Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/432

Rh 410 SCHLEIERMACHER of his three years' course at Halle he obtained through the influence of the court-chaplain Sack an appointment as private tutor in the family of Count Dohna-Schlobitten, which he held upwards of two years, developing in a culti- vated and aristocratic household his deep love of family and social life. After short engagements in tuition and as locum tenens to a clergyman of the small town of Landsberg, he received (1796) the appointment of chaplain to the Charit6 Hospital in Berlin, a position which he held nearly six years, and which offered no scope for the development of his powers as a preacher. He was the more induced to seek the satisfaction of his mental and spiritual necessities in the cultivated society of Berlin, aud in profound philosophical studies. This was the period in which he was constructing the framework of his philoso- phical and religious system. It was the period too when he made himself widely acquainted with art, literature, science, and modern culture generally. He was at that time profoundly affected by German Romanticism, as represented by his friend Friedrich Schlegel, and it required all the energy of his moral nature and the force of his intellect to preserve himself from its moral and mental extravagances. Of this his Confidential Letters on Schlegel's Ludnde (1801), as well as his perilous relation to Eleonore Grunow, the wife of a Berlin clergyman, are proof and illustration. Gradually his sound moral nature, his deep religiousness, and his powerful intellect enabled him to emancipate himself entirely from the errors and weaknesses of a transient phase of mental and social history, and to appropriate at the same time the elements of truth and goodness which it possessed in rich measure. Romanticism unlocked for him the divine treasures of life and truth which are stored in the feelings and intuitions of the human soul, and thus enabled him to lay the founda- tions of his philosophy of religion and his ethical system. It enriched his imagination and life too 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, Reden iiber die Religion (1799), and his "new year's gift" to the new century, the Monologen (1800). 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 de- scribed 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. In 1802, to his great advantage morally and intellectually, Schleier- macher exchanged the brilliant circle of Berlin Romanticists for the retired life of a pastor in the little Pomeranian town of Stolpe. Here he remained two years, which were full of pastoral and literary work, as well as rich in personal and moral progress. He relieved Friedrich Schlegel entirely of his nominal responsibility for the translation of Plato, which they had together undertaken, and regarded the completion of it as the work of his life. The first volume was published in 1804, and the last (the Republic) in 1828. At the same time another work, Grund- Hiiim ihiir Jiritik th-r Inx/uri'/en Sittenlehre (1803), the first of his strictly critical and philosophical productions, occupied him. This work is a severe criticism of all previous moral systems, especially those of Kant and Fichte, Plato's and Spinoza's finding most favour ; its leading principles are that the tests of the soundness of a moral system are the completeness of its view of the laws and ends of human life as a whole and the harmonious arrangement of its subject-matter under one fundamental principle; and, though it is almost exclusively critical and negative, the book announces clearly the division and scope of moral science which Schleiermacher sub- sequently adopted, attaching prime importance to a " Giiterlehre," or doctrine of the ends to be obtained by moral action. But the obscurity of the style of the book as well as its almost purely negative results proved fatal to its immediate success. In 1804 Schleiermacher removed as university preacher and professor of theology to Halle, where he remained until 1807, and where he quickly obtained a reputation as professor and preacher, and exercised a powerful influence in spite of the contradictory charges of his being an atheist, Spinozist, and pietist. In this period he wrote his dialogue the Weihnachtsfeier (1806), a charming production, which holds a place midway between his Reden and his great dogmatic work the Christliche Glaube, and presents in the persons of its speakers phases of his growing appreciation of Christianity as well as the conflicting elements of the theology of the period. After the battle of Jena he returned to Berlin (1807), was soon appointed pastor of the Trinity Church there, and the next year married the widow of his friend Willich. At the foundation of the Berlin university (1810), in which he took a prominent part, he was called to a theological chair, and soon became secretary to the Academy of Sciences. He was thus placed in a position suited to his powers and in domestic and social surroundings adapted to meet the wants of his rich nature. At the same time he approved himself in the pulpit and elsewhere as a large- hearted and fearless patriot in that time of national calamity and humiliation, acquiring a name and place in his country's annals with Arndt, Fichte, Stein, and Scharn- horst. He took a prominent part too in the reorganiza- tion of the Prussian church, and became the most powerful advocate of the union of the Lutheran and Reformed divisions of German Protestantism. The twenty-four years of his professional career in Berlin were opened with his short but important outline of theological study (Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums, 1810), in which he sought to do for theology what he had done for religion in his Reden. While he preached every Sunday, he also gradually took up in his lectures in the university almost every branch of theology and philosophy New Testament exegesis, introduction to and interpretation of the New Testament, ethics (both philosophic and Christian), dogmatic and practical theology, church history, history of philosophy, psychology, dialectics (logic and metaphysics), politics, pedagogy, and aesthetics. His own materials for these lectures and his students' notes and reports of them are the only form in which the larger proportion of his works exist, a circumstance which has greatly increased the difficulty of getting a clear and harmonious view of fundamental portions of his philo- sophical and ethical system, while it has effectually deterred all but the most courageous and patient students from reading these posthumous collections. As a preacher he produced a powerful effect, yet not at all by the force of his oratory but by his intellectual strength, his devotional spirit, and the philosophical breadth and unity of his thought. In politics he was an earnest friend of