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SCHLEICHER, AUGUST (1821–1868), German philologist, was born at Meiningen on the 19th of February 1821, the son of a medical practitioner. He attended (1835–1840) the gymnasium at Coburg. In the autumn of 1840 he entered the university of Leipzig as a student of theology, but exchanged Leipzig in the spring of 1841 for Tübingen. Here he remained two years, and under the influence of the famous orientalist Ewald, relinquished the study of theology for that of languages. Proceeding to the university of Bonn in 1843, he took his doctor's degree in 1846 and established himself as Privatdozent for comparative philology. In 1850 he was appointed extraordinary professor of classical philology at the university of Prague, and in 1853 was advanced as ordinary professor to the chair of German and comparative philology and Sanskrit. While at Prague he commenced the study of Slavonic languages, and with the assistance of the Vienna academy of sciences undertook in 1852 a journey of scientific research into Prussian Lithuania, the fruits of which were the first scientific examination and description of the character of the Lithuanian language. In 1857 he became professor of philology at Jena, where he lived and worked until his death on the 6th of December 1868. Next to (q.v.), the founder on the science of language, no German savant left a more enduring stamp of his personality upon this science than did Schleicher.

SCHLEIDEN, MATTHIAS JAKOB (1804–1881), German botanist, was born at Hamburg on the 5th of April 1804. He studied law at Heidelberg and practised as an advocate in Hamburg till 1831, but not succeeding he studied botany and medicine at Göttingen and Berlin, and in 1839 graduated at Jena, where he was appointed extraordinary professor of botany, becoming honorary professor in 1846 and ordinary professor in 1850. In 1863 he was called to Dorpat, but resigned the following year and returned to Germany, where he lived as a private teacher. He died at Frankfort-on-Main on the 23rd of June 1881. His title to remembrance is twofold. Uniting the labours of two centuries of workers in vegetable histology, he proved that a nucleated cell is the only original constituent of the plant embryo, and that the development of all vegetable tissues must be referred to such cells, thus preparing the way for the epoch-making cell theory of (q.v.); and his Principles of Scientific Botany (1842–1843), which went through several editions, did much to shake the tyranny of the purely systematic Linnean school, whose accumulations he was accustomed irreverently to describe as “ hay.” Despite a certain inability to criticize and verify his own hypotheses, he gave, both by his speculative activity and by the introduction of improved technical methods, so vivid an impulse to the younger botanists of his time as to have earned from Anton de Bary the title of reformer of, scientific botany. His botanical labours practically ceased after 1850, when he entered on various phi1osophical and historical studies.

SCHLEIERMACHER, FRIEDRICH DANIEL ERNST (1768-1834), theologian and philosopher, was the son of a Prussian army chaplain of the Reformed confession, and was born on the 21st of November 1768 at Breslau. He was educated in a Moravian school at N iesky in upper Lusatia, and at Barby near Halle. Moravian theology, however, soon ceased to satisfy him, and his doubts rapidly took definite shape. Reluctantly his father gave him permission to leave Barby for the university of Halle, which had already (1787) abandoned pietism and adopted the rationalist spirit of Wolf and Semler (see RATIONAL-ISM). As a student he pursued an independent course of reading and neglected to his permanent loss the study of the Old Testament and the Oriental languages. But he frequented the lectures of Semler and of ]. A. Eberhard, acquiring from the former the principles of an independent criticism of the New Testament and from the latter his love of Plato and Aristotle. At the same time he studied with great earnestness the writings of Kant and Jacobi. He acquired thus early his characteristic habit of forming his opinions by the process of patiently examining and weighing the positions of all thinkers and parties. But with the receptivity of a great eclectic he combined the reconstructive power of a profoundly original thinker. While yet a student he began to apply ideas gathered from the Greek philosophers in a reconstruction of Kant's system. At the completion of his three years course at Halle he was for two years private tutor in the family of Count Dohna-Schlobitten, developing in a cultivated and aristocratic household his deep love of family and social life. In 1796 he became chaplain to the Charité Hospital in Berlin. Having no scope for the development of his powers as a preacher, he sought mental and spiritual satisfaction in the cultivated society of Berlin, and in profound philosophical studies. This was the period in which he was constructing the framework of his philosophical and religious system. It was the period, too, when he made himself widely acquainted with art, literature, science and general culture. He was at that time profoundly affected by German Romanticism, as represented by his friend Friedrich Schlegel. Of this his Conjidential Letters on Schlegel's Lucinde (Vertrauten Briefe uber Sehlegel's “ Lucinde, ” 1801; ed. 1835; by jonas Frankel, 1907; R. Frank, 1907), as well as his perilous relation to Eleonore Grunow, the wife of a Berlin clergyman, are proof and illustration. Though his ultimate principles were unchanged he gained much from the struggle. It showed him much of the inner truth of human feeling and emotion, and enriched his imagination and life with. ideals ancient and modern, which gave elevation, depth and colour to all his thought. Meantime he studied Spinoza and Plato, and was profoundly influenced by both, though he was never a Spinozist; he made Kant more and more his master, though he departed on fundamental points from him, and finally remodelled his philosophy; with some of Jacobi's positions he was in sympathy, and from Fichte and Schelling he accepted ideas, which in their place in his system, however, received another value and import. The literary fruit 'of this period of intense fermentation and of rapid development was his “epoch making ” book, Redcn uber die Religion (1799; ed. Gottingen, 1906), and his “ new year's gift ” to the new century, the M onologen (1800; ed. 1902). In the first book he vindicated for religion an eternal place amongst the divine mysteries of human nature, distinguished it from all current caricatures of it and allied phenomena, and described the perennial forms of its manifestation and life in men and society, giving thereby the programme of his subsequent theological system. In the Monologen he threw out his ethical manifesto, in which he proclaimed his ideas as to the freedom and independence of the spirit, and as to the relation of the mind to the world of sense and imperfect social organizations, and sketched his ideal of the future of the individual and society.

From 1802 to 1804, Schleierrnacher was pastor in the little Pomeranian town of Stolpe. These years were full of literary