Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/431

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S C H S C H 409 at Hanover on the 10th March 1772. Having studied at Gottingen and Leipsic, he attracted some attention by a book on the Griechen und Romer (1797), which was praised by Heyne. This work was soon followed by his Geschichte der Poesie der Griechen und Romer. At Jena, where he lectured as a privat-docent at the university, he contributed to the At/tenxum many striking critical articles, and a number of lyrical poems which were afterwards included in a volume entitled Gedichte. Here also he wrote Lucinde, an unfinished romance, Avhich was held by some of the best of his contemporaries to be of a deeply immoral tendency, and Alarms, a tragedy, in which he attempted without much success to combine romantic and classical elements. In 1802 he went to Paris, where he edited Europa, lectured on philosophy, and carried on Oriental studies, some results of which lie embodied in a well-known book, Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. In 1803 he and his wife joined the Roman Church, and from this time he became more and more opposed to the principles of political and religious freedom. He went to Vienna in 1808, and in the following year was engaged as imperial court secretary at the head- quarters of the archduke Charles. At a later period he was for some time councillor of legation in the Austrian embassy at the Frankfort diet, but in 1818 he returned to Vienna. Meanwhile he had published two series of lectures, Ueber die neuere Geschichte (1811) and Geschichte der alien und neuen Liter atur (1815). After his return to Vienna from Frankfort he edited Concordia, and began the issue of his Sammtliche WerTce. He also delivered lectures, which were republished in his Philosophie des Lebens (1828) and in his Philosophie der Geschichte (1829). He died on the llth January 1829 at Dresden, where he was delivering the course of lectures which appeared in 1830 under the title Philosophische Vorles- ungen, insbesondere iiber die Philosophie der Sprache und des Wortes. His own collection of his works included ten volumes, and to this number five volumes were added after his death. A permanent place in the history of German literature belongs to Friedrich Schlegel and his brother August Wilhelm as the critical leaders of the Romantic school, which derived from them most of its governing ideas as to the characteristics of the Middle Ages, and as to the methods of literary expression. In their writings, too, there is the fullest and most impres- sive statement of the mystical spiritual doctrines of the Romantic school. Of the two brothers, August Wilhelm did the highest permanent service to his countrymen by his translations from Shakespeare and Calderon. The best of Friedrich's works is his Geschichte der alien und neuen Literatur, in which was presented for the first time a systematic account of the development of European literature as a whole. Friedrich Schlegel's wife, Dorothea, a daughter of Moses Men- delssohn, was born at Berlin about the year 1770, and died at Frankfort in 1839. She was an eccentric but remarkably clever woman, and wrote or edited several works, issued by her husband, the unfinished romance Florentin (1801), the first volume of the Sammlung romnntischer Dichtungen des Mittelalters (2 vols., 1804), and Lather und Mailer (1805). By her first marriage she had a son, Philip Veit, who became one of the most eminent painters of his day in Germany. SCHLEICHER, AUGUST (1821-1868), born at Meinin- gen on February 19, 1821, studied at the universities of Leipsic and Tubingen, became extraordinary professor of philology in Prague in 1850, removed to Jena as ordinary professor in 1857, and died there December 6, 1868. His work is characterized in the article PHILOLOGY, vol. xviii. p. 782. SCHLEIDEN, MATTHIAS (1804-1881), was born at Hamburg in 1804. He studied law at Heidelberg and practised as advocate in Hamburg till 1831, but not succeeding he studied botany and medicine at Gottingen and Berlin, and graduated in Jena in 1839, where he afterwards became professor of botany (1846-50). In 1863 he was called to Dorpat, but resigned the following year and returned to Germany, where he lived as a private teacher. He died at Frankfurt in 1881. His title to remembrance is twofold. Uniting the labours of two centuries of workers in vegetable histology, from Malpighi and Grew to Mirbel and Robert Brown, he proved that a nucleated cell is the only original constituent of the plant embryo, and that the development of all vegetable tissues must be referred to such cells, thus preparing the way for the epoch-making cell theory of Schwann ; and his Prin- ciples of Scientific Botany, which went through several editions (1842-50), did much to shake the tyranny of the purely systematic Linnean school, whose accumulations he was accustomed irreverently to describe as " hay." Despite a certain inability to criticize and verify his own hypotheses, he gave, both by his speculative activity and by the introduction of improved technical methods, so vivid an impulse to the younger botanists of his time as to have earned from De Bary the title of reformer of scientific botany. His botanical labours practically ceased after 1850, when he entered on various philosophical and historical studies. See SCHWANN. SCHLEIERMACHER, FRIEDRICH DANIEL ERNST (1768-1834), theologian and philosopher, was the son of a Prussian army-chaplain of the Reformed confession, and was born November 21, 1768, at Breslau. In his fifteenth year the boy, who was of a weak constitution, was placed by his parents in a Moravian school at Niesky in Upper Lusatia, and two years later in the seminary of the same sect at Barby near Halle. Here Moravian theology proved inadequate to satisfy the deep religious needs and awak- ening intellect of the youth. It was particularly the doctrines of eternal punishment, of the deity and the substitutionary sufferings of Christ, and of the total corruption of human nature that were stumbling-blocks to him. He was also unable to make his own the peculiar religious experiences of his Moravian and pietistic teachers. The efforts of his strictly orthodox father and of the heads of the seminary to lead him to crush his doubts as sinful, and to shun modern theology and literature, tended only to strengthen his desire to explore the great world of know- ledge. Reluctantly his father gave him permission to leave Barby for the university of Halle, and the correspond- ence between the father and the son on this painful crisis in Friedrich's life supplies a striking illustration of a typical phase of distressing modern mental history. When Schleiermacher entered the university of Halle (1787) the reign of pietism there had ceased, having given way to the rationalistic philosophy of Wolf with the critical theology of Semler, though the new philosophy of Kant was rapidly displacing Wolf's. As a student he pursued an independent course of reading and neglected to his permanent loss the study of the Old Testament and the Oriental languages. But he frequented the lectures of Semler and of J. A. Eberhard, acquiring from the former the principles of an independent criticism of the New Testa- ment and from the latter his love of Plato and Aristotle. At the same time he studied with great earnestness the writings of Kant and Jacobi. He commenced thus early his characteristic habit of forming his opinions by the process of patiently examining and weighing the positions of all thinkers and parties. But with the receptivity of a great eclectic he combined the reconstructive power of a profoundly original thinker. While yet a student he began to apply ideas gathered from the Greek philosophers in a reconstruction of Kant's system. At the completion XXL 52