HEGEL’S LECTURES ON THE
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

VOLUME THREE

Hegel’s Lectures on
THE HISTORY OF
PHILOSOPHY

Translated from the German by

E. S. HALDANE
and
FRANCES H. SIMSON, M.A.

In three volumes

VOLUME THREE

ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL LTD

Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane

London, E.C.4

First published in England 1896
by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd
Reprinted 1955
by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd
Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane
London, E.C.4

Reprinted by lithography in Great Britain by
Jarrold and Sons Limited, Norwich

CONTENTS

PART TWO

PHILOSOPHY OF THE MIDDLE AGES

SECTION ONE

SECTION TWO

SECTION THREE

PART THREE

MODERN PHILOSOPHY

SECTION ONE

SECTION TWO

SECTION THREE

PART TWO

PHILOSOPHY OF THE MIDDLE AGES

INTRODUCTION

The first period embraces a space of one thousand years—from Thales, 550 B.C., to Proclus, who died 485 A.D., and until the disappearance of pagan philosophy as an outward institution, 529 A.D. The second period extends to the sixteenth century, and thus again embraces a thousand years, to pass over which we must provide ourselves with seven-leagued boots. While Philosophy has hitherto found its place in the religion of the heathen, from this time on it has its sphere within the Christian world; for Arabians and Jews have only to be noticed in an external and historic way.

1. Through the Neo-Platonic philosophy we have come into quite familiar acquaintance with the Idea of Christianity, as the new religion which has entered into the world. For the Neo-Platonic philosophy has as its essential principle the fact that the Absolute is determined as spirit in a concrete way, that God is not a mere conception. Although the Absolute is Thought, it must, in order to be true, be concrete in itself and not abstract; in what we have just seen we have, then, the first appearance of the absolutely existent spirit. But in spite of their profound and true speculation, the Neo-Platonists still had not proved their doctrine that the Trinity is the truth, for there is lacking to it the form of inward necessity. The Neo-Platonists begin from the One that determines itself, that sets a limit to itself from which the determinate proceeds; this, however, is itself an immediate method of presentation, and it is this that makes such philosophers as Plotinus and Proclus so tiresome. Undoubtedly dialectic considerations enter in, in which the opposites which are conceived as absolute are shown to be null; but this dialectic is not methodical, but occurs only disconnectedly. The principle of retroversion and comprehension found with the Neo-Platonists is that of substantiality generally, but because subjectivity is lacking, this idea of Spirit is deficient in one moment, the moment of actuality, of the point which draws all moments into one, and which thereby becomes immediate unity, universality, and Being. To them spirit is thus not individual spirit; and this deficiency is made good through Christianity, in which spirit is found as actual, present spirit, immediately existent in the world here and now, and the absolute spirit is known in the immediate present as man.

In order to grasp and apply the Idea of Christianity, the philosophic Idea of which we have already spoken in connection with the Neo-Platonists must have been comprehended for itself; but within Christianity the basis of Philosophy is that in man has sprung up the consciousness of the truth, or of spirit in and for itself, and then that man requires to participate in this truth. Man must be qualified to have this truth present to him; he must further be convinced of this possibility. This is the absolute demand and necessity; the consciousness must be arrived at that this alone is true. The first point of interest in the Christian religion thus is that the content of the Idea should be revealed to man; more particularly that the unity of the divine and human nature should come to the consciousness of man, and that, indeed, on the one hand as an implicitly existent unity, and, on the other, in actuality as worship. The Christian life signifies that the culminating point of subjectivity is made familiar with this conception, the individual himself is laid claim to, is made worthy of attaining on his own account to this unity, which is to make himself worthy of the Spirit of God—Grace, as it is called—dwelling in him. Hence the doctrine of reconciliation is that God is known as reconciling Himself with the world, i.e. as we have seen in the Neo-Platonic philosophy, that He particularizes Himself and does not remain abstract. Not external nature alone, but the whole world pertains to the particular; above all must human individuality know itself in God. The interest of the subject is itself involved, and here it plays an essential rôle in order that God may be realized and may realize Himself in the consciousness of individuals who are spirit and implicitly free. Thus through the process these accomplish that reconciliation in themselves, actualize their freedom; that is to say, they attain to the consciousness of heaven upon earth, the elevation of man to God. Thus the true intellectual world is not a beyond, but the so-called finite is an element in it, and no division exists between this side and that. The real concrete in regard to the absolute Idea is the knowing of the mundane, the ‘other’ in God, as implicitly divine, as universal, as the world of intellect, as having its root in God, but only the root. In God man is accepted only in his truth, and not in his immediacy, and thus this doctrine is not what we call Pantheism, for that leaves the immediate just as it is. Man then has himself to accomplish the process of reconciliation in himself in order to attain to his truth. We have thus seen that man possesses the determination and attributes of God as the first begotten son, Adam Kadmon, the first man; we may call this unity the concrete Idea, which, however, is still only implicit.

But the fact that because man is capable of the divine, the identity of the divine and human nature must likewise be present for him, has in an immediate way become known to him in Christ, as one in whom the divine and human nature are implicitly one. In the world what has come to pass is that the Absolute has been revealed as the concrete, and, further, not only in thought in a general way as intelligible world, but because it has in itself proceeded to its ultimate point of intensity. Thus it is an actual self, an “I,” the absolute universal, the concrete universal, that is God; and also the absolute opposite of this determination, the clearly finite as it exists in space and time, but this finite determined in unity with the eternal as self. The Absolute comprehended as concrete, the unity of these two absolutely different determinations, is the true God; each of them is abstract, and either of them taken by itself is thus not the true God. The fact that the concrete is thus known to men in this perfection as God, brings about the whole revolution that has taken place in the world’s history. The Trinity is thereby not only present in conception, which would not yet constitute the perfect concrete, but actuality is perfectly united to it. In the consciousness of the world it has consequently broken in upon men that the Absolute has attained to this “culminating point” of immediate actuality, as Proclus says; and that is the manifestation of Christianity. The Greeks were anthropomorphic, their gods were humanly constituted; but the deficiency in them is that they were not anthropomorphic enough. Or rather the Greek religion is on the one hand too much, and, on the other hand, too little anthropomorphic—too much, because immediate qualities, forms, actions, are taken up into the divine; too little, because man is not divine as man, but only as a far-away form and not as ‘this,’ and subjective man.

Thus man reaches this truth, because for him it becomes a sure intuition that in Christ the λόγος has become Flesh. We thus first have man through this process attaining to spirituality, and in the second place we have man as Christ, in whom this original identity of both natures is known. Now since man really is this process of being the negation of the immediate, and from this negation attaining to himself—to a unity with God—he must consequently renounce his natural will, knowledge, and existence. This giving up of his natural existence is witnessed in Christ’s sufferings and death, and in His resurrection and elevation to the right hand of the Father. Christ became a perfect man, endured the lot of all men, death; as man He suffered, sacrificed Himself, gave up His natural existence, and thereby elevated Himself above it. In Him this process, this conversion of His other-being into spirit, and the necessity of pain in the renunciation of the natural man is witnessed; but this pain, the pain of feeling that God Himself is dead, is the starting point of holiness and of elevation to God. Thus what must come to pass in the subject—this process, this conversion of the finite—is known as implicitly accomplished in Christ. This constitutes the great leading Idea of Christianity.

From what has been said it follows, in the second place, that the world must not be left in its immediate naturalness. The original, implicitly existent, is found only in the strictest conception of mind, or as its determination: immediately, man is only a living being, who has indeed the capacity to become actual spirit—but spirit does not pertain to nature. Man is thus not by nature this particular in which the spirit of God lives and dwells: man is not by nature what he ought to be. The animal is by nature what it ought to be. But what has to be noticed in this respect is that natural things merely remain in their implicit Notion, or their truth does not enter into their sensuous life, for this their natural individuality is only a fleeting fact that cannot look back on itself. The misfortune in natural things is that they get no further, that their essential nature is not for itself and independent; from this it follows that they do not attain to infinitude, to liberation from their immediate individuality, i.e. they do not attain to freedom, but only remain in the necessity which is the connection of the “one” with an “other,” so that when this other unites itself to natural things, these last perish because they cannot bear the contradiction. But because the truth exists for man as consciousness, and in it he has the qualities necessary for freedom, he is capable of perceiving the Absolute, of placing himself in a relation to the same, and having knowledge as an end; and the liberation of mind depends on the fact that consciousness does not remain in its natural condition, but becomes spiritual, i.e. that for it the eternal, that is the reconciliation of the finite as this subject with the infinite, exists. Thus consciousness does not signify remaining in the sphere of nature, but the existence of the process whereby the universal becomes object or end to man. Man makes himself divine, but in a spiritual, that is to say not in an immediate way. In the ancient religions the divine is also united to the natural or human; but this unity is no reconciliation, but an immediate, undeveloped, and thus unspiritual unity, just because it is merely natural. But because mind is not natural but only that into which it makes itself, the spiritual is first met with in this very process of producing unity. To this spiritual unity pertains the negation of nature, of the flesh, as that in which man must not rest; for nature is from the beginning evil. Man is likewise naturally evil, for all the wickedness that man does proceeds from a natural desire. Now because man is in himself the image of God, but in existence is only natural, that which is implicit must be evolved, while the first natural condition must be abrogated. So much the more is it true that man first becomes spiritual, and attains to truth through rising above the natural, inasmuch as God Himself is a spirit only in that He transformed the hidden unity into the other of Himself, in order from this other to turn back again into Himself.

Now the fact that this is given as, or asserted to be the fundamental Idea of Christianity, implies on the one hand an historic question; at different times this idea has been grasped in different ways, and now, for example, men again have their particular conceptions of it. In order to bring about the conclusion that this is the historic idea of Christianity, we should have to enter upon an historic disquisition; but because we cannot deal with this here, we must accept it as an historic axiom. On the other hand, in so far as this question falls within the history of Philosophy, the assertion that this is the idea of Christianity has another ground to stand on than that of history, and this constitutes the third point of interest. In connection with the preceding forms it has been shown that this Idea of Christianity must have now come forth, and indeed become the universal consciousness of the nations. The fact that it has come forth as the world-religion, is the content of history; it is this necessity in the Idea which has to be expounded more clearly in the philosophy of history. To this end the conception of mind must be made fundamental, and it must now be shown that history is the process of mind itself, the revelation of itself from its first superficial, enshrouded consciousness, and the attainment of this standpoint of its free self-consciousness, in order that the absolute command of mind, “Know thyself,” may be fulfilled. The recognition of this necessity has been called the à priori construction of history; there is no good in decrying it as inadmissible, and indeed as arrogant. The development of history may be represented as contingent. Or, if the providence and government of God are seriously accepted, these are represented as though Christianity were so to speak ready made in the mind of God; then, when thrust into the world, it appears to be contingent. But the rationality and likewise the necessity of this decree of God’s has now to be considered, and this may be called a theodicy, a justification of God, i.e. a vindication of our Idea. It is a demonstration that, as I have just said, things have happened rationally in the world, and it implies the fact that the world-history represents the process of mind partially as the history of mind, which has to be reflected into itself in order to come to a consciousness of what it is. It is this which is shown forth in temporal history, and as history, indeed, just because mind is the living movement, proceeding from its immediate existence to beget revolutions in the world, as well as in individuals.

Since it is hereby presupposed that this Idea must necessarily become universal religion, there is, in the fourth place, present in it the source of a method of knowledge proper to the particular consciousness. That is to say, the new religion has made the intelligible world of Philosophy the world of common consciousness. Tertullian hence says: “Even children in our day have a knowledge of God, which the wisest men of antiquity alone attained to.” But in order that all may know the truth, this Idea must come to them as an object, not for the thinking, philosophic and cultured consciousness, but for the sensuous consciousness which still adheres to uncultured methods of regarding things. If this Idea were not to receive and to retain this form of outward consciousness, it would be a philosophy of the Christian religion; for the standpoint of Philosophy is the Idea in the form of the merely universal thought, and not the Idea as it is for the subject and directed to the subject. That through which this Idea appears as religion, belongs, however, to the history of religion, and this development of its form must here be passed over. Through these forms we must however not mistake the content, much less reject it altogether, for we must rather recognize its presence more completely; the forms must likewise not be held to be absolute, and we must not try to maintain the doctrines in this form alone, as was at one time done by an orthodoxy “of straw.”

Only one example will here be given. The so-called doctrine of original sin implies that our first parents have sinned, that this sin has thus descended to all mankind as an hereditary disorder, and has come upon posterity in an external way as something inherent in their nature, which does not pertain to freedom of the mind, nor has its ground therein. Through this original sin, it is further signified, man has drawn upon himself the wrath of God. Now if these forms be adhered to, we have in the first place there the first parents in time, and not in thought; but the thought of these first parents is none other than man as he is in and for himself. What is said of him as such, what every member of the human race really is in himself, is represented here in the form of the first man, Adam; and in this first man sin manifests itself as something contingent, or, more particularly, in his allowing himself to be enticed into eating of the apple. But it is again not merely represented that he simply partook of the fruit, but that he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; it is as man that he must partake of it, and not as beast. The fundamental characteristic, however, through which he distinguishes himself from the animal, is the very fact that he knows what good and evil are. For God likewise says, “Behold, Adam has become as one of us, to know good and evil.” But it is only through man’s having the power of thinking that he can make this distinction between good and evil; in thought alone is there thus the source of good and evil, but the healing of the evil which is brought about through thought is also there. The second point is that man is by nature evil and transmits the evil. On the other hand, it is said: “Why should the sinner suffer punishment seeing that there is no responsibility for what is inborn in him?” As a matter of fact the statement that man is implicitly or by nature evil would seem to be a hard saying. But if we set aside this hard saying, and do not speak of a divine punishment, but make use of milder general expressions, in this idea of original sin the fact remains for us that man as he is by nature is not what he ought to be before God, but has the power of becoming explicitly what he only is implicitly; and the fact that this rests in the determination of man as such is represented as inheritance. The abrogation of mere naturalness is known to us simply as education, and arises of itself; through education subjection is brought about, and with that a capacity for becoming good is developed. Now if this appears to come to pass very easily, we must recollect that it is of infinite importance that the reconciliation of the world with itself, the making good, is brought about through the simple method of education.

2. What concerns us now is to make the Principle of Christianity, which has been explained at considerable length, into the principle of the world; the task set before the world is to bring this absolute Idea within itself, to actualize it in itself, and thereby to reconcile itself to God. This task once more falls into three separate divisions.

In the first place we have the dissemination of the Christian religion and the bringing of it within the hearts of men; this, however, lies outside the limits of our consideration. The heart signifies the subjective man as ‘this,’ and through this principle the latter has a different position from before; it is essential that this subject should be present. The individual subject is the object of divine grace; each subject, or man as man, has on his own account an infinite value, is destined to partake of this spirit which must, as God, be born within the heart of every man. Man is determined for freedom, he is here recognized as implicitly free; this freedom is, however, at first only formal, because it remains within the principle of subjectivity.

The second point is that the principle of the Christian religion should be worked out for thought, and be taken up into thinking knowledge, and realized in this; and thus that it should attain to reconciliation, having the divine Idea within itself, and that the riches of thought and culture belonging to the philosophic Idea should become united to the Christian principle. For the philosophic Idea is the Idea of God, and thought has the absolute right of reconciliation, or the right to claim that the Christian principle should correspond with thought. The Fathers have rendered the service of thus elaborating the Christian religion in thinking knowledge; but neither have we to consider further this development of the Christian principle, since it belongs to the history of the Church. We have only here to give the point of view adopted regarding the relation of the Fathers to Philosophy. They for the most part lived within the ancient Roman world and in Latin culture, though the Byzantines likewise are included with them. We know that the Fathers were men of great philosophic culture, and that they introduced Philosophy, and more especially Neo-Platonic philosophy, into the Church; in this way they worked out a Christian system by which the first mode in which Christianity was manifested in the world was supplemented, for system was not present in this first manifestation. The Fathers have dealt with all questions respecting the nature of God, the freedom of man, the relationship to God—who is the objective—the origin of evil, and so on; and whatever thought decided regarding these questions was by them brought into and incorporated with the Christian system. The nature of spirit, the way of salvation, i.e. the various stages in the spiritualizing of the subject, his growth, the process of spirit, whereby it is spirit, the changes it has undergone, they have likewise treated in its freedom, and recognized its moments in the depths to which it reaches.

We may thus describe the attitude of the Christian Fathers, and likewise remark that this first philosophic development of the Christian principle has been looked on as a crime on their part, and it has been said that they have thus corrupted the purity of Christianity as originally manifested. We must speak of the nature of this corruption. It is well known that Luther in his Reformation made his aim the bringing of the Church back to the purity of its first estate in the early centuries, but this first condition already shows the fabric of an extensive and closely interwoven system, an elaborate tissue of doctrines regarding what God is and what is man’s relation to Him. Hence at the time of the Reformation no particular system was built up, but what was originally there was purified from later additions; it is a complicated erection, in which the most intricate pieces of workmanship are to be found. In modern times this elaborately woven system has been entirely pulled to pieces, because men have wished to bring Christianity back to the simple lines of the Word of God as found in the writings of the New Testament. Men have likewise given up the propagation of the system, the doctrine of Christianity as determined through the Idea and by the Idea, and have returned to the manner of its first appearance (and that, indeed, in eclectic fashion, and having regard to what will fit in with their own notions), so that now only the original Gospel narrative is regarded as forming the basis of Christianity. As regards the title of Philosophy and the Fathers to bring Philosophy into Christianity we have the following remarks to make.

Modern Theology on the one hand derives its formulas from the words of the Bible, which are made to form their basis, so that the whole business of the individual, as regards his thoughts and his conceptions, is merely exegetical; religion must be retained in its positive form, and thus it is from something received and given, something most evidently externally posited and revealed, that a beginning must be made. These words and this text are, however, of a nature such that they allow full latitude to the will of the interpreter; hence the other side is also present, or the application of the Bible saying: “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” This must be assented to, and the spirit means none else than the power which dwells within those who apply themselves to the letter in order that they may spiritually apprehend and animate it. This signifies that it is the conceptions which we bring along with us which have in the letter to give efficacy to themselves. Now these reflections brought along with us may be grasped by the most ordinary human understanding, which is what is indicated in modern times when we say that dogmas must be popular. In that way the right to act upon the letter with the spirit is assumed, i.e. the right to approach it with our individual judgment; but to the Fathers this is forbidden. They did act upon it with the Spirit; and it is expressly said that the Spirit dwells within the Church, directs, teaches, and illuminates it. The Fathers have hence a similar right to relate themselves with the Spirit to the positive, to what is given by the senses. Only it will depend absolutely upon what the nature of the Spirit is, for spirits are very different.

The assertion that the spirit must give life to the mere letter is certainly more definitely stated as that spirit has only to expound what is given, i.e. it must leave the actual sense of what is immediately contained in the words. We must, however, be far behind in culture if we do not see the fallacy in the attitude here adopted. To expound without the individual spirit, as though the sense were one entirely given, is impossible. To elucidate signifies to make clear, and it must be made clear to me; this can be done by nothing excepting what was already present in me. It must be in conformity with my subjective judgment, the necessities of my knowledge, of my apprehension, of my heart, &c.; thus only is it for me. We find what we look for, and just because I make it clear to myself, I make my conception, my thought, a factor in it; otherwise it is a dead and external thing, which is not present for me at all. It is hence very difficult to make clear to ourselves those foreign religions which lie far below our spiritual needs; but yet they touch a side of my spiritual necessities and standpoints, although it is but a dim and sensuous side. Thus when we talk of “making clear,” we conceal the real matter in a word; but if this word itself is made clear we find nothing in it but the fact that the spirit which is in man desires therein to recognize itself, and that it cannot know anything which does not rest in him. Thus have men made of the Bible what may be called a nose of wax. This man finds this thing, the other man that; what was secure now shows itself as insecure, because it is considered by the subjective spirit.

In this regard the nature of the text describing the method in which the first manifestation of Christianity took place, must be remarked upon; it cannot as yet expressly contain that which rests in the principle of Christianity, but only somewhat of an anticipation of what spirit is and will know as true. This also is expressly said in the text itself. Christ says: “If I depart, I will send the Comforter, the Holy Ghost.... He will guide you into all truth,” He—and not Christ’s earthly presence nor His spoken words. It was only to be after Him, and after His teaching through the text, that the Spirit was to come into the Apostles, and that they were to become full of the Spirit. It might almost be said that when Christianity is carried back to its first appearing, it is brought down to the level of unspirituality, for Christ Himself says that the Spirit will not come until He Himself has departed. In the text of the first manifestation of Christianity we, on the other hand, see Christ only as the Messiah, or under the more explicit designation of a mere teacher; for His friends and apostles He is a present man whom they can perceive by the senses, and who does not yet hold to them the relationship of the Holy Ghost. His friends have seen Him, heard His doctrine, seen His miracles, and have thereby been brought to believe in Him. But Christ Himself sternly rebukes those who demand miracles of Him; if He thus be made as God to man, God in the heart of man, He cannot have a sensuous and immediate presence. The Dalai-lama, in the form of a sensuous man, is God to the inhabitants of Thibet, but in the Christian principle, where God dwells in the hearts of men, He cannot be present to them in sensuous form.

The second point then is that the sensuous and present form must disappear, so that it may be taken into the Mnemosyne, into the realm of popular conception; then for the first time can the spiritual consciousness, the spiritual relation, enter in. To the question of whither Christ has gone, the answer is given, “He sits on the right hand of God,” which signifies that it is only now that God can be known as this concrete One, as the One who has the other moment, His Son (λόγος, σοφία), in Himself. Thus to know what is the principle of Christianity as truth, the truth of the Idea of spirit must be known as concrete spirit, and this is the form peculiar to the Fathers of the Church. With this the idea that the abstractly divine breaks up and has broken up within itself, first began to appear. This other moment in the divine must not, however, be grasped in the mode of an intelligible world, or, as we certainly have it in the ordinary conception, of a kingdom of heaven with many angels, who are also finite, limited, thus approaching closer to humanity. But it is not sufficient that the concrete moment should be known in God, for the further knowledge is requisite that Christ is an actual present man. This moment of Christ’s actual present humanity is of immense importance to Christianity, because it is the union of the most tremendous opposites. This higher conception could not have been present in the text, in the first manifestation; the greatness of the Idea could only come in later on, after the Spirit had perfected the Idea.

That the revelation of Christ has this significance is the belief of Christians, while the profane, immediate and direct significance of this history is that Christ was a mere prophet and met the fate of all the prophets in being misunderstood. But the fact that it has the significance given by us is known through the Spirit, for the Spirit is revealed in this history. This history is the Notion, the Idea of Spirit itself, and the world-history has in it found its end, which is in this immediate way to know the truth. It is therefore the Spirit which so comprehends that history, and at the time of Pentecost this is shown in an immediate and evident manner. For before this time the Apostles did not know the infinite significance of Christ; they did not yet know that this is the infinite history of God; they had believed in Him, but not yet as seeing in Him this infinite truth.

This is the truth which the Fathers developed; the general relation of the first Christian Church to Philosophy is hereby given. On the one hand, the philosophic Idea has been transplanted into this religion; on the other, this moment in the Idea—according to which the latter breaks up within itself into wisdom, the active Logos, the Son of God, &c., but yet in so doing remains in universality—has been brought to a culmination in subjectivity, and further in the sensuous immediate individuality and present existence of a human individual appearing in time and space. These two elements are essentially intermingled in this Christian system, the Idea itself, and secondly the form as it presents itself through its connection with a single individuality present in time and space. To the Fathers this history had thus the Idea as its principle; the true Idea of the Spirit was consequently to them likewise in the determinate form of history. But the Idea was not yet, as such, separated from history; because the Church thus held to this Idea in historic form, it determined the doctrines. This, then, is the general character of the time.

From this Idea as comprehended through the Spirit, many so-called heresies arose in the first centuries after Christ. Among such heretics must be included those of the Gnostics who take the Christian literature as their basis, but give a spiritual significance to everything therein present. For they did not remain at this historical form of the Idea of Spirit, since they interpreted the history and deprived it of its historical value. The reflections which they introduced are, as we have seen (Vol. II., pp. 396-399), to a greater or less extent such as are to be found in the philosophy of the Alexandrians or of Philo. In conformity with their principles they adopted a speculative attitude, but they proceeded into extravagances both of the imagination and morality, although in this dim fantastic region the elements which we found in history may always be recognized. But the form of immediate existence, an essential moment in Christ, is by them etherealized into a universal thought, so that the determination of the individual as a ‘this’ disappears. The Docetæ, for example, said that Christ had only a phantom body, a phantom life; yet in such assertions thought still constituted the background. The Gnostics were thus antagonistic to the Western Church, and, like Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists, this last strove hard against Gnosticism, because it remained in what is general, grasped the conception in the form of imagination, and because this conception was opposed to that of Christ in the Flesh (Χριστὸς ἐν σαρκί).[1] The Church, on the contrary, held to the definite form of personality as the principle of concrete actuality.

From the East other forms of opposition in the principles than those we mentioned in connection with the Gnostics have been introduced, namely, Light and Darkness, Good and Evil. But more particularly has this Parsee opposition emerged in Manichæism, in which God, as the Light opposes the evil, non-existent (οὐκ ὄν), the ὕλη, the material, self-annihilating. Evil is that which contains contradiction in itself: the powers of evil (ὕλη), given over to themselves and raging in blind enmity against one another, were met by a gleam from the Kingdom of Light and thereby attracted, and this light pacified the powers of evil, so as to cause them to cease from strife and unite together in order to penetrate into the Kingdom of Light. As an inducement to make them so act, in order to weaken and mitigate their blind fury through a power operating irresistibly, and in order to bring about their final overthrow, and the universal supremacy of light, of life, of the soul, the Father of Light delivered over one of the powers of good. That is the world-soul (ψυχὴ ἁπάντων); it was swallowed up by the material, and this intermixture is the basis of the whole creation. Hence the soul is everywhere disseminated, and in the dead husk it is everywhere working and striving in man, the microcosm, as in the universe, the macrocosm, but with unequal power; for where beauty reveals itself, the Light-principle, the soul, obtains the mastery over matter, but in the ugly, the hateful, it is subordinate, and matter is the conqueror. This captive soul Mani likewise called the Son of Man—that is, of the primitive man, the heavenly man, of Adam Kadmon. But only a part of the Light-principle which was destined to strive with the Kingdom of Evil is in this manner delivered over; being too weak, it incurred the danger of being vanquished, and had to deliver over to matter a part of its armour, this soul. The part of the soul which had not suffered through such intermingling with matter, but had raised itself freely to heaven, works from above for the purification of the imprisoned souls, its kindred portions of light; and that is Jesus, the Son of Man, in so far as he has not suffered (ἀπαθής), as distinguished from the suffering Son of Man, the soul confined within the universe. But that delivering soul remains in the second and visible light which is still distinguished from the first and unapproachable, having its seat there, and by means of sun and moon exercising influence in the purification of nature. To Mani the whole course of the physical as of the spiritual world appears as a process of purification by means of this soul. The captive principle of Light required to be raised from the cycle of metempsychosis to an immediate re-union with the Kingdom of Light. Hence the pure heavenly soul came down to earth and appeared in the semblance of human form in order to reach to the suffering soul (to the νοῦς παθητικός of Aristotle?) a helping hand. The Manichæans also express themselves to the effect that God, the Good, goes forth, illumines, and thus produces an intelligible world. What comes third is Spirit as turning round, establishing the unity of the second and first, and experiencing feeling, and this feeling is Love. This heresy fully recognizes the Idea, but does away with the form of individual existence in which the Idea is presented in the Christian religion. The crucifixion of Christ is consequently taken as merely a semblance, as allegorical only, simply an image. That merely phantom crucifixion of the non-suffering Jesus, the fellow-suffering, only imaginary certainly, of the soul unmingled with matter, shows forth the actual suffering of the captive soul. Thus as the forces of Darkness could exercise no power over Christ, they must also show themselves powerless over the soul allied thereto. With the Manichæans originates the conception of a Jesus who is crucified in all the world and in the soul; the crucifixion of Christ thus mystically signifies only the wounds of our suffering souls. Through vegetation the particles of light were held fast, and thus held fast they were brought forth as plants. The earth becoming fruitful brings forth the suffering (patibilis) Jesus, who is the life and salvation of men and is crucified on every tree. The νοῦς which appeared in Jesus signifies all things.[2] The Church has likewise made a principal point of asserting the unity of the divine and human nature. But because this unity in the Christian religion attained to conceiving consciousness, human nature was in its actuality taken as ‘this,’ and not merely in an allegorical or philosophic sense.

Now if, on the one hand, the essential matter with the orthodox Fathers who opposed themselves to these Gnostic speculations, is the fact that they held firmly to the definite form of an objectively conceived Christ, on the other hand they attacked the Arians and all that pertain to them; for these recognize the individual as manifested, but do not place the Person of Christ in connection with the separation, with the breaking up of the divine Idea. They took Christ to be a man, accorded to Him indeed a higher nature, not, however, making Him a moment of God, of Spirit itself. The Arians did not indeed go so far as the Socinians, who accepted Christ merely as a man of noble nature, a teacher, and so on; this sect hence did not form part of the Church at all, being simply heathen. But still the Arians, since they did not recognize God in Christ, did away with the idea of the Trinity, and consequently with the principle of all speculative philosophy. The according to Him of a higher nature is likewise a hollow mockery which cannot satisfy us; as against this the Fathers accordingly asserted the unity of the divine and human nature, which has come to consciousness in the individual members of the Church, and this is a point of fundamental importance. The Pelagians again, denied original sin, and maintained that man has by nature sufficient virtue and religion. But man should not be what he is by nature; he should be spiritual. And thus this doctrine is likewise excluded as heretical. Therefore the Church was ruled by Spirit, to enable it to hold to the determinations of the Idea, though always in the historic form. This is the philosophy of the Fathers; they produced the Church, as the developed Spirit required a developed doctrine, and nothing is so out of place as the endeavour or desire of some men of the present day to lead the Church back to her original form.

What follows thirdly is that the Idea permeates reality, is immanent therein, that not only is there a multitude of believing hearts, but that from the heart, just as the natural law rules over a sensuous world, a higher life of the world, a kingdom, is constituted—the reconciliation of God with Himself is accomplished in the world, and not as a heavenly kingdom that is beyond. This community is the kingdom of God upon earth in the Church; “Where two or three are gathered together in my name,” says Christ, “there am I in the midst of them.” The Idea is only for spirit, for subjective consciousness, in so far as it realizes itself in actuality, and thus it not only has to bring itself to perfection in the heart, but has to perfect itself also into a kingdom of actual consciousness. The Idea which man, self-consciousness, should recognize, must become altogether objective to him, so that he may truly apprehend himself as spirit and the Spirit, and then that he may be spiritual in a spiritual, and not in an emotional way. The first objectification is found in the first immediate consciousness of the Idea, where it appeared as an individual object, as the individual existence of a man. The second objectivity is the spiritual worship and communion extended to the Church. We might imagine a universal community of Love, a world of piety and holiness, a world of brotherly kindness, of innocent little lambs and pretty triflings with things spiritual, a divine republic, a heaven upon earth. But this is not supposed to come to pass on earth; that imagination is relegated to heaven, i.e. to some other place, that is to say, it is put off until death. Each living actuality directs his feelings, actions, and affairs in a very different way from this. On the appearance of Christianity it is first of all said: “My kingdom is not of this world;” but the realization has and ought to be in the present world. In other words the laws, customs, constitutions, and all that belongs to the actuality of spiritual consciousness should be rational. The kingdom of rational actuality is quite a different one, and must be organized and developed thinkingly and with understanding; the moment of the self-conscious freedom of the individual must maintain its rights against objective truth and objective command. This, then, is the true and actual objectivity of mind in the form of an actual temporal existence as state, just as Philosophy is the objectivity of thought which comes to us in the form of universality. Such objectivity cannot be in the beginning, but must come forth after being worked upon by mind and thought.

In Christianity these absolute claims of the intellectual world and of spirit had become the universal consciousness. Christianity proceeded from Judaism, from self-conscious abjectness and depression. This feeling of nothingness has from the beginning characterized the Jews; a sense of desolation, an abjectness where no reason was, has possession of their life and consciousness. This single point has later on, and in its proper time, become a matter of universal history, and into this element of the nullity of actuality the whole world has raised itself, passing out of this principle indeed, but also into the kingdom of Thought, because that nothingness has transformed itself into what is positively reconciled. This is a second creation which came to pass after the first; in it Mind became aware of itself as I = I, that is, as self-consciousness. This second creation has first of all appeared in self-consciousness equally directly in the form of a sensuous world, in the form of a sensuous consciousness. As much of the Notion as has entered in was adopted by the Fathers from the philosophers already mentioned; their Trinity, in so far as a rational thought, and not a mere ordinary conception, comes from these, and certain other ideas also. But what mainly distinguishes them is the fact that for the Christian this intelligible world had likewise this immediate sensuous truth of an ordinary course of events—a form which it must have and retain for the majority of men.

3. This new world has therefore, however, to be adopted by a new race of men, by Barbarians; for it is characteristic of barbarians to apprehend the spiritual in a sensuous way. And it must be by northern barbarians, for it is the northern self-containedness alone that is the immediate principle of this new world-consciousness. With this self-consciousness of the intelligible world as a world immediately actual, mind, having regard to what it has in itself become, is higher than before, but, on the other side, in respect of its consciousness it is thrown quite back to the beginning of culture, and this consciousness had to commence from the beginning again. What it had to overcome was on the one hand this sensuous immediacy of its intelligible world, and secondly the opposed sensuous immediacy of actuality, by its consciousness held as null. It excludes the sun, replaces it with tapers, is furnished with images merely; it is in itself alone, and inward, not reconciled for consciousness—to self-consciousness a sinful, wicked world is present. For the intelligible world of Philosophy had not yet completed in itself the task of making itself the actual world—of recognizing the intelligible in the actual, as well as the actual in the intelligible. It is one thing to have the Idea of Philosophy, to recognize absolute essence as absolute essence, and quite another thing to recognize it as the system of the universe, of nature, and of individual self-consciousness, as the whole development of its reality. The Neo-Platonists had found that principle of realization—namely, this real substance which again places itself in quite opposed, though in themselves real determinations—but having got so far they did not find the form, the principle of self-consciousness.

On the Teutonic nations the world-spirit imposed the task of developing an embryo into the form of the thinking man. What comes first is the mind as apprehended, and to that is opposed the subjectivity of will which has not been taken up into mind; the kingdom of truth and that of the world are bound together and at the same time evidently divided. An intelligible world has thus in the conception of men established itself in the mode of this same actuality, like a far-away land that is just as really conceived of by us, peopled and inhabited, as the world we see, but which is hidden from us as though by a mountain. It is not the Greek or any other world of gods and of mythology—a simple, undivided faith; for there is likewise present in it the highest negativity, that is, the contradiction between actuality and that other world. This intellectual world expresses the nature of real absolute existence. It is on it that Philosophy tries its powers, and on it that thought also moils and toils. We have in general outline to deal with these not very pleasing manifestations.

Our first view of Philosophy, as revealed in Christianity (pp. 10-21) is that of a dim groping which is carried on within the depths of the Idea—as being the forms assumed by the same, which constitute its moments; we see a hard struggle made by reason, which cannot force its way out of the imagination and popular conceptions to the Notion. There is no venture too rash for the imagination to undertake, because, impelled by reason, it cannot satisfy itself with beautiful images, but has to pass beyond them. There is likewise no extravagance of reason into which it does not fall, because it cannot obtain the mastery of the image, but within this element is merely in the act of warfare with it. Later on than this Western self-immersion, there arose in the East expansion, negation of all that is concrete, abstraction from all determinations; this pure contemplation or pure thought present in Mohammedanism corresponds to the Christian descent into self. Within Christianity itself, however, the intellectual world is set in opposition to that first Cabalistic principle; in it pure conceptions rule which constitute the ideas present in thought, and with this we enter upon the Scholastic philosophy. Philosophy, like the arts and sciences, when, through the rule of the Barbarians of Germany, they became dumb and lifeless, took refuge with the Arabians, and there attained a wonderful development; they were the first sources from which the West obtained assistance. Through the presupposition of the immediately present and accepted truth, thought had lost its freedom and the truth its presence in conceiving consciousness; and philosophy sank into a metaphysics of the understanding and into a formal dialectic. We have thus in this period first of all to consider philosophy in the East, and secondly in the West; that is, the philosophy of the Arabians first, and subsequently the philosophy of the Schools. The Schoolmen are the principal figures in this period; they represent European philosophy in the European Middle Ages. The third stage is the dissolution of what is upheld in the scholastic philosophy; new meteor-like apparitions are now seen, which precede the third period, the genuine revival of free Philosophy.

SECTION ONE

Arabian Philosophy

In the West the Germanic tribes had obtained possession of what had hitherto formed a section of the Roman Empire, and their conquests were attaining to shape and solidity, when another religion dawned in the East, namely the Mohammedan. The East purified itself of all that was individual and definite, while the West descended into the depths and actual presence of spirit. As quickly as the Arabians with their fanaticism spread themselves over the Eastern and the Western world, so quickly were the various stages of culture passed through by them, and very shortly they advanced in culture much farther than the West. For in Mohammedanism, which quickly reached its culminating point, both as regards external power and dominion and also spiritual development, Philosophy, along with all the other arts and sciences, flourished to an extraordinary degree, in spite of its here not displaying any specially characteristic features. Philosophy was fostered and cherished among the Arabians; the philosophy of the Arabians must therefore be mentioned in the history of Philosophy. What we have to say, however, chiefly concerns the external preservation and propagation of Philosophy. The Arabians became acquainted with Greek philosophy mainly through the medium of the Syrians in Western Asia, who had imbibed Greek culture, and who were under the Arabian sway. In Syria, which formed a Greek kingdom, at Antioch, especially in Berytus and Edessa, there were great institutes of learning; and thus the Syrians constituted the connecting link between Greek philosophy and the Arabians. Syrian was the language of the people even in Bagdad.[3]

Moses Maimonides, a learned Jew, gives further historical particulars in his Doctor Perplexorum of this transition of Philosophy to the Arabians. He says: “All that the Ishmaelites have written of the unity of God and other philosophic dogmas”—especially the sect of the Muatzali (‎‏מעתוזלה‏‎, i.e. the Separated), who were the first to take an interest in the abstract intellectual knowledge of such subjects, while the sect Assaria (‎‏האשערייה‏‎) arose later—“is based upon arguments and propositions which have been taken from the books of the Greeks and Aramæans” (Syrians), “who strove to refute and deny the teachings of the philosophers.” The cause of this is as follows: The Christian community came to include within it these nations also, and the Christians defended many dogmas which were contradictory of philosophic tenets; among these nations, however, the teachings of philosophers were very widely and generally diffused (for with them Philosophy had its origin), and kings arose who adopted the Christian religion. The Christian Greeks and learned Aramæans, therefore, when they perceived that their doctrines were so clearly and plainly refuted by the philosophers, thought out a wisdom of their own, the “Wisdom of the Words” (Devarim), and they themselves received on that account the name of the Speakers (Medabberim, ‎‏מִדַבְרִים‏‎). They set up principles which served the purpose both of confirming their faith and of refuting the opposite teaching of the philosophers. When the Ishmaelites followed and attained supremacy, and the books of the philosophers themselves fell into their hands, and along with them the answers which “Christian Greeks and Aramæans had written against the philosophic books, as for instance the writings of Johannes Grammaticus, Aben Adi, and others, they eagerly laid hold of these and adopted them bodily.”[4] Christians and Ishmaelites felt the same need of philosophy; the Ishmaelites, moreover, strove all the more eagerly after knowledge of this kind, because their first desire was to defend Mohammedanism against Christianity, which was the religion of a large proportion of the nations they had conquered.

The external sequence of events is this. Syriac versions of Greek works were to be had, and these were now translated into Arabic by the Arabians; or translations were made from the Greek directly into Arabic. In the reign of Harun al-Raschid several Syrians are named who lived in Bagdad, and who had been called upon by the Caliphs to translate these works into Arabic. They were the first scientific teachers among the Arabians, and were chiefly physicians; hence the works they translated were on medicine. Among these translators was Johannes Mesue of Damascus, who lived in the reigns of Al-Raschid (d. A.D. 786), Al-Mamun (d. A.D. 833) and Al-Motawakkil (d. A.D. 847), rather earlier than the rise of the Turks to supremacy (A.D. 862); he was a hospital superintendent in Bagdad. Al-Raschid appointed him to make translations from Syriac into Arabic; he opened a public school for the study of medicine and all the sciences then known. Honain was a Christian, as was also his master Johannes, and belonged to the Arab tribe Ebadi; he applied himself to the study of Greek, and made a number of translations into Arabic, and also into Syriac, for example, Nicolaus De summa philosophiæ Aristotelicæ, Ptolemy, Hippocrate and Galen. Another is Ebn Adda, an eminent dialectician, who is quoted by Abulfaraj.[5] Among the works of the Greek philosophers it was almost exclusively the writings of Aristotle which were translated by these Syrians, and the later commentaries on the same. It was thus not the Arabians themselves who translated the above works.

In the Arabic philosophy, which shows a free, brilliant and profound power of imagination, Philosophy and the sciences took the same bent that they had taken earlier among the Greeks. Plato with his Ideas or universals laid the foundation of the independent world of intellect, and established absolute existence as an existence which is manifestly present in the mode of thought; Aristotle developed, completed and peopled the realm of thought; the Neo-Platonic philosophy reached the further conception of the intelligible world as Idea of the existence which is independent in itself, of spirit; and then this first Idea, which we have already met with in connection with Proclus, passed over into a similar Aristotelian development and completion. Consequently it is the Alexandrian or Neo-Platonic Idea which forms the essential principle or basis of the Arabian as well as the Scholastic philosophy, and all that Christian philosophy offers; it is on it that the determinations of the Notion expend their strength, and around this that they career. A particular description of Arabian philosophy has in some parts but little interest; in other parts it will be found that the main dogmas of this philosophy have much in common with those of the Scholastics.

We may say of the Arabians that their philosophy constitutes no characteristic stage in the development of philosophy. The principal points in this, as in the later philosophy, were the question whether the world is eternal, and the task of proving the unity of God and similar dogmas. One great consideration in all this, however, was to defend the doctrines of Mohammedanism, and owing to this all philosophizing had to be carried on within the limits of these doctrines. The Arabians, like the Christians of the West, were restricted by the dogmas of their Church (if one may call it so), few though these dogmas were; yet this last circumstance of the small number of the dogmas certainly gave them greater liberty. But according to all that we know of them, they established no principle of self-conscious reason that was truly higher, and thus they brought Philosophy no further. They have no other principle than that of revelation, therefore only a principle that is external.

[A. Philosophy of the Medabberim.]

The Medabberim are specially mentioned by Moses Maimonides as a widely extended philosophic school or sect of considerable eminence. He speaks (More Nevochim, P. I. c. 71, pp. 134, 135) of the peculiarity of their method of philosophy somewhat as follows: “The Ishmaelites, however, have extended their discourses still further, and have aspired to other wonderful doctrines, of which none of the Greek Medabberim knew anything, because they were still on some points in agreement with the philosophers. The main point to be remarked is that all the Medabberim, whether among the Greeks who had become Christians, or among the Ishmaelites, in the building up of their principles did not follow the nature of the matter itself, or draw their arguments from it, but only had in view how the subject must be regarded in order to support their assertion, or at least not to refute it altogether: afterwards they boldly asserted that these were the circumstances of the case, and adduced further arguments and maxims in support of their object. They insisted on that, and that alone, which concurred with their opinions, even though it were in the most remote degree, through a hundred links of reasoning. The earliest of their learned men adopted this practice, though professing that they reached these reflections through speculation alone, without reference to any preconceived opinion. Their successors did not follow their example,” &c.

In the pure philosophy of the so-called “Speakers” was expressed the principle, peculiar to the Oriental mind, of the dissolution of definite thought in all its consequences as the dissolution of all connection and relation. Maimonides says (P. I. c. 71, p. 135; c. 73, p. 149): “The ground-principle of the Medabberim is that men can have no certain knowledge of the nature of things, because in the understanding the contrary may ever exist and be thought. Besides this they in the majority of instances confound imagination with understanding, and give to the former the name of the latter. They adopted as a principle, atoms and empty space,” where all connection appears as something contingent. “Production is nothing but a connection of atoms, and decay nothing but a separation of the same; and time consists of many ‘nows.’” In this way nothing but the atom really exists. They have thus in the more advanced cultivation of thought brought to consciousness the main standpoint, then as now the standpoint of the Orientals—that of substance, the one substance. This pantheism, or Spinozism, if you like to call it so, is thus the universal view of Oriental poets, historians and philosophers.

The Medabberim go on to say: “Substances, i.e. individuals, which,” for the rest, “are created by God, have many accidental qualities, as in snow every particle is white. But no quality can endure for two moments; as it comes, it goes again, and God creates another and yet another in its place.” All determinations are thus fleeting or perishable; the individual alone is permanent. “If it pleases God to create another quality in a substance, it continues; but if He ceases to create, the substance perishes.” Thereby all necessary connection is done away with, so that Nature has no meaning. “They therefore deny that anything exists by nature, likewise that the nature of this or that body necessitates that it should have certain qualities rather than others. But they say that God creates all qualities instantaneously, without natural means and without the help of anything else.” General permanence is substance, and the particular is altered every moment, and so exists through the substance. “According to this principle they say, for instance, that when we think we have dyed a garment red with red dye we have not dyed it red at all; for God created the red colour in the garment at the very moment at which we thought we had brought about the result with the red dye. God observes the invariable custom of not permitting that the colour black should be produced except when the garment is dyed with that hue; and the first colour which comes to pass on the occasion of the connection is not permanent, but disappears on the instant, and every moment another appears which is created in its turn. In the same way knowledge also is an accident, which is created by God at every moment that I know anything; to-day we no longer possess the knowledge which we yesterday possessed. A man,” when writing, “does not move the pen when he thinks he moves it, but the motion is an accident of the pen, created by God at the moment.” In this way God alone is in truth the operative cause; but He might have made everything differently. “Their eighth proposition is to the effect that nothing but substance or accident exists, and natural forms are themselves accidents; substances alone are individuals. The ninth proposition is that accidents have nothing to do with one another; they have no causal connection or other relation; in every substance all accidents may exist. The tenth proposition is transition (‎‏אִפִשָׁרות‏‎, transitus, possibilitas):” “All that we can fancy may also pass over into the understanding, i.e. be possible. But in this way everything is possible,” since there are no laws of the understanding; this transition of thought is thus perfectly accidental. “A man as large as a mountain, a flea as large as an elephant, are possible. Everything may just as well be something else as what it is, and there is no reason at all why anything should be one way rather than another. They term it a mere habit that the earth revolves round a centre-point, that fire moves upward and that it is hot; it is just as possible, they say, that fire should be cold.”[6]

We thus see an utter inconstancy of everything; and this whirl of all things is essentially Oriental. But at the same time this is certainly also a complete dissolution of all that pertains to reasonableness, in harmony of course with Eastern exaltation of spirit, which allows of nothing definite. God is in Himself the perfectly undefined, His activity is altogether abstract, and hence the particulars produced thereby are perfectly contingent; if we speak of the necessity of things, the term is meaningless and incomprehensible, and no attempt should be made to comprehend it. The activity of God is thus represented as perfectly devoid of reason. This abstract negativity, combined with the permanent unity, is thus a fundamental conception in the Oriental way of looking at things. Oriental poets are in a marked degree pantheists; the pantheistic is their ordinary point of view. Thus the Arabians developed the sciences and philosophy, without further defining the concrete Idea; their work is rather the dissolution of all that is definite in this substance, with which is associated mere changeableness as the abstract moment of negativity.

[B. Commentators of Aristotle.]

The Arabians, moreover, made a point for the most part of studying the writings of Aristotle very diligently, and of availing themselves more especially both of his metaphysical and logical writings, and also of his Physics; they occupied themselves particularly with multiplying commentaries on Aristotle, and developing still further the abstract logical element there present. Many of these commentaries are still extant. Works of this kind are known in the West, and have been even translated into Latin and printed; but much good is not to be got from them. The Arabians developed the metaphysics of the understanding and a formal logic. Some of the famous Arabians lived as early as the eighth and ninth centuries; their progress was therefore very rapid, for the West had as yet made very little advance in culture.

Alkendi, who wrote a commentary on the Logic, flourished in and about A.D. 800, under Almamun.[7] Alfarabi died in 966; he wrote commentaries on Aristotle’s Organon, which were made diligent use of by the Scholastics, and was also author of a work “On the Origin and Division of the Sciences.” It is related of him that he read through Aristotle’s treatise On Hearing forty times, and his Rhetoric two hundred times, without getting at all tired of them;[8] he must have had a good stomach. The very physicians made a study of philosophy, and formulated theories; among them was Avicenna (b. A.D. 984, d. A.D. 1064), who belonged to Bokhara, to the east of the Caspian Sea; he wrote a commentary on Aristotle.[9] Algazel (d. A.D. 1127 at Bagdad) wrote compendiums of logic and metaphysics; he was a sceptic of great ability, with a powerful mind of the Oriental cast; he held the words of the Prophet to be pure truth, and wrote Destructio Philosophorum.[10] Tofail died in Seville in A.D. 1193.[11] Averroës, who died A.D. 1217, was specially distinguished as the commentator of Aristotle.[12]

The acquaintance of the Arabians with Aristotle has this interest in history that it was thus that Aristotle first became known also in the West. The commentaries on Aristotle and the collections of passages from his writings become thus for the Western world a fountain of philosophy. Western nations long knew nothing of Aristotle, excepting through such retranslations of his works and translations of Arabian commentaries on them. For such translations were made from Arabic into Latin by Spanish Arabs, and especially by Jews in the south of Spain and Portugal and in Africa; there was often even a Hebrew translation between.

[C. Jewish Philosophers.]

With the Arabians are closely connected the Jewish philosophers, among whom the above-mentioned Moses Maimonides held a distinguished place. He was born at Cordova, in Spain, A.D. 1131 (Anno Mundi 4891, or, according to others, 4895), and lived in Egypt.[13] Besides More Nevochim, which has been translated into Latin, he composed other works; of him and other Jews much more of a literary character might be said. In their philosophy a strong Cabalistic element, on the one hand, makes itself felt throughout, in astrology, geomancy, &c.; on the other hand, we find in Moses Maimonides, as in the Fathers, that the foundation is laid in history. He deals with this in a strictly abstract system of metaphysics, which is connected, in Philo’s fashion, with the Mosaic books and their interpretation. We find in these Jewish philosophers proofs brought forward that God is One, that the world was created, and that matter is not eternal; Maimonides also speaks of the nature of God. The unity of God is dealt with as it was among the ancient Eleatics and the Neo-Platonists; to prove, namely, that not the Many, but the self-begetting and self-abrogating One is the truth.[14]

SECTION TWO

The Scholastic Philosophy

All the Philosophy which we first encounter in the Middle Ages, when independent states begin to rise, consists of bare remnants of the Roman world, which on its Fall had sunk in all respects so low that the culture of the world seemed to have come entirely to an end. Thus in the West hardly anything was known beyond the Isagoge of Porphyry, the Latin Commentaries of Boethius on the Logical works of Aristotle, and extracts from the same by Cassiodorus—most barren compilations; there is also what is just as barren, the dissertations ascribed to Augustine De dialectica and De categoriis, which last is a paraphrase of the Aristotelian work upon the categories.[15] These were the first make-shifts or expedients for carrying on Philosophy; in them the most external and most formal reasoning is applied.

The whole effect of the scholastic philosophy is a monotonous one. In vain have men hitherto endeavoured to show in this theology, which reigned from the eighth or even sixth century almost to the sixteenth, particular distinctions and stages in development. In this case as in that of the Arabian philosophy, time does not allow—and if it did the nature of things would not allow—us to separate the scholastic philosophy into its individual systems or manifestations, but only to give a general sketch of the main elements present therein which it has actually taken up into thought. It is not interesting by reason of its matter, for we cannot remain at the consideration of this; it is not a philosophy. The name, however, properly speaking indicates a general manner rather than a system—if we may speak of a philosophic system. Scholasticism is not a fixed doctrine like Platonism or Scepticism, but a very indefinite name which comprehends the philosophic endeavours of Christendom for the greater part of a thousand years. However, this history which occupies nearly a thousand years is, as a matter of fact, comprised within one Notion which we propose to consider more closely; it has ever occupied the same standpoint, and been grounded on the same principle; for it is the faith of the Church that we catch sight of, and a formalism which is merely an eternal analysis and constant re-iteration within itself. The more general acceptance of the Aristotelian writings has merely brought forth a difference of degree and caused no real scientific progress. Here there is indeed a history of men, but speaking properly none of scientific knowledge; the men are noble, pious, and in all respects most distinguished.

The study of the scholastic philosophy is a difficult one, even if its language only be considered. The Scholastics certainly make use of a barbaric Latin, but this is not the fault of the Scholastics but of their Latin culture. Latin forms a quite unsuitable instrument for applying to philosophic categories such as these, because the terms which the new culture adopts could not possibly be expressed by this language without unduly straining it; the beautiful Latin of Cicero is not adapted for use in profound speculations. It cannot be expected of anyone to know at first hand this philosophy of the Middle Ages, for it is as comprehensive and voluminous as it is barren and ill-expressed.

Of the great schoolmen we still have many works left to us which are very lengthy, so that it is no easy task to study them: the later they are, the more formal do they become. The Schoolmen did not only write compendiums—for the writings of Duns Scotus amount to twelve, and those of Thomas Aquinas to eighteen folios. Abstracts of them are to be found in various works. The principal sources from which we obtain our knowledge are: 1, Lambertus Danæus in the Prolegomena to his Commentarius in librum primum sententiarum Petri Lombardi, Genevæ, 1580. (This is the best authority we have in abridged form); 2, Launoi: De varia Aristotelis in Academia Parisiensi fortuna; 3, Cramer: Continuation of Bossuet’s History of the World, in the last two volumes; 4, the Summa of Thomas Aquinas. In Tiedemann’s History of Philosophy extracts from the Scholastics are also to be found, as likewise in Tennemann; Rixner also makes judicious extracts.

We shall limit ourselves to general points of view. The name finds its origin in this way. From the time of Charles the Great it was only in two places—in the great schools attached to the great cathedral churches and monasteries—that a cleric, that is a canon who had the oversight of the instructors (informatores), was called scholasticus; he likewise gave lectures on the most important branch of science, theology. In the monasteries he who was the most advanced instructed the monks. We have not, properly speaking, to deal with these; but although scholastic philosophy was something altogether different, the name of Scholastics attached itself to those alone who propounded their theology scientifically and in a system. In place of the patres ecclesiæ there thus arose later on the doctores.

The scholastic philosophy is thus really theology, and this theology is nothing but philosophy. The further content of theology is merely that which is present in the ordinary conceptions of religion; theology, however, is the science of the system as it must necessarily be present within every Christian, every peasant, &c. The science of theology is often placed in an external historical content, in exegesis, in the enumeration of the various manuscripts of the New Testament, in considering whether these are written on parchment, cotton fabrics or paper, whether in uncial letters or otherwise, and which century they belong to; further matters for consideration are the Jewish conceptions of time, the history of the Popes, Bishops and Fathers, and what took place at the councils of the Church. All these matters, however, do not pertain to the nature of God and its relation to mankind. The one essential object of theology as the doctrine of God, is the nature of God, and this content is in its nature really speculative; those theologians who consider this are therefore nothing less than philosophers. The science of God is nothing but Philosophy. Philosophy and theology have hence here also been counted one, and it is their separation that constitutes the transition into modern times, seeing that men have thought that for thinking reason something could be true which is not true for theology. Down to the Middle Ages, on the contrary, it was held as fundamental that there should be but one truth. Thus the theology of the scholastics is not to be represented as though, as with us, it merely contained doctrines about God, &c., in historic guise, for in fact it also has within it the profoundest speculations of Aristotle and of the Neo-Platonists. Their philosophy, and much in them that is excellent, is found in Aristotle, only in a simpler and purer form; and to them too the whole lay beyond actuality and mingled with Christian actuality as it is represented to us.

From Christianity, within whose bounds we now have our place, Philosophy has to re-establish its position. In heathendom the root of knowledge was external nature as thought devoid of self, and subjective nature as the inward self. Both Nature and the natural self of mankind, and likewise thought, there possessed affirmative significance; hence all this was good. In Christianity the root of truth has, however, quite another meaning; it was not only the truth as against the heathen gods, but as against Philosophy also, against nature, against the immediate consciousness of man. Nature is there no longer good, but merely a negative; self-consciousness, the thought of man, his pure self, all this receives a negative position in Christianity. Nature has no validity, and affords no interest; its universal laws, as the reality under which the individual existences of nature are collected, have likewise no authority: the heavens, the sun, the whole of nature is a corpse. Nature is given over to the spiritual, and indeed to spiritual subjectivity; thus the course of nature is everywhere broken in upon by miracles. With this surrender of natural necessity we have the fact associated that all further content, all that truth which constitutes the universal of that nature, is given and revealed. The one starting-point, the contemplation of nature, is thus for knowledge undoubtedly not present. Then this fact is likewise set aside that I am present as a self. The self as this immediate certainty has to be abrogated; it must also merge itself in another self, but in one beyond, and only there does it have its value. This other self, in which the proper self is made to have its freedom, is first of all likewise a particular self, that has not the form of universality: it is determined and limited in time and space, and at the same time has the significance of an absolute in and for itself. A real sense of self is thus abandoned, but what self-consciousness on the other hand gains is not a universal, a thought. In thought I have real affirmative significance, not as an individual, but as universal ‘I’; the content of truth is now, however, plainly individualized, and thus the thought of the ‘I’ falls away. Thereby, however, the highest concrete content of the absolute Idea is set forth, in which the opposites that are plainly infinite are united; it is the power which unites in itself what appears to consciousness infinitely removed from one another—the mortal and the absolute. This absolute is itself ‘this’ first of all as this concrete, not as abstraction, but as the unity of universal and individual; this concrete consciousness is for the first time truth. The reason of the former content being also true, comes to me as something not pertaining to myself, but as a thing received outside of self. The testimony of spirit, indeed, pertains thereto, and my inmost self is present there; but the testimony of spirit is a thing concealed, which does not further reveal itself, does not beget the content from itself, but receives it. The Spirit which bears witness is further itself distinguished from me as an individual; my testifying spirit is another, and there only remains to me the empty shell of passivity. Conditioned by this inflexible standpoint, Philosophy had to go forth once more. The first working up of this content, the inward operation of universal thought in the same, is the task scholastic philosophy has to undertake. The opposition between faith and reason forms the end arrived at; reason, on the one hand, feels the necessity of setting to work on nature in order to obtain immediate certainty, and on the other hand of finding in genuine thought, in specific production out of self, this same satisfaction.

We must now speak of the methods and manners of the scholastics. In this scholastic activity thought pursues its work quite apart from all regard to experience; we no longer hear anything of taking up actuality and determining it through thought. Although the Notion came into recognition earlier than this, in Aristotle, in the first place, the Notion was not apprehended as the necessity of carrying the content further; for this was received in its successive manifestations, and there was present merely an intermingling of actuality accepted as truth and of thought. Still less, in the second place, was the greater part of the content permeated by Notions, for this content was taken up superficially into the form of thought—more especially with the Stoics and Epicureans. The scholastic philosophy altogether dissociates itself from any such endeavours; it leaves actuality to exist alongside itself as if it were despised and had no interest. For reason found its true existence, its actualization, in another world and not in this; the whole progress of the cultivated world goes, however, to the re-instalment of a faith in the present world. Nevertheless, at first all knowledge and action, and whatever relates to an interest in this world, were entirely banished. Branches of knowledge that pertain to such ordinary matters as sight and hearing, restful contemplation and occupation with ordinary actuality here found no place; nor did such sciences as recognize a definite sphere of actuality after their own particular fashion, and constitute the material for genuine philosophy, nor arts which give to the Idea a sensuous existence. Likewise law and right, the recognition of the actual man, were not esteemed as pertaining to the social relationships of life, but to some other sphere. In this absence of rationality in the actual, or of rationality which has its actuality in ordinary existence, is found the utter barbarism of thought, in that it keeps to another world, and does not have the Notion of reason—the Notion that the certainty of self is all truth.

Now thought as sundered has a content, the intelligible world, as an actuality existent for itself, to which thought applies itself. Its conduct is here to be compared with that which takes place when the understanding applies itself to the sensuous and perceptible world, makes it as substance its basis, having a fixed object in it, and reasoning respecting it; it is then not the independent movement of Philosophy proper which penetrates existence and expresses it, for all it does is to find predicates regarding it. The scholastic philosophy has thus the intelligible world of the Christian religion, God and all His attributes and works therewith connected, as an independent object; and thought is directed to God’s unchangeableness, to such questions as whether matter is eternal, whether man is free, &c.—just as the understanding passes to and fro over the phenomenal and perceived. Now the scholastic philosophy was here given over to the infinite movement of determinate Notions; the categories of possibility and actuality, freedom and necessity, constitution and substance, &c., are of this nature, they are not fixed, but pure movements. Anything whatever, determined as potential, transforms itself equally into the opposite, and must necessarily be surrendered; and determination can only save itself by a new distinction, because it must, on the one hand, be given up, and on the other retained. The scholastics are thus decried on account of the endless distinctions which they draw. For the sake of these determinations through the abstract Notion the Aristotelian philosophy was predominant, though not in its whole extent. It was the Aristotelian Organon that was held in such favour, and that indeed just as much for its laws of thought as for its metaphysical conceptions—the categories. These abstract Notions constituted in their determinateness the understanding of the scholastic philosophy, which could not pass beyond itself and attain to freedom, nor seize upon the freedom given by reason.

With this finite form a finite content is likewise directly associated. From one determination we pass on to another, and such determinations, as particular, are finite; the determination there relates itself externally and not as self-comprehensive and self-embracing. The result of this determination is that thought will really act as if it brought about conclusions, for to draw conclusions is the mode of formal logical progression. Philosophy thus consists of a methodical and syllogistic reasoning. Just as the Sophists of Greece wandered about amongst abstract conceptions on behalf of actuality, so did the scholastics on behalf of their intellectual world. To the former Being had validity; it they had rescued and delivered as against the negativity of the Notion, while along with that they had justified it through the same. The principal endeavour of the scholastics was in the same way to vindicate the Christian intellectual world as against the confusion of the Notion, and through the latter to demonstrate its conformity with the same. The universal form of the scholastic philosophy thus consisted in this—that a proposition was laid down, the objections to it brought forward, and these contradicted through counter-propositions and distinctions. Philosophy was hence not separated from theology, as it is not in itself, for Philosophy is the knowledge of absolute existence, that is to say, theology. But to that theology the Christian absolute world was a system which was held to be an actuality, as was ordinary actuality for the Greek sophists. Of Philosophy proper there thus remained only the laws of thought and abstractions.

[A. Relationship of the Scholastic Philosophy to Christianity.]

Philosophy with the scholastics had consequently the same quality of want of independence as it had before this with the Christian Fathers and the Arabians. The Church as already constituted established itself amongst the Teutonic nations, and through its constitution it conditioned philosophy. The Christian Church had indeed spread itself abroad throughout the Roman world, but, more especially in the beginning, it merely formed a community of its own, by whom the world was renounced, and which made no special claims to recognition—or if such claims were made they were merely negative, because the individuals in the world were simply martyrs, thus renouncing the world. But the Church in time became dominant, and the Roman emperors, both of the East and of the West, embraced Christianity. Thus the Church attained to a position openly recognized and undisturbed, from which it exercised much influence upon the world. The political world, however, fell into the hands of the Teutonic nations, and thereby a new form arose, and to this the scholastic philosophy pertains. We know the revolution by the name of the Migration of the Nations (supra, pp. 23, 24). Fresh races inundated the ancient Roman world and established themselves therein; they thus erected their new world on the ruins of the old—a picture which Rome in its present aspect still presents. There the splendour of the Christian temples is due in part to the remnants of the ancient, and new palaces are built on ruins and have ruins all around.

1. The principal feature in the Middle Ages is found in this disunion, the two sides here present; there are revealed in it two nations, two manners of speech. We see people who have hitherto ruled, a previous world having its own language, arts, and sciences, and on this to them foreign element the new nations grafted themselves, and these thus started upon their course internally dissevered. In this history we have thus before us not the development of a nation from itself, but one proceeding from its opposite, and one which is and remains burdened by this opposite, and which takes it up into itself and has to overcome it. Hence these people have in this way represented in themselves the nature of the spiritual process. Spirit is the making for itself a presupposition, the giving to itself the natural as a counterpoise, the separating itself therefrom, thus the making it an object, and then for the first time the working upon this hypothesis, formulating it, and from itself bringing it forth, begetting it, internally reconstructing it. Hence in the Roman as in the Byzantine world, Christianity has triumphed as a Church; but neither of these worlds was capable of effectuating the new religion in itself and of bringing forth a new world from this principle. For in both there was a character already present—customs, laws, a juridical system, a constitution (if it can be called constitution), a political condition, capacities, art, science, spiritual culture—in short, everything was there. The nature of spirit, on the contrary, requires that the world thus constituted should be begotten from it, and that this process of begetting should take place through the agency of reaction, through the assimilation of something which has gone before. These conquerors have thus established themselves in a foreign sphere, and have become the rulers over it; but at the same time they have come under the dominion of a new spirit which has been imposed upon them. Although on the one hand predominant, on the other they have come under the dominion of the spiritual element, because they conducted themselves passively in regard to it.

The spiritual Idea or spirituality has become imposed upon the dulness, both in mind and spirit, of these rough barbarians; their hearts were thereby pricked. The rough nature has in this way become immanent in the Idea as an eternal opposition, or there is kindled in them infinite pain, the most terrible suffering—such that it may even be represented as a crucified Christ. They had to sustain this conflict within themselves, and one side of it is found in the philosophy which later on made its appearance amongst them, and was first of all received as something given. They are still uncultured people, but for all their barbaric dulness they are deep in heart and mind; on them, then, has the principle of mind been bestowed, and along with it this pain, this war between spiritual and natural, has necessarily been instituted. Culture here begins from the most terrible contradiction, and this has to be by it resolved. It is a kingdom of pain, but of purgatory, for that which is in the pain is spirit and not animal, and spirit does not die, but goes forth from its grave. The two sides of this contradiction are really thus related to one another in such a way that it is the spiritual which has to reign over the barbarians.

The true dominion of spirit cannot, however, be a dominion in the sense that its opposite is in subjection to it; spirit in and for itself cannot have the subjective spirit to which it relates confronting it as an externally obedient slave, for this last is itself also spirit. The dominion that exists must take up this position, that spirit is in subjective spirit in harmony with itself. The universal is thus that opposition in which the one can only have supremacy by the subjection of the other, but which already contains the principle of resolution in itself because mind must necessarily bear rule. And hence the consequent development is only this, that mind as reconciliation attains the mastery. To this it pertains that not the subjective consciousness, mind and heart alone, but also the worldly rule, laws, institutions, the human life, in so far as these rest in mind, must become rational. In the Republic of Plato we have met with the idea that the philosophers are those who ought to reign. Now is the time in which it is said that the spiritual are to govern, but this talk about the spiritual has been made to bear the significance that ecclesiasticism and the ecclesiastics ought to govern. The spiritual is thus made a particular form, an individual, but the real meaning that it bears is that the spiritual as such ought to be the determining factor; and this has passed current until the present day. Thus in the French Revolution we see that abstract thought is made to rule; in accordance with it constitution and laws are determined, it forms the bond between man and man; and men come to have the consciousness that what is esteemed amongst them is abstract thought, and that liberty and equality are what ought to be regarded; in this the subject also has his real value, even in relation to actuality.

One form of this reconciliation is likewise this, that the subject is satisfied with himself and in himself as he stands and moves, with his thoughts, his desires, with his spirituality; and thus that his knowledge, his thought, his conviction, has come to be the highest, and has the determination of the divine, of what holds good as absolute. The divine and spiritual is thus implanted in my subjective spirit, is identical with me; I myself am the universal, and it has efficacy for me only as I directly know it. This form of reconciliation is the newest, but the most one-sided. For the spiritual is not there determined as objective, but is only comprehended as it is in my subjectivity, in my consciousness: my conviction as such is taken as ultimate, and that is the formal reconciliation of subjectivity with itself. If the reconciliation has this form, the point of view of which we spoke before has no longer any interest; it is past and a mere matter of history. If the conviction as it immediately reveals itself within every subject is the true, the absolute, this process of mediation between God, as the true and absolute, and mankind, is no longer in us a necessity. The doctrines of the Christian religion have likewise the position of something foreign, pertaining to a particular time, that with which certain men have occupied themselves. The conception that the Idea is absolutely concrete, and is as spirit in a relation of opposition to the subject, has disappeared, and only shows itself as having passed away. In so far that which I have said about the principle of the Christian system, and shall still say of the scholastics, has interest only from the standpoint which I have given, when the interest is in the Idea in its concrete determination, and not from the standpoint of the immediate reconciliation of the subject with himself.

2. We have now to consider further the character of the opposition to any agreement with Philosophy; and to do this we must shortly call to mind the historical aspect of the case, although we need only treat of the main points therein. The first matter to consider is the opposition that exists in the world. This form of opposition as it appears in history is as follows. Spirituality as such should be the spirituality of the heart; spirit, however, is one, and thus the communion of those who have this spirituality is asserted. Hence a community arises, which then becomes an external order, and thus, as we have seen (pp. 21, 22), expands into a church. In as far as spirit is its principle, it is, as spiritual, immediately universal, for isolation in feeling, opinion, &c., is unspiritual. The Church organizes itself, but yet it goes forth into worldly existence, attains to riches, possesses goods, and even becomes worldly and imbued with all the brute passions; for the spiritual is merely the original principle. The heart that is set on ordinary existence, on the world, and the whole of such human relationships as are hereby involved, is guided by these inclinations, desires and passions, by all this grossness and vulgarity. Thus the Church merely has the spiritual principle within itself without its being truly real, and in such a way that its further relationships are not yet rational; for such is their character before the development of the spiritual principle in the world. The worldly element without being conformable to the spiritual, is present as existence, and is the immediately natural worldly element; in this way the Church comes to have in itself the immediately natural principle. All the passions it has within itself—arrogance, avarice, violence, deceit, rapacity, murder, envy, hatred—all these sins of barbarism are present in it, and indeed they belong to its scheme of government. This government is thus already a rule of passion, although it professes to be a spiritual rule, and thus the Church is for the most part wrong in its worldly principles, though right in its spiritual aspect.

Hence the new religion separated our whole conception of the world into two different worlds, the intellectual but not subjectively conceived world, and the temporal world. Therefore life as a whole fell into two parts, two kingdoms. Directly opposite the spiritual worldly kingdom there stands the independent worldly kingdom, emperor against pope, papacy and Church—not a state, but a worldly government; there the world beyond, here the world beside us. Two absolutely essential principles conflict with one another; the rude ways of the world, the ruggedness of the individual will, beget an opposition most terrible and severe. The culture which now begins to show itself is confronted by this incomplete reality, as an actual world in opposition to its world of thought; and it does not recognize the one as present in the other. It possesses two establishments, two standards of measure and of weight, and these it does not bring together but leaves mutually estranged.

The spiritual kingdom likewise has as Church an immediate present of ordinary actuality, but the worldly kingdom, both as external nature and as the real self of consciousness, has no truth or value in itself; for truth, as lying beyond it—the measure of truth that shines in it—is given to it from without as something inconceivable and in itself complete. The worldly kingdom must thus be subject to the spiritual become worldly; the emperor is hence defender and protector of the Church (advocatus ecclesiæ). The worldly element, in a certain sense, takes up a position of independence, no doubt, but it is still in unity with the other in such a way that it recognizes the spiritual as dominant. In this opposition a war must arise both on account of the worldly element which is present in the Church itself, and likewise on account of the directly worldly element of violence and of barbarism in worldly rule as it exists per se. The war must at first, however, prove disastrous to the worldly side, for just as its own position is asserted, the other is likewise recognized by it, and it is forced humbly to submit to this last, to the spiritual and its passions. The bravest, noblest emperors have been excommunicated by popes, cardinals, legates, and even by archbishops and bishops; and they could do nothing in self-defence, nor put their trust in outward power, for it was internally broken; and thus they were ever vanquished and finally forced to surrender.

In the second place, as regards morality in the individual, we see on the one hand religion in its truly noble and attractive form in a few isolated individuals alone. I refer to those solitary spirits who are dead to the world and far removed therefrom, who find in their emotions what satisfies them, and, living in a little circle, can limit themselves to the sphere of religion. This is the case with women in the Middle Ages, or with the monks or other solitaries who were able to preserve themselves in a restricted and contracted state of fervour such as this, in which the spiritual side makes itself infinitely felt, although it lacks actuality. The one truth stood isolated and alone in man, the whole actuality of mind was not yet penetrated by it. On the other hand it is, however, essential that mind as will, impulse and passion, should demand quite another position, another mode of venting and realizing itself, than any such solitary and contracted sphere affords, that the world should require a more extended sphere of existence, an actual association of individuals, reason and thought coming together in actual relations and actions. This circle in which mind is realized—the human life—is, however, at first separated from the spiritual region of truth. Subjective virtue partakes more of the character of suffering and privation on its own account, morality is just this renunciation and self-surrender, and virtue as regards others merely has the character of benevolence, a fleeting, accidental character destitute of relation. All that pertains to actuality is hence not perfected by the truth, which remains a heavenly truth alone, a Beyond. Actuality, the earthly element, is consequently God-forsaken and hence arbitrary; a few isolated individuals are holy, and the others are not holy. In these others we first see the holiness of a moment in the quarter of an hour of worship, and then for weeks a life of rudest selfishness and violence and the most ruthless passion. Individuals fall from one extreme into another, from the extreme of rude excess, lawlessness, barbarism, and self-will, into the renunciation of all things without exception, the conquest of all desires.

The great army of the Crusaders gives us the best example of this. They march forth on a holy errand, but on the way they give free vent to all the passions, and in this the leaders show the example; the individuals allow themselves to fall into violence and heinous sin. Their march accomplished, though with an utter lack of judgment and forethought, and with the loss of thousands on the way, Jerusalem is reached: it is beautiful when Jerusalem comes in view to see them all doing penance in contrition of heart, falling on their faces and reverently adoring. But this is only a moment which follows upon months of frenzy, foolishness and grossness, which everywhere displayed itself on their march. Animated by the loftiest bravery, they go on to storm and conquer the sacred citadel, and then they bathe themselves in blood, revel in endless cruelties, and rage with a brutal ferocity. From this they again pass on to contrition and penance; then they get up from their knees reconciled and sanctified, and once more they give themselves up to all the littleness of miserable passions, of selfishness and envy, of avarice and cupidity: their energies are directed to the satisfaction of their lusts, and they bring to nought the fair possession that their bravery had won. This comes to pass because the principle is only present in them in its implicitude as an abstract principle, and the actuality of man is not as yet spiritually formed and fashioned. This is the manner in which the opposition in actuality manifests itself.

In the third place, we reach the opposition existing in the content of religion, in the religious consciousness; this has many forms, though we have here only to call to mind those that are most inward. On the one hand, we have the Idea of God—that He is known as the Trinity; on the other, we have worship, i.e. the process of individuals making themselves conformable to spirit, to God, and reaching the certainty of entering the kingdom of God. A present and actual church is an actuality of the kingdom of God upon earth, in such a way that this last is present for every man—every individual lives and must live in the kingdom of God. In this disposition we have the reconciliation of every individual; thereby each becomes a citizen of this kingdom, and participates in the enjoyment of this certainty. But this reconciliation is allied to the fact that in Christ the unity of the divine and human nature is shown forth, that is to say, the way in which the spirit of God must be present in man. This Christ thus cannot be one who is past and gone, and the life of reconciliation cannot be a mere recollection of that past. For as the just behold Christ in heaven, so must Christ be an object on earth which may likewise be beheld. In that case this process must be present—the individual must be united to this to him objective form, and it becomes identical with him; the history of Christ, that God reveals Himself as man, sacrifices Himself, and through this sacrifice raises Himself to the right hand of God, is in the individual always being accomplished in the culminating point which is called the sacrifice of the mass. The mediating element to which the individual relates himself in worship, is ever present in the mass as the objective of which the individual must be made to partake, as the Host and the act of partaking of the same. This Host, on the one hand, as objective, is held to be divine, and, on the other, it is in form an unspiritual and external thing. But that is the lowest depth of externality reached in the Church; for in this perfect externality it is before the thing that the knee must be bowed, and not in as far as it is an object that may be partaken of. Luther changed this way of regarding matters; in what is called the Supper, he has retained the mystical fact that the subject receives the divine element into himself; but he maintains that it is only divine in so far as it is partaken of in this subjective spirituality of faith, and ceases to be an external thing. But in the Church of the Middle Ages, in the Catholic Church generally, the Host is honoured even as an external thing; thus if a mouse eats of the Host, both it and its excrements are reverenced; there the divine element has altogether the form of externality. This is the central point of intense opposition which is on the one hand dissolved, and on the other remains in perfect contradiction, so that the Host, still held to be a merely external thing, must nevertheless be thus high and absolute.

With this externality the other side is connected—the consciousness of this relation—and here we then have the consciousness of what is spiritual, of what is the truth, in the possession of a priesthood. Thus as thing it is naturally also in the possession of another, from whom, since it is something distinguished by itself, it has to receive its distinction—or it must be consecrated—and this last is likewise an external action only, performed by individuals. The power to give this distinction to the thing is in the possession of the Church; from the Church the laity receive it.

But besides all this, the relationship of the subject in himself, the fact that he belongs to the Church and is a true member of the same, must be considered. After the admission of individuals into the Church their participation therein must likewise be brought about—that is, their purification from sin. To this it is, however, essential, in the first place, that it should be known what evil is, and secondly, that the individual should desire the good and that pertaining to religion; and thirdly, that sin should be committed from an innate and natural sinfulness. Now since what is inward, or conscience, must be of a right nature, the sins that are committed must be removed, and made as though they had not happened; man must ever be purified, baptized anew, so to speak, and received back again: the negation that shuts him out must ever be removed. Against this sinfulness positive commands and laws are now given, so that from the nature of spirit men cannot know what is good and evil. Thus the divine law is an external, which must hence be in someone’s possession; and priests are separated from others, so that they are exclusively acquainted both with the particular details of doctrine and the means of grace, i.e. the mode whereby the individual is religious in his worship and comes to know that he participates in the divine. In the same way that the administration of the means of grace belongs as an outward possession to the Church in relation to worship, so is the Church also in possession of a moral estimate for judging of the actions of individuals; it is in the possession of the conscience, as of knowledge as a whole, so that man’s inmost essence, his accountability, passes into other hands and to another person, and the subject is devoid of individuality even in his inmost self. The Church also knows what the individual ought to do; his faults must be known, and another, the Church, knows them; the sins must be taken away, and this also is effected in an external way, through purchase, fasting and stripes, through journeyings, pilgrimages, &c. Now this is a relation of self-suppression, unspirituality and deadness both of knowledge and will, in the highest things as well as in the most trivial actions.

These are the main facts as regards externality in religion itself, on which all further determinations depend.

3. We have now obtained a better idea of the elements present in this philosophy; but in barbaric nations Christianity could have this form of externality alone, and this pertains to history. For the dulness and frightful barbarism of such nations must be met by servitude, and through this service must their education be accomplished. Man serves under this yoke; this fearful discipline had to be gone through if the Teutonic nations were to be raised into spiritual life. But this severe and wearisome service has an end, an object; infinite spring and infinite elasticity, the freedom of spirit, is the prize. The Indians are in equal servitude, but they are irrevocably lost—identified and identical with nature, yet in themselves opposed to nature. Knowledge is thus limited to the Church, but in this very knowledge a positive authority is firmly rooted, and it is a prominent feature of this philosophy, whose first quality is consequently that of lack of freedom. Thought thus does not appear as though it proceeded from itself and was grounded in itself, but as being really independent of self and depending on a given content, the doctrine of the Church—which, although speculative itself, also contains the mode of the immediate existence of external objects.

In theological form it may be said that, in general, the Middle Ages signify the dominion of the Son and not of Spirit; for this last is still in the possession of the priesthood. The Son has differentiated Himself from the Father, and is regarded as remaining in this differentiation, so that the Father in Him is only implicit; but in the unity of both we first reach Spirit, the Son as Love. If we remain a moment too long in the difference without likewise asserting the identity, the Son is the Other; and in this we find the Middle Ages defined and characterized. The character of Philosophy in the Middle Ages is thus in the second place an attempt to think, to conceive, to philosophize under the burden of absolute hypotheses; for it is not the thinking Idea in its freedom, but set forth in the form of an externality. We thus find here in Philosophy the same character as is present in the general condition of things, and for this reason I before called to mind the concrete character that prevails; for on every period of time one special characteristic is always imprinted. The philosophy of the Middle Ages thus contains the Christian principle, which is the highest incentive to thought, because the Ideas therein present are thoroughly speculative. Of this one side is that the Idea is grasped by the heart, if we call the individual man the heart. The identity of the immediate individuality with the Idea rests in this, that the Son, the mediator, is known as this man; this is the identity of spirit with God for the heart as such. But the connection itself, since it is likewise a connection with God in God, is hence immediately mystical and speculative; thus here there is the call to thought which was first of all responded to by the Fathers, and then by the scholastics.

But since, in the third place, there exists the opposition between the doctrine of the Church and the worldly man—who has indeed through thought worked his way out of this same barbarism, but who in his healthy human understanding has not yet penetrated to reason—the mode in which Philosophy was treated at this time for the setting forth of formal thought, has still no concrete content. We may appeal to the human concrete mind; in it we have a living present as thinking and feeling; a concrete content such as this has its root in the thought of man, and constitutes the material for his independent consciousness. Formal thought directs its course by this; the wanderings of abstract reflection have in such consciousness an aim, which sets a limit upon them, and leads them back to a human concrete. But the reflections of the scholastics on such a content depend unsupported on the determinations of formal thought, on formal conclusions; and all the determinations regarding natural relationships, laws of nature, &c., that may issue, receive as yet no sustenance from experience; they are not yet determined by the healthy human understanding. In this respect the content likewise is unspiritual, and these unspiritual relationships are inverted and carried into the spiritual in so far as advance is made to determinateness of a higher kind. These three points constitute the main characteristics of this philosophy.

More particularly we would shortly deal with the chief representatives of this philosophy. Scholastic philosophy is considered to begin with John Scotus Erigena who flourished about the year 860, and who must not be confused with the Duns Scotus of a later date. We do not quite know whether he belonged to Ireland or to Scotland, for Scotus points to Scotland, and Erigena to Ireland. With him true philosophy first begins, and his philosophy in the main coincides with the idealism of the Neo-Platonists. Here and there stray works of Aristotle were likewise known, even to John Scotus, but the knowledge of Greek was very limited and rare. He shows some knowledge of the Greek and Hebrew tongues, and even of Arabic as well; but we do not know how he attained to this. He also translated from Greek to Latin writings of Dionysius the Areopagite, a later Greek philosopher of the Alexandrian school, who more especially followed Proclus: namely, De cœlesti hierarchia, and others which Brucker calls (Hist. crit. phil. T. III. p. 521), nugæ et deliria Platonica. Michael Balbus, Emperor of Constantinople, had in the year 824 made a present of these works to the Emperor Louis the Pious; Charles the Bald caused them to be translated by Scotus, who long resided at his court. In this way something of the Alexandrian philosophy became known in the West. The Pope quarrelled with Charles, and complained to him of the translator, against whom he made the reproach that “he should have first sent the book to him in conformity with the general usage, and asked his approval.” John Scotus afterwards lived in England as head of a school at Oxford, which had been founded by King Alfred.[16]

Scotus was also the author of some original works, which are not without depth and penetration, upon nature and its various orders (De naturæ divisione), &c. Dr. Hjort, of Copenhagen, published an epitome of the writings of Scotus Erigena, in 1823. Scotus Erigena sets to work philosophically, expressing himself in the manner of the Neo-Platonists, and not freely, and as from himself. Thus in the method of expression adopted by Plato, and also by Aristotle, we are rejoiced to find a new conception, and on bringing it to the test of philosophy, to find it both correct and profound; but here everything is ready to hand, cut and dry. Yet, with Scotus, theology is not yet built on exegesis, and on the authority of the Church; the Church in many cases rejected his writings. Thus Scotus is reproached by a Lyons church council in these words: “There have come to us the writings of a boastful, chattering man, who disputes about divine providence and predestination, in human fashion, or, as he himself boasts, with philosophic arguments, and without relying on the holy scriptures and bringing forward the authority of the Fathers. And he dares to defend this on its own merit, and to establish it on its own laws, without submitting himself to the holy scriptures and the authority of the Fathers.”[17] Scotus Erigena hence even said: “The true Philosophy is the true Religion, and the true Religion is the true Philosophy.”[18] The separation came later on. Scotus then made a beginning, but properly he does not belong to the scholastics.

[B. General Historical Points of View.]

All further scholastic philosophy attaches itself more to the doctrines of the Christian Church; the ecclesiastical system which it thereby made its necessary basis, became early established through church councils, while the faith of the Evangelical Church already prevailed before the time of these councils from which the Catholic Church derives its support. The most important and most interesting thoughts which pertain to the scholastics, are, on the one hand, the strife between nominalism and realism; and, on the other, the proof of the existence of God—quite a new manifestation.

[1. The Building Up of Dogmas on Metaphysical Grounds.]

The efforts of the scholastics were further directed, firstly, to the building up of the dogmas of the Christian Church on metaphysical bases. After this, the collected doctrines of the Church were systematically treated. Then the scholastics had branches or modifications of these dogmas, which were not determined by the doctrinal system. Those grounds themselves, and then these further and special points of view, were objects handed over for free discussion. Neo-Platonic philosophy was what lay before the theologians first of all; the manner of this school is recognized in the older and purer scholastics. Anselm and Abelard are the more distinguished of those who follow later.

[a. Anselm.]

Amongst those who wished to give additional proof of the doctrines of the Church through thought, is Anselm, a man of great distinction and high repute. He was born at Aosta, in Piedmont, about 1034; in 1060 he became a monk at Bec, and in 1093 was raised to the rank of Archbishop of Canterbury; in 1109 he died.[19] He sought to consider and prove philosophically the doctrines of the Church, and it has even been said of him that he laid the basis for scholastic philosophy.

He speaks as follows of the relation of faith to thought: “Our faith must be defended by reason against the godless, and not against those who glory in the name of Christian; for of these we may rightly demand that they should hold firm to the obligations which they came under in baptism. Those others must be shown through reason how irrationally they strive against us. The Christian must go on through faith to reason, and not come from reason to faith; but if he cannot attain to comprehension, he must still less depart from faith. For if he is able to press on to knowledge, he rejoices therein; when he is unable so to do, he humbly adores.”[20] He makes a noteworthy remark, which contains his whole philosophy, in his work Cur Deus homo (I. 2), which is rich in speculative thought: “It appears to me great negligence if we are firm in the faith, and do not seek also to comprehend what we believe.” Now this is declared to be arrogance; immediate knowledge, faith, is held to be higher than knowledge. But Anselm and the scholastics maintained the opposite view.

Anselm may be regarded from this point of view as quite specially the founder of scholastic theology. For the thought of proving through a simple chain of reasoning what was believed—that God exists—left him no rest day and night, and tortured him for long. At first he believed his desire to prove the divine truths through reason to be a temptation of the devil, and he was in great anxiety and distress on that account; finally, however, success came to him by the grace of God in his Proslogium.[21] This is the so-called ontological proof of the existence of God which he set forth, and which made him specially famous. This proof was included among the various proofs up to the time of Kant, and—by some who have not yet reached the Kantian standpoint—it is so included even to the present day. It is different from what we find and read of amongst the ancients. For it was said that God is absolute thought as objective; for because things in the world are contingent, they are not the truth in and for itself—but this is found in the infinite. The scholastics also knew well from the Aristotelian philosophy the metaphysical proposition that potentiality is nothing by itself, but is clearly one with actuality. Later, on the other hand, the opposition between thought itself and Being began to appear with Anselm. It is noteworthy that only now for the first time through the Middle Ages and in Christianity, the universal Notion and Being, as it is to ordinary conception, became established in this pure abstraction as these infinite extremes; and thus the highest law has come to consciousness. But we reach our profoundest depths in bringing the highest opposition into consciousness. Only no advance was made beyond the division as such, although Anselm also tried to find the connection between the sides. But while hitherto God appeared as the absolute existent, and the universal was attributed to Him as predicate, an opposite order begins with Anselm—Being becomes predicate, and the absolute Idea is first of all established as the subject, but the subject of thought. Thus if the existence of God is once abandoned as the first hypothesis, and established as a result of thought, self-consciousness is on the way to turn back within itself. Then we have the question coming in, Does God exist? while on the other side the question of most importance was, What is God?

The ontological proof, which is the first properly metaphysical proof of the existence of God, consequently came to mean that God as the Idea of existence which unites all reality in itself, also has the reality of existence within Himself; this proof thus follows from the Notion of God, that He is the universal essence of all essence. The drift of this reasoning is, according to Anselm (Proslogium, c. 2), as follows: “It is one thing to say that a thing is in the understanding, and quite another to perceive that it exists. Even an ignorant person (insipiens) will thus be quite convinced that in thought there is something beyond which nothing greater can be thought; for when he hears this he understands it, and everything that is understood is in the understanding. But that beyond which nothing greater can be thought cannot certainly be in the understanding alone. For if it is accepted as in thought alone, we may go on farther to accept it as existent; that, however, is something greater” than what is merely thought. “Thus were that beyond which nothing greater can be thought merely in the understanding, that beyond which nothing greater can be thought would be something beyond which something greater can be thought. But that is truly impossible; there thus without doubt exists both in the understanding and in reality something beyond which nothing greater can be thought.” The highest conception cannot be in the understanding alone; it is essential that it should exist. Thus it is made clear that Being is in a superficial way subsumed under the universal of reality, that to this extent Being does not enter into opposition with the Notion. That is quite right; only the transition is not demonstrated—that the subjective understanding abrogates itself. This, however, is just the question which gives the whole interest to the matter. When reality or completion is expressed in such a way that it is not yet posited as existent, it is something thought, and rather opposed to Being than that this is subsumed under it.

This mode of arguing held good until the time of Kant; and we see in it the endeavour to apprehend the doctrine of the Church through reason. This opposition between Being and thought is the starting point in philosophy, the absolute that contains the two opposites within itself—a conception, according to Spinoza, which involves its existence likewise. Of Anselm it is however to be remarked that the formal logical mode of the understanding, the process of scholastic reasoning is to be found in him, the content indeed is right, but the form faulty. For in the first place the expression “the thought of a Highest” is assumed as the prius. Secondly, there are two sorts of objects of thought—one that is and another that is not; the object that is only thought and does not exist, is as imperfect as that which only is without being thought. The third point is that what is highest must likewise exist. But what is highest, the standard to which all else must conform, must be no mere hypothesis, as we find it represented in the conception of a highest acme of perfection, as a content which is thought and likewise is. This very content, the unity of Being and thought, is thus indeed the true content; but because Anselm has it before him only in the form of the understanding, the opposites are identical and conformable to unity in a third determination only—the Highest—which, in as far as it is regulative, is outside of them. In this it is involved that we should first of all have subjective thought, and then distinguished from that, Being. We allow that if we think a content (and it is apparently indifferent whether this is God or any other), it may be the case that this content does not exist. The assertion “Something that is thought does not exist” is now subsumed under the above standard and is not conformable to it. We grant that the truth is that which is not merely thought but which likewise is. But of this opposition nothing here is said. Undoubtedly God would be imperfect, if He were merely thought and did not also have the determination of Being. But in relation to God we must not take thought as merely subjective; thought here signifies the absolute, pure thought, and thus we must ascribe to Him the quality of Being. On the other hand if God were merely Being, if He were not conscious of Himself as self-consciousness, He would not be Spirit, a thought that thinks itself.

Kant, on the other hand, attacked and rejected Anselm’s proof—which rejection the whole world afterwards followed up—on the ground of its being an assumption that the unity of Being and thought is the highest perfection. What Kant thus demonstrates in the present day—that Being is different from thought and that Being is not by any means posited with thought—was a criticism offered even in that time by a monk named Gaunilo. He combated this proof of Anselm’s in a Liber pro insipiente to which Anselm himself directed a reply in his Liber apologeticus adversus insipientem.[22] Thus Kant says (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 464 of the sixth edition): If we think a hundred dollars, this conception does not involve existence. That is certainly true: what is only a conception does not exist, but it is likewise not a true content, for what does not exist, is merely an untrue conception. Of such we do not however here speak, but of pure thought; it is nothing new to say they are different—Anselm knew this just as well as we do. God is the infinite, just as body and soul, Being and thought are eternally united; this is the speculative, true definition of God. To the proof which Kant criticizes in a manner which it is the fashion to follow now-a-days, there is thus lacking only the perception of the unity of thought and of existence in the infinite; and this alone must form the commencement.

Other proofs such, for example, as the cosmological, which argues from the contingency of the world to an absolute existence, have thereby not reached the idea of absolute essence as spirit, and are without consciousness of the fact that it is an object of thought. The old physico-theological proof, which even Socrates possessed, from beauty, order, organic ends, indeed implies an understanding, a richer thought of absolute existence, and not alone an indeterminate Being, but in this proof it likewise remains unknown that God is the Idea. And then what sort of an understanding is God? A different and immediate one; then this spirit is independent. Further, disorder likewise exists, and thus there must be something else conceived of than this apparent order of nature only. But from asking about the existence of God, from making his objective mode a predicate and thus knowing that God is Idea, to pass to making the absolute existence I = I, thinking self-consciousness, not as predicate but in such a way that each thinking I is the moment of this self-consciousness—is still a long stride. Here, where we see this form first emerge, absolute existence is clearly to be taken as the Beyond of finite consciousness; this is to itself the null and void, and it has not yet grasped its sense of self. Its thoughts regarding things are manifold, and the mere fact of being a thing is to it likewise just such a predicate as the rest; but it is thereby not yet turned back within itself, it knows of existence, but not of itself.

In this, says Tennemann (Vol. VIII. Sec. I. p. 121), “Anselm has laid the first formal ground of scholastic theology;” but even before this the same was present, only to a more limited extent, and merely for individual dogmas—as is also the case with Anselm. His writings bear witness of great penetration and mental ability; and he gave rise to the philosophy of the scholastics, inasmuch as he united theology to philosophy. The theology of the Middle Ages thus stands much higher than that of modern times; never have Catholics been such barbarians as to say that there should not be knowledge of the eternal truth, and that it should not be philosophically comprehended. This is one point which has to be specially noted in Anselm, the other is that he apprehended in its unity that highest opposition between thought and Being spoken of above.

[b. Abelard.]

With Anselm Peter Abelard is associated, both being mainly concerned in the introduction of philosophy into theology. Abelard lived about 1100—from 1079 to 1142—and is famed for his learning, but still more famed in the world of sentiment and passion for his love to Heloise and his after fate.[23] After the days of Anselm he attained to great repute, and he followed him in his treatment of the doctrines of the Church, more especially seeking to give a philosophic proof of the Trinity. He taught at Paris. Paris about this time was to the theologians what Bologna was to the jurists, the central point of the sciences; it was at that time the seat of philosophizing theology. Abelard often delivered his lectures there before a thousand listeners. Theological science and philosophizing regarding it, was in France (as was jurisprudence in Italy) a matter of great importance, which, as most significant in the development of France, has hitherto been too much neglected. The conception prevailed that philosophy and religion were one and the same; which they absolutely speaking are. But the distinction was soon reached, “that much may be true in philosophy and false in theology:” this the Church denied. Tennemann (Vol. VIII. Sec. II. pp. 460, 461) quotes as follows from a rescript of the Bishop Stephen: “They say that this is true according to philosophy, and not according to the Catholic faith, just as if there were two contradictory truths, and as if in the doctrines of the accursed heathen a truth contradictory to the truth of the holy scriptures could be present.” While then undoubtedly, through the separation of the four faculties in the University of Paris which came about in 1270, philosophy became separated from theology, it was yet forbidden to it to subject theological beliefs and dogmas to disputation.[24]

[2. Methodical Representation of the Doctrinal System of the Church.]

We now go on to the more definite form which the scholastic theology reached; for in a second development of scholastic philosophy the main endeavour became to make the teaching of the Christian Church methodical, while still keeping its connection with all previous metaphysical arguments. These and their counter-arguments were placed side by side in stating every dogma, so that theology became represented in a scientific system, while before this the ecclesiastical teaching in the general education of the clergy was limited to the propounding of successive dogmas, and the writing down of passages from Augustine and other Fathers bearing on each proposition.

[a. Peter Lombard.]

Peter of Novara in Lombardy was the first of those who brought this to pass; he dates from the middle of the twelfth century, and was the originator of this method. He died in the year 1164. Petrus Lombardus set forth a whole system of scholastic theology which remained for several centuries the basis of the doctrine of the Church. He composed to that end his Quatuor libros sententiarum, and hence he likewise received the name Magister sententiarum. For in those times every learned schoolman had some predicate such as Doctor acutus, invincibilis, sententiosus, angelicus, &c. Others also availed themselves of the same title for their works; thus Robert Pulleyn wrote Sententiarum libros octo.[25]

Lombard collected the principal points in church doctrines from councils and Fathers, and then added subtle questions respecting particular items; with these the schools occupied themselves, and they became a subject of disputation. He himself, indeed, answered these questions, but he caused counter-arguments to follow, and his answer often left the whole matter problematical, so that the questions were not properly decided. The arguments are thus enumerated on either side; even the Fathers contradicted themselves, and numerous passages from them were quoted by both the opposed sides in support of their respective views. In this way theses arose, then quæstiones, in reply to these argumenta, then again positiones, and finally dubia; according as men chose to take the words in this sense or that, and followed this or that authority. Yet a certain degree of method began to enter in.

Speaking generally, this middle of the twelfth century forms the epoch in which scholasticism became more universal as a learned theology. The book of Lombard was all through the Middle Ages commentated by the doctores theologicæ dogmaticæ, who were now held to be the recognized guardians of ecclesiastical doctrine, while the clergy had charge of the soul. Those doctors had great authority, they held synods, criticized and condemned this or that doctrine and book as heretical, &c., in synods or as the Sorbonne, a society of such doctors in the University of Paris. They took the place of assemblages of the Church, and were something like the Fathers in reference to the Christian doctrine. In particular they rejected the writings of the mystics like Amalrich and his disciple David of Dinant, who, resembling Proclus in their point of view, went back to unity. Amalrich, who was attacked as a heretic in 1204, for instance said, “God is all, God and the Creature are not different, in God all things are, God is the one universal substance.” David asserted, “God is the first matter and everything is one in matter, and God is just this unity.” He divided everything into three classes, bodies, souls, eternal immaterial substances or spirits. “The indivisible principle of souls is the νοῦς, and that of spirits is God. These three principles are identical and hence all things in essence are one.” His books were burned.[26]

[b. Thomas Aquinas.]

The other individual who was equally famous with Peter Lombard, was Thomas Aquinas, born in 1224 of the noble race Aquino, in his paternal castle Roccasicca, in the province of Naples. He entered the Order of Dominicans, and died in 1274 on a journey to a church council at Lyons. He possessed a very extensive knowledge of theology, and also of Aristotle; he was likewise called Doctor angelicus and communis, a second Augustine. Thomas Aquinas was a disciple of Albertus Magnus, he wrote commentaries on Aristotle and on Petrus Lombardus; and he also himself composed a summa theologiæ (that is, a system) which with his other writings obtained for him the greatest honour, and which became one of the principal text-books in scholastic theology.[27] In this book there are found, indeed, logical formalities—not, however, dialectical subtleties, but fundamental metaphysical thoughts regarding the whole range of theology and philosophy.

Thomas Aquinas likewise added questions, answers and doubts, and he gave the point on which the solution depended. The main business of scholastic theology consisted in working out the summa of Thomas. The principal point was to make theology philosophic and more widely systematic; Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas are best known in respect of this endeavour, and for long their works formed the basis of all further learned elaborations of doctrine. With Thomas, Aristotelian forms constitute the basis—that of substance (forma substantialis) is, for instance, analogous to the entelechy (ἐνέργεια) of Aristotle. He said of the doctrine of knowledge, that material things consist of form and matter; the soul has the substantial form of the stone in itself.[28]

[c. John Duns Scotus.]

In respect of the formal development of philosophic theology a third individual is famous, namely, Duns Scotus, Doctor subtilis, a Franciscan, who was born at Dunston in the county of Northumberland, and who little by little obtained thirty thousand disciples. In the year 1304 he came to Paris, and in 1308 to Cologne, as a doctor in the university newly instituted there. He was received with great rejoicings, but he died there of apoplexy soon after his arrival, and is said to have been buried alive. He is supposed to have been only 34, according to others 43, and according to others again 63 years old, for the year of his birth is not known.[29] He wrote commentaries on the Magister sententiarum, which procured for him the fame of a very keen thinker, following the order of beginning with the proof of the necessity of a supernatural revelation as against the mere light of reason.[30] On account of his power of penetration he has been likewise called the Deus inter philosophos. He was accorded the most excessive praise. It was said of him: “He developed philosophy to such an extent that he himself might have been its discoverer if it had not already been discovered; he knew the mysteries of the faith so well that he can scarcely be said to have believed them; he knew the secrets of providence as though he had penetrated them, and the qualities of angels as though he were himself an angel; he wrote so much in a few years that scarcely one man could read it all, and hardly any were able to understand it.”[31]

According to all testimony it appears that Scotus helped the scholastic method of disputation to reach its height, finding the material for the same in arguments and counter-arguments arranged in syllogisms; his manner was to add to each sententia a long succession of distinctiones, quæstiones, problemata, solutiones, argumenta pro et contra. Because he also refuted his arguments in a similar series, everything fell once more asunder; hence he was held to be the originator of the quodlibetan method. The Quodlibeta signified collections of miscellaneous dissertations on individual objects in the every-day manner of disputation, which speaks of everything, but without systematic order and without any consistent whole being worked out and set forth; others, on the other hand, wrote summas. The Latin of Scotus is exceedingly barbarous, but well suited for exact philosophic expression; he invented an endless number of new propositions, terms and syntheses.

[3. Acquaintanceship with Aristotelian Writings.]

We must further remark a third development, which proceeded from the external historical circumstance that in the end of the twelfth and in the thirteenth century the Western theologians became more generally acquainted with the Aristotelian writings and their Greek and Arabian commentators, in Latin translations from the Arabic. These now became much used by them, and were made the subject of further commentaries and discussions. The veneration, admiration and respect which Aristotle received, now reached its height.

[a. Alexander of Hales.]

The familiar acquaintance with Aristotle and the Arabians became first evident in Alexander of Hales (died 1245), the Doctor irrefragabilis. The earlier stages by which this familiarity came about has been shown above (p. 35). Hitherto the acquaintance with Aristotle was very slight, and through many centuries it was limited, as we saw above (p. 37), more especially to his Logic, which had survived from the earliest times and was transmitted in the works of Boethius, Augustine and Cassiodorus. It was only when we came to Scotus Erigena that we found (p. 59) a knowledge of Greek, although it was quite unusual in his day. In Spain, under the Arabians, the sciences flourished greatly. In particular the university of Cordova in Andalusia was a centre-point of learning; many from the lands of the West journeyed thither, just as even the Pope Sylvester II., so well known in his earlier days as Gerbert, escaped as a monk to Spain for the purpose of studying with the Arabs.[32] The sciences of medicine and alchemy were diligently pursued. Christian doctors there studied medicine under the Jewish-Arabian teachers. It was principally the Aristotelian metaphysics and physics which were then known, and from these abstracts (summæ) were constructed. The logic and metaphysics of Aristotle were spun out with extreme fineness into endless distinctions, and brought into genuine syllogistic forms of the understanding, which constituted for the most part the principle for the treatment of the subject dealt with. In this way dialectic subtlety was much increased, while the properly speculative side in Aristotle remained for the spirit of externality, and consequently also of irrationality, in the background.

The Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II. then sent for Aristotelian books from Constantinople and had them translated into Latin. At first, indeed, on the first appearance of the Aristotelian writings, the Church made difficulties; the reading of his metaphysics and physics and the abstracts prepared therefrom, as also the exposition of the same, was forbidden by a church synod held at Paris 1209. Likewise in 1215 the cardinal Robert Corceo came to Paris and there held a visitation of the university, on which occasion he ordained that regular lectures on the dialectical writings of Aristotle should be held while he forbade the reading of and lecturing on the metaphysics and natural philosophy of Aristotle, and the abstracts prepared from them; he also condemned the doctrines of the heretics David of Dinant and Amalrich and likewise the Spaniard Mauritius. Pope Gregory, in a bull issued to the University of Paris in 1231, without mentioning metaphysics, forbade the books of the Physics to be read until they had been examined and purified from all suspicion of error. But later on, in 1366, it was on the other hand ordained by two cardinals that no one could be made a magister unless he had studied the prescribed books of Aristotle—amongst which were the Metaphysics and some of the Physics—and had proved himself capable of explaining them.[33] It was only much later on, however, when Greek literature in general had again become widely diffused, that men became better acquainted with the Greek text of the Aristotelian writings.

[b. Albertus Magnus.]

Amongst those who distinguished themselves through their commentaries on Aristotle’s writings, we must specially mention Albertus Magnus, the most celebrated German schoolman, of the noble race of Bollstadt. Magnus either was his family name, or it was given him on account of his fame. He was born in 1193 or 1205 at Lauingen on the Danube in Swabia, and began by studying at Padua, where his study is still shown to travellers. In the year 1221 he became a Dominican friar, and afterwards lived at Cologne as Provincial of his Order in Germany: in 1280 he died. It is said of him that in his youth he showed himself very dull and stupid, until, according to a legend, the Virgin Mary appeared to him in company with three other beautiful women, incited him to the study of Philosophy, liberated him from his dulness of understanding, and promised him that he should enlighten the Church, and, in spite of his science, should still die in the faith. What happened was in accordance with this prophecy, for five years before his death he forgot all his philosophy as quickly as he learned it, and then actually died in the dulness and orthodoxy of his earlier years. Hence there is current regarding him an old saying: “Albert changed quickly from an ass into a philosopher, and from a philosopher into an ass.” His learning was generally understood to consist largely of magic. For although natural objects have nothing to do with scholasticism proper, which was really perfectly blind to nature, he occupied himself much therewith; and amongst other devices he manufactured a talking machine which alarmed his pupil Thomas of Aquino, who even aimed a blow at it, thinking he saw therein a work of the devil. Likewise the fact that he received and entertained William of Holland[34] in the middle of winter in a garden full of blossom, is counted as magic.[35] While as for us—we find the winter-garden in Faust quite natural.

Albert wrote a great deal, and twenty-one folios remain to us of his writings. He wrote on Dionysius the Areopagite, commentated the Magister sententiarum, was specially conversant with the Arabians and the Rabbis, as he was also well acquainted with the works of Aristotle, although he himself understood neither Greek nor Arabic. He likewise wrote on the Physics of Aristotle. There is found in him a remarkable instance of deficient knowledge of the history of Philosophy. He derived the name Epicurean (Opera, T.V. pp. 530, 531) from the fact that they idled away their time [auf der faulen Haut lagen] (ἐπὶ cutem) or else from cura because they concerned themselves with many useless things (supercurantes). He represents the Stoics as being something like our choir-boys; he says that they were people who made songs (facientes cantilenas), and roamed about in porticoes. For, as he here remarks in a very learned way, the first philosophers clothed their philosophy in verses, and then sang them in halls and porches, and hence they are called standers in the porch (Stoici). Gassendi relates (Vita Epicuri, I. c. 11, p. 51) that Albertus Magnus mentioned as the first Epicureans, Hesiodus, Athalius or Achalius (of whom we know nothing), Cæcina, or, as others call him, Tetinnus, a friend of Cicero, and Isaacus, the Jewish philosopher. How that is arrived at we do not know at all. Of the Stoics Albertus, on the contrary, mentions Speusippus, Plato, Socrates and Pythagoras. These anecdotes give us a picture of the condition of culture in these times.

[4. Opposition Between Realism and Nominalism.]

In the fourth place we must mention an important matter, to which much attention was devoted in the Middle Ages, namely that particular philosophic question which formed the subject of controversy between the Realists and the Nominalists, and the discussion of which was continued through very nearly the whole of the Scholastic period. Speaking generally, this controversy is concerned with the metaphysical opposition between the universal and the individual; it occupies the attention of Scholastic philosophy for several centuries, and reflects great credit upon it. A distinction is drawn between the earlier and later Nominalists and Realists, but otherwise their history is very obscure; and we know more of the theological aspect of the subject than of this.

[a. Roscelinus.]

The beginning of the controversy dates back to the eleventh century, Roscelinus being the earliest Nominalist. The famous Abelard, although he professes to be an opponent of Roscelinus, is himself nothing more or less than a Nominalist. Roscelinus wrote also against the doctrine of the Trinity, and was pronounced guilty of heresy in 1092 at an ecclesiastical council which met at Soissons. His influence was, however, but small.[36]

The matter in question is the universal as such (universale), or the genus, the essence of things, what in Plato was called the Idea—for instance, Being, humanity, the animal. The followers of Plato asserted that these universals exist; their existence was individualized, and thus ‘tableness’ was said to be also a real existence (supra, Vol. II. p. 29). We make representations of a thing to ourselves, and say “it is blue;” this is a universal. The question now is whether such universals are something real in and for themselves, apart from the thinking subject, and independent of the individual existing thing, so that they exist in the individual things independently of the individuality of the thing and of each other; or whether the universal is only nominal, only in the subjective representation, a thing of thought. Those who maintained that the universals had a real existence apart from the thinking subject and distinct from the individual thing, and that the Idea alone constitutes the essence of things, were termed Realists—a use of the term in quite an opposite sense to that which passes current now. I mean that this expression has for us the signification that things as they are in their immediacy have an actual existence; and to this idealism is opposed, that being a name which was given later to the philosophy which ascribes reality to ideas alone, and asserts that things as they appear in their individuality have no truth. The realism of the Scholastics in the same way maintained that the Universal has an independent, absolute existence, for Ideas are not liable to destruction, like natural things, therefore they are immutable and the only true existence. In opposition to this, the others, the Nominalists or Formalists, asserted that if generals or universals are formed, these are only names, matters of form, representations which we make to ourselves, a subjective generalization, a product of the thinking mind; the individual alone is the real.

This is then the matter in question; it is of great interest, and is founded upon a much higher opposition than any the ancients knew of. Roscelinus made universal conceptions arise only from the necessities of language. He maintained that ideas or universals, like Being, life, reason, are in themselves nothing but mere abstract notions or generic names, which, as such, have in and for themselves no universal reality of their own: that which has Being and life is found in the individual alone. Against these assertions arguments are brought forward by which one can see that the manner in which the Christian world was taken as basis, often became in the highest degree ridiculous. For instance, Abelard reproaches Roscelinus for having asserted that no thing has parts, that only the words which denote the things are divisible. Abelard proved that according to Roscelinus, Christ did not eat a real part of the broiled fish, but only a part—I do not know which—of the word “broiled fish,” since according to him there were no parts—which interpretation would be preposterous and highly blasphemous.[37] Our way of reasoning from “healthy human understanding,” is not much better.

[b. Walter of Mortagne.]

Walter of Mortagne (d. 1174) aimed at the union of the particular and the universal, saying that the universal must be individual, that universals must be united with individuals in accordance with their essence.[38] In later times the two rival factions were known to fame as Thomists, from the Dominican Thomas Aquinas, and Scotists, from the Franciscan Johannes Duns Scotus. Nevertheless, the original question as to whether universal notions have reality, and, if so, to what extent they have it, underwent a great variety of modifications and gradations, just as the opposing parties received very various names. Nominalism, in its crude form, declared universal notions to be mere names, which have reality only in speech, and it ascribed reality to individuals alone; Realism followed the exactly opposite course of attributing reality only to universals, while it considered that what distinguished individual things was an accident only or a pure difference. Neither of these two theories was correct in the manner of passing from the universal to the particular. There were some, however, among the Schoolmen who grasped the true conception that individuation, the limitation of the universal, and indeed of what is most universal, Being and entity, is a negation. Others said that the limit is itself something positive, but that it is not one with the universal by union with it, for it rather stands in a metaphysical connection with it, that is, in a connection such as that which binds thought with thought. This implies that the individual is only a clearer expression of what is already contained in the general conception; so that these conceptions, in spite of their being divided into parts and differentiated, still remain simple; Being or entity, moreover, really is a Notion.[39]

Thomas, who was a Realist, declared the universal Idea to be indeterminate, and placed individuation in determinate matter (materia signata), i.e. matter in its dimensions or determinations. According to him, the original principle is the universal Idea; the form, as actus purus, may, as with Aristotle, exist on its own account; the identity of matter and form, the forms of matter, as such, are further removed from the original principle,—while thinking substances are mere forms.[40] But for Scotus the universal is rather the individual One, the one he thinks may appear also in the other; he maintained therefore the principle of individuation, and the formal character of the universal. In his view indeterminate matter becomes individual through an inward positive addition; the substantial forms of things are their real essence. Occam thus represents the views of Scotus: “In the thing that exists outside of the soul the same Nature exists realiter with the difference limiting (contrahente) it to a determinate individual, being only formally distinguished, and in itself neither universal nor individual, but incompletely universal in the thing, and completely universal in the understanding.”[41] Scotus racked his brains much over this subject. To universals the Formalists allowed only an ideal reality in the divine and human intellect beholding them.[42] We thus see how closely connected with this is the thought which we first meet with in the Scholastics, namely the seeking and giving of so-called proofs of God’s existence (supra, pp. 62-67).

[c. William Occam.]

The opposition between Idealists and Realists appeared at an early stage, it is true, but it was not until later, after the time of Abelard, that it became the order of the day, and was invested with general interest. This was brought about chiefly by the Franciscan William Occam, of the village of Occam in the county of Surrey in England, who was surnamed Doctor invincibilis, and flourished in the beginning of the fourteenth century: the year of his birth is unknown. He is greatly celebrated for his skill in handling the weapons of logic; he is keen in discrimination and fertile in devising arguments and counter-arguments. Occam was a leading champion of Nominalism, which up to this time had found only here and there a defender, like Roscelinus and Abelard; his numerous followers received the name of Occamists and were Franciscans, while the Dominicans retained the name of Thomists. The conflict between Nominalists and Realists raged with a burning vehemence, and was carried to the greatest extremes; a pulpit is still shown which was separated by a wooden partition from the platform of the opponent, in order that the disputants might not come to blows. Henceforth theology was taught under two forms (theologia scholastica secundum utramque partem). Owing to the civil wars in France, politics also began gradually to affect the relationship between the orders, and this lent increased importance to the conflict into which jealousy had plunged the rival factions. In 1322, at a convention of his order, and also on other occasions, Occam and his order defended to the utmost of their power the claims of the different princes, such as the King of France and the Emperor of Germany, Louis of Bavaria, against the pretensions of the Pope. Among the words of William to the Emperor were these, “Do thou defend me with the sword, and I will defend thee with the pen.” Interdicts of the Paris University and Papal bulls were issued against Occam. The Paris University forbade his doctrines to be taught or his works quoted. A special prohibition was issued in 1340: “No teacher shall venture to assert plainly, or in so many words, that some familiar maxim of the author on whom he is lecturing is false, but shall either assent to it, or distinguish the true and the false significance; otherwise the dangerous result is to be apprehended that the truths of the Bible might be in like manner rejected. No teacher shall assert that a maxim cannot be thus explained or further defined.” Occam was excommunicated in 1328, and died at Munich in 1343.[43]

Occam asks in one of his writings (in libr. I. Sentent. Dist. II. Quæst. 4), “Whether what is immediately and proximately denoted by the universal and by the generic name is a real thing outside of the soul, something intrinsic and essential in the things to which it is common and which are called by its name, and yet in reality distinguished from them.” This definition of the Realists is given more in detail by Occam as follows: “As to this question, one opinion is that each generic designation or universal is a thing really existing outside of the soul in each and every individual, and that the Being (essentia) of each individual is really distinguished from each individual” (i.e. from its individuality), “and from each universal. Thus man, the universal, is a true thing outside of the soul, which exists in reality in each human being, but is distinguished from each human being, from Universal living nature, and from the universal substance, and in this way from all species and genera, those that are subordinate as well as those that are not subordinate.” The universal, the common designation of all the individuals, is therefore, according to this, not identical with the Self, the ultimate point of subjectivity. “As many universal predicables as there are of any individual thing”—e.g. humanity, reason, Being, life, quality, &c.—“so many really different things there are in nature, each of which is really distinct from the other and from that individual, and all these things are in no wise multiplied in themselves, however much the separate predicables are multiplied, which are in every individual of the same kind.” That is the most uncompromising way of stating the independence and isolation of every universal quality in a thing. Occam refutes this, saying: “Nothing which is one in number can, without being changed or multiplied, be present in several subjects or individuals. Science invariably restricts itself to propositions regarding the known; it is, therefore, a matter of no moment whether the terms of the propositions are known things outside of the soul, or only in the soul; and therefore it is not necessary for the sake of science to assume universal things, really distinct from individual things.”

Occam proceeds to state other opinions opposed to that first given; he does not exactly give his own decision, yet in this same passage (Quæst. 8) he, in the main, argues in favour of the opinion “that the universal is not something real that has explicit subjectivity (esse subjectivum) neither in the soul nor in the thing. It is something conceived, which, however, has objective reality (esse objectivum) in the soul, while the external thing has this objective reality as an explicitly existent subject (in esse subjectivo). This comes to pass in the following manner. The understanding, which perceives a thing outside the soul, forms the mental image of a similar thing, so that, if it had productive power, it would, like an artist, exhibit it in an absolutely existing subject, as numerically an individual distinct from any preceding. Should anyone be displeased by this manner of speaking of the mental image as being formed, it may be said that the mental image and every universal conception is a quality existing subjectively in the mind, which by its nature is the sign of a thing outside of the soul, just as the spoken word is a sign of the thing, arbitrarily instituted for marking out that thing.” Tennemann says (Vol. VIII. Section II. p. 864): “One result of this theory was that the principle of individuation, which had occupied to such an extent the attention of the Scholastics, was cast aside as utterly unnecessary.” Thus the main question with the Scholastics concerns the definition of the universal, and this was in itself highly important and significant for the culture of more modern times. The universal is the One, but not abstract; it is conceived or thought of as comprehending all things in itself. With Aristotle the universal was, in a judgment, the predicate of the subject in question; in a syllogism it was the terminus major. With Plotinus, and especially with Proclus, the One is still incommunicable, and is known only by its subordinate forms. But because the Christian religion is a revelation, God is no longer therein the unapproachable, incommunicable, a hidden mystery: for the various stages of the progression from Him are verily His manifestation, and the Trinity is thus the revealed. In this way the triads and the One are not distinguished, but these three Persons in the Godhead are themselves God and One, i.e. One as it is for another, as in itself relative. The Father, the God of Israel, is this One; the moment of the Son and of the Spirit is the Most High in spiritual and bodily presence, the former in the Church, the latter in Nature. With the Neo-Platonists the universal is, on the contrary, only the first condition of things which then merely opens out and develops; with Plato and Aristotle it is rather the Whole, the All, the All in One.

[d. Buridan.]

Buridan, a Nominalist, inclines to the view of the Determinists that the will is determined by circumstances. Against him is cited the case of the ass which, being placed between two equal bundles of hay, perforce perished from hunger.

Louis XI., in 1473, confiscated the books of the Nominalists and interdicted the teaching of their doctrines, but in the year 1481 this interdict was removed. In the theological and philosophical faculty Aristotle is said to have been interpreted and studied, as were also his commentators, Averroës, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas.[44]

[5. Formal Dialectic.]

The study of dialectics was carried to a very great height, but it was quite formal in character; this constitutes the fifth point for consideration. With this is closely connected the interminable finding out of termini technici. This formal dialectic was very ingenious in devising objects, problems and questions, destitute of all religious and philosophic interest, on which to practise its method of procedure. The last remark that we have, however, in this connection to make regarding the Scholastics is this, that it was not only into the ecclesiastical system that they introduced all possible formal relations of the understanding, but that also objects intelligible in themselves—the intellectual conceptions and religious ideas—they represented as immediately and sensuously real, as brought down into the externality of altogether sensuous relations, and in these relations subjected to systematic investigation. Originally, it is true, the basis was spiritual, but the externality in which it was at once comprehended, made of the spiritual something perfectly unspiritual. It may therefore be said that, on the one hand, the Scholastics showed great profundity in their treatment of Church dogma; and, on the other hand, that they secularized it by placing it in quite inappropriate external relations; thus here we have the worst kind of secularity. For the dogma of the Church explicitly contains, in the historical form of the Christian religion, a number of ordinary conceptions determined in an external way, which are connected with the spiritual, it is true, but trench upon sensuous relationships. If a network of such relationships is then contrived, there arises a host of oppositions, contrasts, contradictions, which have not the very slightest interest for us. It is this aspect of the matter that the Scholastics have taken up and handled with finite dialectic; and it is on this account that the Scholastics in later times were so much ridiculed. Of this I have some examples to give.

[a. Julian, Archbishop of Toledo.]

Julian, Archbishop of Toledo, sought, with as great earnestness as if the salvation of the human race depended on it, to answer questions which contain an absurd assumption. In doing so he no less gives himself up to petty triflings than do the philologists when they institute investigations regarding Greek accents, metres, and verse-divisions. For instance, there arises a question of this kind as to the dead. It is a dogma of the Church, that man will rise again; now if to this it be added that he will be clothed with the body, we thereby enter the sensuous sphere. The following were inquiries which arose in connection with this question: “What will be the age of the dead when they rise? Will they rise as children, youths, grown men, or aged? In what form will they rise? What will be the constitution of their bodies? Will the fat be again fat, and the lean again lean? Will the distinction of sex continue in that future life? Will those who rise again recover all that they lost here in the way of nails and hair?”[45] Thus a special distinction was drawn between the actual dogma, which was indisputable, and the various aspects of the supersensuous world which are connected with that dogma. These were regarded, though often only for the time being, as detached from the doctrinal system of the Church. For the system was not so definitely formulated but that anything in it might have to be proved from the Fathers, until a council or a special synod decided the point. Disputes were also possible regarding the proofs which were given of the content of this system; and besides there was quite a large amount of matter which was open to discussion, and respecting which the Scholastics—with the exception, of course, of the noble men, renowned as Doctores and writers,—expressed themselves in finite syllogisms and forms, which degenerated into an utterly empty and formal craze for disputation. The Scholastic Philosophy is thus the direct opposite of the empirical science of the understanding, with which curiosity is largely mingled, and which, careless of the Notion, follows after facts alone.

[b. Paschasius Radbertus.]

About 840 another subject of discussion was raised, namely, the birth of Christ, whether it was natural or supernatural. This led to a protracted controversy. Paschasius Radbertus wrote two volumes, De partu beatæ virginis; and many others wrote and argued on the same topic.[46] They went so far as even to speak of an accoucheur, and to discuss this subject; and many questions were raised, to which our sense of what is fitting forbids us even to turn our thoughts.

God’s wisdom, omnipotence, foresight, and predetermination led in the same way to a host of contradictions in abstract, meaningless, local and trivial particulars, which concern not God. In the works of Petrus Lombardus, where the Trinity, the Creation, and the Fall are dealt with, as also angels and their orders and ranks, questions are found such as whether God’s providence and predetermination would have been possible, had nothing been created; and where God was before the Creation. Thomas of Strasburg answered: Tunc ubi nunc, in se, quoniam sibi sufficit ipse.[47]

Lombardus goes on to ask “If God can know more than He knows?” as if potentiality and actuality still remained distinguished; “If God retains at all times all power that He has once possessed? Where the angels were after their creation? If the angels have always existed?” A multitude of other questions of this kind are raised regarding the angels. Then he asks: “At what age was Adam created? Why was Eve made from the rib, and not from some other part of the man? Why during sleep, and not when the man was awake? Why did the first human pair not have intercourse in Paradise? How the human race would have been propagated, if man had not sinned? If in Paradise children would have been born with limbs fully grown, and the complete use of their senses? Why it was the Son, and not the Father or the Holy Ghost, who became man?” To do this rests in the very Notion of the Son. “If God could not have also become incarnate in female form?”[48]

Additional examples of quæstiones of this kind are given by those who ridiculed such dialectic, for instance by Erasmus in his Encomium moriæ: “Could there be several sonships (filiationes) in Christ? Is the proposition possible that God the Father hates the Son? Might God not have also taken the form of a woman, or have passed into the devil? Might He not also have appeared in the form of an ass or of a pumpkin? In what manner would the pumpkin have preached and wrought miracles, and how would it have been crucified?”[49] Thus were intellectual determinations combined and distinguished in a manner altogether without sense or thought. The main point is that the Scholastics were like barbarians in their way of handling divine things and bringing them into sensuous determinations and relations. They thus introduced a completely sensuous rigidity and these altogether external and senseless forms into the purely spiritual, thus bringing it to a lower and unspiritual level; Hans Sachs similarly made a Nürnberg version of sacred history [die göttliche Geschichte vernürnbergert]. In such representations as are given in the Bible of the wrath of God, or of the history of God’s work of creation, it is said that God did this or that, naming some human and homely action. God is certainly not to be looked on as something alien and unapproachable; on the contrary, we are to come to Him with courage and with all our heart. But to bring Him into the province of thought, and strive in earnest after a knowledge of Him, is a very different matter. The reverse of this is to bring forward arguments pro and contra, for they decide nothing, and are of no use; they are no more than the assumptions which are only sensuous and finite determinations, and therefore infinite differences and distinctions. This barbarous use of the understanding is utterly irrational; it is like putting a golden necklace on a sow. The One is the Idea of the Christian religion, and it is also the philosophy of the great and noble Aristotle; neither of the two could have been more bedraggled and besmirched, to so low a pass had the Christians brought their spiritual Idea.

[6. Mystics.]

In the above sketch we have mentioned the principal heads which come under our consideration in studying Scholastic philosophy. With regard to this intrusion of distinctions of the understanding and sensuous relations into that which in and for itself and by virtue of its very nature is spiritual, absolute and infinite, it is to be remarked that to this craze for reducing everything to the finite, some noble spirits here and there opposed themselves. As such we must here, in the sixth place, make honourable mention of the many great Scholastics who have been named Mystics, for although they are to be distinguished from the real ecclesiastical Scholastics, they followed upon identical lines, and are closely connected with them. They took but little interest in these discussions and arguments, and maintained their purity in regard to Church doctrines and philosophic speculation. Some of them were pious and spiritual men, who carried on their philosophic studies upon the lines of the Neo-Platonic philosophy, as Scotus Erigena had done in earlier times. Among them genuine philosophy is to be found—termed also Mysticism; it tends to inwardness and bears a great resemblance to Spinozism. They also derived morality and the religious sentiment from actual feelings, and the meditations and maxims we have from them embody these views.

[a. John Charlier.]

John Charlier, more generally known as Von Jerson or Gerson, was born in 1363; he wrote a theologia mystica.[50]

[b. Raymundus of Sabunde.]

Very similar were the views expressed by Raymundus of Sabunde or Sabeyde, a Spaniard of the fifteenth century, and professor at Toulouse about the year 1437. In his theologia naturalis, which he handled in a speculative spirit, he dealt with the Nature of things, and with the revelation of God in Nature and in the history of the God-man. He sought to prove to unbelievers the Being, the trinity, the incarnation, the life, and the revelation of God in Nature, and in the history of the God-man, basing his arguments on Reason. From the contemplation of Nature he rises to God; and in the same way he reaches morality from observation of man’s inner nature.[51] This purer and simpler style must be set off against the other, if we are to do justice to the Scholastic theologians in their turn.

[c. Roger Bacon.]

Roger Bacon treated more especially of physics, but remained without influence. He invented gunpowder, mirrors, telescopes, and died in 1294.[52]

[d. Raymundus Lullus.]

Raymundus Lullus, the Doctor illuminatus, made himself famous chiefly by the art of thinking which he invented, which was called the ars magna. He was born at Majorca in 1234, and was one of those eccentric, unsettled natures whose activity finds vent in all directions. He had a strong inclination towards alchemy and great enthusiasm for the sciences in general, as well as a fiery, restless power of imagination. In his youth he led a reckless life, throwing himself headlong into a round of pleasures; then he retreated to a desert, and had there many visions of Jesus. At this time the impulse shaped itself in his ardent nature to dedicate his life to spreading the blessings of Christianity among the Mohammedans in Asia and Africa. In order to carry on this work of conversion he learned Arabic, travelled through Europe and Asia, sought for assistance from the Pope and all the crowned heads of Europe, without giving up, for all that, his interest in his ‘Art.’ He suffered persecution and passed through many hardships and strange adventures, perils of death, imprisonments, cruelties. He lived long in Paris at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and was the author of well-nigh four hundred works. After a life of the utmost restlessness, he died in 1315, revered as a saint and martyr, his death being the result of cruel treatment which he had suffered in Africa.[53]

The chief object aimed at in this man’s ‘Art’ was an enumeration and arrangement of the various concepts under which all objects fall, or of the pure categories according to which they can be determined, so that it may be possible in regard to every object to indicate with ease the conceptions applicable to it. Lullus is so systematic that he becomes at times mechanical. He constructed a diagram in circles, on which were marked triangles through which the circles pass. In these circles he arranged the various concepts, and strove to give a complete catalogue of them. Some of the circles were fixed, others movable, and they were six in number, two of them indicating the subjects, three the predicates, while the outermost circle represented possible questions. For each class he had nine qualities, to indicate which he chose nine letters, B C D E F G H I K. Thus in the first place he wrote round the diagram nine absolute predicates, goodness, greatness, duration, power, wisdom, volition, virtue, truth, splendour; then he wrote nine relative predicates, diversity, unanimity, opposition, beginning, middle, end, the qualities of being greater, equal, or less; in the third place he set down the questions Whether? What? Whence? Why? How great? Of what nature? When? Where? How and wherewith? the ninth of which contains two determinations; in the fourth place he put nine substances (esse), viz. God (divinum), angel (angelicum), heaven (cæleste), man (humanum), imaginativum, sensitivum, vegetativum, elementativum, instrumentativum; in the fifth place were nine accidents, i.e. natural relations, viz. quantity, quality, relation, activity, passivity, possession, position, time, place; and sixthly nine moral relations, the virtues, viz. justice, prudence, courage, temperance, faith, hope, love, patience, piety; and the vices, viz. envy, wrath, inconstancy, covetousness, falsehood, gluttony, riotousness, pride, sluggishness (acedia). These circles had to be placed in a certain way, in order to give proper combinations. By turning them round according to certain rules, by which all substances received the absolute and relative predicates which fitted them, it was supposed that there would be obtained in every possible combination universal science, truth, and the knowledge of concrete objects in general.[54]

[C. General Standpoint of the Scholastics.]

After thus dealing with the subject in detail, we must pronounce judgment on the Scholastics, and give an estimate of them. Though the subjects which they investigated were lofty, and though there were noble, earnest and learned individuals in their ranks, yet this Scholasticism on the whole is a barbarous philosophy of the finite understanding, without real content, which awakens no true interest in us, and to which we cannot return. For although religion is its subject matter, thought here reached such an excessive point of subtlety that, as a form of the mere empty understanding, it does nothing but wander amongst baseless combinations of categories. Scholastic philosophy is this utter confusion of the barren understanding in the rugged North German nature. We see here two different worlds, a kingdom of life and a kingdom of death. The intellectual kingdom, which is outside and above, while in the popular conception, is thereby brought within the sphere of the mere understanding and the senses, even though by nature it is purely peculative; and this does not take place as in art, but, on the contrary, after the fashion of ordinary reality. As the relationship of Father and Son, to begin with, appealed to the senses, so the divine world was furnished for the imaginative faculty and for purposes of devotion (in a way unknown to the disciples of Plato) with angels, saints and martyrs, instead of with thoughts;—or the thoughts are nothing but a rubbishy metaphysic of the understanding. In the supersensuous world there was no reality of the thinking, universal, rational self-consciousness to be met with: in the immediate world of sensuous nature, on the other hand, there was no divinity, because nature was but the grave of God, in the same way that God was outside of nature. The existence of the Church, as the government of Christ upon earth, is higher, it is true, than the external existence which stands in contrast to it; for religion must rule our temporal affairs, and through the subjection of worldly power the Church became a theocracy. But the divine kingdom, the dwelling-place of the dead, was to be reached only through the gate of death; yet the natural world was dead to an equal degree—all that lived in it was the vision of that other world, and hope—it had no present. It was of no avail to introduce mediators as a connecting link, the Virgin Mary, or the dead in a world beyond. The reconciliation was formal, not absolute; for it was nothing but the longing of man for a satisfaction to be found only in another world. What purpose does all this serve? It lies behind us as a thing of the past, and must continue useless to us on its own merits. There is no good, however, in calling the Middle Ages a barbarous period. It is a singular kind of barbarism, and is not simple and rude; for the absolute Idea and the highest culture have sunk into barbarism, and that through the agency of thought. Thus we have here, on the one hand, the most hideous form of barbarism and perversion, but, on the other hand, the never-failing source of a higher reconciliation.

If we seek an immediate contrast to scholastic philosophy and theology and their methods, we may say that it is to be found in the “healthy human understanding,” in outward and inward experience, in the contemplation of nature, and in humanity. The character of Greek humanity, for instance, was that everything concrete, everything that possessed interest for mind, had its place in the human breast, and its root in the feelings and thoughts of man. Intelligent consciousness, cultured science, has in such content its real material—that in which it is and remains at home with itself; knowledge busies itself on all sides with that which concerns it, and remains true to itself, while both on its serious and its playful side it finds in this material, in Nature and its uniform laws, a standard and a guide by which to direct its course aright. Even should we go astray on ground like this, our errors keep in view the fixed centre-point of the self-consciousness of the human mind, and as errors even they have a root therein, which as such forms the justification for them. It is only a one-sided withdrawal from the unity of this root with the altogether concrete ground-work and original, that is really faulty. What we see here, in contrast with the above, is the infinite truth, expressed as spirit, committed to a nation of barbarians who have not the self-consciousness of their spiritual humanity—they have a human breast, it is true, but not yet a human spirit. The absolute truth does not yet make itself real and present in actual consciousness, but men are torn out of themselves. They still find this content of spirit within themselves, introduced as into a strange vessel full of the most intense impulses and desires of physical and intellectual life, but it is like a ponderous stone, whose enormous pressure they only feel, but which they neither digest nor assimilate with their own impulses or desires. Thus they can only find rest and reconciliation when they come absolutely out of themselves, and they have become fierce and savage in the very circumstances and by the very means which ought to have rendered their spirit peaceable and mild.

Just as truth was not yet the foundation of reality, so science was likewise destitute of firm basis. The understanding, when it comes to think, applies itself, it is true, in the first place to the mysteries of religion, which, as an altogether speculative content, exist for the rational Notion only. But as Spirit, the rational element in question, has not yet taken its place in thought, thought is still God-forsaken, it is still only abstract, finite understanding, a manner of thinking which is in itself quite formal and devoid of content, which is a stranger to subjects of such profundity as this, even when it is ostensibly occupying itself with the same. This understanding therefore draws its content entirely from things to which it remains altogether alien, and which remain altogether alien to it; yet it is not thereby at all circumscribed, for it observes no bounds in its determinations and distinctions. It is just as if one were to arbitrarily form and connect propositions, words and tones—without making the presupposition that they should by themselves express a concrete sense—which need be only capable of being uttered, without having any restriction except possibility, that is, that they must not contradict each other.

In the second place, in so far as the understanding keeps to the given religious content, it can prove this content; one can demonstrate that it must be so, just as if it were a geometrical proposition. But there still remains something to be desired, in order that the satisfaction may be complete; the content is proved, but I nevertheless do not understand it. Thus Anselm’s excellent proposition (supra, pp. 63, 64) in which we may perceive the general character of the scholastic understanding, is a proof, it may be admitted, of the existence of God, but it shows no comprehension of it. Though I see the truth of the proposition, I have not attained to the final point, the object of my desire; for there is lacking the I, the inner bond, as inwardness of thought. This lies only in the Notion, in the unity of the particular and the universal, of Being and thought. For the comprehension of this unity, without which there could be no true proof, it was implied that further progress should not take place after the manner of the understanding. It was necessary that from the nature of thought itself it should become evident how, taken on its own account, it negates itself, and how the determination of Being itself rests therein, or that the manner in which thought determines itself into Being should be shown forth. On the other hand it must in like manner be demonstrated in the case of Being that it is its peculiar dialectic to abrogate itself, and from itself to make itself a universal Notion. The determination of itself into Being is certainly an object of thought, whose content is thought itself. This is inwardness, not a mere conclusion drawn from presuppositions. Here in scholastic philosophy, however, the object is not the nature of thought and Being, for what they are is a mere matter of assumption.

The understanding may take its start from experience, a given concrete content, a determinate contemplation of nature, the human heart, right, duty, which are just exactly what inwardness means. It may find its determinations, so to speak, on behalf of this content, and starting from this point it may come to abstractions, such as matter and force in physics. In this case, although a general form such as this does not satisfy the content, it has at any rate therein a fixed point, by which it can regulate itself, and a boundary line for speculation, which would otherwise have no limit set to its roaming. Or when we have the concrete perception of state and family, reasoning has in this content a fixed point which gives it guidance—a conception, which is the main thing; the deficiency in its form becomes concealed and forgotten, and emphasis is not laid on it. But in scholastic philosophy, in the third place, a basis was not sought in such objects as direct the course of reflection; with this understanding of the Scholastics it was rather the case that they received in the categories the external culture of the understanding as tradition, and enlarged upon it. Because there was no standard set up for this scholastic understanding, either by concrete intuition or by the pure Notion, it remained unregulated in its externality. In later times this spirit-forsaken understanding came across the philosophy of Aristotle, in an external way; but that philosophy is a two-edged sword, a highly determinate, clear understanding, which is at the same time speculative Notion; in it the abstract determinations of the understanding, taken by themselves, and powerless thus to stand, pass away by means of dialectic, and have truth only when taken in their connexion. The speculation that we find in Aristotle has this condition, that such thought never abandons itself to free reflection, but keeps ever before it the concrete nature of the object; this nature is the Notion of the thing, and this speculative essence of the thing is the ruling spirit, which does not leave the determinations of reflection free on their own account. But the Scholastics laid down hard and fast the abstract determinations of the understanding, which are always inadequate to their absolute subject, and in like manner they took every example from life as subject, and since the concrete contradicts them, they could hold fast by these determinations of the understanding only by defining and limiting. In so doing, however, they involved themselves in an endless web of distinctions, which could themselves be held in the concrete, and maintained thereby alone. There is thus no “healthy human understanding” in such procedure of the Scholastics; the former cannot oppose itself to speculation, but it can very well take up a position hostile to ungrounded reflection, seeing that it contains a basis and a rule of guidance for abstract determinations of the understanding. The Aristotelian philosophy is quite opposed to this Scholastic procedure, but it became therein alienated from itself. The fixed conception of the supersensuous world with its angels and so on was a subject which the Scholastics elaborated without any regulating standard, in barbaric fashion, and they enriched and embellished it with the finite understanding and with the finite relationships of the same. There is present no immanent principle in the thinking itself, but the understanding of the Scholastics got into its possession a ready-made metaphysic, without the need of making it relate to the concrete; this metaphysic was killed, and its parts in their lifelessness were separated and parcelled out. It might be said of the Scholastics that they philosophized without conception, that is, without a concrete; for esse reale, esse formale, esse objectivum, quidditas (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι) they made their subjects of discussion.

This crude understanding, in the fourth place, made everything equal, reduced it all to the same level, and that in virtue of its abstract universality, which was held to be valid. In politics also the understanding aims at making all alike equal. This crude understanding did not make away with itself and its finitude, but in its dealings with them simply reduced to finite relations Heaven, the Idea, the intellectual, mystic, speculative world; for it makes no difference (and can make none) whether its finite determinations are valid here or not. Hence arose these senseless questions, and the endeavours to decide them; for it is senseless, I may even say it is distasteful and revolting, although it may be logically correct, to carry over determinations into a field where they are utterly out of place, as soon as it comes to be a matter of comprehending a concrete content in its universality. This understanding in its operations furnishes no bridge from the universal to the particular, and the conclusions which it draws it leaves up in the clouds as conceptions of its fancy. If, for instance, law is divided into canonical law, criminal law, and so on, the ground of division is not taken from the universal itself; and it is thus left vague which particular determination is in accordance with the universal object. If this object is God,—for instance, such a determination as that He became man—the relation between God and man is not derived from their nature. Because God only manifests Himself, He can do so in any way whatever; then, because nothing is impossible with God, the pumpkin idea is easily introduced (p. 90), since it is a matter of indifference in which determination the Universal is supposed to be. Regarding the apple in Paradise the understanding asks to what species of apple it belonged.

We must go on to indicate the principles which have been adopted and stand opposed to one other, and the development of the same, in order to comprehend the transition into modern history and the present standpoint of philosophy. For this reason we must speak of the further progress of universal spirit. For thought was distorted by reason of its being bound to an externality, and spirit was in it no longer acting for spirit. Because then in this and similar ways the Idea of spirit had, as it were, its heart pierced through, the parts remained without spirit and life, and were worked upon by the understanding. Amongst the learned ignorance of the rational was displayed, a complete and unnatural lack of spirituality; and in the same way there was the most utter and terrible ignorance amongst the others, the monks. This destruction of knowledge brought about the transition to a different state of affairs; while heaven and the divine were thus degraded, the lofty aspirations and high spiritual claims of the clerical element rose above the secular. For we saw that the supersensuous world of truth, as the world of religious conceptions, was ruined by the understanding making all things equal. We saw, on the one hand, a handling of dogma in philosophic fashion, but we saw also a development of formal logical thought, the secularization of the absolutely existent content. In the same way the existing Church, this presence of heaven upon earth, brought itself down to the level of the secular, by entering upon the possession of riches and lands. In this way the distinction between the world and the Church is blotted out, not in a rational manner as regards the Church, but in a way that is altogether revolting, and which amounts to destruction: it is a reality, I grant, but one most terrible and barbarous. For state, government, right, property, civil order, all these enter into religion as rational differences, that is, laws on their own account fixed. The acknowledgment of ranks, classes, divisions, their different occupations, the stages and degrees of evil, as well as of good, are an entering into the form of finitude, actuality, existence of the subjective will, while what is religious has only the form of infinity. But the Church in its outward existence is inviolable, it can throw over all the laws of the good; every offence against it is a violation of sanctity. Evil and its penalties are made eternal, divergences of opinion are punished even with death: so are heresy and also heterodoxy in respect of the most abstract and empty determinations of an endless system of dogmas. Abominable practices and evil passions, utter wantonness, voluptuousness, bribery, dissoluteness, avarice, crimes of all kinds found their way into the Church, because it was unrestrained by laws; and it founded and maintained the system of government. The secular ought to be only secular; but this whole secular government of the Church claims at the same time the dignity and authority of the divine. This mingling of the sacred, divine, inviolable, with temporal interests, begets, on the one hand, fanaticism, as among the Turks, and on the other hand, the humility and obedientia passiva of the laity against this dread power. It was this ruin of the supersensuous world, as represented in knowledge and as the actual Church, that inevitably forced man out of a temple such as this, the Holy of Holies degraded into finitude.

Against this disunion, on the other hand, the secular element has spiritualized itself in itself; or it has established itself firmly in itself, and that in a manner which the Spirit justifies. To religion was lacking the presence of its culminating point, the present reality of its head; to the present secularity there is lacking the presence in it of thought, reason, spirit. In the tenth century there was manifested in Christendom a general impulse to build churches, although it was not possible to regard God Himself as present therein. It was thus that Christianity rose up, in her longing to take to herself the principle of reality as absolutely her own. But neither these buildings, nor external wealth, nor the power and dominion of the Church, nor monks, nor clergy, nor Pope, are the principle of real actual presence in her; they were insufficient for the spiritual. The Pope or the Emperor is not Dalai-lama, the Pope is only the Vicar of Christ; Christ, as a past existence, is in memory and hope alone. Impatient at the lack of reality and at the want of holiness, Christendom goes to seek this true Head; and this is the ruling motive of the Crusades. Christendom sought Christ’s outward presence in the land of Canaan, the traces of Him, the mount where He suffered, His grave; they took possession of the Holy Sepulchre. What they represent to themselves as real they also take possession of in fact as real; but a grave is a grave—all that they find is a grave, and even that is torn from them. “Because Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt Thou suffer Thine Holy One to see corruption.” Christians made the mistake of thinking that they would find satisfaction in this; this was the true object of their search; but they did not understand themselves. These holy spots, the Mount of Olives, the Jordan, Nazareth, as external sensuous presence of place without presence of time, are things of the past, a mere memory, no perception of the immediate present; the Christians found only their loss, their grave, in this present. Barbarians all the time, they did not seek the universal, the world-controlling position of Syria and Egypt, this central point of the earth, the free connection of commerce; Bonaparte did this when mankind became rational. The Crusaders were by the Saracens and by their own violence and repulsiveness, as also by their own misery (p. 53), brought to confess that they had in this deceived themselves. This experience taught them that they must hold to the actual reality which they despised, and seek in this the realization of their intelligible world. What they sought for they were to find in themselves, in the present of the understanding; thought, personal knowledge and will constitute this present. Because their acts, their aims and their interests are upright, and thus are constituted the Universal, the present is rational. What pertains to the world has thus become fixed in itself, that is, it has received into itself thought, justice, reason.

With reference to the general aspect of the period, from an historical point of view, it may be remarked that as on the one side we see the selflessness of spirit, the fact that spirit is not at home with itself, the torn and rent condition of man, on the other side we see the political condition becoming more consolidated, in the establishment of an independence which is no longer merely selfish. In the first independence there is contained the moment of barbarism, which has need of fear in order to be held within bounds. Now, however, we see justice and order enter in; it is true that the ruling order is the feudal system with its servitude, but everything therein has certainly a firm basis in justice. Justice, however, has its root in freedom, and thus the individual therein brings himself into existence, and is recognized; nevertheless relationships which properly belong to the state are here still made the concern of private individuals. Feudal monarchy, which now emerges in opposition to the self-abnegation of the Church, determines essential rights, it is true, according to birth; ranks are not, however, like the system of caste among the Indians, for in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, for instance, anyone might from the lowest class rise to the very highest position. Even under the feudal system, moreover, justice, civil order, legal freedom gradually emerged. In Italy and Germany cities obtained their rights as citizen republics, and caused these to be recognized by the temporal and ecclesiastical power; wealth displayed itself in the Netherlands, Florence and the free cities on the Rhine. In this way men gradually began to emerge from the feudal system; an example of this is seen in the case of the Capitani. The fact that the lingua volgare became the language used may also be looked on as a springing up of self-abnegation of spirit: as in Dante’s Divina Commedia.

The spirit of the times took this new direction; it forsook the intellectual world, and looked upon its present world, this hither side. The finite heaven, the content which had lost its religious character, drove it to the finite present. With this revolution the scholastic philosophy sinks and is lost, as its thoughts are outside of reality. While the Church heretofore believed itself to be in possession of divine truth, so now the temporal government, as it received into itself order and right, and worked its way out through the hard discipline of service, felt itself to be a divine institution, and consequently considered that it had the divine element here present in it, and that it was justified in having an independent existence in opposition to the divine element in the Church, which takes up an exclusive position as regards the laity. Since in this way the temporal power, the worldly life, self-consciousness, has taken into itself the higher and more divine ecclesiastical principle, the harsh contrast has disappeared. The power of the Church appeared as the violence of the Church, not aiming at operating in accordance with reality and in reality, but at being mighty in the spirit. There at once came into the secular element the consciousness that abstract Notions were filled with the reality of the present, so that this was no longer a nullity, but had truth also in itself.

With this commerce and the arts are associated. It is implied in the arts that man brings what is divine out of himself; as artists were at one time so pious that as individuals they had self-abnegation as their principle, it was they from whose subjective abilities these representations were produced. With this is connected the circumstance that the secular knew that it had in itself the right to hold to such determinations as are founded on subjective freedom. In his handicraft the individual is taken in reference to his work, and is himself the producer. Thus men came to the point of knowing that they were free, and insisting on the recognition of that freedom, and having the power of exercising their activity for their own objects and interests. Thus spirit came again to itself; it drew itself together again, and looked into its reason, as if looking into its own hands. This new birth is pointed out as the revival of the arts and sciences which were concerned with present matter, the epoch when the spirit gains confidence in itself and in its existence, and finds its interest in its present. It is in reality reconciled with the world, not implicitly, far away in mere thought, at the last day, at the world’s transfiguration, i.e. when the world is reality no more, but it has to do with the world as not by any means annihilated. The man who was moved to seek what was moral and right, could no longer find it on such soil, but looked round about him to seek it elsewhere. The place which was pointed out to him is himself, his inner life, and external Nature; in the contemplation of Nature the spirit begins to have a sense of being present therein.

SECTION THREE

Revival of the Sciences

The deeper interest of the subject had been lost sight of, as we have seen, in the dryness and dulness of the content of thought, and in speculations which went wandering off into endless details. But now spirit gathered itself together, and rose to claim the right to find and know itself as actual self-consciousness, both in the supersensuous world and in immediate nature. This awakening of the self-hood of spirit brought with it the revival of the arts and sciences of the ancient world. This looked like a falling back into childhood, but it was really a spontaneous ascent into the Idea, a movement originating with self—while up to this time the intellectual world had been rather something given from without. From this proceeded all efforts and all inventions, the discovery of America and of the way to the East Indies. Thus in a very special way the love for the old, so-called heathen sciences once more awoke, for men turned to the works of the ancients, which had now become objects of study, as studia humaniora, where man is recognized in what concerns himself and in what he effects. These sciences, though at first they were placed in opposition to the divine, are rather themselves the divine, as living, however, in the reality of spirit. Men, because they are men, find it interesting to study men as men. With this a further consideration is intimately connected, namely, that when the formal culture of the mind, found among the Scholastics, became transformed into the Universal, the result necessarily was that thought knew and found itself in itself; from this the antithesis between the finite understanding and ecclesiastical dogma or faith consequently arose. The idea became prevalent that the understanding can recognize something to be false which the Church affirms to be true; and it was of importance that the understanding did so apprehend itself, although it was in opposition to the positive in general.

[A. Study of the Ancients.]

The first way in which the desire to find the human element in reference to what pertains to science manifested itself, was that an interest in such matters sprang up in the West, a receptive power where the ancients in their definiteness and beauty are concerned. But the revival of the arts and sciences, and especially of the study of ancient literature bearing on Philosophy, was at first in some measure a simple revival of the old philosophy in its earlier and original form, without anything new being added; this working up of old philosophies, to which a great number of writings were devoted, was thus the restoration of something forgotten only. The study of the Greeks was more especially revived; the knowledge of the Greek originals which the West acquired is connected with external political events. The West kept up constant intercourse with the Greeks through the Crusades, and Italy did so by means of commerce; yet there were no special diplomatic relations. Even the Roman laws were brought back from the East, until a code of the corpus juris was by chance discovered. But the West was again, and more effectually, brought into touch with the Greek East when, on the disastrous fall of the Byzantine Empire, the noblest and most distinguished of the Greeks fled to Italy. Earlier than this even, when the Greek Empire was being harassed by the Turks, ambassadors had been sent to the West in order to solicit help. These ambassadors were men of learning, and by their means—for as a rule they settled in the West—there was transplanted thither that love for antiquity to which we have referred. Petrarch in this way learned Greek from Barlaam, a monk in Calabria, where dwelt many belonging to the order of St. Basil; this order had monasteries in the south of Italy, and used Greek ritual. In Constantinople Barlaam had made the acquaintance of Greeks, particularly of Chrysoloras, who from 1395 chose Italy as his permanent dwelling-place. These Greeks made the West familiar with the works of the ancients, especially of Plato.[55] Too much honour is done to the monks when it is asserted that they preserved for us the writings of the ancients; these works, at least such as were in Greek, came rather from Constantinople, while the Latin portion of them, it is true, were preserved in the West. Acquaintance was now also for the first time made with Aristotle’s own writings (supra, p. 75), and thereby the old philosophies were again revived, although mingled with intellectual vagaries of the utmost wildness.

Thus it was partly the old Platonic philosophy that was sought out, and partly the Neo-Platonic, as also the Aristotelian and Stoic, the Epicurean as far as it regarded physics, and the popular philosophy of Cicero in its first form; these were brought forward as authorities against Scholasticism, being in direct contradiction to it. Such endeavours are, however, connected rather with the history of literature and culture, and with the advancement of the same; we do not find originality in this philosophic work, nor can we recognize therein any forward step. We have still writings of that period, by which we find that each school of the Greeks found its adherents, and that Aristotelians, Platonists, and so on appeared on the scenes, though they were of a very different stamp from those of olden times. For true instruction in philosophy we must, however, go to the original sources, the ancients.

[1. Pomponatius.]

Pomponatius was one of the most remarkable of these Aristotelians; among other subjects he wrote in 1534 on the immortality of the soul, and in so doing he showed—following a practice which was specially in vogue at that time—that this dogma, which he believed as a Christian, was according to Aristotle and reason incapable of proof.[56] The disciples of Averroës alleged that the universal νοῦς, which is present in thought, is immaterial and immortal, while the soul as numerically one is mortal; and Alexander Aphrodisiensis also maintained its mortality. Both of these opinions were condemned in 1513 at the Council of Benevento, under Leo X.[57] The vegetative and sensitive soul Pomponatius asserted to be mortal (c. VIII. p. 36; c. IX. pp. 51, 62-65): and he maintained that it is only through thought and reason that man partakes of immortality. Pomponatius was summoned before the Inquisition; but as cardinals protected him, no further notice was taken of the matter.[58] There were many other pure Aristotelians; especially among the Protestants at a later time were they general. The Scholastics were erroneously termed Aristotelians; therefore the Reformation was opposed to Aristotle only in appearance, but to the Scholastics it was opposed in fact.

[2. Bessarion, Ficinus, Picus.]

Men now began to form acquaintance more especially with Plato, when manuscripts of his works were brought from Greece; Greeks, refugees from Constantinople, gave lectures on Plato’s philosophy. Cardinal Bessarion of Trapezunt, at one time Patriarch of Constantinople, was specially active in making Plato known in the West.[59]

Ficinus, who was born in Florence in 1433, and died in 1499, the accomplished translator of Plato, was a man of note; it was mainly due to him that the study of Neo-Platonism, as presented by Proclus and Plotinus, was again revived. Ficinus wrote also a Platonic Theology. One of the Medici in Florence, Cosmo II., went so far as to found a Platonic Academy even in the fifteenth century. These Medici, the elder Cosmo, Lorenzo, Leo X., Clement VII., were patrons of all the arts and sciences, and made their court the resort of classical Greek scholars.[60]

Two counts of the name of Pico della Mirandola—Giovanni, and Giovanni Francesco, his nephew—were influential rather by virtue of their marked personality and their originality; the elder propounded nine hundred theses, fifty-five of which were taken from Proclus, and invited philosophers one and all to a solemn discussion of the same; he also in princely fashion undertook to pay the travelling expenses of those at a distance.[61]

[3. Gassendi, Lipsius, Reuchlin, Helmont.]

Somewhat later, and specially by Gassendi, the opponent of Descartes, the atom theory of Epicurus was again revived. As a development therefrom the theory of molecules maintained its place thenceforth in physical science.

The revival of Stoic philosophy due to Lipsius was not so clearly evidenced.

In Reuchlin (Kapnio), who was born at Pforzheim in Swabia in 1455, and who was himself the translator of several comedies of Aristophanes, the Cabalistic philosophy found a defender. He endeavoured also to reconstruct the Pythagorean philosophy proper; but he mingled with it much that is vague and mysterious. There was in hand a project to destroy all Hebrew books in Germany by an imperial decree, as had been done in Spain; Reuchlin deserves great credit for having prevented this.[62] On account of the entire lack of dictionaries, the study of the Greek language was rendered so difficult that Reuchlin travelled to Vienna for the purpose of learning Greek from a Greek.

Later on we find many profound thoughts in Helmont, an Englishman, who was born in 1618, and died in 1699.[63]

All these philosophies were carried on side by side with belief in Church dogmas, and without prejudice thereto; not in the sense in which the ancients conceived them. A mass of literature exists on this subject, containing the names of a multitude of philosophers, but it is a literature of the past, without the vitality characteristic of higher principles; it is in fact not a true philosophy at all, and I shall therefore not dwell any longer upon it.

[4. Ciceronian Popular Philosophy.]

Cicero’s mode of philosophizing, a very general mode, was revived in an especial degree. It is a popular style of philosophizing, which has no real speculative value, but in regard to general culture it has this importance, that in it man derives more from himself as a whole, from his outer and inner experience, and speaks altogether from the standpoint of the present. He is a man of understanding who says,—

“What helps a man in life, is what life itself has taught him.”

The feelings, &c., of man obtained due recognition, we must observe, as against the principle of self-abnegation. A very large number of writings of this kind were issued, some of them simply on their own account, others aimed against the Scholastics. Although all that great mass of philosophical writings—much, for instance, that Erasmus wrote on similar subjects—has been forgotten, and though it possesses little intrinsic value, it was still of very great service, as succeeding the barrenness of the Scholastics and their groundless maunderings in abstractions:—groundless I say, for they had not even self-consciousness as their basis. Petrarch was one of those who wrote from himself, from his heart, as a thinking man.

This new departure in Philosophy applies in this regard to the reform of the Church by Protestantism also. Its principle is simply this, that it led man back to himself, and removed what was alien to him, in language especially. To have translated for German Christians the book on which their faith is grounded, into their mother-tongue, is one of the greatest revolutions which could have happened. Italy in the same way obtained grand poetic works when the vernacular came to be employed by such writers as Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch; Petrarch’s political works were however written in Latin. It is not until a thing is expressed in my mother tongue that it becomes my own possession. Luther and Melancthon cast the Scholastic element quite aside, and drew their conclusions from the Bible, from faith, from the human heart. Melancthon presents to us a calm popular philosophy, in which the human element makes itself felt, and which therefore forms the most striking contrast to the lifeless and jejune Scholasticism. This attack against the Scholastic method was made in the most different directions and in the most various forms. But all this belongs rather to the history of Religion than to that of Philosophy.

[B. Certain Attempts in Philosophy.]

A second series of writers who now appeared have mainly to do with particular attempts made in Philosophy which remained attempts merely, and are only found while this terrible time of upheaval lasted. Many individuals of that period saw themselves forsaken by what had hitherto been accepted by them as content, by the object which up to this time had formed the stay and support of their consciousness—by faith. Side by side with the peaceful reappearance of the ancient philosophy there displayed itself, on the other hand, a multitude of individuals in whom a burning desire after the conscious knowledge of what is deepest and most concrete was violently manifested. It was spoilt, however, by endless fancies, extravagances of the imagination and a craze for secret, astrological, geomantic and other knowledge. These men felt themselves dominated, as they really were, by the impulse to create existence and to derive truth from their very selves. They were men of vehement nature, of wild and restless character, of enthusiastic temperament, who could not attain to the calm of knowledge. Though it cannot be denied that there was in them a wonderful insight into what was true and great, there is no doubt on the other hand that they revelled in all manner of corruption in thought and heart as well as in their outer life. There is thus to be found in them great originality and subjective energy of spirit; at the same time the content is heterogeneous and unequal, and their confusion of mind is great. Their fate, their lives, their writings—which often fill many volumes—manifest only this restlessness of their being, this tearing asunder, the revolt of their inner being against present existence and the longing to get out of it and reach certainty. These remarkable individuals really resemble the upheavals, tremblings and eruptions of a volcano which has become worked up in its depths and has brought forth new developments, which as yet are wild and uncontrolled. The most outstanding men of this nature are Cardanus, Bruno, Vanini, Campanella, and lastly Ramus. They are representative of the character of the time in this interval of transition, and fall within the period of the Reformation.

[1. Cardanus.]

Hieronymus Cardanus is of their number; he was remarkable as an individual of world-wide reputation, in whom the upheaval and fermentation of his time manifested itself in its utmost violence. His writings fill ten folio volumes. Cardanus was born in 1501 at Pavia, and died at Rome in 1575. He recounted his own history and described his character in his book De vita propria, where he makes an extraordinary confession of his sins, passing the severest possible judgment upon them. The following may serve to give a picture of these contradictions. His life was a series of the most varied misfortunes, external and domestic. He speaks first of his pre-natal history. He relates that his mother, when pregnant with him, drank potions in order to produce abortion. When he was still at the breast, there was an outbreak of the plague; the nurse who suckled him died of the pestilence, he survived. His father was very severe in his treatment of him. He lived sometimes in the most crushing poverty and the utmost want, sometimes in the greatest luxury. Afterwards he applied himself to science, became a Doctor of Medicine, and travelled much. He was celebrated far and wide; summons came to him from every quarter, several times he was called to Scotland. He writes that he cannot tell the sums of money that were offered to him. He was professor at Milan, first of mathematics and then of medicine; after that he lay for two years in Bologna in the strictest imprisonment, and had to undergo the most frightful tortures. He was a profound astrologer, and predicted the future for many princes, who on that account held him in the greatest awe and reverence.[64] He is a name of note in mathematics; we have from him still the regula Cardani for the solution of equations of the third degree, the only rule we have had up to this time.

He lived his whole life in perpetual inward and outward storms. He says that he suffered the greatest torments in his soul. In this inward agony he found the greatest delight in inflicting torture both on himself and others. He scourged himself, bit his lips, pinched himself violently, distorted his fingers, in order to free himself from the tortures of his spiritual disquietude and induce weeping, which brought him relief. The same contradictions were to be seen in his outward demeanour, which was sometimes quiet and decorous, while at other times he behaved as if he were crazy and demented, and that without any external provocation whatever, and in matters the most indifferent. Sometimes he put on decent clothes and made himself neat and trim, at other times he went in rags. He would be reserved, diligent, persevering in his work, and then would break out into excesses, wasting and squandering all that he had, his household goods and his wife’s jewels. Sometimes he would walk quietly along, like other men; at other times he would rush on as if he were mad. The upbringing of his children, as was quite to be expected under the circumstances, was very bad. He had the unhappiness of seeing his sons turn out ill; one of them poisoned his own wife and was executed with the sword; he had his second son’s ears cut off, to chastise him for being dissipated.[65]

He himself was of the wildest temperament, brooding deeply within himself, and yet breaking out into violence in the most contradictory manner; within him there also raged a consuming restlessness. I have epitomized the description which he gives of his own character, and now quote it: “I have by nature a mind of philosophic and scientific cast; I am witty, elegant, well-bred, fond of luxury, cheerful, pious, faithful, a lover of wisdom, reflective, enterprising, studious, obliging, emulous, inventive, self-taught. I have a longing to perform prodigies, I am crafty, cunning, bitter, versed in secrets, sober, diligent, careless, talkative, contemptuous of religion, vindictive, envious, melancholy, malicious, treacherous, a sorcerer, a magician, unhappy; I am surly to my family, ascetic, difficult to deal with, harsh, a soothsayer, jealous, a ribald talker, a slanderer, compliant, inconstant; such contradictoriness of nature and manners is to be found in me.”[66]

His writings are in parts just as utterly unequal as his character. In them he gave vent to the wild vehemence of his nature; they are disconnected and contradictory, and were often written in the direst poverty. They contain a medley of all kinds of astrological and chiromantic superstition, yet lit up here and there with profound and brilliant flashes; there are Alexandrine and Cabalistic mysteries side by side with perfectly lucid psychological observations of his own. He treated astrologically the life and deeds of Christ. His positive merit consists, however, rather in the stimulus which he gave to original production, and in this direction he exercised an important influence on his times. He boasted of the originality and novelty of his ideas, and the craze to be original drove him to the strangest devices. This represents the first form taken by the newly awakened and energizing reason in its spontaneous activity; to be new and different from others was regarded as tantamount to possessing a private claim to science.

[2. Campanella.]

Tommaso Campanella, a student of Aristotle, represents just such another medley of all possible dispositions. He was born at Stilo, in Calabria, in 1568, and died at Paris in 1639. Many of his writings still remain to us. For seven-and-twenty years of his life he was kept in strict imprisonment at Naples.[67] Such men as he aroused enormous interest and gave great offence, but on their own account they were productive of very little result. We have still to make special mention of Giordano Bruno and Vanini as belonging to this period.

[3. Bruno.]

Giordano Bruno was of an equally restless and effervescent temperament, and we see in him a bold rejection of all Catholic beliefs resting on mere authority. In modern times he has again been brought into remembrance by Jacobi (Werke, Vol. IV. Section II. pp. 5-46), who appended to his letters on Spinoza an abstract of one of Bruno’s works.[68] Jacobi caused great attention to be paid to Bruno, more especially by his assertion that the sum of Bruno’s teaching was the One and All of Spinoza, or really Pantheism; on account of the drawing of this parallel Bruno obtained a reputation which passes his deserts. He was less restless than Cardanus; but he had no fixed habitation on the earth. He was born at Nola in the province of Naples, and lived in the sixteenth century; the year of his birth is not known with certainty. He roamed about in most of the European states, in Italy, France, England, Germany, as a teacher of philosophy: he forsook Italy, where at one time he had been a Dominican friar, and where he had made bitter reflections both upon various Catholic dogmas—for instance, on transubstantiation and the immaculate conception of the Virgin—and upon the gross ignorance and scandalous lives of the monks. He then lived in Geneva in 1582, but there he fell out in the same way with Calvin and Beza, and could not live with them: he made some stay in several other French cities, such as Lyons; and after a time he came to Paris, where in 1585 he formally challenged the adherents of Aristotle, by following a practice greatly in favour in those days (supra, p. 112), and proposing for public disputation a series of philosophic theses, which were specially directed against Aristotle. They appeared under the title Jord. Bruni Nol. Rationes articulorum physicorum adversus Peripateticos Parisiis propositorum, Vitebergæ apud Zachariam Cratonem, 1588; he was not successful in them, however, as the position of the Aristotelians was still too well assured. Bruno was also in London; he visited Wittenberg in the year 1586; he likewise stayed in Prague and other universities and towns. In Helmstedt he was high in the favour of the Dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg in 1589; after that he went to Frankfort-on-Main, where he had several of his works printed. He was a wandering professor and author. Finally he came back to Italy in 1592, and lived in Padua for some time undisturbed, but at last he was seized in Venice by the Inquisition, cast into prison, sent on to Rome, and there in the year 1600, refusing to recant, he was burned at the stake as a heretic. Eye-witnesses, and amongst them Scioppius, recount that he met death with the most unflinching courage. He had become a Protestant when in Germany, and had broken the vows of his order.[69]

Among both Catholics and Protestants his writings were held to be heretical and atheistic, and therefore they were burned and destroyed, or kept in concealment. His complete works are hence very seldom met with; the greatest number of them are to be found in the University Library at Gottingen; the fullest account of them is given in Buhle’s History of Philosophy (supra, Vol. I. p. 113). His works are for the most part rare, and in many cases interdicted; in Dresden they are still included among prohibited writings, and are therefore not to be seen there. Lately[70] an edition of them in the Italian language was prepared,[71] which possibly has never yet been issued. Bruno also wrote a great deal in Latin. Wherever he took up his abode for a time, he gave public lectures, wrote and published works; and this increases the difficulty of making complete acquaintance with his books. Many of his writings are for the above reason very similar in their matter, the form only being different, and in the evolution of his thoughts he never consequently advanced very much nor attained to any results. But the leading characteristic of his various writings is really to some extent the grand enthusiasm of a noble soul, which has a sense of indwelling spirit, and knows the unity of its own Being and all Being to be the whole life of thought. There is something bacchantic in his way of apprehending this deep consciousness; it overflows in becoming thus an object of thought, and in the expression of its riches. But it is only in knowledge that spirit can bring itself forth as a whole; when it has not yet attained to this point of scientific culture, it reaches out after all forms, without bringing them first into due order. Bruno displays just such an unregulated and multiform profusion; and on that account his expositions have frequently a dreamy, confused, allegorical appearance of mystical enthusiasm. Many of his writings are in verse, and much that is fantastic finds a place in them, as for instance when he says in one of his works, entitled La Bestia Trionfante, that something else must be put in place of the stars.[72] He sacrificed his personal welfare to the great enthusiasm which filled him, and which left him no peace. It is easy to say that he was “a restless being, who could get on with nobody.” But whence did this restlessness come to him? What he could not get on with was the finite, the evil, the ignoble. Thence arose his restlessness. He rose to the one universal substantiality by putting an end to this separation of self-consciousness and nature, whereby both alike are degraded. God was in self-consciousness, it was admitted, but externally, and as remaining something different from self-consciousness, another reality; while Nature was made by God, being His creature, not an image of Him. The goodness of God displayed itself only in final causes, finite ends, as when it is said: “Bees make honey for man’s food; the cork tree grows to provide stoppers for bottles.”[73]

As to his reflections, Jacobi has by his recent[74] exposition of them made it seem as if it were a theory specially characteristic of Bruno that one living Being, one World-Soul, should penetrate all existence, and should be the life of all. Bruno asserted, in the first place, the unity of life and the universality of the World-Soul, and, in the second place, the indwelling presence of reason; but Bruno in so saying is far from being original, and in fact this doctrine is a mere echo of the Alexandrian. But in his writings there are two specially marked features. The first is the nature of his system, based as it is on his leading thoughts, or his philosophic principles generally, namely the Idea as substantial unity. The second, which is closely connected with the first, is his use of the Art of Lullius; this is specially emphasized and highly esteemed by him, the art of finding differences in the Idea: it he wished to bring into special recognition.

a. His philosophic thoughts, to express which he sometimes made use of Aristotle’s concepts, give evidence of a peculiar, highly strung and very original mind. The substance of his general reflections is found in the greatest enthusiasm for the above-mentioned vitality of Nature, divinity, the presence of reason in nature. His philosophy is thus on the whole certainly Spinozism, Pantheism. The separation of man from God or the world, all such relations of externality, have been superadded to his living idea of the absolute, universal unity of all things, for the expression of which idea Bruno has been so greatly admired. In his conception of things the main points are that, on the one hand, he gives the universal determination of matter, and, on the other hand, that of form.

α. The unity of life he thus determines as the universal, active understanding (νοῦς), which manifests itself as the universal form of all the world, and comprehends all forms in itself; it bears the same relation to the production of natural objects as does the understanding of man, and moulds and systematizes them, as the human understanding moulds the multitude of its concepts. It is the artist within, who shapes and forms the material without. From within the root or the seed-grain it makes the shoot come forth; from this again it brings the branches, and from them the twigs, and from out of the twigs it calls forth the buds, and leaves, and flowers. All is planned, prepared and perfected within. In the same way this universal reason within calls back their saps from the fruits and blossoms to the twigs, and so on. The universe is thus an infinite animal, in which all things live and move and have their being in modes the most diverse. The formal understanding is thus in no wise different from the Final Cause (the Notion of end, the entelechy, the unmoved principle, which we meet with in Aristotle); but these are just as truly also active understanding, the efficient cause (causa efficiens), this same producing force. Nature and Spirit are not separated; their unity is the formal understanding, in which is contained the pure Notion, not as in consciousness, but as free and independent, remaining within itself, and at the same time exercising activity and passing beyond itself. The understanding working towards one particular end is the inward form of the thing itself, an inward principle of the understanding. What is continually produced is in accordance with this form, and contained within it; what appears is determined as the form is in itself determined.[75] With Proclus in the same way the understanding, as substantial, is that which includes all things in its unity: life is the outgoing, the producing force: and the understanding as such similarly includes the returning force, which brings all things back into unity. In dealing with Kant’s philosophy we shall have again to mention this determination of final purpose. That which has organic life, whose principle is formative, which has its efficacy in itself, and in the same only remains at home with itself and maintains itself, is nothing but the end, the activity determined in itself, which in its relation to what is different does not comport itself as mere cause, but returns upon itself.

β. Bruno, who asserts the final cause to be immediately operative, and the life immanent in the universe, asserts it also to be existent, as substance; he is therefore opposed to the conception of a merely extra-mundane understanding. To a certain extent Bruno distinguishes form and matter in substance, which itself, as the aforesaid activity of the Idea, is the unity of form and matter; thus matter has life in itself. The permanent element in the endless changes of existence is, he says, the first and absolute matter; although without form, it is nevertheless the mother of all forms, and receptive of all forms. Because matter is not without the first universal form, it is itself principle or in itself final cause. Form is immanent in matter; the one simply cannot exist without the other; thus matter itself brings about these changes of form, and the same matter runs through them all. What was at first seed becomes blade, then ear, then bread, chyle, blood, seed of animal, an embryo, a human being, a corpse, then once more earth, stone, or other substance; from sand and water frogs are produced. Here then we can perceive something which, although it transforms itself into all these things in turn, yet still in itself remains one and the same. This matter cannot be a body, for bodies have form; nor can it belong to the class which we term properties, attributes, or qualities, for these are liable to change. Thus nothing seems to be eternal and worthy of the name of a principle, except matter. Many have for this reason held matter to be the only reality, and all forms to be accidental. This error arises from the fact of their recognizing only a form of the second kind, and not that necessary first and eternal form, which is the form and source of all forms. In the same way the aforesaid matter, on account of its identity with the understanding which causes form beforehand, is itself intelligible, as the universal presupposition of all corporeality. Because it is everything in general, it is nothing in particular, neither air nor water, nor anything else, abstract or otherwise; it has no dimensions, in order to have all dimensions. The forms of matter are the inward power of matter itself; it is, as intelligible, the very totality of form.[76] This system of Bruno’s is thus objective Spinozism, and nothing else; one can see how deeply he penetrated.

Bruno here asks the question: “But this first universal form and that first universal matter, how are they united, inseparable? Different—and yet one Being?” He answers by making use of the Aristotelian forms of δύναμις and ἐνέργεια: Matter is to be regarded as potentiality; in this way all possible forms of existence in a certain sense are included in the Notion of it. The passivity of matter must be regarded as pure and absolute. Now it is impossible to attribute existence to a thing which lacks the power to exist. Existence has, however, such an express reference to the active mode, that it is at once clear that the one cannot exist without the other, but that each of them presupposes the other. If therefore at all times a capacity of working, producing, creating, was there, so must there also have been at all times a capacity of being worked upon, produced, created. The perfect potentiality of the existence of things (matter) cannot precede their actual existence, and just as little can it remain after that is past. The first and most perfect principle includes all existence in itself, can be all things, and is all things. Active power and potentiality, possibility and actuality are therefore in it one undivided and indivisible principle.[77] This simultaneousness of acting and being acted upon is a very important determination; matter is nothing without activity, form is therefore the power and inward life of matter. If matter were nothing but indeterminate potentiality, how would the determinate be arrived at? This simplicity of matter is itself only one moment of form: in wishing therefore to tear asunder matter and form, matter is at once established in one determination of form, but in so doing there is immediately established also the existence of the Other.

Thus the Absolute is determined for Bruno: it is not so with other things, which may exist and also may not exist, and which may be determined in one way or in another way. In regard to finite things and in finite determinations of the understanding the distinction between form and matter is thus present. The individual man is at every moment what he may be at that moment, but not everything which he may be in general and with reference to substance. The things which appear to be different are only modifications of one single thing which includes in its existence all other existence. The universe, unbegotten Nature, is, however, everything which it can be in reality and at one time, because it includes in itself the whole of matter, as well as the eternal, unchangeable form of its changing forms. But in its developments from moment to moment, its particular parts, qualities, individual existences, in its externality as a whole, it is no more what it is and may be; but a part such as this is only a shadow of the image of the first principle.[78] Thus Bruno wrote also a book, De umbris idearum.

γ. This is Bruno’s fundamental idea. He says: “To recognize this unity of form and matter in all things, is what reason is striving to attain to. But in order to penetrate to this unity, in order to investigate all the secrets of Nature, we must search into the opposed and contradictory extremes of things, the maximum and the minimum.” It is in these very extremes that they are intelligible, and become united in the Notion; and this union of them is infinite Nature. “To find the point of union is not the greatest matter; but to develop from the same its very opposite, this is the real and the deepest secret of the art.”[79] It is saying much if we speak of knowing the development of the Idea as a necessity of determinations; we shall see later how Bruno proceeded to do this. He represents the original principle, which is elsewhere known as the form, under the Notion of the minimum, which is at the same time the maximum—One, which at the same time is All; the universe is this One in All. In the universe, he says, the body is not distinguished from the point, nor the centre from the circumference, nor the finite from the infinite, nor the maximum from the minimum. There is nothing but centre point; or the centre point is everywhere and in everything. The ancients expressed the same by saying of the Father of the gods, that he really had his dwelling-place in every point of the universe. It is the universe that first gives to things true reality; it is the substance of all things, the monad, the atom, the spirit poured out on all things, the innermost essence, the pure form.[80]

b. The second object to which Bruno devoted himself was the so-called Lullian Art, which received its name from its first inventor, the Scholastic Raymundus Lullus (supra, pp. 92-94). Bruno adopted this and carried it to completion; he termed it also his ars combinatoria. This art is in some respects like what we met with in Aristotle under the name of the Topics (Vol. II. pp. 217, 218), seeing that both give an immense number of “places” and determinations which were fixed in the conception like a table with its divisions, in order that these headings might be applied to all that came to hand. But the Topics of Aristotle did this in order to apprehend and determine an object in its various aspects, while Bruno rather worked for the sake of lightening the task of memory. He thus really connected the Lullian Art with the art of mnemonics as practised by the ancients, which has come into notice again in recent times, and which will be found described in greater detail in the Auctor ad Herennium (Libr. III. c. 17, sqq.). To give an example: one establishes for oneself a certain number of different departments in the imagination, which are to be chosen at pleasure; there may be perhaps twelve of these, arranged in sets of three, and indicated by certain words, such as Aaron, Abimelech, Achilles, Berg, Baum, Baruch, etc., into which divisions one inserts, as it were, what has to be learnt by heart, and forms it into a succession of pictures. In this way when we repeat it, we have not to say it from memory or out of our head, as we are accustomed to do, but we have only to read it off as if from a table. The only difficulty lies in making some ingenious connection between the content in question and the picture; that gives rise to the most unholy combinations, and the art is therefore not one to be commended. Bruno also soon abandoned it, since what had been a matter of memory became a matter of imagination; which was, of course, a descent. But since with Bruno the diagram is not only a picture of external images, but a system of universal determinations of thought, he certainly gave to this art a deeper inward meaning.[81]

α. Bruno passes over to this art from universal ideas which are given. Since namely one life, one understanding is in all things, Bruno had the dim hope of apprehending this universal understanding in the totality of its determinations, and of subsuming all things under it—of setting up a logical philosophy by its means, and making it applicable in all directions.[82] He says: The object of consideration therein is the universe, in so far as it enters into the relation of the true, the knowable and the rational. Like Spinoza he distinguishes between the intelligible thing of reason and the actual thing: As metaphysics has for object the universal thing, which is divided into substance and accident, so the chief matter is that there is a single and more universal art which knits together and compasses round the thing of reason and the actual thing, and recognizes them both as harmonizing with one another, so that the many, be they of what kind they may, are led back to simple unity.[83]

β. For Bruno the principle in all this is the understanding generally: None other than the understanding whose activity extends beyond itself, which brings into existence the sensuous world. It is related to the illumination of the spirit as the sun is related to the eye: it relates therefore to a phenomenal manifold, illuminating this, not itself. The Other is the active understanding in itself, which is related to the objects of thought in their various classes, as the eye is to things visible.[84] The infinite form, the active understanding which dwells in reason, is the first, the principle, which develops; the process in some respects resembles what was met with in the Neo-Platonists. Bruno’s great endeavour is really now to apprehend and demonstrate the modes of organizing this active understanding.

γ. This is presented more in detail as follows: To the pure truth itself, the absolute light, man approaches only; his Being is not absolute Being itself, which alone is the One and First. He rests only under the shadow of the Idea, whose purity is the light, but which at the same time partakes of the darkness. The light of substance emanates from this pure First Light, the light of accident emanates from the light of substance. This we met with also in Proclus (supra, Vol. II. p. 446) as the third moment in the first triad. This absolute principle in its unity is for Bruno the first matter, and the first act of this principle he names the original light (actus primus lucis). But substances and accidents, which are many, cannot receive the full light, they are therefore only included in the shadow of the light; in like manner the ideas also are only shadows thereof.[85] The development of Nature goes on from moment to moment; created things are only a shadow of the first principle, not the first principle itself.

δ. Bruno continues: From this super-essential (super-essentiale)—an expression which is also met with in Proclus (supra, Vol. II. p. 441)—advance is made to the essences, from the essences to that which is, from that which is to their traces, images and shadows, and that in a double direction: both towards matter, in order to be produced within her (these shadows are then present in natural fashion), and also towards sensation and reason, in order to be known by means of these. Things withdraw themselves from the First Light towards the darkness. But since all things in the universe are in close connection, the lower with the middle, and those with the upper, the compound with the simple, the simple with those which are more simple, the material with the spiritual, in order that there may be one universe, one order and government of the same, one principle and aim, one first and last; so, following the sound of the lyre of the universal Apollo (an expression which we saw used by Heraclitus, Vol. I. pp. 284, 285), the lower can be led back step by step to the higher, as fire was condensed and transformed into air, air into water, water into earth. Thus One Being is in all. That process is the same as this return, and they form a circle. Nature within her limits can produce all from all, and so the understanding can also know all from all.[86]

ε. The unity of opposites is explained more in detail as follows: The diversity of shadows is no real opposition. In the same conception the opposites are known, the beautiful and the ugly, the appropriate and the inappropriate, the perfect and the imperfect, the good and the evil. Imperfection, evil, ugliness, do not rest upon special ideas of their own; they become known in another conception, not in one peculiar to themselves, which is nothing. For this that is peculiarly theirs is the non-existent in the existent, the defect in the effect. The first understanding is the original light; it streams its light out of the innermost to the outermost, and draws it again from the outermost to itself. Every Being can, according to its capacity, appropriate somewhat of this light.[87]

ζ. The real element in things is just that which is intelligible, not that which is perceived or felt, or what is peculiar to the individual; whatever else is termed real, the sensuous, is non-Being. All that comes to pass beneath the sun, all that dwells in the region of matter, falls under the notion of vanity (finitude). Seek to take from Ideas a firm basis for thy conceptions, if thou art wise. The pure light of things is nothing but this knowableness, which proceeds from the first understanding and is directed towards it; the non-existent is not known. What is here contrast and diversity, is in the first understanding harmony and unity. Try therefore if thou canst identify the images thou hast received, if thou canst harmonize and unite them; thus thou wilt not render thy mind weary, thy thoughts obscure, and thy memory confused. Through the idea which is in the understanding a better conception of anything will be formed than by means of the form of the natural thing in itself, because this last is more material: but that conception is reached in a supreme degree through the idea of the object as it exists in the divine understanding.[88] The differences which are here given, are therefore no differences at all; but all is harmony. To develop this was therefore Bruno’s endeavour; and the determinations, as natural in that divine understanding, correspond with those which appear in the subjective understanding. Bruno’s art consists only in determining the universal scheme of form, which includes all things within itself, and in showing how its moments express themselves in the different spheres of existence.

η. The main endeavour of Bruno was thus to represent the All and One, after the method of Lullus, as a system of classes of regular determinations. Hence in the manner of Proclus he specifies the three spheres: First, the original form (ὑπερουσία) as the originator of all forms; secondly, the physical world, which impresses the traces of the Ideas on the surface of matter, and multiplies the original picture in countless mirrors set face to face; thirdly, the form of the rational world, which individualizes numerically for the senses the shadows of the Ideas, brings them into one, and raises them to general conceptions for the understanding. The moments of the original form itself are termed Being, goodness (nature or life), and unity. (Something similar to this we also met with in Proclus, Vol. II. p. 445) In the metaphysical world the original form is thing, good, principle of plurality (ante multa); in the physical world it manifests itself in things, goods, individuals; in the rational world of knowledge it is derived from things, goods and individuals.[89] Unity is the agent that brings them back once more; and Bruno, while distinguishing the natural and metaphysical world, seeks to set up the system of the above determinations, in order to show at once how the same thing is in one way a natural appearance, and in another way an object existing for thought.

Since Bruno sought to apprehend this connection more closely, he considers thinking as a subjective art and activity of the soul, representing inwardly and in accordance with the ordinary conception, as it were through an inward writing, what Nature represents externally, as it were, through an outward writing. Thinking, he says, is the capability both of receiving into one’s self this external writing of nature and of imagining and substantiating the inward writing in the outward. This art of thinking inwardly and organizing outwardly in accordance with the same, and the capacity to reverse the process—an art possessed by the soul of man—Bruno places in the closest connection with the art of the nature of the universe, with the energy of the absolute World-principle, by means of which all is formed and fashioned. It is one form which develops; it is the same world-principle which causes form in metals, plants and animals, and which in man thinks and organizes outside himself, only that it expresses itself in its operations in an endlessly varied manner throughout the entire world. Inwardly and outwardly there is consequently one and the same development of one and the same principle.[90]

In his Ars Lulliana Bruno made the attempt to determine and systematize these various writings of the soul, by means of which also the organizing world-principle reveals itself. He assumes therein twelve principal kinds of writing, or classes of natural forms, to form a starting-point: “Species, Formæ, Simulacra, Imagines, Spectra, Exemplaria, Indicia, Signa, Notæ, Characteres et Sigilli. Some kinds of writing are connected with the external sense, like external forms, pictures and ideals (extrinseca forma, imago, exemplar); these painting and other plastic arts represent, by imitating Mother Nature. Some are connected with the inner sense, where—with regard to mass, duration, number—they are magnified, extended in time and multiplied; such are the products of fancy. Some are connected with a common point of similarity in several things; some are so divergent from the objective nature of things that they are quite imaginary. Finally, some appear to be peculiar to art, as signa, notæ, characteres et sigilli; by means of these the powers of art are so great that it seems to be able to act independently of Nature, beyond Nature, and, when the matter in question involves it, even against Nature.”[91]

So far all, on the whole, goes well; it is the carrying out of the same scheme in all directions. All respect is due to this attempt to represent the logical system of the inward artist, the producing thought, in such a way that the forms of external Nature correspond thereto. But while the system of Bruno is otherwise a grand one, in it the determinations of thought nevertheless at once become superficial, or mere dead types, as in later times was the case with the classification of natural philosophy; for Bruno merely enumerates the moments and contrasts of the system, just as the natural philosophers developed the three-fold character in every sphere, regarded as absolute. Further or more determinate moments Bruno has done nothing more than collect together; when he tries to represent them by figures and classifications, the result is confusion. The twelve forms laid down as basis neither have their derivation traced nor are they united in one entire system, nor is the further multiplication deduced. To this part of his subject he devoted several of his writings (De sigillis), and in different works it is presented in different ways; the appearances of things are as letters, or symbols, which correspond with thoughts. The idea is on the whole praiseworthy compared with the fragmentariness of Aristotle and the Scholastics, according to whom every determination is fixed once for all. But the carrying out of the idea is in part allied with the Pythagorean numbers, and consequently unmethodical and arbitrary; and in part we find metaphorical, allegorical combinations and couplings, where we cannot follow Bruno; in this attempt to introduce order, all things are mingled together in the wildest disorder.

It is a great beginning, to have the thought of unity; and the other point is this attempt to grasp the universe in its development, in the system of its determinations, and to show how the outward appearance is a symbol of ideas. These are the two aspects of Bruno’s teaching which had to be taken into consideration.

[4. Vanini.]

Julius Cæsar Vanini has also to be mentioned as belonging to this period; his first name was really Lucilius. He has many points of similarity with Bruno, and, like him, he suffered as a martyr on account of philosophy; for he shared Bruno’s fate, which was to be burned at the stake. He was born in 1586 at Taurozano in the province of Naples. He wandered from country to country; we find him in Geneva, and then in Lyons, whence he fled to England in order to save himself from the Inquisition. After two years he returned to Italy. In Genoa he taught Natural Philosophy on the system of Averroës, but did not bring himself into favour. In his travels he met with all manner of strange adventures, and engaged in many and various disputations on philosophy and theology. He became more and more an object of suspicion, and fled from Paris; he was summoned before the tribunal on a charge of impiety, not of heresy. Franconus, his accuser, stated on oath that Vanini had uttered blasphemies. Vanini protested that he had remained faithful to the Catholic Church, and to his belief in the Trinity; and in answer to the charge of atheism he took up a straw from the ground in the presence of his judges, and said that even this straw would convince him of the existence of God. But it was of no avail; in 1619 at Toulouse in France he was condemned to the stake, and before the carrying out of this sentence his tongue was torn out by the executioner. How the case was proved against him is not, however, clear; the proceedings seem to have been in great part due to personal enmity, and to the zeal for persecution which filled the clergy in Toulouse.[92]

Vanini derived his chief stimulus from the originality of Cardanus. In him we see reason and philosophy taking a direction hostile to theology, while Scholastic philosophy went hand in hand with theology, and theology was supposed to be confirmed thereby. Art developed in the Catholic Church, but free thought broke off from, and remained alien to it. In Bruno and Vanini the Church took her revenge for this; she renounced science, and took up a position of hostility to it.

Vanini’s philosophy does not go very far; he admires the living energy of Nature; his reasonings were not deep, but were more of the nature of fanciful ideas. He always chose the dialogue form; and it is not evident which of the opinions stated are his own. He wrote commentaries on Aristotle’s works on Physics. We have two other works by Vanini, which are very rare. The one is styled: Amphitheatrum æternæ providentiæ divino-magicum, christiano-physicum, nec non astrologo-catholicum, adversus veteres philosophos, Atheos, Epicureos, Peripateticos et Stoicos. Auctore Julio Cæsare Vanino, Lugd. 1615; in this he gives a very eloquent account of all these philosophies and their principles, but the manner in which he refutes them is rather feeble. The second work is entitled “On the Wonderful Secrets of Nature, the Queen and Goddess of Mortals” (De admirandis Naturæ, reginæ Deæque mortalium, arcanis libr. IV., Lutetiæ 1616); it was printed “with the approval of the Sorbonne,” which at first found in it nothing “which contradicted and was hostile to the Catholic Apostolic and Roman religion.” It contains scientific investigations into various matters belonging to physics and natural history, and is also in dialogue form, without definite indication being given as to which of the characters is made the mouthpiece of Vanini’s own opinions. What one finds is assurances from him that he would believe this or that doctrine if he had not received Christian teaching. Vanini’s tendency, however, was towards naturalism; he showed that it is Nature that is the Deity, that all things had a mechanical genesis. He therefore explained the whole universe in its connection by efficient causes alone, not by final causes; but the statement of this is made in such a way that the writer does not give it as his own conclusion.[93]

Thus Vanini placed reason in opposition to faith and church dogma, as had already been done by Pomponatius (supra, p. 111) and others. Yet all the time that they were proving by reason this or that dogma which is in direct contradiction to the Christian belief, they were declaring that they submitted their conviction to the Church—a course which was always adopted by Bayle afterwards in the reformed church. Another practice of these philosophers was to bring forward all sorts of arguments and theories contradictory of theological dogmas, as so many insoluble difficulties and contradictions brought about by reason, which were, however, by them submitted to faith. Thus, for instance, Bayle says in the article “Manichæans” found in his critical Dictionnaire—in which he touches on many philosophic conceptions—that the assertion of the existence of two principles cannot be disproved, but that we must submit herein to the Church. In this fashion all possible arguments were advanced against the Church. Vanini thus states objections against the Atonement, and brings forward arguments to prove that Nature is God. Now men were convinced that reason could not be contradictory of the Christian dogmas, and no faith was placed in the sincerity of a submission which consisted in giving up what one was convinced of by reason; therefore Galileo, because he defended the system of Copernicus, had to recant on his knees, and Vanini was burned at the stake. Both of them had in vain chosen the dialogue form for their writings.

Vanini certainly made one of the speakers in the Dialogues prove (De naturæ arcanis, p. 420) even “out of the text of the Bible, that the devil is mightier than God,” and that therefore God does not rule the world. Among his arguments are the following: It was against the will of God that Adam and Eve sinned, and thus brought the whole human race to ruin (ad interitum): Christ also was crucified by the powers of darkness. Moreover it is the will of God that all men should be saved. But of Catholics there are very few in comparison with the rest of the world, and the Jews often fell away from their faith; the Catholic religion extends only over Spain, France, Italy, Poland and a part of Germany. If there were to be deducted also the atheists, blasphemers, heretics, whoremongers, adulterers, and so on, there would be still fewer left. Consequently the devil is mightier than God. These are arguments of reason; they are not to be refuted; but he submitted himself to the faith. It is remarkable that no one believed this of him; the reason thereof being that it was impossible for him to be in earnest with the refutation of what he asserted to be rational. That the refutation was but weak and subjective does not justify anyone in doubting Vanini’s sincerity; for poor reasons may be convincing for the subject, just as the subject holds to his own rights in respect of objective matters. What lies at the bottom of the proceedings against Vanini is this, that when a man by means of his reason has come to perceive something which seems to him incontrovertible, he cannot but adhere to these definite perceptions, he cannot believe what is opposed to them. It is impossible to believe that faith is stronger in him than this power of perception.

The Church in this way fell into the strange contradiction of condemning Vanini, because he did not find her doctrines in accordance with reason, and yet submitted himself to them; she thus appeared to demand—a demand which she emphasized with the burning pile—not that her doctrines should be considered above reason, but in accordance with it, and that reason should have merely the formal function of explaining the content of theology, without adding anything of her own. This susceptibility of the Church is inconsistent, and entangled her in contradictions. For in earlier times she certainly admitted that reason could not grasp what was revealed, and that it was consequently a matter of little importance to refute and solve by reason the objections which reason itself brought forward. But as she now would not permit the contradiction of faith and reason to be taken seriously, but burned Vanini at the stake as an atheist for professing so to do, it was implied that the doctrine of the Church cannot contradict reason, while man has yet to submit reason to the Church.

There is kindled here the strife between so-called revelation and reason, in which the latter emerges independently, and the former is separated from it. Up to this time both were one, or the light of man was the light of God; man had not a light of his own, but his light was held to be the divine. The Scholastics had no knowledge having a content of its own beyond the content of religion; philosophy remained entirely formal. But now it came to have a content of its own, which was opposed to the content of religion; or reason felt at least that it had its own content, or was opposing the form of reasonableness to the immediate content of the other.

This opposition had a different meaning in former times from what it bears now-a-days; the earlier meaning is this, that faith is the doctrine of Christianity, which is given as truth, and by which as truth man has to remain. We have here faith in this content, and opposed to this stands conviction by means of reason. But now this faith is transferred into the thinking consciousness itself; it is a relation of self-consciousness itself to the facts which it finds within itself, not to the objective content of the doctrine. In respect to the earlier opposition a distinction must be drawn in the objective creed; the one part of it is the teaching of the Church as dogma, the teaching as to the nature of God, that He is Three in One; to this pertains the appearing of God in the world, in the flesh, the relation of man to this divine nature, His holiness and divinity. That is the part which has to do with the eternal verities, the part which is of absolute interest for men; this part is in its content essentially speculative, and can be object only for the speculative Notion. The other part, belief in which is also required, has reference to other external conceptions, which are connected with that content; to this pertains the whole extent of what belongs to history, in the Old and New Testament as well as in the Church. A belief in all this finite element may be demanded also. If a man, for instance, did not believe in ghosts, he would be taken for a free-thinker, an atheist: it would be just the same if a man did not believe that Adam in Paradise ate of the forbidden fruit. Both parts are placed upon the one level; but it tends to the destruction of Church and faith, when belief is demanded for these parts alike. It is to the external conceptions that attention has been chiefly directed by those who have been decried as opponents of Christianity and as atheists, down to the time of Voltaire. When external conceptions such as these are held to firmly, it is inevitable that contradictions should be pointed out.

[5. Petrus Ramus.]

Pierre de la Ramée was born in 1515 in Vermandois, where his father worked as a day-labourer. He early betook himself to Paris, in order to satisfy his desire for learning: he was, however, obliged on two occasions to leave it on account of the difficulty he experienced in procuring a subsistence, before he obtained employment as a servant at the Collége de Navarre. Here he found an opportunity of extending his knowledge; he occupied himself with the Aristotelian philosophy and with mathematics, and he distinguished himself in disputation by extraordinary oratorical and dialectical readiness. In a disputation for obtaining the degree of magister, he came publicly forward with a thesis that caused a great sensation: “All that Aristotle taught is not true;” and the honour fell to him. Having became magister, he attacked so bitterly and violently the Aristotelian logic and dialectic, that the government took notice of it. He was now accused of undermining by his anti-Aristotelian opinions the foundations of religion and science; this accusation was brought before the parliament of Paris by the enemies of Ramus, as a criminal case. But because the parliament appeared disposed to act in a judicial way, and seemed favourably inclined to Ramus, the complaint was withdrawn, and brought before the council of the king. The latter decided that Ramus should hold a disputation with his opponent Goveanus before a special commission of five judges, two of whom Goveanus was to choose, and two Ramus, while the king was to appoint the president; these judges were to lay their opinion of the result before the king. The interest of the public was intense, but the contest was conducted in the most pedantic way. On the first day Ramus maintained that the Aristotelian logic and dialectic were imperfect and faulty, because the Organon did not begin with a definition. The commission decided that a disputation or a dissertation requires indeed a definition, but in dialectic it is not necessary. On the second day Ramus criticized the Aristotelian logic for its want of arrangement; this, he asserted, is essential. The majority of the judges, consisting of the commissioner of the king and the two nominees of the opponent Goveanus, now wished to annul the investigation as far as it had gone, and to set to work in another way, since the assertions of Ramus put them in a difficulty. He appealed to the king, who, however, refused to hear him, and decided that the decision of the judges should be considered final. Ramus was hence condemned, but the other two took no share in the matter, and, indeed, resigned. The decision was publicly placarded in all the streets of Paris, and sent to all the academies of learning throughout Europe. Plays aimed against Ramus were performed in the theatres, greatly to the delight of the Aristotelians. The public generally took a very lively interest in such disputes, and a number of contests of this kind had already taken place on similar questions of the schools. For example, the professors in a royal Collége disputed with the theologians of the Sorbonne whether quidam, quisquis, quoniam should be said or kidem, kiskis, koniam, and from this dispute a case before parliament arose, because the doctors took away his benefice from a theologian who said quisquis. Another hot and bitter controversy came before the magistrates as to whether ego amat was as correct as ego amo, and this dispute had to be suppressed by them. Finally Ramus obtained a public educational appointment, a professorship in Paris; but because he had become a Huguenot he had to vacate this office several times in the internal disquietude that prevailed; on one occasion he even went to travel in Germany. On St. Bartholomew’s Eve in 1572, Ramus finally fell, murdered through the instrumentality of his enemies; one of his colleagues who was among his bitterest enemies, Charpentier, had engaged assassins for the purpose, by whom Ramus was frightfully maltreated, and then thrown down from an upper window.[94]

Ramus aroused great interest, more especially by his attacks on the Aristotelian dialectic as it had hitherto existed, and he contributed very greatly to the simplification of the formal nature of the rules of dialectic. He is specially famed for his extreme hostility to the scholastic logic, and for having set up in opposition to it a logic of Ramus—an opposition which has spread so far that even in the history of literature in Germany we find various factions of Ramists and anti-Ramists and semi-Ramists mentioned.

There are many other remarkable men who come within this period and who are usually mentioned in the history of Philosophy, such as Michael of Montaigne, Charron, Macchiavelli, etc. The popular writings of the first two contain pleasing, refined and spiritual thoughts on human life, social relationships, the right and good. The efforts of such men are counted as philosophy in as far as they have drawn from their consciousness, from the sphere of human experience, from observation, from what takes place in the world and in the heart. It is in a philosophy of life that they have comprehended and imparted such experiences; they are thus both entertaining and instructive. In accordance with the principle on which they worked, they entirely forsook the sources from which Scholastic knowledge had up to this time been derived, and also the methods hitherto prevalent of acquiring it. But because they do not make the question of highest interest to Philosophy the object of their investigation, and do not reason from thought, they do not properly belong to the history of Philosophy, but to general culture and to the healthy human understanding. They have contributed to man’s taking a greater interest in his own affairs, to his obtaining confidence in himself; and this is their main service. Man has looked within his heart again and given to it its proper value; then he has restored to his own heart and understanding, to his faith, the essence of the relationship of the individual to absolute existence. Although still a divided heart, this division, this yearning, has become a disunion within itself; and man feels this disunion within himself, and along with that his rest in himself. But here we must notice a transition, with which we are concerned, on account of the universal principle which in it is known in a higher way and in its true authority.

[C. The Reformation.]

It was in the Lutheran Reformation that the great revolution appeared, as, after the eternal conflicts and the terrible discipline which the stiff-necked Germanic character had undergone and which it had to undergo, mind came to the consciousness of reconciliation with itself, a reconciliation whose form required that it should be brought about within the mind. From the Beyond man was thus called into the presence of spirit, as earth and her bodily objects, human virtues and morality, the individual heart and conscience, began to have some value to him. In the church, if marriage was not held to be immoral, self-restraint and celibacy were considered higher, but now marriage came to be looked on as a divine institution. Then poverty was esteemed better than possession, and to live on alms was considered higher than to support oneself honestly by the work of one’s hands; now, however, it becomes known that poverty is not the most moral life, for this last consists in living by one’s work and taking pleasure in the fruits thereof. The blind obedience by which human freedom was suppressed, was the third vow taken by the monks, as against which freedom, like marriage and property, was now also recognized as divine. Similarly on the side of knowledge man turned back into himself from the Beyond of authority; and reason was recognized as the absolutely universal, and hence as divine. Now it was perceived that it is in the mind of man that religion must have its place, and the whole process of salvation be gone through—that man’s salvation is his own affair, and that by it he enters into relationship with his conscience and into immediate connection with God, requiring no mediation of priests having the so-called means of grace within their hands. There is indeed a mediation present still by means of doctrine, perception, the observation of self and of one’s actions; but that is a mediation without a separating wall, while formerly a brazen wall of division was present separating the laity from the church. It is thus the spirit of God that must dwell within the heart of man, and this indwelling spirit must operate in him.

Although Wycliffe, Huss, and Arnold of Brescia had started from scholastic philosophy with similar ends in view, they did not possess the character requisite to enable them modestly, and without any learned scholastic convictions, to set aside everything but mind and spirit. It was with Luther first of all that freedom of spirit began to exist in embryo, and its form indicated that it would remain in embryo. This beginning of the reconciliation of man with himself, whereby divinity is brought into man’s actuality, is thus, at first principle alone. The unfolding of this freedom and the self-reflecting grasp of the same was a subsequent step, in the same way as was the working out of the Christian doctrine in the Church in its time. The subjective thought and knowledge of man, which enables him, being satisfied in his activity, to have joy in his work and to consider his work as something both permissible and justifiable—this value accorded to subjectivity now required a higher confirmation, and the highest confirmation, in order to be made perfectly legitimate, and even to become absolute duty; and to be able to receive this confirmation it had to be taken in its purest form. The mere subjectivity of man, the fact that he has a will, and with it directs his actions this way or that, does not constitute any justification: for else the barbarous will, which fulfils itself in subjective ends alone, such as cannot subsist before reason, would be justified. If, further, self-will obtains the form of universality, if its ends are conformable to reason, and it is apprehended as the freedom of mankind, as legal right which likewise belongs to others, there is therein only indeed the element of permission, but still there is much in the end being recognized as permitted, and not as absolutely sinful. Art and industry receive through this principle new activity, since now their activity is justified. But we always find the principle of personal spirituality and independence at first limited to particular spheres of objects merely, in accordance with its content. Not until this principle is known and recognized in relation to the absolutely existent object, i.e. in relation to God, and is likewise grasped in its perfect purity, free from desires and finite ends, does it receive its highest confirmation, and that is its sanctification through religion.

This, then, is the Lutheran faith, in accordance with which man stands in a relation to God which involves his personal existence: that is, his piety and the hope of his salvation and the like all demand that his heart, his subjectivity, should be present in them. His feelings, his faith, the inmost certainty of himself, in short, all that belongs to him is laid claim to, and this alone can truly come under consideration: man must himself repent from his heart and experience contrition; his own heart must be filled with the Holy Ghost. Thus here the principle of subjectivity, of pure relation to me personally, i.e. freedom, is recognized, and not merely so, but it is clearly demanded that in religious worship this alone should be considered. The highest confirmation of the principle is that it alone has value in the eyes of God, that faith and the subjection of the individual heart are alone essential: in this way this principle of Christian freedom is first presented and brought to a true consciousness. Thereby a place has been set apart in the depths of man’s inmost nature, in which alone he is at home with himself and at home with God; and with God alone is he really himself, in the conscience he can be said to be at home with himself. This sense of being at home should not be capable of being destroyed through others; no one should presume to have a place therein. All externality in relation to me is thereby banished, just as is the externality of the Host; it is only in communion and faith that I stand in relation to God. The distinction between the laity and the priests is by it removed; there are no longer any laymen, for in religion each by himself is enjoined to know personally what it is. Responsibility is not to be avoided; good works without spiritual reality in them are no longer of avail; there must be the heart which relates itself directly to God without mediation, without the Virgin, and without the Saints.

This is the great principle—that all externality disappears in the point of the absolute relation to God; along with this externality, this estrangement of self, all servitude has also disappeared. With it is connected our ceasing to tolerate prayer in foreign tongues, or to study the sciences in such. In speech man is productive; it is the first externality that he gives himself, the simplest form of existence which he reaches in consciousness. What man represents to himself, he inwardly places before himself as spoken. This first form is broken up and rendered foreign if man is in an alien tongue to express or conceive to himself what concerns his highest interest. This breach with the first entrance into consciousness is accordingly removed; to have one’s own right to speak and think in one’s own language really belongs to liberty. This is of infinite importance, and without this form of being-at-home-with-self subjective freedom could not have existed; Luther could not have accomplished his Reformation without translating the Bible into German. Now the principle of subjectivity has thus become a moment in religion itself, and in this way it has received its absolute recognition, and has been grasped as a whole in the form in which it can only be a moment in religion. The injunction to worship God in spirit is now fulfilled. Spirit, however, is merely conditioned by the free spirituality of the subject. For it is this alone which can be related to spirit; a subject who is not free does not stand in an attitude of spirituality, does not worship God in spirit. This is the general signification of the principle.

Now this principle was at first grasped in relation to religious objects only, and thereby it has indeed received its absolute justification, but still it has not been extended to the further development of the subjective principle itself. Yet in so far as man has come to the consciousness of being reconciled to himself, and of only being able to reconcile himself in his personal existence, he has in his actuality likewise attained another form. The otherwise hearty and vigorous man may also, in as far as he enjoys, do so with a good conscience; the enjoyment of life for its own sake is no longer regarded as something which is to be given up, for monkish renunciation is renounced. But to any other content the principle did not at first extend. Yet further, the religious content has more specially been apprehended as concrete, as it is for the recollection, and into this spiritual freedom the beginning and the possibility of an unspiritual mode of regarding things has thus entered. The content of the Credo, speculative as it is in itself, has, that is to say, an historical side. Within this barren form the old faith of the church has been admitted and allowed to exist, so that in this form it has to be regarded by the subject as the highest truth. The result then follows that all development of the dogmatic content in a speculative manner is quite set aside. What was required is man’s inward assurance of his deliverance, of his salvation—the relation of the subjective spirit to the absolute, the form of subjectivity as aspiration, repentance, conversion. This new principle has been laid down as paramount, so that the content of truth is clearly of importance; but the teaching respecting the nature and the process of God is grasped in the form in which it at first appears for the ordinary conception. Not only have all this finality, externality, unspirituality, this formalism of scholastic philosophy, been on the one hand discarded, and with justice, but, on the other, the philosophic development of the doctrines of the church has been also set aside, and this is done in connection with the very fact that the subject is immersed in his own heart. This immersion, his penitence, contrition, conversion, this occupation of the subject with himself, has become the moment of first importance; but the subject has not immersed himself in the content, and the earlier immersion of spirit therein has also been rejected. Even to this present day we shall find in the Catholic Church and in her dogmas the echoes, and so to speak the heritage of the philosophy of the Alexandrian school; in it there is much more that is philosophic and speculative than in the dogmatism of Protestantism, even if there is still in this an objective element, and if it has not been made perfectly barren, as though the content were really retained only in the form of history. The connection of Philosophy with the theology of the Middle Ages has thus in the Catholic Church been retained in its essentials; in Protestantism, on the contrary, the subjective religious principle has been separated from Philosophy, and it is only in Philosophy that it has arisen in its true form again. In this principle the religious content of the Christian Church is thus retained, and it obtains its confirmation through the testimony of spirit that this content shall only hold good for me in as far as it makes its influence felt in my conscience and heart. This is the meaning of the words: “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God.” The criterion of truth is how it is confirmed in my heart; the fact that I judge and know rightly—or that what I hold to be true is the truth—must be revealed to my heart. Truth is what it is in my mind; and, on the other hand, my spirit is only then in its proper attitude to truth when truth is within it, when the spirit and its content are related thus. One cannot be isolated from the other. The content has not thus the confirmation in itself which was given to it by philosophical theology in the fact that the speculative Idea made itself therein effectual; neither has it the historic confirmation which is given to a content in so far as it has an outward and historic side in which historic witnesses are heard in evidence, and in which its correctness is determined by their testimony. The doctrine has to prove itself by the condition of my heart, by penitence, conversion and joy in God. In doctrine we begin with the external content, and thus it is external only; but taken thus, independently of the state of my mind, it properly speaking has no significance. Now this beginning is, as Christian baptism and education, a working upon the nature in addition to an acquaintance with externals. The truth of the gospel and of Christian doctrines only, however, exists in true relation to the same; it is really so to speak a use of the content to make it educative. And this is just what has been said, that the nature is reconstructed and sanctified in itself, and it is this sanctification for which the content is a true one. No further use can be made of the content than to build up and edify the mind, and awaken it to assurance, joy, penitence, conversion. Another and wrong relation to the content is to take it in an external way, e.g. according to the great new principle of exegesis, and to treat the writings of the New Testament like those of a Greek, Latin or other author, critically, philologically, historically. Spirit is alone in true relation to spirit; and it is a wrong beginning of a wooden and unyielding exegesis to prove in such an external and philological way the truth of the Christian religion. This has been done by orthodoxy, which thereby renders the content devoid of spirituality. This, then, is the first relation of spirit to this content; here the content is indeed essential, but it is as essential that the holy and sanctifying spirit should bear a relation to it.

This spirit is, however, in the second place really thinking spirit likewise. Thought as such must also develop itself therein, and that really as this form of inmost unity of spirit with itself; thought must come to the distinction and contemplation of this content, and pass over into this form of the purest unity of spirit with itself. At first thought, however, reveals itself as abstract thought alone, and it possesses as such a relation to theology and religion. The content which is here in question, even in so far as it is historic merely and externally accepted, must yet be religious; the unfolding of the nature of God must be present therein. In this we have the further demand that the thought for which the inward nature of God is, should also set itself in relation to this content. But inasmuch as thought is at first understanding and the metaphysic of the understanding, it will remove from the content the rational Idea and make it so empty that only external history remains, which is devoid of interest.

The third position arrived at is that of concrete speculative thought. According to the standpoint which has just been given, and as religious feeling and its form are here determined, all speculative content as such, as well as its developments, are at first rejected. And as for the enrichment of the Christian conceptions through the treasures of the philosophy of the ancient world, and through the profound ideas of all earlier oriental religions, and the like,—all this is set aside. The content had objectivity; but this merely signified that the objective content, without subsisting for itself, was to constitute the beginning only, on which the mind had spiritually to build up and sanctify itself. All the enrichment of the content whereby it became philosophic, is thus abandoned, and what follows later simply is that the mind, as thinking, again immerses itself in itself, in order to be concrete and rational. What forms the basis of the Reformation is the abstract moment of a mind being within self, of freedom, of coming to self; freedom signifies the life of the spirit in being turned back within itself in the particular content which appears as another; while spirit is not free if it allows this other-being, either unassimilated or dead, to exist in it as something foreign. In as far as spirit now goes on to knowledge, to spiritual determinations, and as it looks around and comes forth as a content, so far will it conduct itself therein as in its own domain, as in its concrete world, so to speak—and it will there really assert and possess its own. This concrete form of knowledge which, however, in the beginning remains but dim, we have now to consider, and it forms the third period of our treatise, into which we properly step with the Reformation, although Bruno, Vanini and Ramus, who lived later, still belong to the Middle Ages.