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 part 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 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. 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 æsthetic writers Hotho, Friedrich Theodor Vischer † (1807-87), and Max Schasler (Critical History of Esthetics, 1872; Esthetics, 1886), the historians of philosophy, Schwegler (died 1857; History of Greek Philosophy, 1859, 4th ed., 1886, edited by Karl Köstlin, whose Esthetics appeared 1869), Eduard Zeller 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 * K. Rosenkranz: Psychology, 1837. 3d ed., 1863; Science of the Logical Idea, 1858; Studies, 1839 seq., New Studies, 1875 seq.; Esthetics of the Ugly, 1853 several works on the history of poetry. Vischer: Esthetics, 1846-58; Critical Excursions, 1844 seq.; several Hefte "Alles and Neues." The diary in the second part of the novel Auch Einer develops an original pantheistic view of the world. 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. also, and Zeller and Fischer strive back toward Kant, Johannes Volkelt* 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 HülfvorstellungsThatigkeit und als Anpassungsvorgang in the Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vols. xcvi., xcvii., 1889–90). The leaders of the Hegelian left require more detailed consideration. In David Friedrich Strauss † (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 supernaturalistic 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 lifehistory 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 *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. + 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. 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. 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 "),* 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?" may be 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 æsthetic 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. As Strauss went over from Hegelianism to pantheism, so Ludwig Feuerbach † (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 * English translation by Mathilde Blind, 1873. 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 |