Schleiermacher's philosophical labors cover the departments of epistemology, ethics and the philosophy of religion.
a. He investigates the presuppositions of knowledge in his Dialectik (which was published only after his death). Knowledge exists only in the case where every single idea is not only necessarily combined with all other ideas, but where an actual reality likewise corresponds to the particular ideas. The relations between ideas must correspond with the relations between things. Particularly does the causal relation of objective reality correspond to the combination of concepts expressed in judgments. Here Schleiermacher presents a mixture of criticism and dogmatism. He forgets that the only knowledge we have of reality is by means of our thoughts, and furthermore that reality and thought forever remain incomparable. He nevertheless assumes that the identity of thought and being is a presupposition of knowledge, but not in itself knowledge. He thus opposes Schelling, for whom in fact that very identity constituted the highest kind of knowledge. But, according to Schleiermacher, Schelling offers nothing more than abstract schemata.—The pathway from that presupposition, which forms the starting-point of knowledge, to the idea of a complete totality of all existence, which would be the consummation of all knowledge— or, as it may likewise be expressed, from the idea of God to the idea of the universe—is a long one, and it can never be compassed by human knowledge. Knowledge is only provisional. We are always somewhere between the beginning and the end of knowledge and neither the one nor the other can be transformed into actual knowledge. But beyond the confines of knowledge the unity of being can be directly experienced in the affections and expressed in symbols. Here dialectic justifies every symbol which
