A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 16 – Robertson · Verses Across
Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 16German Freethought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (part 3)
18
Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 16
German Freethought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (part 3)
RobertsonEnglish
19. Meanwhile, the drift of the age of Aufklärung was apparent in the practically freethinking attitude of the two foremost men of letters in the new Germany--Goethe and Schiller. Of the former, despite the bluster of Carlyle, and despite the æsthetic favour shown to Christianity in Wilhelm Meister, no religious ingenuity can make more than a pantheist, who, insofar as he touched on Biblical questions, copied the half-grown rationalism of the school of Semler. "The great Pagan" was the common label among his orthodox or conformist contemporaries. As a boy, learning a little Hebrew, he was already at the critical point of view in regard to Biblical marvels, though he never became a scientific critic. He has told how, in his youth, when Lavater insisted that he must choose between orthodox Christianity and atheism, he answered that, if he were not free to be a Christian in his own way (wie ich es bisher gehegt hätte), he would as soon turn atheist as Christian, the more so as he saw that nobody knew very well what either signified. As he puts it, he had made a Christ and a Christianity of his own. His admired friend Fräulein von Klettenberg, the "Beautiful Soul" of one of his pieces, told him that he never satisfied her when he used the Christian terminology, which he never seemed to get right; and he tells how he gradually turned away from her religion, which he had for a time approached, in its Moravian aspect, with a too passionate zeal. In his letters to Lavater, he wrote quite explicitly that a voice from heaven would not make him believe in a virgin birth and a resurrection, such tales being for him rather blasphemies against the great God and his revelation in Nature. Thousands of pages of earlier and later writings, he declared, were for him as beautiful as the gospel. Nor did he ever yield to the Christian Church more than a Platonic amity; so that much of the peculiar hostility that was long felt for his poetry and was long shown to his memory in Germany is to be explained as an expression of the normal malice of pietism against unbelievers. Such utterances as the avowal that he revered Jesus as he revered the Sun, and the other to the effect that Christianity has nothing to do with philosophy, where Hegel sought to bring it--that it is simply a beneficent influence, and is not to be looked to for proof of immortality --are clearly not those of a believer. To-day belief is glad to claim Goethe as a friend in respect of his many concessions to it, as well as of his occasional flings at more consistent freethinkers. But a "great pagan" he remains for the student. In the opinion of later orthodoxy his "influence on religion was very pernicious." He indeed showed small concern for religious susceptibilities when he humorously wrote that from his youth up he believed himself to stand so well with his God as to fancy that he might even "have something to forgive Him."
One passage in Goethe's essay on the Pentateuch, appended to the West-Oestlicher Divan, is worth noting here as illustrating the ability of genius to cherish and propagate historical fallacies. It runs: "The peculiar, unique, and deepest theme of the history of the world and man, to which all others are subordinate, is always the conflict of belief and unbelief. All epochs in which belief rules, under whatever form, are illustrious, inspiriting, and fruitful for that time and the future. All epochs, on the other hand, in which unbelief, in whatever form, secures a miserable victory, even though for a moment they may flaunt it proudly, disappear for posterity, because no man willingly troubles himself with knowledge of the unfruitful" (first ed. pp. 424-25). Goethe goes on to speak of the four latter books of Moses as occupied with the theme of unbelief, and of the first as occupied with belief. Thus his formula was based, to begin with, on purely fabulous history, into the nature of which his poetic faculty gave him no true insight. (See his idyllic recast of the patriarchal history in Th. I, B. iv of the Wahrheit und Dichtung.) Applied to real history, his formula has no validity save on a definition which implies either an equivoque or an argument in a circle. If it refer, in the natural sense, to epochs in which any given religion is widely rejected and assailed, it is palpably false. The Renaissance and Goethe's own century were ages of such unbelief; and they remain much more deeply interesting than the Ages of Faith. St. Peter's at Rome is the work of a reputedly unbelieving pope. If on the other hand his formula be meant to apply to belief in the sense of energy and enthusiasm, it is still fallacious. The crusades were manifestations of energy and enthusiasm; but they were profoundly "unfruitful," and they are not deeply interesting. The only sense in which Goethe's formula could stand would be one in which it is recognized that all vigorous intellectual life stands for "belief"--that is to say, that Lucretius and Voltaire, Paine and d'Holbach, stand for "belief" when confidently attacking beliefs. The formula is thus true only in a strained and non-natural sense; whereas it is sure to be read and to be believed, by thoughtless admirers, in its natural and false sense, though the whole history of Byzantium and modern Islam is a history of stagnant and unfruitful belief, and that of modern Europe a history of fruitful doubt, disbelief, and denial, involving new affirmations. Goethe's own mind on the subject was in a state of verbalizing confusion, the result or expression of his temperamental aversion to clear analytical thought ("Above all," he boasts, "I never thought about thinking") and his habit of poetic allegory and apriorism. "Logic was invincibly repugnant to him" (Lewes, Life of Goethe, 3rd ed. p. 38). The mosaic of his thinking is sufficiently indicated in Lewes's sympathetically confused account (id. pp. 523-27). Where he himself doubted and denied current creeds, as in his work in natural science, he was most fruitful (though he was not always right--e.g., his polemic against Newton's theory of colour); and the permanently interesting teaching of his Faust is precisely that which artistically utters the doubt through which he passed to a pantheistic Naturalism.
20. No less certain is the unbelief of Schiller (1759-1805), whom Hagenbach even takes as "the representative of the rationalism of his age." In his juvenile Robbers, indeed, he makes his worst villains freethinkers; and in the preface he stoutly champions religion against all assailants; but hardly ever after that piece does he give a favourable portrait of a priest. He himself soon joined the Aufklärung; and all his æsthetic appreciation of Christianity never carried him beyond the position that it virtually had the tendency (Anlage) to the highest and noblest, though that was in general tastelessly and repulsively represented by Christians. He added that in a certain sense it is the only æsthetic religion, whence it is that it gives such pleasure to the feminine nature, and that only among women is it to be met with in a tolerable form. Like Goethe, he sought to reduce the Biblical supernatural to the plane of possibility, in the manner of the liberal theologians of the period; and like him he often writes as a deist, though professedly for a time a Kantist. On the other hand, he does not hesitate to say that a healthy nature (which Goethe had said needed no morality, no Natur-recht, and no political metaphysic) required neither deity nor immortality to sustain it.
21. The critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) may be said to represent most comprehensively the outcome in German intelligence of the higher freethought of the age, insofar as its results could be at all widely assimilated. In its most truly critical part, the analytic treatment of previous theistic systems in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he is fundamentally anti-theological; the effect of the argument being to negate all previously current proofs of the existence and cognizableness of a "supreme power" or deity. Already the metaphysics of the Leibnitz-Wolff school were discredited; and so far Kant could count on a fair hearing for a system which rejected that of the schools. Certainly he meant his book to be an antidote to the prevailing religious credulity. "Henceforth there were to be no more dreams of ghost-seers, metaphysicians, and enthusiasts." On his own part, however, no doubt in sympathy with the attitude of many of his readers, there followed a species of intuitional reaction. In his short essay What is Freethinking? (1784) he defines Aufklärung or freethinking as "the advance of men from their self-imputed minority"; and "minority" as the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. "Sapere aude; dare to use thine own understanding," he declares to be the motto of freethought: and he dwells on the laziness of spirit which keeps men in the state of minority, letting others do their thinking for them as the doctor prescribes their medicine. In this spirit he justifies the movement of rational criticism while insisting, justly enough, that men have still far to go ere they can reason soundly in all things. If, he observes, "we ask whether we live in an enlightened (aufgeklärt) age the answer is, No, but in an age of enlightening (aufklärung)." There is still great lack of capacity among men in general to think for themselves, free of leading-strings. "Only slowly can a community (Publikum) attain to freethinking." But he repeats that "the age is the age of aufklärung, the age of Frederick the Great": and he pays a high tribute to the king who repudiated even the arrogant pretence of "toleration," and alone among monarchs said to his subjects, "Reason as you will; only obey!"
But the element of apprehension gained ground in the aging freethinker. In 1787 appeared the second edition of the Critique, with a preface avowing sympathy with religious as against freethinking tendencies; and in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) he makes an almost avowedly unscientific attempt to restore the reign of theism on a basis of a mere emotional and ethical necessity assumed to exist in human nature--a necessity which he never even attempts to demonstrate. With the magic wand of the Practical Reason, as Heine has it, he reanimated the corpse of theism, which the Theoretic Reason had slain. In this adjustment he was perhaps consciously copying Rousseau, who had greatly influenced him, and whose theism is an avowedly subjectivist predication. But the same attitude to the problem had been substantially adopted by Lessing; and indeed the process is at bottom identical with that of the quasi-skeptics, Pascal, Huet, Berkeley, and the rest, who at once impugn and employ the rational process, reasoning that reason is not reasonable. Kant did but set up the "practical" against the "pure" reason, as other theists before him had set up faith against science, or the "heart" against the "head," and as theists to-day exalt the "will" against "knowledge," the emotional nature against the logical. It is tolerably clear that Kant's motive at this stage was an unphilosophic fear that Naturalism would work moral harm --a fear shared by him with the mass of the average minds of his age.
The same motive and purpose are clearly at work in his treatise on Religion within the bounds of Pure [i.e. Mere] Reason (1792-1794), where, while insisting on the purely ethical and rational character of true religion, he painfully elaborates reasons for continuing to use the Bible (concerning which he contends that, in view of its practically "godly" contents, no one can deny the possibility of its being held as a revelation) as "the basis of ecclesiastical instruction" no less than a means of swaying the populace. Miracles, he in effect avows, are not true; still, there must be no carping criticism of the miracle stories, which serve a good end. There is to be no persecution; but there is to be no such open disputation as would provoke it. Again and again, with a visible uneasiness, the writer returns to the thesis that even "revealed" religion cannot do without sacred books which are partly untrue. The doctrine of the Trinity he laboriously metamorphosed, as so many had done before him, and as Coleridge and Hegel did after him, into a formula of three modes or aspects of the moral deity which his ethical purpose required. And all this divagation from the plain path of Truth is justified in the interest of Goodness.
All the while the book is from beginning to end profoundly divided against itself. It indicates disbelief in every one of the standing Christian dogmas--Creation, Fall, Salvation, Miracles, and the supernatural basis of morals. The first paragraph of the preface insists that morality is founded on the free reason, and that it needs no religion to aid it. Again and again this note is sounded. "The pure religious faith is that alone which can serve as basis for a universal Church; because it is a pure reason-faith, in which everyone can participate." But without the slightest attempt at justification there is thrown in the formula that "no religion is thinkable without belief in a future life." Thus heaven and hell and Bible and church are arbitrarily imposed on the "pure religion" for the comfort of unbelieving clergymen and the moralizing of life. Error is to cast out error, and evil, evil.
The process of Kant's adjustment of his philosophy to social needs as he regarded them is to be understood by following the chronology and the vogue of his writings. The first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason "excited little attention" (Stuckenberg, Life of Kant, p. 368); but in 1787 appeared the second and modified edition, with a new preface, clearly written with a propitiatory eye to the orthodox reaction. "All at once the work now became popular, and the praise was as loud and as fulsome as at first the silence had been profound. The literature of the day began to teem with Kantian ideas, with discussions of the new philosophy, and with the praises of its author.... High officials in Berlin would lay aside the weighty affairs of State to consider the Kritik, and among them were found warm admirers of the work and its author." Id. p. 369. Cp. Heine, Rel. und Phil. in Deutschland, B. iii--Werke, iii, 75, 82.
This popularity becomes intelligible in the light of the new edition and its preface. To say nothing of the alterations in the text, pronounced by Schopenhauer to be cowardly accommodations (as to which question see Adamson, as cited, and Stuckenberg, p. 461, note 94), Kant writes in the preface that he had been "obliged to destroy knowledge in order to make room for faith"; and, again, that "only through criticism can the roots be cut of materialism, fatalism, atheism, freethinking unbelief (freigeisterischen Unglauben), fanaticism and superstition, which may become universally injurious; also of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous rather to the Schools, and can hardly reach the general public." (Meiklejohn mistranslates: "which are universally injurious"--Bohn ed. p. xxxvii.) This passage virtually puts the popular religion and all philosophies save Kant's own on one level of moral dubiety. It is, however, distinctly uncandid as regards the "freethinking unbelief," for Kant himself was certainly an unbeliever in Christian miracles and dogmas.
His readiness to make an appeal to prejudice appears again in the second edition of the Critique when he asks: "Whence does the freethinker derive his knowledge that there is, for instance, no Supreme Being?" (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Transc. Methodenlehre, 1 H. 2 Absch. ed. Kirchmann, 1879, p. 587; Bohn tr. p. 458.) He had just before professed to be dealing with denial of the "existence of God"--a proposition of no significance whatever unless "God" be defined. He now without warning substitutes the still more undefined expression "Supreme Being" for "God," thus imputing a proposition probably never sustained with clear verbal purpose by any human being. Either, then, Kant's own proposition was the entirely vacuous one that nobody can demonstrate the impossibility of an alleged undefined existence, or he was virtually asserting that no one can disprove any alleged supernatural existence--spirit, demon, Moloch, Krishna, Bel, Siva, Aphrodite, or Isis and Osiris. In the latter case he would be absolutely stultifying his own claim to cut the roots of "superstition" and "fanaticism" as well as of freethinking and materialism; for, if the freethinker cannot disprove Jehovah, neither can the Kantist disprove Allah and Satan; and Kant had no basis for denying, as he did with Spinoza, the existence of ghosts or spirits. From this dilemma Kant's argument cannot be delivered. And as he finally introduces deity as a psychologically and morally necessary regulative idea, howbeit indemonstrable, he leaves every species of superstition exactly where it stood before--every superstition being practically held, as against "freethinking unbelief," on just such a tenure.
If he could thus react against freethinking before 1789, he must needs carry the reaction further after the outbreak of the French Revolution; and his Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (1792-1794) is a systematic effort to draw the teeth of the Aufklärung, modified only by his resentment of the tyranny of the political authority towards himself. Concerning the age-long opposition between rationalism (Verstandesaufklärung) and intuitionism or emotionalism (Gefühlsphilosophie), it is claimed by modern transcendentalists that Kant, or Herder, or another, has effected a solution on a plane higher than either. (E.g. Kronenberg, Herder's Philosophie, 1889, p. 6.) The true solution certainly must account for both points of view--no very difficult matter; but no solution is really attained by either of these writers. Kant alternately stood at the two positions; and his unhistorical mind did not seek to unify them in a study of human evolution. For popular purposes he let pass the assumption that a cosmic emotion is a clue to the nature of the cosmos, as the water-finder's hazel-twig is said to point to the whereabouts of water. Herder, recognisant of evolution, would not follow out any rational analysis.
All the while, however, Kant's theism was radically irreconcilable with the prevailing religion. As appears from his cordial hostility to the belief in ghosts, he really lacked the religious temperament. "He himself," says a recent biographer, "was too suspicious of the emotions to desire to inspire any enthusiasm with reference to his own heart." This misstates the fact that his "Practical Reason" was but an abstraction of his own emotional predilection; but it remains true that that predilection was nearly free from the commoner forms of pious psychosis; and typical Christians have never found him satisfactory. "From my heart," writes one of his first biographers, "I wish that Kant had not regarded the Christian religion merely as a necessity for the State, or as an institution to be tolerated for the sake of the weak (which now so many, following his example, do even in the pulpit), but had known that which is positive, improving, and blessed in Christianity." He had in fact never kept up any theological study; and his plan of compromise had thus, like those of Spencer and Mill in a later day, a fatal unreality for all men who have discarded theology with a full knowledge of its structure, though it appeals very conveniently to those disposed to retain it as a means of popular influence. All his adaptations, therefore, failed to conciliate the mass of the orthodox; and even after the issue of the second Critique (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft) he had been the subject of discussion among the reactionists. But that Critique, and the preface to the second edition of the first, were at bottom only pleas for a revised ethic, Kant's concern with current religion being solely ethical; and the force of that concern led him at length, in what was schemed as a series of magazine articles, to expound his notion of religion in relation to morals. When he did so he aroused a resentment much more energetic than that felt by the older academics against his philosophy. The title of his complete treatise, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, is obviously framed to parry criticism; yet so drastic is its treatment of its problems that the College of Censors at Berlin under the new theological régime vetoed the second part. By the terms of the law as to the censorship, the publisher was entitled to know the reason for the decision; but on his asking for it he was informed that "another instruction was on hand, which the censor followed as his law, but whose contents he refused to make known." Greatly incensed, Kant submitted the rejected article with the rest of his book to the theological faculty of his own university of Königsberg, asking them to decide in which faculty the censorship was properly vested. They referred the decision to the philosophical faculty, which duly proceeded to license the book (1793). As completed, it contained passages markedly hostile to the Church. His opponents in turn were now so enraged that they procured a royal cabinet order (October, 1794) charging him with "distorting and degrading many of the chief and fundamental doctrines of the Holy Scriptures and of Christianity," and ordering all the instructors at the university not to lecture on the book. Such was the reward for a capitulation of philosophy to the philosophic ideals of the police.
Kant, called upon to render an account of his conduct to the Government, formally defended it, but in conclusion decorously said: "I think it safest, in order to obviate the least suspicion in this respect, as your Royal Majesty's most faithful subject, to declare solemnly that henceforth I will refrain altogether from all public discussion of religion, whether natural or revealed, both in lectures and in writings." After the death of Frederick William II (1797) and the accession of Frederick William III, who suspended the edict of 1788, Kant held himself free to speak out again, and published (1798) an essay on "The Strife of the [University] Faculties," wherein he argued that philosophers should be free to discuss all questions of religion so long as they did not handle Biblical theology as such. The belated protest, however, led to nothing. By this time the philosopher was incapable of further efficient work; and when he died in 1804 the chief manuscript he left, planned as a synthesis of his philosophic teaching, was found to be hopelessly confused.
The attitude, then, in which Kant stood to the reigning religion in his latter years remained fundamentally hostile, from the point of view of believing Christians as distinguished from that of ecclesiastical opportunists. What were for temporizers arguments in defence of didactic deceit, were for sincerer spirits fresh grounds for recoiling from the whole ecclesiastical field. Kant must have made more rebels than compliers by his very doctrine of compliance. Religion was for him essentially ethic; and there is no reconciling the process of propitiation of deity, in the Christian or any other cult, with his express declaration that all attempts to win God's favour save by simple right-living are sheer fetichism. He thus ends practically at the point of view of the deists, whose influence on him in early life is seen in his work on cosmogony. He had, moreover, long ceased to go to church or follow any religious usage, even refusing to attend the services on the installation of a new university rector, save when he himself held the office. At the close of his treatise on religion, after all his anxious accommodations, he becomes almost violent in his repudiations of sacerdotalism and sectarian self-esteem. "He did not like the singing in the churches, and pronounced it mere bawling. In prayer, whether public or private, he had not the least faith; and in his conversation as well as his writings he treated it as a superstition, holding that to address anything unseen would open the way for fanaticism. Not only did he argue against prayer; he also ridiculed it, and declared that a man would be ashamed to be caught by another in the attitude of prayer." One of his maxims was that "To kneel or prostrate himself on the earth, even for the purpose of symbolizing to himself reverence for a heavenly object, is unworthy of man." So too he held that the doctrine of the Trinity had no practical value, and he had a "low opinion" of the Old Testament.
Yet his effort at compromise had carried him to positions which are the negation of some of his own most emphatic ethical teachings. Like Plato, he is finally occupied in discussing the "right fictions" for didactic purposes. Swerving from thoroughgoing freethought for fear of moral harm, he ends by sacrificing intellectual morality to what seems to him social security. His doctrine, borrowed from Lessing, of a "conceivable" revelation which told man only what he could find out for himself, is a mere flout to reason. While he carries his "categorical imperative," or à priori conception of duty, so extravagantly far as to argue that it is wrong even to tell a falsehood to a would-be murderer in order to mislead him, he approves of the systematic employment of the pulpit function by men who do not believe in the creed they there expound. The priest, with Kant's encouragement, is to "draw all the practical lessons for his congregation from dogmas which he himself cannot subscribe with a full conviction of their truth, but which he can teach, since it is not altogether impossible that truth may be concealed therein," while he remains free as a scholar to write in a contrary sense in his own name. And this doctrine, set forth in the censured work of 1793, is repeated in the moralist's last treatise (1798), wherein he explains that the preacher, when speaking doctrinally, "can put into the passage under consideration his own rational views, whether found there or not." Kant thus ended by reviving for the convenience of churchmen, in a worse form, the medieval principle of a "twofold truth." So little efficacy is there in a transcendental ethic for any of the actual emergencies of life.
On this question compare Kant's Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, Stück iii, Abth. i, § 6; Stück iv, Th. ii, preamble and §§ i, 3, and 4; with the essay Ueber ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen (1797), in reply to Constant--rep. in Kant's Vorzügliche kleine Schriften, 1833, Bd. ii, and in App. to Rosenkranz's ed. of Werke, vii, 295--given by T. K. Abbott in his tr. of the Critique of Judgment. See also Stuckenberg, pp. 341-45, and the general comment of Baur, Kirchengeschichte des 19ten Jahrhunderts, 1862, p. 65. "Kant's recognition of Scripture is purely a matter of expedience. The State needs the Bible to control the people; the masses need it in order that they, having weak consciences, may recognize their duty; and the philosopher finds it a convenient vehicle for conveying to the people the faith of reason. Were it rejected it might be difficult, if not impossible, to put in its place another book which would inspire as much confidence." All the while "Kant's principles of course led him to deny that the Bible is authoritative in matters of religion, or that it is of itself a safe guide in morals.... Its value consists in the fact that, owing to the confidence of the people in it, reason can use it to interpret into Scripture its own doctrines, and can thus make it the means of popularizing rational faith. If anyone imagines that the aim of the interpretation is to obtain the real meaning of Scripture, he is no Kantian on this point" (Stuckenberg, p. 341).
22. The total performance of Kant thus left Germany with a powerful lead on the one hand towards that unbelief in religion which in the last reign had been fashionable, and on the other hand a series of prescriptions for compromise; the monarchy all the while throwing its weight against all innovation in doctrine and practice. In 1799 Fichte is found expressing the utmost alarm at the combination of the European despotisms to "rout out freethought"; and so strong did the official reaction become that in the opinion of Heine all the German philosophers and their ideas would have been suppressed by wheel and gallows but for Napoleon, who intervened in the year 1805. The Prussian despotism being thus weakened, what actually happened was an adaptation of Kant's teaching to the needs alike of religion and of rationalism. The religious world was assured by it that, though all previous arguments for theism were philosophically worthless, theism was now safe on the fluid basis of feeling. On the other hand, rationalism alike in ethics and in historical criticism was visibly reinforced on all sides. Herder, as before noted, found divinity students grounding their unbelief on Kant's teaching. Staüdlin begins the preface to his History and Spirit of Skepticism (1794) with the remark that "Skepticism begins to be a disease of the age"; and Kant is the last in his list of skeptics. At the close of the century "the number of Kantian theologians was legion," and it was through the Kantian influence that "the various anti-orthodox tendencies which flourished during the period of Illumination were concentrated in Rationalism" --in the tendency, that is, to bring rational criticism to bear alike on history, dogma, and philosophy. Borowski in 1804 complains that "beardless youths and idle babblers" devoid of knowledge "appeal to Kant's views respecting Christianity." These views, as we have seen, were partly accommodating, partly subversive in the extreme. Kant regards Jesus as an edifying ideal of perfect manhood, "belief" in whom as such makes a man acceptable to God, because of following a good model. "While he thus treats the historical account of Jesus as of no significance, except as a shell into which the practical reason puts the kernel, his whole argument tends to destroy faith in the historic person of Jesus as given in the gospel, treating the account itself as something whose truthfulness it is not worth while to investigate." In point of fact we find his devoted disciple Erhard declaring: "I regard Christian morality as something which has been falsely imputed to Christianity; and the existence of Christ does not at all seem to me to be a probable historical fact"--this while declaring that Kant had given him "the indescribable comfort of being able to call himself openly, and with a good conscience, a Christian."
While therefore a multitude of preachers availed themselves of Kant's philosophic licence to rationalize in the pulpit and out of it as occasion offered, and yet others opposed them only on the score that all divergence from orthodoxy should be avowed, the dissolution of orthodoxy in Germany was rapid and general; and the anti-supernaturalist handling of Scripture, prepared for as we have seen, went on continuously. Even the positive disparagement of Christianity was carried on by Kantian students; and Hamann, dubbed "the Magician of the North" for his alluring exposition of emotional theism, caused one of them, a tutor, to be brought before a clerical consistory for having taught his pupil to throw all specifically Christian doctrines aside. The tutor admitted the charge, and with four others signed a declaration "that neither morality nor sound reason nor public welfare could exist in connection with Christianity." Hamann's own influence was too much a matter of literary talent and caprice to be durable; and recent attempts to re-establish his reputation have evoked the deliberate judgment that he has no permanent importance.
Against the intellectual influence thus set up by Kant there was none in contemporary Germany capable of resistance. Philosophy for the most part went in Kant's direction, having indeed been so tending before his day. Rationalism of a kind had already had a representative in Chr. A. Crusius (1712-1775), who in treatises on logic and metaphysics opposed alike Leibnitz and Wolff, and taught for his own part a kind of Epicureanism, nominally Christianized. To his school belonged Platner (much admired by Jean Paul Richter, his pupil) and Tetens, "the German Locke," who attempted a common-sense answer to Hume. His ideal was a philosophy "at once intelligible and religious, agreeable to God and accessible to the people." Platner on the other hand, leaning strongly towards a psychological and anthropological view of human problems, opposed first to atheism and later to Kantian theism a moderate Pyrrhonic skepticism; here following a remarkable lead from the younger Beausobre, who in 1755 had published in French, at Berlin, a treatise entitled Le Pyrrhonisme Raisonnable, taking up the position, among others, that while it is hard to prove the existence of God by reason it is impossible to disprove it. This was virtually the position of Kant a generation later; and it is clear that thus early the dogmatic position was discredited.
23. Some philosophic opposition there was to Kant, alike on intuitionist grounds, as in the cases of Hamann and Herder, and on grounds of academic prejudice, as in the case of Kraus; but the more important thinkers who followed him were all as heterodox as he. In particular, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), who began in authorship by being a Kantian zealot, gave even greater scandal than the Master had done. Fichte's whole career is a kind of "abstract and brief chronicle" of the movements of thought in Germany during his life. In his boyhood, at the public school of Pforta, we find him and his comrades already influenced by the new currents. "Books imbued with all the spirit of free inquiry were secretly obtained, and, in spite of the strictest prohibitions, great part of the night was spent in their perusal. The works of Wieland, Lessing, and Goethe were positively forbidden; yet they found their way within the walls, and were eagerly studied." In particular, Fichte followed closely the controversy of Lessing with Goeze; and Lessing's lead gave him at once the spirit of freethought, as distinct from any specific opinion. Never a consistent thinker, Fichte in his student and tutorial days is found professing at once determinism and a belief in "Providence," accepting Spinoza and contemplating a village pastorate. But while ready to frame a plea for Christianity on the score of its psychic adaptation to "the sinner," he swerved from the pastorate when it came within sight, declaring that "no purely Christian community now exists." About the age of twenty-eight he became an enthusiastic convert to the Kantian philosophy, especially to the Critique of Practical Reason, and threw over determinism on what appear to be grounds of empirical utilitarianism, failing to face the philosophical issue. Within a year of his visit to Kant, however, he was writing to a friend that "Kant has only indicated the truth, but neither unfolded nor proved it," and that he himself has "discovered a new principle, from which all philosophy can easily be deduced.... In a couple of years we shall have a philosophy with all the clearness of geometrical demonstration." He had in fact passed, perhaps under Spinoza's influence, to pantheism, from which standpoint he rejected Kant's anti-rational ground for affirming a God not immanent in things, and claimed, as did his contemporaries Schelling and Hegel, to establish theism on rational grounds. Rejecting, further, Kant's reiterated doctrine that religion is ethic, Fichte ultimately insisted that, on the contrary, religion is knowledge, and that "it is only a corrupt society that has to use religion as an impulse to moral action."
But alike in his Kantian youth and later he was definitely anti-revelationist, however much he conformed to clerical prejudice by attacks upon the movement of freethought. In his "wander-years" he writes with vehemence of the "worse than Spanish inquisition" under which the German clergy are compelled to "cringe and dissemble," partly because of lack of ability, partly through economic need. In his Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung ("Essay towards a Critique of all Revelation"), published with some difficulty, Kant helping (1792), he in effect negates the orthodox assumption, and, in the spirit of Kant and Lessing, but with more directness than they had shown, concludes that belief in revelation "is an element, and an important element, in the moral education of humanity, but it is not a final stage for human thought." In Kant's bi-frontal fashion, he had professed to "silence the opponents of positive religion not less than its dogmatical defenders"; but that result did not follow on either side, and ere long, as a professor at Jena, he was being represented as one of the most aggressive of the opponents. Soon after producing his Critique of all Revelation he had published anonymously two pamphlets vindicating the spirit as distinguished from the conduct of the French Revolution; and upon a young writer known to harbour such ideas enmity was bound to fall. Soon it took the form of charges of atheism. It does not appear to be true that he ever told his students at Jena: "In five years there will be no more Christian religion: reason is our religion"; and it would seem that the first charges of atheism brought against him were purely malicious. But his career henceforth was one of strife and friction, first with the student-blackguardism which had been rife in the German universities ever since the Thirty Years' War, and which he partly subdued; then with the academic authorities and the traditionalists, who, when he began lecturing on Sunday mornings, accused him of attempting to throw over Christianity and set up the worship of reason. He was arraigned before the High Consistory of Weimar and acquitted; but his wife was insulted in the streets of Jena; his house was riotously attacked in the night; and he ceased to reside there. Then, in his Wissenschaftslehre ("Doctrine of Knowledge," 1794-95) he came into conflict with the Kantians, with whom his rupture steadily deepened on ethical grounds. Again he was accused of atheism in print; and after a defence in which he retorted the charge on the utilitarian theists he resigned.
In Berlin, where the new king held the old view that the wrongs of the Gods were the Gods' affair, he found harbourage; and sought to put himself right with the religious world by his book Die Bestimmung des Menschen ("The Vocation of Man," 1800), wherein he speaks of the Eternal Infinite Will as regulating human reason so far as human reason is right--the old counter-sense and the old evasion. By this book he repelled his rationalistic friends Schelling and the Schlegels; while his religious ally Schleiermacher, who chose another tactic, wrote on it a bitter and contemptuous review, and "could hardly find words strong enough to express his detestation of it." A few years later Fichte was writing no less contemptuously of Schelling; and in his remaining years, though the Napoleonic wars partly brought him into sympathy with his countrymen, from whom he had turned away in angry alienation, he remained a philosophic Ishmael, warring and warred upon all round. He was thus left to figure for posterity as a religionist "for his own hand," who rejected all current religion while angrily dismissing current unbelief as "freethinking chatter." If his philosophy be estimated by its logical content as distinguished from its conflicting verbalisms, it is fundamentally as atheistic as that of Spinoza. That he was conscious of a vital sunderance between his thought and that of the past is made clear by his answer, in 1805, to the complaint that the people had lost their "religious feeling" (Religiosität). His retort is that a new religious feeling has taken the place of the old; and that was the position taken up by the generation which swore by him, in the German manner, as the last had sworn by Kant.
But the successive philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, all rising out of the "Illumination" of the eighteenth century, have been alike impermanent. Nothing is more remarkable in the history of thought than the internecine strife of the systems which insisted on "putting something in the place" of the untenable systems of the past. They have been but so many "toppling spires of cloud." Fichte, like Herder, broke away from the doctrine of Kant; and later became bitterly opposed to that of his former friend Schelling, as did Hegel in his turn. Schleiermacher, hostile to Kant, was still more hostile to Fichte; and Hegel, detesting Schleiermacher and developing Fichte, give rise to schools arrayed against each other, of which the anti-Christian was by far the stronger. All that is permanent in the product of the age of German Rationalism is the fundamental principle upon which it proceeded, the confutation of the dogmas and legends of the past, and the concrete results of the historical, critical, and physical research to which the principle and the confutation led.
24. It is true that the progressive work was not all done by the Rationalists so-called. As always, incoherences in the pioneers led to retorts which made for rectification. One of the errors of bias of the early naturalists, as we have noted, was their tendency to take every religious document as genuine and at bottom trustworthy, provided only that its allegations of miracles were explained away as misinterpretations of natural phenomena. So satisfied were many of them with this inexpensive method that they positively resisted the attempts of supernaturalists, seeking a way out of their special dilemma, to rectify the false ascriptions of the documents. Bent solely on one solution, they were oddly blind to evidential considerations which pointed to interpolation, forgery, variety of source, and error of literary tradition; while scholars bent on saving "inspiration" were often ready in some measure for such recognitions. These arrests of insight took place alternately on both sides, in the normal way of intellectual progress by alternate movements. All the while, it is the same primary force of reason that sets up the alternate pressures, and the secondary pressures are generated by, and are impossible without, the first.
25. The emancipation, too, was limited in area in the German-speaking world. In Austria, despite a certain amount of French culture, the rule of the Jesuits in the eighteenth century was too effective to permit of any intellectual developments. Maria Theresa, who knew too well that the boundless sexual licence against which she fought had nothing to do with innovating ideas, had to issue a special order to permit the importation of Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois; and works of more subversive doctrine could not openly pass the frontiers at all. An attempt to bring Lessing to Vienna in 1774, with a view to founding a new literary Academy, collapsed before the opposition; and when Prof. Jahn, of the Vienna University--described as "freethinking, latitudinarian, anti-supernaturalistic"--developed somewhat anti-clerical tendencies in his teaching and writing, he was forced to resign, and died a simple Canon. The Emperor Joseph II in his day passed for an unbeliever; but there was no general movement. "Austria, in a time of universal effervescence, produced only musicians, and showed zest only for pleasure." Yet among the music-makers was the German-born Beethoven, the greatest master of his age. Kindred in spirit to Goethe, and much more of a revolutionist than he in all things, Beethoven spent the creative part of his life at Vienna without ceasing to be a freethinker. "Formal religion he apparently had none." He copied out a kind of theistic creed consisting of three ancient formulas: "I am that which is": "I am all that is, that was, that shall be": "He is alone by Himself; and to Him alone do all things owe their being." Beyond this his beliefs did not go. When his friend Moscheles at the end of his arrangement of Fidelio wrote: "Fine, with God's help," Beethoven added, "O man, help thyself." His reception of the Catholic sacraments in extremis was not his act. He had left to mankind a purer and a more lasting gift than either the creeds or the philosophies of his age.
