which is not so certainly in keeping with human autonomy, with its fearful possibilities of persistent abuse and progressive deterioration of the moral faculties.1

The school of Bengel naturally suggests the names of Stilling and Lavater. Like the members of this school they combined religious earnestness with a certain bent to eccentricity. Far removed from the deistic temper of the age, they believed that mystery and miracle lie close to man's pathway, and that the supernatural is repeatedly overflowing into the sphere of the natural. In some of their views they indicated an appreciative acquaintance with the writings of Swedenborg.

Hamann, whose peculiar style was noticed above, represents the antithesis of the Wolfian stress upon formal demonstration. "For him the highest principle of truth was not the law of contradiction, which the Wolfians everywhere made the criterion of knowledge, but the coincidentia oppositorum of Giordano Bruno, the oneness of opposites, the union of A and not-A. did not regard the logical understanding as the spring of truth, but assigned that office to feeling, expressing itself not in clear, logical, cogent thinking, but in sentiment, which works all the more certainly because it works in the dark. "2

He

That a prosaic intellectualism did not rule the whole field in this era is made manifest still further by the names of Klopstock, Gellert, Haller, and Claudius, not to mention such hymn-writers from the earlier part of the century as Schmolck, Freylinghausen, Bogatzky, 1 See Auberlen, Die Theosophie Oetinger's. 2 Kronenberg, Herder's Philosophie.

Tersteegen, and Waltersdorf. Klopstock held a very significant position in his age, as combining the German spirit with an appreciation for classic forms, and also with a firm evangelical faith. His extensive poem, the "Messiah," may tax, it is true, the patience of the modern reader, and one may turn with a certain sense of relief from its vague and labored representation of Christ to the living pages of the gospel narratives; nevertheless, the elaborate epic had its message for that generation, being both religiously and poetically edifying to a great number of the German people. In Gellert a lyric talent, regulated by simplicity and moderation of spirit, often found happy expression. While his hymns do not reflect the intenser phases of Christian feeling, they meet so well the average demand of worship as naturally to claim a wide acceptance. Haller, like his contemporary, Euler, was a man who blended with scientific labor the spirit and belief of a devout Christian. His poetry is of the didactic rather than of the lyric order. Claudius made his gift for popular expression tributary to a lively and intense appreciation of Biblical truth.

III.-FROM KANT TO SCHLEIERMACHER.

The principal works of Kant, beginning with the "Critique of the Pure Reason," fell between the beginning of the year 1781 and the end of the year 1793. This interval may properly be regarded as one of the greatest eras in the history of philosophy. In the modern world no single mind has afforded a profounder

intellectual incentive than that which came from the Königsberg professor.

A leading item in the significance of Kant is the searching scrutiny which he expended upon the problem of knowledge. Awakened by the scepticism of Hume, he labored with great diligence to determine the conditions and limits of human cognition.

The result, on the one side, was a repudiation or emphatic qualification of sensationalism. Not denying that sensations are a necessary means of acquaintance with objective reality, Kant maintained still that in themselves they are far from constituting knowledge. They make only a confused manifold, and must remain in the sphere of blind impressions unless met by an arranging and interpreting faculty not contained in themselves. Only in a subject having unity of consciousness and furnished with a priori forms of intuition and thought can they obtain any proper relation and meaning. In virtue of its original constitution the mind has its view-points or categories under which all materials must be subsumed if they are to become objects of knowledge. Thus far the Kantian analysis evidently gives dignity to the human mind, making its activity a condition of all rational experience, and lifting it far above the rank of a mere resultant of material forces.

On the other side, the outcome of Kant's investigation was an emphatic limitation upon the power of the mind to establish ultimate truth in a speculative way. If the mind takes its own necessary intuitions and forms of thought, though it may weave them into an elaborate system, it can have no assurance that this

system is anything more than a complex of abstractions. The materials used being purely subjective, there is no pledge that the combination represents aught beyond the circle of subjectivity. If in place of this subjective flight the mind looks outward toward what is given in sense-perception, it strikes indeed upon objective reality, yet only upon the surface of this reality. It reaches only phenomena. What lies back

of phenomena, if in truth there is anything beyond, it has no means of seeing or demonstrating. It knows how things affect itself, but things in themselves it does not know. Self and the phenomenal world seem thus to make up the whole sphere of reality respecting which the human mind can gain proper knowledge.

Is then all that lies beyond, including God and His immortal kingdom, to be ignored as out of relation to man, or beyond the sphere of authorized conviction? This is far from being Kant's conclusion. In his view, what is beyond the reach of intuition or demonstration may yet be practically demanded, and so be an object of faith. A very urgent demand of this kind exists. Man knows himself as a moral being. His nature asserts a comprehensive law of duty, a categorical imperative, which may be expressed in terms like these: So act that the maxim of thy will can always hold good as a principle of universal legislation. The presence of this law, as an inalienable factor of man's moral consciousness, legitimates belief in a moral system, and in the essential constituents of a veritable moral system, namely, freedom, immortality, and the existence and government of God. The speculative reason has nothing to offer against these great truths, and, as the prac

tical reason demands them, it is but the exercise of a rational faith to accept them.

From this it is evident that the outcome of Kant's system, as understood by himself, was not a radical agnosticism. A theistic faith based upon and required by imperishable data of the moral consciousness is at a great remove from blank ignorance and uncertainty. Some further warrant for rational conviction may indeed be attainable. The æsthetic impress made by a speculative or historical ideal, where this impress is sufficiently steadfast and general, has an evidential force as well as the bare sense of duty. It must also be confessed that Kant fell short of the truth, and opened a door to scepticism, by questioning the objective validity of the categories, or the fundamental forms of thought. Still, it is fair to acknowledge that he conceived of theistic faith as being demanded by philosophy, and considered that his own system made rather for its support than for its overthrow.

While Kant conceived of man as a religious being, he was averse to including in the idea of religion anything more than the attitude toward the moral law as the will of God expressed in and through man's nature. In other words, he considered morality the real core of religion, and had but slight appreciation for that order of supernatural communications which Christianity, as a positive religion, predicates. He regarded the supposition of miracles as prejudicial to a scientific view of nature, and argued that in the event of their occurrence they could furnish only a dubious ground of inference, since it would be impossible to trace them to their source, so as to identify with certainty God's will and