vigorously the pulse of English and American thought. The mysticism of Schleiermacher was an immense relief from the wooden views of God and the world held by the Deistic school; and the publication of these Discourses in 1799 did much to exile from German and English thought the conceptions of the Wollfian Illumination. In the alembic of Schleiermacher's thought, the theories of the century and the dialectics of Plato were subjected to a vigorous fusion. Kantian criticism, the idealism of Fichte, the 'Identitäts-Philosophie' of Schelling, and Spinozism, as Pfleiderer has pointed out, all are found as ingredients in the system of Schleiermacher. From this fusion emerged as an original product, the Religion of Feeling, which, with all its one-sidedness, exerted a revolutionary influence not only in the sphere of religion, but upon philosophy and politics as well.
The editor, in his biographical sketch, informs us that Zeller gratefully lauds Schleiermacher as the greatest of Protestant theologians, the noble champion of the rights of science and of religious individuality. Neander derived from these 'Speeches' an inspiration which led him to make the passage from Judaism to Christianity. Lipsius considers his theory of perception as marking as important an epoch in the realm of Religion as Kant's Critique of Reason marked in the realm of philosophy. Treitschke gives him the first place in the patriotic struggle with Napoleon.
It was the illustrious merit of Schleiermacher to gather into focus the rays scattered in the speculation of Lessing and his successors, and to furnish the basis upon which all modern philosophy of religion rests. Religion was shown to be no external and fortuitous fact, but a reality founded in human nature itself. It is psychical and not exotic, internal to the mind and not a divine imposition. Schleiermacher became the champion of consciousness against the despotism of the old theological and metaphysical dogmatism.
The dignity and activity of the Ego were vindicated from the claims of objective revelation. 'Religions-Philosophie' now finds in these postulates of Schleiermacher the clue to guide it through the labyrinth of difficulty, in which primitive and modern psychology are in danger of going astray. And the science of the History of Religion is likewise much indebted to Schleiermacher for the true method. The theory of feeling, which is more cautiously developed in 'Glaubenslehre,' is in these 'Speeches' unhappily identified with the unity of the Ego. It is unfortunate thus to confound the Ego with one of the forms of its manifestation; and it becomes again a positive source of error if we identify the subjective unity of man's being with the unity of the world or with God. Feeling is but a psychological state of the individual consciousness, and cannot be identified with God as within us; for if religion is feeling, all feeling is not religion. This "purely formal feeling" of Schleiermacher is one face of the medal, the obverse of which with Kant is the "purely formal moral law," as Pfleiderer indicates. An extreme subjectivism marks both definitions of consciousness, from both the objective contents are absent. The real
