1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Ulrici, Hermann

ULRICI, HERMANN (1806–1884), German philosopher, was born at Pforten, Prussia, on the 23rd of March 1806. He was educated for the law, but gave up his profession on the death of his father, and devoted four years to the study of literature, philosophy and science. In 1834 he was called to a professorship at Halle, where he remained till his death, on the 11th of January 1884. His philosophical standpoint may be characterized as a reaction from the pantheistic tendency of Hegel’s idealistic rationalism towards a more pronouncedly theistic position. The Hegelian identity of being and thought is also abandoned and the truth of realism acknowledged, an attempt being made to exhibit idealism and realism as respectively incomplete but mutually complementary systems. Ulrici’s later works, while expressing the same views, are largely occupied in proving the existence of God and the soul from the basis of scientific conceptions, and in opposition to the materialistic current of thought then popular in Germany.

His first works were in the sphere of literary criticism; of his treatise On Shakespeare’s Dramatic Art (1839; editions, 1847, 1868, 1874), the 3rd ed. was translated into English by L. D. Schmitz in 1876. In 1841 he published Über Princip u. Methode der Hegelschen Philosophie, a severe criticism of the Hegelian system. This was continued in the Grundprincip der Philosophie (1845–1846), which also gives his speculative position. Complementary to this is his System der Logik (1852). His later works on the relation of philosophy to science and to the thought of his time were more popular in character. These are Glauben u. Wissen (1858), Gott u. die Natur (1862; 3rd ed., 1875), Gott und der Mensch (2 vols., 1866–1873; 2nd ed., 1874). From 1847 onward Ulrici edited, jointly with the younger Fichte, the Zeitschrift für Philosophie u. phil. Kritik. See Frankel’s art. in Allgemeine deutsche Biog. (1895) and works there quoted.