemporary. This school had therefore gained a foothold, and could boast of powerful adherents, when the real nature of Spinozism began to be known. Hence the ripened seed of Descartes' philosophy, which the astute Hebrew had gathered, was not immediately sown broadcast. It lay buried in the congenial soil of Germany; destined

pu, however, to

spring forth into a prodigious growth, When empiricism should have run its course and proved itself, too, a failure.

111

This move

passed over

for the present.

It does not belong to the present part of my ment to be plan to trace this empirical movement in the world of thought; a movement which became so powerful towards the close of the seventeenth century, and which was subverted in the eighteenth. The Positivism of our times may, I think, find in this its lineal predecessor. Condillac, Bonnet, Helvetius, Saint Lambert, Condorcet, Baron d'Holbach, were its high priests in France. One of its strongest early advocates in England was Thomas Hobbes. David Hume held the same relation to it as a critic which Spinoza held to Cartesianism. Taking it upon its own premises, that is, he showed its logical ultimate to be universal scepticism ; just as Spinoza had shown that Descartes' principles led to pantheism. This keen sighted Scotchman was to arise, and cut up by the roots the empirical metaphysics of Locke; then Kant was to introduce, instead thereof, the germs of a-priori thinking again; and then the doctrine. of Spinoza was to experience a resurrection, and to have a development which is one of the marvels of speculative philosophy. "The God of Spinoza, which the seventeenth century had broken as an idol,” is the remark of Saisset, "becomes the God of Lessing, of Goethe, of Novalis." It is with this German pantheism, only so far, however, as it appears in the philosophy of the period, that I am now concerned. Lessing the sceptic, who deemed it less blessed to possess truth than to search for truth, was among the earliest of the Germans to awaken an interest in the study of Spinoza; but he belongs to the department of criticism and

Revival of
Spinozism.

Wise is perhaps as good a reproduction as we have of the spirit of Spinozism, and I shall repeatedly have occasion to refer to him; but the present starting-point is more properly Kant's Critique of the Pure Reason, from which the stream of pantheistic thought flows steadily on, through the writings of Fichte and Schelling more especially, till it comes to an end in the Absolute Idea of Hegel. It is with very great diffidence that I enter this path, along which so many able critics have been found stumbling. There is a tradition that Hegel, near the close of his life, said, "Only one of my followers has understood me; and he has misunderstood me." Even with the best of qualifications, therefore, I might well shrink from the attempt to represent German pantheism with thoroughness. But fortunately my plan does not require this; nor is it probable that the numerous class which I hope to reach would be greatly aided by such an effort, however successful in itself. I shall undertake only so much as is requisite in order that certain forms of unbelief, more or less popular at the present day, may be seen in their historical connections. I do not claim to be a master of the German tongue, nor to have read the works of the famous authors just referred to, in the original text; but I have taken pains to verify any statements which seemed to me to require it by recourse to that text, and have used only those translations which have the sanction of high authority. Though preferring to walk over the bridge rather than swim the river, as Mr. Emerson puts the case, I have not hesitated to plunge in and make examination, where anything seemed insecure. The writer whom I

What is

here attempted.

shall quote chiefly, in sketching the course of thinking from Kant to Hegel, is Heinrich Moritz Chalybæus, of whose book, rendered into English by Alfred Tulk,' so competent a judge as Sir William Hamilton says, that it is "a perspicuous and impartial survey of the various modern systems of German philosophy, at once comprehensive and compendious." It will be seen I am confident, even in the imperfect and fragmentary sketch which alone I can hope to give, that there is, in all a-priori thinking, a danger on the side towards pantheistic forms of unbelief; and my object will be fully accomplished if it is made clear that the philosophy of consciousness is not a sufficient guide in the search for truth, save where it is supplemented and upheld by a divine energy, but carries one fatally on to emanation, and the confounding of effects with their causes, with no promise of a logical resting-place short of the One Substance with infinite attributes in which Spinoza at last rested.

Leibnitz to

the new

Leibnitz, who was mainly a Cartesian, may Relation of be said to have nourished the life of Descartes' movement. philosophy in the German mind, during the period of its feebleness. He was, notwithstanding his seeming arrogance and impatience of contradiction, in many respects a remarkable thinker. Nothing short of the limitless universe of truth seemed an adequate field. for his powers, over which his intellect swept on imperial wing. But besides this largeness of range, he had, what is more to the present point, the rare faculty of kindling

1 Historical Survey of Speculative Philosophy from Kant to Hegel (An

enthusiasm in other minds. This last trait has no doubt done much towards perpetuating his influence; for the works which he finished with his own hand have been less valued than some of those which he stimulated others to undertake. It was his mission to open new doors of knowledge, to point out with eagle eye the errors of previous and contemporaneous thought; to make suggestions and start hypotheses which, in the minds of the rising class of thinkers, unfolded gradually into systems of philosophy.

The Leibnitz-Wolfian philos

This influence was especially manifest in the case of John Christian Wolf, who was perhaps the leading thinker of Germany at the begin- ophy. ning of the eighteenth century. So closely did

he adhere to the teachings of his master, in the numerous works which he published, and which were scattered over Europe, that it has been said of him, “He dried, cut up, and sold the philosophy of Leibnitz." This criticism seems unduly severe, however, for there is evidence that Wolf anticipated some of the views of later and more famous thinkers; it is in his writings that the term Rational Psychology, used in the sense of the Kantian school, first occurs. But even granting that he added no new material to the subject, he was a master of method, and gave the discoveries of Leibnitz a systematic shape, whereby he taught them many years, and with no small success, to his countrymen. It was not an age of great intellects. Frederick the Great had drawn around him a class of French writers, who were spreading the worst results of Sensationalism, and thus a kind of shallow eclecticism had grown up in the very home of Leibnitz.