is lacking in Wolff's thinking, he is remarkable for his power of
systematization, his persevering diligence, and his logical earnestness,
so that the praise bestowed on him by Kant, that he was the author of the
spirit of thoroughness in Germany, was well deserved.
He, too, finds
the end of philosophy in the enlightenment of the understanding, the
improvement of the heart, and, ultimately, in the promotion of the
happiness of mankind. But while Thomasius demanded as a condition of such
universal intelligibility and usefulness that, discarding the scholastic
garb, philosophy should appear in the form of easy ratiocination, Wolff, on
the other hand, regards methodical procedure and certainty in results as
indispensable to its usefulness, and, in order to this certainty,
insists on distinctness of conception and cogency of proof. He demands
a _philosophia et certa et utilis_. If, finally, his methodical
deliberateness, especially in his later works, leads him into wearisome
diffuseness, this pedantry is made good by his genuinely German, honest
spirit, which manifests itself agreeably in his judgment on practical
questions.
[Footnote 1: _Reasonable Thoughts on the Powers of the Human
Understanding_, 1712; _Reasonable Thoughts on God, the World, and the
Soul of Man, also on All Things in General_, 1719
(_Notes_ to this 1724);
_Reasonable Thoughts on the Conduct of Man_, 1720; _Reasonable Thoughts on
the Social Life of Man_, 1721; _Reasonable Thoughts on the Operations of
Nature_, 1723; _Reasonable Thoughts on the Purposes of Natural Things_,
1724; _Reasonable Thoughts on the Parts of Man, Animals, and Plants_, 1725,
all in German. Besides these there are extensive Latin treatises (1728-53)
on Logic, Ontology, Cosmology, Empirical and Rational Psychology, Natural
Theology, and all branches of Practical Philosophy.
Detailed extracts may
be found in Erdmann's _Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Darstellung_, ii.
2. The best account of the Wolffian philosophy has been given by Zeller
(pp. 211-273).]
[Footnote 2: Eucken, _Geschichte der Terminologie_^ pp.
133-134.]
Wolff reaches his division of the sciences by combining the two
psychological antitheses--the higher (rational) and lower (sensuous)
faculties of cognition and appetition. On the first is based the
distinction between the rational and the empirical or historical method of
treatment. The latter concerns itself with the actual, the former with the
possible and necessary, or the grounds of the actual; the one observes and
describes, the other deduces. The antithesis of cognition and appetition
gives the basis for the division into theoretical and practical philosophy.
The former, called metaphysics, is divided into a general part, which
treats of being in general whether it be of a corporeal or a spiritual
nature, and three special parts, according to their principal subjects, the
world, the soul, and God,--hence into ontology, cosmology, psychology, and
theology. The science which establishes rules for action and regards man as
an individual being, as a citizen, and as the head or member of a family,
is divided (after Aristotle) into ethics, politics, and economics, which
are preceded by practical philosophy in general, and by natural law. The
introduction to the two principal parts is furnished by formal logic.
Philosophy is the science of the possible, _i.e._, of that which contains
no contradiction; it is science from concepts, its principle, the law of
identity, its form, demonstration, and its instrument, analysis, which in
the predicate explicates the determinations contained in the concept of the
subject. In order to confirm that which has been deduced from pure concepts
by the facts of experience, _psychologia rationalis_ is supplemented by
_psychologia empirica_, rational cosmology by empirical physics, and
speculative theology by an experimental doctrine of God (teleology). Wolff
gives no explanation how it comes about that the deliverances of the
reason agree so beautifully with the facts of experience; in his naïve,
unquestioning belief in the infallibility of the reason he is a typical
dogmatist.
A closer examination of the Wolffian philosophy seems unnecessary, since
its most essential portions have already been discussed under Leibnitz and
since it will be necessary to recur to certain points in our chapter on
Kant. Therefore, referring the reader to the detailed accounts in Erdmann
and Zeller, we shall only note that Wolff's ethics opposes the principle
of perfection to the English principle of happiness (that is good which
perfects man's condition, and this is life in conformity with nature or
reason, with which happiness is necessarily connected); that he makes the
will determined by the understanding, and assigns ignorance as the cause of
sin; that his philosophy of religion, which argues for a natural religion
in addition to revealed religion (experiential and rational proofs for the
existence of God, and a deduction of his attributes), and sets up certain
tests for the genuineness of revelation, favors a rationalism which was
flexible enough to allow his pupils either to take part in orthodox
movements or to advance to a deism hostile to the Church.
Among the followers of Wolff, Alexander Baumgarten (1714-62) deserves
the first place, as the founder of German aesthetics _(Aesthetica_, 1750
_seq_.). He perceives a gap in the system of the philosophical sciences.
This contains in ethics a guide to right volition, and in logic a guide
to correct thinking, but there are no directions for correct feeling, no
aesthetic. The beautiful would form the subject of this discipline. For the
perfection (the harmonious unity of a manifold, which is pleasant to the
spectator), which manifests itself to the will as the good and to the
clear thinking of the understanding as the true, appears--according to
Leibnitz--to confused sensuous perception as beauty.
From this on the name
aesthetics was established for the theory of the beautiful, though in
Kant's great work it is used in its literal meaning as the doctrine of
sense, of the faculty of sensations or intuitions.
Baumgarten's pupils
and followers, the aesthetic writer G.F. Meier at Halle, Baumeister, and
others, contributed like himself to the dissemination of the Wolffian
system by their manuals on different branches of philosophy. To this school
belong also the following: Thümmig (_Institutiones Philosophia Wolfianae_,
1725-26); the theologian Siegmund Baumgarten at Halle, the elder brother
of the aesthete; the mathematician Martin Knutzen, Kant's teacher;[1] the
literary historian Gottsched [2] at Leipsic; and G.
Ploucquet, who in
his _Methodus Calculandi in Logicis_, with a _Commentatio de Arte
Characteristica Universali_ appended to his _Principia de Substantiis et
Phaenomenis_, 1753, took up again Leibnitz's cherished plan for a logical
calculus and a universal symbolic language. The psychologist Kasimir von
Creuz (_Essay on the Soul_, in two parts, 1753-54), and J.H. Lambert,[3]
whom Kant deemed worthy of a detailed correspondence, take up a more
independent position, both demanding that the Wolffian rationalism be
supplemented by the empiricism of Locke, and the latter, moreover, in
anticipation of the Critique of Reason, pointing very definitely to the
distinction between content and form as the salient point in the theory of
knowledge.
[Footnote 1: Benno Erdmann, _M. Knutzen und seine Zeit_, 1876.]
[Footnote 2: Th. W. Danzel, _Gottsched und seine Zeit_, 1848.]
[Footnote 3: Lambert: _Cosmological Letters_, 1761; _New Organon_, 1764;
_Groundwork of Architectonics_, 1771. Bernoulli edited some of Lambert's
papers and his correspondence.]
Among the opponents of the Wolffian philosophy, all of whom favor
eclecticism, A. Rüdiger[1] and Chr. Aug. Crusius,[2] who was influenced by
Rüdiger, and, like him, a professor at Leipsic, are the most important.
Rüdiger divides philosophy according to its objects,
"wisdom, justice,
prudence," into three parts--the science of nature (which must avoid
one-sided mechanical views, and employ ether, air, and spirit as principles
of explanation); the science of duty (which, as metaphysics, treats of
duties toward God, as natural law, of duties to our neighbor, and deduces
both from the primary duty of obedience to the will of God); and the
science of the good (in which Rüdiger follows the treatise of the Spaniard,
Gracian, on practical wisdom). Crusius agrees with Rüdiger that mathematics
is the science of the possible, and philosophy the science of the actual,
and that the latter, instead of imitating to its own disadvantage the
deductive-analytical method of geometry, must, with the aid of experience
and with attention to the probability of its conclusions, rise to the
highest principles synthetically. Besides its deduction the determinism
of the Wolffian philosophy gave offense, for it was believed to endanger
morals, justice, and religion. The will, the special fundamental power of
the soul (consisting of the impulses to perfection, love, and knowledge),
is far from being determined by ideas; it is rather they which depend on
the will. The application of the principle of sufficient reason, which is
wrongly held to admit of no exception, must be restricted in favor of
freedom. For the rest, we may note concerning Crusius that he derives the
principle of sufficient reason (everything which is now, and before was
not, has a cause) and the principle of contingency from the principles of
contradiction, inseparability, and incompatibility, and these latter from
the principle of conceivability; that he rejects the ontological argument,
and makes the ground of obligation in morality consist in obedience toward
God, and its content in perfection. Among the other opponents of the
Wolffian philosophy, we may mention the theologian Budde(us)[3]
_(Institutiones Philosophiae Eclecticae_, 1705); Darjes (who taught in Jena
and Frankfort-on-the-Oder; _The Way to Truth_, 1755); and Crousaz (1744).
[Footnote 1: Rüdiger: _Disputatio de eo quod Omnes Idea Oriantur a
Sensione_, 1704; _Philosophia Synthetica_, 1707; _Physica Divina_, 1716;
_Philosophia Pragmatica_, 1723.]
[Footnote 2: Crusius: _De Usu et Limitibus Principii Rationis_, 1743;
_Directions how to Live a Rational Life_ (theory of the will and of
ethics), 1744; _A Sketch of the Necessary Truths of Reason_, 1745; _Way to
the Certainty and Trustworthiness of Human Knowledge_, 1747.]
[Footnote 3: J.J. Brucker _(Historia Critica Philosophiae_, 5 vols.,
1742-44; 2d ed., 6 vols., 1766-67) was a pupil of Budde.]
%3. The Illumination as Scientific and as Popular Philosophy.%
After a demand for the union of Leibnitz and Locke, of rationalism and
empiricism, had been raised within the Wolffian school itself, and still
more directly in the camp of its opponents, under the increasing influence
of the empirical philosophy of England,[1] eclecticism in the spirit of
Thomasius took full possession of the stage in the Illumination period.
There was the less hesitation in combining principles derived from entirely
different postulates without regard to their systematic connection, as
the interest in scholastic investigation gave place more and more to the
interest in practical and reassuring results.
Metaphysics, noëtics, and
natural philosophy were laid aside as useless subtleties, and, as in the
period succeeding Aristotle, man as an individual and whatever directly
relates to his welfare--the constitution of his inner nature, his duties,
the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God--
became the exclusive
subjects of reflection. The fact that, besides ethics and religion,
psychology was chosen as a favorite field, is in complete harmony with the
general temper of an age for which self-observation and the enjoyment of
tender and elevated feelings in long, delightfully friendly letters and
sentimental diaries had become a favorite habit. Hand in hand with this
narrowing of the content of philosophy went a change in the form of
presentation. As thinkers now addressed themselves to all cultivated
people, intelligibility and agreeableness were made the prime requisites;
the style became light and flowing, the method of treatment facile and
often superficial. This is true not only of the popular philosophers
proper--who, as Windelband pertinently remarks (vol. i.
p. 563), did not
seek after the truth, but believed that they already possessed it, and
desired only to disseminate it; who did not aim at the promotion of
investigation, but the instruction of the public--but to a certain extent,
also, of those who were conscious of laboring in the service of science.
Among the representatives of the more polite tendency belong, Moses
Mendelssohn[2] (1729-86); Thomas Abbt (_On Death for the Fatherland_, 1761;
_On Merit_, 1765); J.J. Engel (_The philosopher for the World_, 1775); G.S.
Steinbart (_The Christian Doctrine of Happiness_, 1778); Ernst Platner
(_Philosophical Aphorisms_, 1776, 1782; on Platner cf.
M. Heinze, 1880);
G.C. Lichtenberg (died 1799; _Miscellaneous Writings_, 1800 _seq_.; a
selection is given in _Reclam's Bibliothek_); Christian Garve (died 1798;
_Essays_, 1792 _seq.; Translations from the Ethical Works of Aristotle,
Cicero, and Ferguson_); and Friedrich Nicolai[3] (died 1811). Eberhard,
Feder, and Meiners will be mentioned later among the opponents of the
Kantian philosophy.
[Footnote 1: The influence of the English philosophers on the German
philosophy of the eighteenth century is discussed by Gustav Zart, 1881.]
[Footnote 2: Mendelssohn: _Letters on the Sensations_, 1755; _On Evidence
in the Metaphysical Sciences_, a prize essay crowned by the Academy, 1764;
_Phaedo, or on Immortality_, 1767; _Jerusalem_, 1783; _Morning Hours, or on
the Existence of God_, 1785; _To the Friends of Lessing_
(against Jacobi),
1786; _Works_, 1843-44. Cf. on Mendelssohn, Kayserling, 1856, 1862, 1883.]
[Footnote 3: Nicolai: _Library of Belles Lettres_, from 1757; _Letters on
the Most Recent German Literature_, from 1759; _Universal German Library_,
from 1765; _New Universal German Library_, 1793-1805.]
Among the psychologists J.N. Tetens, whose _Philosophical Essays on Human
Nature_, 1776-77, show a remarkable similarity to the views of Kant,[1]
takes the first rank. The two thinkers evidently influenced each other. The
three fold division of the activities of the soul,
"knowing, feeling,
and willing," which has now become popular and which appears to us
self-evident, is to be referred to Tetens, from whom Kant took it; in
opposition to the twofold division of Aristotle and Wolff into "cognition
and appetition," he established the equal rights of the faculty of
feeling--which had previously been defended by Sulzer (1751), the aesthetic
writer, and by Mendelssohn (1755, 1763, 1785). Besides Tetens, the
following should be mentioned among the psychologists: Tetens's opponent,
Johann Lossius (1775), an adherent of Bonnet; D.
Tiedemann (_Inquiries
concerning Man_, from 1777), who was estimable also as a historian of
philosophy (_Spirit of Speculative Philosophy_, 1791-97); Von Irwing
(1772 _seq_.; 2d ed., 1777); and K. Ph. Moriz (_Magazin zur
Erfahrungsseelenlehre_, from 1785). Basedow (died 1790), Campe (died 1818),
and J.H. Pestalozzi (1745-1827) did valuable work in pedagogics.
[Footnote 1: Sensation gives the content, and the understanding
spontaneously produces the form, of knowledge. The only objectivity of
knowledge which we can attain consists in the subjective necessity of the
forms of thought or the ideas of relation. Perception enables us to cognize
phenomena only, not the true essence of things and of ourselves, etc.]
One of the clearest and most acute minds among the philosophers of the
Illumination was the deist Hermann Samuel Reimarus[1]
(1694-1768), from
1728 professor in Hamburg. He attacks atheism, in whatever form it may
present itself, with as much zeal and conviction as he shows in breaking
down the belief in revelation by his inexorable criticism (in his
_Defense_, communicated in manuscript to a few friends only). He obtains
his weapons for this double battle from the Wolffian philosophy. The
existence of an extramundane deity is proved by the purposive arrangement
of the world, especially of organisms, which aims at the good--not merely
of man, as the majority of the physico-theologists have believed, but--of
all living creatures. To believe in a special revelation, _i.e._, a
miracle, in addition to such a revelation of God as this, which is granted
to all men, and is alone necessary to salvation, is to deny the perfection
of God, and to do violence to the immutability of his providence. To these
general considerations against the credibility of positive revelation
are to be added, as special arguments against the Jewish and Christian
revelations, the untrustworthiness of human testimony in general, the
contradictions in the biblical writings, the uncertainty of their meaning,
and the moral character of the persons regarded as messengers of God, whose
teachings, precepts, and deeds in no wise correspond to their high mission.
Jewish history is a "tissue of sheer follies, shameful deeds, deceptions,
and cruelties, the chief motives of which were self-interest and lust for
power." The New Testament is also the work of man; all talk of divine
inspiration, an idle delusion, the resurrection of Christ, a fabrication of
the disciples; and the Protestant system, with its dogmas of the Trinity,
the fall of man, original sin, the incarnation, vicarious atonement, and
eternal punishment, contrary to reason. The advance of Reimarus beyond
Wolff consists in the consistent application of the criteria for the divine
character of revelation, which Wolff had set up without making a positive,
not to speak of a negative, use of them. His weakness[2]
consists in the
fact that, on the one hand, he contented himself with a rationalistic
interpretation of the biblical narratives, instead of pushing on--as Semler
did after him at Halle (1725-91)--to a historical criticism of the sources,
and, on the other, held fast to the alternative common to all the deists,
"Either divine or human, either an actual event or a fabrication," without
any suspicion of that great intermediate region of religious myth, of the
involuntary and pregnant inventions of the popular fancy.
[Footnote 1: H.S. Reimarus: _Discussions on the Chief Truths of Natural
Religion_, 1754; _General Consideration of the Instincts of Animals_, 1762;
_Apology or Defense for the Rational Worshipers of God_.
Fragments of the
last of these works, which was kept secret during its author's life, were
published by Lessing (the well-known "Wolffenbüttel Fragments," from
1774). A detailed table of contents is to be found in _Reimarus und seine
Schutzschrift_, 1862, by D. Fr. Strauss, included in the fifth volume of
his _Gesammelte Schriften_.]
[Footnote 2: Cf. O. Pfleiderer, _Philosophy of Religion_, vol. i. p. 102,
p. 106 _seq_.]
The philosophico-religious standpoint of G.E. Lessing (1729-81), in whom
the Illumination reached its best fruitage, was less one-sided. Apart from
the important aesthetic impulses which flowed from the _Laocoon_ (1766) and
the _Hamburg Dramaturgy_ (1767-69), his philosophical significance rests
on two ideas, which have had important consequences for the religious
conceptions of the nineteenth century: the speculative interpretation of
certain dogmas (the Trinity, etc.), and the application of the Leibnitzian
idea of development to the history of the positive religions. By both of
these he prepared the way for Hegel. In regard to his relation to his
predecessors, Lessing sought to mediate between the pantheism of Spinoza
and the individualism of Leibnitz; and in his comprehension of the latter
showed himself far superior to the Wolffians. He can be called a Spinozist
only by those who, like Jacobi, have this title ready for everyone
who expresses himself against a transcendent, personal God, and the
unconditional freedom of the will. Moreover, in view of his critical and
dialectical, rather than systematic, method of thinking, we must guard
against laying too great stress on isolated statements by him.[1]
[Footnote 1: A caution which Gideon Spicker (_Lessings Weltanschauung_,
1883) counsels us not to forget, even in view of the oft cited avowal of
determinism, "I thank God that I must, and that I must the best." Among the
numerous treatises on Lessing we may note those by G.E.
Schwarz (1854), and
Zeller (in Sybel's _Historische Zeitschrift_, 1870, incorporated in the
second collection of Zeller's _Vorträge und Abhandlungen_, 1877); and on
his theological position, that of K. Fischer on Lessing's _Nathan der
Weise_, 1864, as well as J.H. Witte's _Philosophie unserer Dichterheroen_,
vol. i. _(Lessing and Herder_), 1880. [Cf. in English, Sime, 2 vols., 1877,
and _Encyclopedia Britannica_, vol. xiv. pp, 478-482.--
TR.]]
Lessing conceives the Deity as the supreme, all-comprehensive, living
unity, which excludes neither a certain kind of plurality nor even a
certain kind of change; without life and action, without the experience of
changing states, the life of God would be miserably wearisome. Things are
not out of, but in him; nevertheless (as "contingent") they are distinct
from him. The Trinity must be understood in the sense of immanent
distinctions. God has conceived himself, or his perfections, in a twofold
manner: he conceived them as united and himself as their sum, and he
conceived them as single. Now God's thinking is creation, his ideas
actualities. By conceiving his perfections united he created his eternal
image, the Son of God; the bond between God representing and God
represented, between Father and Son, is the Holy Spirit.
But when he
conceived his perfections singly he created the world, in which these
manifest themselves divided among a continuous series of particular beings.
Every individual is an isolated divine perfection; the things in the world
are limited gods, all living, all with souls, and of a spiritual nature,
though in different degrees. Development is everywhere; at present the soul
has five senses, but very probably it once had less than five, and in
the future it will have more. At first the actions of men were guided by
obscure instinct; gradually the reason obtained influence over the will,
and one day will govern it completely through its clear and distinct
cognitions. Thus freedom is attained in the course of history--the rational
and virtuous man consciously obeys the divine order of the world, while he
who is unfree obeys unconsciously.
Lessing shares with the deistic Illumination the belief in a religion of
reason, whose basis and essential content are formed by morality; but he
rises far above this level in that he regards the religion of reason not
as the beginning but as the goal of the development, and the positive
religions as necessary transition stages in its attainment. As natural
religion differs in each individual according to his feelings and powers,
without positive enactments there would be no unity and community in