Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/210

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FRIES
207

cepts, which condition all understanding from the facts of experience. The method is more important than the system. This analytic method demands a strictly scientific treatment of the problems of psychology. Psychology must be a strictly causal science, whose correlate constitutes an exact science of the corporeal side of nature. This standpoint of Fries is Spinozistic. He presumes, by way of analogy, that all existence everywhere possesses an inner, spiritual phase as well as an external, material phase (Psychische Anthropologie, 1820-1).

Even the most consistent causal method only leads from the finite to the finite. There is no scientific path to the infinite and the eternal. But the same reality which the natural sciences regard as the world of phenomena, faith construes as supported by an eternal principle. But the only way we can describe this principle is negatively. Whenever faith makes use of positive expressions, it must be understood that these can only have symbolical significance. Fries carries out the idea of symbolism far more purely and consistently than Kant and Schleiermacher (Handbuch der Philosophie der Religion, 1832).

2. John Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841), who was an instructor in the universities of Konigsberg and Gottingen, calls himself a "Kantian of 1828." He thus described both his relation to Kant as well as his critical advance beyond him. He would start from experience—but he regards it impossible to remain on the empirical basis. For experience contains contradictions which—owing to the logical principle of identity—must be corrected: things change but they are nevertheless supposed to remain the same things! One and the same thing