BRITISH AND FOREIGN EVANGELICAL REVIEW.

JULY 1864.

ART. I.-Historical Sketch of the Later German Philosophy.

THE

HE countrymen of Kant and Hegel, whatever their defects may be, have given proof of an aptitude for philosophical inquiry which is beyond the reach of cavil. However little we may be able to sympathise with the aberrations of German thinkers, nobody thinks of denying to the Teutonic mind a quite unexampled fund of intellectual activity. Hence, amid the rumours that reach us of a great change in the current of German thought, which has taken place in late years, it will hardly be supposed by any one that the most speculative people in the world has positively given over thinking. Here was a nation which, until about a hundred years ago, had for a long period been lagging behind other nations in the path of literary achievement generally, and only keeping pace with them in philosophy. But suddenly it sprang to the forefront, and distinguished itself above all the rest in nothing more than in philosophy. The brilliant series of thinkers from Kant to Hegel astonished the world by the boldness of their speculative flights, and, backed by numerous adherents and imitators, they spread abroad the fame of German thinking over Europe; so that even in minds little concerned with such things, a dim notion arose that Germans found their greatest pleasure in the hunt after shadowy abstractions, and could scale mountain-tops, and breathe and live where others in the thin air could only gasp and die. In the first twenty years of this century, there was hardly a youth in a German university at all philosophically

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inclined, who did not dream of bringing out a system of the universe, spun out of some single abstract notion, with the help of a thing called the dialectic method. But of all such daring spirits Hegel was the patriarch, because he used the instrument most deftly. Thirty years ago or more, he died at Berlin surrounded by a crowd of disciples all eager to spread farther a system which, to many of them, stood in the place of a creed. How it fared with them when they had lost their head, we shall see; but in view of what is to come, it concerns us much to inquire, first, whether in those early years Hegel and his followers had undisputed possession of the philosophical field.

Now there were actually some who saw whither all this dialectical cleverness was tending, and that the end of it was vanity and worse. Herbart, who taught in Kant's university, had discovered early what was the weakness of the Kantian philosophy, its want of a sufficient psychological basis. Kant, with his well-balanced mind, and his careful scientific training, could curb himself enough to shun many of the devious paths wherein his less wary successors lost themselves; but from the first his psychology was hardly better than the best supplied by the Wolfian school. Except his threefold division of the mind, and a few scattered ideas, far-reaching indeed, but never followed up, Kant cannot be said to have done much for psychology. His successors in the direct line took up his speculations where he left them off, and troubled themselves little about the foundation. Herbart, however, had the wisdom to turn his eyes thither, saw the weakness, and sought to remedy it by working out a more thorough psychology on scientific principles. With the best intentions he succeeded only moderately, because it was an evil time for sober inquiry. The demon of wild speculation was abroad, and nobody could throw off the spell. Herbart professed an inductive method, but it was supplemented and even preceded by the freest use of metaphysical speculation. The two sort but indifferently together, because the latter is restive and fiery, and is impatient of its plodding fellow. Herbart gave the rein far too freely to mere speculation, and spoiled his course accordingly. Besides, his attempt at mathematical deduction and expression, if possible at all in psychology, was clearly not yet possible. Yet Herbart had a genuine talent, and the impulse he communicated was carried on by a distinct school. This school, let us add here, has preserved its vitality up to the present time, and supports by itself a philosophical periodical. We have to note, therefore, that Herbart's followers have worked on steadily amid all the changes of late years; and that, with a

Beneke's Inductive Psychology.

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man like Drobisch of Leipsic among them, their influence is still far from dead.

Some notice is due to another thinker, who had the courage to stand forth when Hegel was at the height of his power, and protest against his doings as an idle beating of the air. Beneke began to lecture at Berlin in the last decade of Hegel's life, and there, in the very citadel of the autocrat, .he condemned this endless chase after the absolute nothing, and sought to lead men back to the sober investigation of the realities of the universe. Beneke held that philosophy could be saved from utter contempt only by the establishment of a truly inductive psychology, and he had high hopes that, with such a starting-point, enormous advances would be made in every department of philosophy. He said boldly that psychology, the basis of all philosophy, was a natural science, and that it was as absurd to seek to bring out an original and ingenious system per annum, as it would be to attempt the like in astronomy or chemistry. While thus stating his conception of psychology as a science among the other sciences with as much pointedness as has been done. since, Beneke differed from the majority of those who have come after him, in his complete rejection of all aid from physiology. Physiology, he confessed, was important enough in its own place, but in the science of mind we had to do only with the data of the internal consciousness. These were abundantly sufficient for the inductive method to work upon, and were even, as facts, as much superior in reality to any external facts whatever, as internal observation surpassed in exactness and depth of insight any kind of external perception. This great superiority, which Beneke held to be attached to internal observation and its data, made up fully, in his opinion, the disadvantage under which psychology laboured, as compared with other sciences, in not affording room for experiment, without which an induction from observation only is generally incomplete. Here too, as we shall see, Beneke stands aloof from some of his successors. But he had, in common with Herbart and with almost all the psychologists of a later date, the notion that the timehonoured treatment of the mind, according to faculties (which has been so familiar to ourselves), is unscientific and barren in results. The mind should be studied, not in its mature and efficient condition, but in its genesis, and while it is still growing and expanding. We may have occasion to return to this view; but here, in passing, let us notice how far we are already from the fundamental position of Kant and the speculative school. Beneke does not speak of space and time as universal forms of intuition which are insepar

able from every mind at every stage; he would say, whether forms or not, they have a growth and a development, and we are bound to go back to their germ in the infant, and in attempting to learn what they were, and their becoming, we know first thoroughly what they are. Beneke went on teaching down to the time of his unfortunate death in 1856. He has founded no school, and his name is little mentioned in the disorder of the universal scramble forward that marks the present time; but many of the schoolmasters thoughout Germany remember him for the insight he gave them into the process of development in the youthful consciousness. One finds in his works proofs of a remarkable acquaintance with the history of British thought, which, since the time of Locke, he rated very much higher than do most of his countrymen, or than they affect to do. While Hegel was pouring contempt on British empiricism, Beneke said it was good, and prophesied that it would live and bear fruit after Hegel's air-bubbles had burst.

Schopenhauer claims attention at this stage, not because he contributed at all positively, like Herbart and Beneke, to prepare the way for later inquiries, but because of his fiercely contemptuous opposition to the dominant school of thirty years ago. He belonged really to a generation that has passed away, although his death, which happened only two or three years back, his personal and philosophical idiosyncrasies, and the lack of other speculative novelties lately, have contributed to give him considerable importance at present. Disgusted that in his younger days an academical career was slow in opening itself for him, he retired to Frankfort to decry all professors of philosophy as a menial brood, and to dream of a Nirvana as the end of all things. In arriving at this dreamy consummation, he was not a little influenced by the Indian philosophy itself, but he professed himself generally a true, and the only true, follower of Kant. The idealistic tendency in Kant's speculation was followed out with the utmost boldness by Schopenhauer, and the merely phenomenal character of all human cognition was set forth with startling vigour in his passionate language. His invectives against Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, for their perversion of the great leading thoughts in Kant's works, are incessant, and, as examples of unscrupulous denunciation, are admirable in their way. But on Hegel, the last of the three, the vials of Schopenhauer's wrath are chiefly poured forth; and when we find the daring speculator fiercely assailed as the Caliban of philosophy, while his influence was still mighty, we may be prepared to find that his dominion would be rudely shaken as soon as his own guiding hand was removed.

Hegel and the Hegelians.

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These short notices may suffice, partly to indicate the fact of a dangerous opposition having early raised itself against all that may be included under the term Hegelianism—a fact which will render the great revulsion that was to come somewhat more intelligible, partly to shew from what quarter deliverance was to come, and what-a better and more scientific psychology-was to be the watchword of the liberators. So long, however, as Hegel lived, he could feel very secure, when he looked upon the host of ardent young disciples around him, and saw how far his ideas tinged the thoughts of men of very various kinds. Besides, Hegel, with all the tremendous arrogance of his philosophy, had managed to stand well with Church and State. Although, armed with his invincible dialectics, he claimed for his thinking a reality and a verity which he strenuously denied to the common experience of men; and although he set himself up accordingly as an ever new creator of the universe through the might of this lordly power of the dialectician, he had the good sense always to busy himself with the creation of just the very things and relations which the common sort found made to hand and accepted implicitly, let who will have made them. Hegel being thus the most judicious of creators, was enabled to appear tolerably orthodox for so erratic a genius; and what was more important, by practising and inculcating submission, he found favour in the eyes of the oppressive political regime that weighed at that time upon Prussia. He counted among his disciples, besides those who cared more about philosophy than anything else, conservatives who were glad to have found philosophical reasons for the existing state of things, which pleased them greatly, and also young radicals, fiery and eager, who were restrained by the master, but who rejoiced nevertheless in the possession of a two-edged sword like the dialectic method, and hoped some day with it to strike down the oppressive power that was crushing all their political aspirations. When, then, Hegel died, there was nothing to hold so heterogeneous a party together; and first, of course, all those who were less philosophers than politicians parted company. The conservative section, which shewed always a great concern for the interests of religion, but too often (and this is still the evil condition of Germany), as a mere state-weapon, went off into spiritualism, making thus a manifest surrender of the key to Hegel's position, inasmuch as he had always carefully avoided every semblance of onesided interpretation, and had meant the philosophy of the absolute to be the lofty expression of the principle of unity which manifested itself equally in mind and matter. Some