Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/196

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SCHLEIERMACHER
193

jectifies his inner experiences in art, science and religion.—Whilst in his youth Schleiermacher (Monologe, 1800) was impatient with the prominence ascribed to material culture, and as a matter of fact wanted to recognize the "symbolizing" activity alone as ethical, later on he tried to recognize both forms of activity in their distinctive significance.

He disagreed with Kant and Fichte not only in the matter of the intimate relation of ethics to nature, but likewise in his strong emphasis on individuality. The nature of the individual is not exhausted in the universal and social. The only way an individual can possess any moral value is by means of the fact that he expresses what universal in human nature in an individual way. His acts must therefore necessarily contain something which could not pertain to another individual. The individual could not have been fully active in the case of any act of his which lacked the distinguishing marks of his individuality.

c. In his conception of religion Schleiermacher is inclined both to intellectualism and to moralism. He assigns religion to the point where the division of the mental faculties has not yet become active, and where that which is individual is just in process of differentiating itself from the universal, without however as yet having attained the antithesis of subject and object. This point is given in an immediate feeling, which he at first (in the Reden über die Religion) described as a sense of unity, later on (in Der christliche Glaube, 1821) rather as a sense of dependence. It is the birth-place of personality. In this feeling we are at once personal and dependent: it is here that we acquire the basis of our personality. The sense of dependence becomes a consciousness of God at the mo-