1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Reimarus, Hermann Samuel

REIMARUS, HERMANN SAMUEL (1694-1768), German philosopher and man of letters, was born at Hamburg, on the 22nd of December 1694. He was educated by his father and by the famous scholar J. A. Fabricius, whose son-in-law he subsequently became. He studied theology, ancient languages, and philosophy at Jena, became Privatdozent in the university of Wittenberg in 1716, and in 1720-21 visited Holland and England. In 1723 he became rector of the high school at Wismar in Mecklenburg, and in 1727 professor of Hebrew and Oriental languages in the high school of his native city. This post he held till his death, though offers of more lucrative positions were made to him. His duties were light, and he employed his leisure in the study of philology, mathematics, philosophy, history, political economy, natural science and natural history, for which he made large collections. His house was the centre of the highest culture of Hamburg, and a monument of his influence in that city still remains in the Haus der patriotischen Gesellschaft, where the learned and artistic societies partly founded by him still meet. He had seven children, only three of whom survived him &mdash; the distinguished physician Johann Albrecht Heinrich, and two daughters, one of them being Elise, Lessing's friend and correspondent. He died on the 1st of March 1768.

Reimarus's reputation as a scholar rests on the valuable edition of Dio Cassius (1750-52) which he prepared from the materials collected by J. A. Fabricius. He published a work on logic (Vernunftlehre als Anweisung zum richtigen Gebrauche der Vernunft, 1756, 5th ed., 1790), and two popular books on the religious questions of the day. The first of these was a collection of essays on the principal truths of natural religion (Abhandlungen von den vornehmsten Wahrheiten der natürlichen Religion, 1755, 7th ed., 1798); the second (Betrachtungen über die Triebe der Thiere, 1760, 4th ed., 1798) dealt with one particular branch of the same subject. His philosophical position is essentially that of Christian Wolff. But he is best known by his Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernunftigen Verehrer Gottes (carefully kept back during his lifetime), from which, after his death, Lessing published certain chapters under the title of the Wolfenbüttel Fragments (see ). The original

MS. is in the Hamburg town library; a copy was made for the university library of Göttingen, 1814, and other copies are known to exist. In addition to the seven fragments published by Lessing, a second portion of the work was issued in 1787 by C. A. E. Schmidt (a pseudonym), under the title Uebrige noch ungedruckte Werke des Wolfenbüttelschen Fragmentisten, and a further portion by D. W. Klose in Niedner's Zeitschrift für historische Theologie, 1850-52. Two of the five books of the first part and the whole of the second part, as well as appendices on the canon, remain unprinted. But D. F. Strauss has given an exhaustive analysis of the whole work in his book on Reimarus.