and life of the world. The bold attempts to comprehend, from a single principle, heaven and earth, again impressed it upon the conviction, that if men wished to know the truth, they must know everything in God; and doctrines of Christianity, which were looked upon as being long ago set aside, such as the Trinity, the union of the divine and human natures, etc., displayed depths into which they looked with amazement. This speculative

school became, of course, a stone of offence to the disciples of Illuminism. The philosophers of Illuminism could not conceal from themselves that these philosophers, too, possessed reason, and undoubtedly greater skill and depth in philosophy than they themselves did. And now to behold these results opposed to everything which, according to the common intellectual sense, could exist! In boldness of investigation, in acuteness of thought, in moral energy, in power of language, in everything, in short, which they admired, Fichte was far superior to the men of Illuminism, and yet he walked in paths of thought absolutely inaccessible. Him, too, Nicolai at length ventured to assail, but only to find his literary death. Fichte's pamphlet (edited by A. W. Schlegel): "Frederick Nicolai's Life and Strange Opinions," is one of the most crushing controversial treatises which was ever written.

The second school, which proceeded from Fichte, is commonly designated by the name of the "Romantic." The Ego of Fichte was not the individual, but that which is common to all individuals—the universal personality. But life is not so logical as science. A circle of distinguished literati, who, with the critical severity of Lessing, renewed Lessing's demand for genius, covered themselves with the cloak of this philosophy. The mystery of life, they said, lies in a God-given original life, in an instinctively working genius of the Ego. By Schelling this is

called "intellectual intuition," by Schlegel, Tieck, Novalis, "poetry," by Schleiermacher, "sense and taste for the infinite." To follow this divine impulse of life is the highest object and duty. This circle knew that, with such a view of life, they were in decided opposition to the world of Illuminism, which, in moral life, followed ethics,—in their vocation, utilitarianism,—in social life, education,—in philosophy and religion, common sense. The bold youth comprehended this world, governed by such aims, under the name of Philisterwelt (world of Philistines), and never wearied in holding them up to ridicule. This irony was a power, because it appeared combined with eminent sagacity and humour. That which is most splendid in Tieck's productions of that period is the humour which he has poured out upon the whole literature of common sense. The critical skill of the two Schlegels becomes terrorism in the "Athenæum." The ironical feature which pervades Schleiermacher's character comes most prominently out, when, with superior understanding, he compels common sense to confess its nothingness. But, hand in hand with this negative element, there was a positive one also. They who thought this to be the mystery of life, to follow, without reflecting, the poetical genius, looked with deep longings into a time when poetry still ruled the nations-the time of the middle ages. Novalis celebrated the middle ages in his Ofterdingen. Tieck revived the world of tales, the popular traditions, the minnesong, the ancient German art. Although they saw a very scanty remainder of medieval glory in the modern Roman Catholicism, yet they found in it more pasture than in cleared out Protestantism. Fred. Schlegel and Zach. Werner went over to Roman Catholicism, and Görres, at a later period, placed his Romanticism entirely at the service of Rome. Creations of true art, however,

have not been produced by this Romantic school, not even by Tieck; and however strangely it may sound, the reason is, that it had too much of that which it fought against, and too little of that which it aimed at. There was too much reflecting understanding, and too little original genius in these Romantics. All of them were stronger in criticising than in creating, more powerful in their aims than in their poetry. Even Tieck never denied his philosophizing native place, Berlin. As their predilection for the middle ages was only a poetical dilettanteism, so the authority also for which many a disciple of this school was longing was rather a palliative for the unbridled caprice of his doings, than a truly moral bent. Werner continued, after he had turned a priest, to have, in the pulpit, his sport with the most sacred things, just as formerly he had sported with Protestantism. He, in the Vienna Conference, performed the parts of Abraham a Santa Clara. "The Romantics," says one of them, "wished, indeed, the positive, not from an orthodox zeal, but for the sake of the mysterious and miraculous, for the sake of the beautiful halo which surrounds the positive; they fought for a faith which, in reality, they themselves had not. Hence their uncertain conduct, this artificial, eccentric, forced Roman Catholicism." 1 This school, however, also fulfilled its mission. The crushing irony with which they assailed Illuminism has had a ventilating and purifying influence. Romanticism has awakened a historical sense, the farther development of which we shall see at a subsequent period. But it has especially contributed to produce the conviction that moral life is its own aim, not a mere appendage to

Eichendorff on the Moral and Religious Importance of the Modern Romantic Poetry in Germany. S. 31.

ethics;

and it has been the merit of Schleiermacher especially to vindicate this.

In 1799, appeared Schleiermacher's "Reden über Religion an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern” (Discourses on Religion, addressed to the educated among its despisers). It was the same year in which Fichte was accused of atheism, and obliged to leave Jena. This affair with Fichte is an historical commentary on these discourses. Fichte was quite the man of his system; the man of the Ego, which submits to itself the non-Ego, was of the boldest energy. According to a family tradition, he was the descendant of a Swedish soldier who, during the Thirty Years' War, had remained in Lusatia.1 Whether that be the case or not, he was a man possessed of the reflection and boldness of a Northlander. In the same powerful manner in which, in his chair, he dealt with his students, and, in his writings, with the public, whom he would compel to understand, he broke, in life also, through everything which he imagined to be a barrier. In his system there was no room for the supra-mundane God of Kant; all religion became faith in the moral order of the world. This he gave forth, with regardless candour, in an essay “On the grounds of our belief in a moral order of the world." In consequence of the agitation called forth by this essay, the government of Electoral Saxony called upon that of Weimar to interfere against excesses directed against even natural religion. Charles Augustus of Weimar, who shortly before had taken Dr Paulus under his protection, thought only of satisfying the government of Electoral Saxony by a certain appearance. Schiller gave, in the name of the Duke, the most satisfactory declarations to Fichte; Göthe judged on the whole affair like an Epicurean: on God and divine things people should observe 1 Fichte, the younger: Johann Gottlieb Fichte. I.

man.

the deepest silence. And what could Herder say, with his Spinozistic views of God? The most distinguished theologians were anxious to assure Fichte of their sympathy. Fichte would have easily got off, if, confiding in his right, he had not asked an honourable victory. In the whole business, the atheist appears as the most moral The government of Weimar got out of the scrape by accepting the resignation which, in a private letter, Fichte had offered. Fichte went to Berlin, where his democratic tendencies, at first, caused some hesitation ; but when the people became convinced that he was not a Jacobin, they neither remembered nor meddled with his controversy with God. Frederick William said: "If Fichte be a quiet citizen, a residence in my realm may be readily granted to him. If it be true that he is engaged in a controversy with our blessed God, the Lord himself may settle that with him; I don't mind it." It was in such a time, when not Christianity merely, but general religion and piety had thus fallen into decay, that Schleiermacher came out with his Discourses on religion: "I know," he says, "that you worship the Deity in holy retirement as little as you attend the deserted temples; and that in your adorned dwellings, no other sacred things are to be found than the wise sayings of our wise men, and the glorious fictions and creations of our artists; and that humanism and sociality, art and science, have so completely taken possession of your hearts and minds, that no room is left for the eternal and holy Being whom you place altogether beyond the world." He told them that he did not come to them as a clergyman, in order to plead for the doctrine and faith of the Church: "I have nothing to do with these old orthodox and barbarous lamentations whereby they would again cry up the fallen walls of their Jewish Zion, and its Gothic pillars." He