this unity must be laid down as the basis of knowledge, it is absolute
and transcendental. In contrast with the “ world, ” as the totality
of being in its differentiation, this absolute unity, or God, in whom
the real as manifold, and the spirit as one, find their unifying base,
by its very nature is unphenomenal, indefinable and inconceivable.
The idea is outside the boundary of thought, though its necessar
postulate, and it is no less inaccessible to religious feeling, thougli
it is its life and soul. Neither member of the antithesis of the real
and the ideal must be conceived as producing the other; they are
both equally existent and equally constituent elements of the world;
but in God they are one, and therefore the world must not be identified
with Him. The world and God are distinct, but correlative,
and neither can be conceived without the other. The world without
God would be “ chaos, " and God without the world an empty
“ phantasm." But though God is transcendent and unknowable
He is immanent in the world. In self-consciousness God is present
as the basis of the unity of our nature in every transition from an
act of knowledge to an act of will, and vice versa. As far as man
is the unity of the real and the ideal, God is in him. He is also in
all things, inasmuch as in everything the totality of the world and
its transcendental basis is presupposed by virtue of their being and
correlation. The unity of our personal life amidst the multiplicity
of its functions is the symbol of God's immanence in the worlcli
though we may not conceive of the Absolute as a person. The
idea of the World as the totality of being is, like the correlative
idea of God, only of regulative value; it is transcendent, as we
never do more than make approaches to a knowledge of the sum of
being. The one idea is the transcendental terminus a quo and the
other the transcendental terminus ad quem of all knowledge. But
though the world cannot be exhaustively known it can be known
very extensively, and though the positive idea of God must always
remain unattainable we are able to reject those ideas which involve
a contradiction of the postulate of the Absolute. Thus the pantheistic
and the theistic conceptions of God as the supreme power,
as the first cause, as a person, are alike unallowable, since they all
bring God within the sphere of antithesis and preclude His absolute
unity. On the other hand, the world can be known as the realm
of antithesis, and it is the correlative of God. Though He may
not be conceived as the absolute cause of the World, the idea of
absolute causality as symbolized in it may be taken as the best
approximate expression of the contents of the religious consciousness.
The unbroken connexion of cause and effect throughout the
world becomes thus a manifestation of God. God is to be sought
only in ourselves and in the world. He is completely immanent
in the universe. It is impossible that His causality should have any
other sphere than the world, which is the totality of being. “ No
God without a world, and no world without God." The divine omnipotence
is quantitatively represented by the sum of the forces of
nature, and qualitatively distinguished from them only as the unity
of infinite causality from the multiplicity of its finite phenomena.
Throughout the world-not excepting the realm of mind-absolute
necessity prevails. As a whole the world is as good and perfect as
a world could possibly be, and 'everything in it, as occupying its
necessary place in the whole, is also good, evil being only the necessary
limitation of individual being.
Schleiermacher's psychology takes as its basis the phenomenal dualism of the ego and the non-ego, and regards the life of man as the interaction of these elements with their interpenetration as its infinite destination. The dualism is therefore not absolute, and, though present in man's own constitution as composed of body and soul, is relative only even there. The ego is itself both body and soul-the conjunction of both constitutes it; our “organization " or sense nature has its intellectual element, and our “ intellect " its organic element. There is no such thing as “ pure mind " or “ pure body." The one general function of the ego, thought, becom-es in relation to the non-ego either receptive or spontaneous action, and in both forms of action its organic, or sense, and its intellectual energies co-operate; and in relation to man, nature and the universe the ego gradually hnds its true individuality by becoming a part of them, “ every extension of consciousness being higher life." The specific functions of the ego, as determined by the relative predominance of sense or intellect, are either functions of the senses (or organism) or functions of the intellect. The former fall into the two classes of feelings (subjective) and perceptions (objective); the latter, according as the receptive or the spontaneous element predominates, into c nition and volition. In cognition being is the object and in vbiition it is the purpose of thought: in the first case we receive (in our fashion) the object of thought into ourselves; in the latter we plant it out into the world. Both cognition and volition a.re functions of thought as well as forms of moral action. It is in those two functions that the real life of the ego is manifested, but behind them is self-consciousness permanently present, which is always both subjective and objective-consciousness of ourselves and of the non-ego. This self-consciousness is the third special form or function of thought-which is also called feeling and immediate knowledge. In it we cognize our own inner life as affected by the non-ego. As the non-ego helps or hinders, enlarges or limits, our inner life, we feel pleasure or pain. Aesthetic, moral and religious feelings are respectively produced by the reception into consciousness of large ideas-nature. mankind and the world; those feelings are the sense of being one with these vast objects. Religious feeling therefore is the highest form of thought and of life; in it we are conscious of our unity with the world and God; it is thus the sense of absolute dependence. Schleiermacher's doctrine of knowledge accepts the fundamental principle of Kant that knowledge is bounded by experience, but it seeks to remove Kant's scepticism as to knowledge of the Ding an sich. or Sein, as Schleiermacher's term is. The idea of knowledge or scientific thought as distinguished from the passive form of thought-of aesthetics and religion-is thought which is produced by all thinkers in the same form and which corresponds to being. All knowledge takes the form of the concept (Begmf) or the judgment (Urtheil), the former conceiving the variety of being as a definite unity and plurality, and the latter simply connecting the concept with certain individual objects. In the concept therefore the intellectual and in the judgment the organic or sense element predominates. The universal uniformity of the production of judgments presupposes the uniformity of our relations to the outward world, and the uniformity of concepts rests similarly on the likeness of our inward nature. This uniformity is not based on the sameness of either the intellectual or the organic functions alone, but on the correspondence of the forms of thought and sensation with the forms of being. The essential nature of the concept is that it combines the general and the special, and the same combination recurs in being; in being the system of substantial or permanent forms answers to the system of concepts and the relation of cause and effect to the system of judgments, the higher concept answering to “ force ” and the lower to the phenomena of force, and the judgment to the contingent interaction of things. The sum of being consists of the two systems of substantial forms and interactional relations, and it reappears in the form of concept and judgment, the concept re resenting being and the judgment being in action. Knowledge has under both forms the same object, , the relative difference of the two being that when the conceptual form predominates we have speculative science and when the form of judgment prevails we have empirical or historical science. Throughout the domain of knowledge the two forms are found in constant mutual relations, another proof of the fundamental unity of thought and being or of the objectivity of knowledge. It is obvious that Plato, Spinoza and Kant had contributed characteristic elements of their thought to this system, and directly or indirectly it was largely indebted to Schelling for fundamental conceptions.
Ethics.-Next to religion and theology it was to the moral world, of which, indeed, the phenomena of religion and theology were in his systems only constituent elements, that he specially devoted himself. In his earlier essays he endeavoured to point out the defects of ancient and modern ethical thinkers, particularly of Kant and Fichte, Plato and Spinoza only finding favour in his eyes. He failed to discover in previous moral systems any necessary basis in thought, any completeness as regards the phenomena of moral action, any systematic arrangement of its parts and any clear and distinct treatment of specific moral acts and relations. His own moral system is an attempt to supply these deficiencies. It connects the moral world by a deductive process with the fundamental idea of knowledge and being; it offers a view of the entire world of human action which at all events aims at being exhaustive; it presents an arrangement of the matter of the science which tabulates its constituents after the model of the physical sciences; and it supplies a sharply defined treatment of specific moral phenomena in their relation to the fundamental idea of human life as a whole. Schleiermacher defines ethics as the theory of the nature of the reason, or as the scientific treatment of the effects produced by human reason in the world of nature and man. As a theoretical or speculative science it is purely descriptive and not practical, being correlated on the one hand to physical science and on the other to history. its method is the same as that of physical science, being distinguished from the latter only by its matter. The ontological basis of ethics is the unity of the real and the ideal, and the psychological and actual basis of the ethical rocess is the tendency of reason and nature to unite in the form of) the complete organization of the latter by the former. The end of the ethical process is that nature (Le. all that is not mind, the human body as well as external nature) may become the perfect symbol and organ of mind. Conscience, as the subjective expression of the presupposed identity of reason and nature in their bases, guarantees the practicability of our moral vocation. Nature is preordained or constituted to become the symbol and organ of mind, just as mind is endowed with the impulse to realize this end. But the moral law must not be conceived under the form of an “ imperative ” or a “ Sollen ”; it differs from a law of nature only as being descriptive of the fact that it ranks the mind as conscious will, or zweckdenkend, above nature. Strictly speaking, the antitheses of good and bad and of free and necessary have no place in an ethical system, but simply in history, which is obliged to compare the actual with the ideal, but as far as the terms “ good " and “bad " are used in morals they express the rule or the contrary of reason, or the harmony or the contrary of the particular and the general. The idea of “ free ” as opposed to necessary expresses simply the fact that the mind can propose to itself ends, though a man cannot alter his own nature. In contrast to Kant and Fichte and modern moral philosophers
