tasy (Indian or Brahmanical), and of being in self (Buddhistic). In the Persian (Zoroastrian) religion of light, the Syrian religion of pain, and the Egyptian religion of enigma, is prepared the way for the transformation into the religion of freedom. The Greek solves the riddle of the Sphinx by apprehending himself as subject, as man.

The religion of spiritual individuality or free subjectivity passes through three stadia: the Jewish religion of sublimity (unity), the Greek religion of beauty (necessity), the Roman religion of purposiveness (of the understanding). In contrast to the Jewish religion of slavish obedience, which by miracle makes known the power of the one God and the nullity of nature, which has been "created" by his will, and the prosaic severity of the Roman, which, in Jupiter and Fortuna, worships only the world-dominion of the Roman people, the more cheerful art-religion of the Hellenes reverences in the beautiful forms of the gods, the powers which man is aware of in himself-wisdom, bravery, and beauty.

The Christian or revealed religion is the religion of truth, of freedom, of spirit. Its content is the unity of the divine nature and the human, God as knowing himself in being known of man; the knowledge of God is God's self-knowl edge. Its fundamental truths are the Trinity (signifying that God differentiates and sublates the difference in love), the incarnation (as a figure of the essential unity of the infinite and finite spirit), the fall, and Christ's atoning death (this signifies that the realization of the unity between man and God presupposes the overcoming of naturality and selfishness).

(3) Philosophy.-Finally the task remains of clothing the absolute content given in religion in the form adequate to it, in the form of the concept. In philosophy absolute spirit attains the highest stage, its perfect self-knowledge. It is the self-thinking Idea.

Here we must not look for further detailed explanations: philosophy is just the course which has been traversed. Its systematic exposition is encyclopædia; the consideration of its own actualization, the history of philosophy, which, as a "philosophical" discipline, has to show the

conformity to law and the rationality of this historical development, to show the more than mere succession, the genetic succession, of systems, as well as their connection with the history of culture. Each system is the product and expression of its time, and as the self-reflection of each successive stage in culture cannot appear before this has reached its maturity and is about to be overcome. Not until the approach of the twilight does the owl of Minerva begin its flight.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE OPPOSITION TO CONSTRUCTIVE IDEALISM: FRIES, HERBART, SCHOPENHAUER.

IN Fries, Herbart, and Schopenhauer a threefold opposition was raised against the idealistic school represented by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The opposition of Fries is aimed at the method of the constructive philosophers, that of Herbart against their ontological positions, and that of Schopenhauer against their estimate of the value of existence. Fries and Beneke declare that a speculative knowledge of the suprasensible is impossible, and seek to base philosophy on empirical psychology; to the monism (panlogism) of the idealists Herbart opposes a pluralism, to their philosophy of becoming, a philosophy of being; Schopenhauer rejects their optimism, denying rationality to the world and the world-ground. Among themselves the thinkers of the opposition have little more in common than their claim to a better understanding of the Kantian philosophy, and a development of it more in harmony with the meaning of its author, than it had experienced at the. hands of the idealists. Whoever fails to agree with them in this, and ascribes to the idealists whom they oppose better grounded claims to the honor of being correct interpreters and consistent developers of Kantian principles, will be ready to adopt the name Semi-Kantians, given by Fortlage to the members of the opposition, a title which seems the more fitting since each of them appropriates only a definitely determinable part of Kant's views, and mingles a foreign element with it. In Fries this nonKantian element comes from Jacobi's philosophy of faith; in Herbart it comes from the monadology of Leibnitz, and the ancient Eleatico-atomistic doctrine; in Schopenhauer, from the religion of India and (as in Beneke) from the sensationalism of the English and the French. We can only

hint in passing at the parallelism which exists between the chief representatives of the idealistic school and the leaders of the opposition. Fries's theory of knowledge and faith is the empirical counterpart of Fichte's Science of Knowledge. Schopenhauer, in his doctrine of Will and Idea, in his vigorously intuitive and highly fanciful view of nature and art, and, in general, in his æsthetical mode of philosophizing, with its glad escape from the fetters of method, has so much in common with Schelling that many unhesitatingly treat his system as an offshoot of the Philosophy of Nature. The contrast between Herbart and Hegel is the more pronounced since they are at one in their confidence in the power of the concept. The most conspicuous point of comparison between the metaphysics of the two thinkers is the significance ascribed by them to the contradiction as the operative moment in the movement of philosophical thought. The attitude of hostility which Schleiermacher assumed in relation to Hegel's intellectualistic conception of religion induced Harms to give to Schleiermacher also a place in the ranks of the opposition. Following the chronological order, we begin with the campaign opened by Fries under the banner of anthropology against the main branch of the Kantian school.

I. The Psychologists: Fries and Beneke. Jacob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843) was born and reared at Barby, studied at Jena, and habilitated at the same university in the year 1801; he was professor at Heidelberg in 1806-16, and at Jena from 1816 until his death. His chief work was the New Critique of Reason, in three volumes, 1807 (2d ed., 1828 seq.), which had been preceded, in 1805, by the treatise Knowledge, Faith, and Presentiment. Besides these he composed a Handbook of Psychical Anthropology, 1821 (2d ed., 1837 seq.), text-books of Logic, Metaphysics, the Mathematical Philosophy of Nature, and Practical Philosophy and the Philosophy of Religion, and a philosophical novel, Julius and Evagoras, or the Beauty of the Soul.

Fries adopts and popularizes Kant's results, while he rejects Kant's method. With Reinhold and Fichte, he

thinks "transcendental prejudice" has forced its way into philosophy, a phase of thought for which Kant himself was responsible by his anxiety to demonstrate everything. That a priori forms of knowledge exist cannot be proved by speculation, but only by empirical methods, and discovered by inner observation; they are given facts of reason, of which we become conscious by reflection or psychological analysis. The a priori element cannot be demonstrated nor deduced, but only shown actually present. The question at issue* between Fries and the idealistic school therefore becomes, Is the discovery of the a priori element itself a cognition a priori or a posteriori? Is the criticism. of reason a metaphysical or an empirical, that is, an anthropological inquiry? Herbart decides with the idealists: "All concepts through which we think our faculty of knowledge are themselves metaphysical concepts" (Lehrbuch zur Einleitung, p. 231). Fries decides: The criticism of reason is an empirico-psychological inquiry, as in general empirical psychology forms the basis of all philosophy.

With the exception of this divergence in method Fries. accepts Kant's results almost unchanged, unless we must call the leveling down which they suffer at his hands a considerable alteration. Only the doctrine of the Ideas and of the knowledge of reason is transformed by the introduction and systematization of Jacobi's principle of the immediate evidence of faith. Reason, the faculty of Ideas, i. e., of the indemonstrable yet indubitable principles, is fully the peer of the sensibility and the understanding. The same subjective necessity which guarantees to us the objective reality of the intuitions and the categories accompanies the Ideas as well; the faith which reveals to us the per se of things is no less certain than the knowledge of phenomena. The ideal view of the world is just as necessary as the natural view; through the former we cognize the same world as through the latter, only after a higher order; both spring from reason or the unity of transcendental apperception, only that in the natural view we are conscious of the fact, from which we abstract in the ideal view, that

*Cf. Kuno Fischer's Pro-Rectoral Address, Die beiden Kantischen Schulen in Jena, 1862.