Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/433

Rh SGHLEIERMACHEE 411 liberty and progress, and in the period of reaction which followed the overthrow of Napoleon he was charged by the Prussian Government with " demagogic agitation " in conjunction with the great patriot Arndt. At the same time he prepared for the press his chief theological work Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsatzen der evan- gelischen Kirche (1821-22 ; 2d edition, greatly altered, 1830-31). The fundamental principle of this classical work is, that religious feeling, the sense of absolute dependence on God as communicated by Jesus Christ through the church, and not the creeds or the letter of Scripture or the rationalistic understanding, is the source and law of dogmatic theology. The work is therefore simply a description of the facts of religious feeling, or of the inner life of the soul in its relations to God, and these inward facts are looked at in the various stages of their development and presented in their systematic con- nexion. The aim of the work was to reform Protestant theology by means of the fundamental ideas of the Reden, to put an end to the unreason and superficiality of both supernaturalism and rationalism, and to deliver religion and theology from a relation of dependence on perpetually changing systems of philosophy. Though the work added to the reputation of its author, it naturally aroused the increased opposition of the theological schools it was intended to overthrow, and at the same time Schleier- macher's defence of the right of the church to frame its own liturgy in opposition to the arbitrary dictation of the monarch or his ministers brought upon him fresh troubles. He felt himself in Berlin more and more isolated, although his church and his lecture-room con- tinued to be largely attended. But he prosecuted his translation of Plato and prepared a new and greatly altered edition of his Christliche Glaube, anticipating the latter in two letters to his friend Liicke (in the Studien und Kritiken, 1829), in which he defended with a masterly hand his theological position generally and his book in particular against opponents on the right and the left. The same year he lost his only son a blow which, he said, " drove the nails into his own coffin." But he continued to defend his theological position against Hengstenberg's party on the one hand and the rationalists Von Colin and D. Schulz on the other, protesting against both subscrip- tion to the ancient creeds and the imposition of a new rationalistic formulary. In the midst of such labours, and enjoying still full bodily and mental vigour, he was carried off after a few days' illness by inflammation of the lungs. He died thinking " the profoundest speculative ideas which were one with his deepest religious feeling," and partaking of the sacrament of the Lord's supper, February 12, 1834. Schleiermacher's friend, the naturalist and poet Steffens, has left the following description of his appearance about the beginning of the century : " Schleiermacher was of small stature, a little deformed, yet hardly enough to disfigure him ; all his movements were animated, and his features in the highest degree expressive; a certain keen- ness in his glance produced perhaps a repellent effect; indeed, he appeared to see through every one ; his face rather long, all his features sharply cut, the lips firmly closed, the chin projecting, the eyes animated and flashing, his look always serious, collected, and thoughtful." liloso- Schleiermacher s Philosophical System. A great antithesis lies ical at the basis of all thought and life that of the real and the ideal, stem, of organism, or sense, and intellect. But the antithesis is not abso- lute, for in life and being both elements are united though with- out its presence life and thought would be impossible. In the actual Avorld the antithesis appears as reason and nature, in each of which, however, there is a combination of its two elements the ideal and the real, the reason having a preponderance of the first and nature a preponderance of the second. At the basis of nature lies universal reason as its organizing principle, and when reason becomes a conscious power in man it finds itself in conflict as well as in harmony with external nature. The whole effort and end of human thought and action is the gradual reduction of the realm and the power of this antithesis in the individual, the race, and the world. Though the antithesis is real and deep, the human mind cannot admit its absolute nature ; we are compelled to sup- pose a transcendental reality or entity in which the real and the ideal, being and thought, subject and object, are one. Conscious- ness itself involves the union of the antithetic elements, and prior to moral action nature is found organized and reason manifested or symbolized therein. "We are ourselves proofs of the unity of the real and the ideal, of thought and being, for we are both, our self- consciousness supplying the expression of the fact. As we have in ourselves an instance of the identity of thought and being, we must suppose a universal identity of the ideal and real behind the antithesis which constitutes the world. This supposition is the basis of all knowledge, for thought becomes knowledge only when it corresponds to being. The supposition may be called a belief, but it is so only in the sense in which belief appears in the religious department, where it is the ultimate ground of all action. The supposition is the basis of all ethics, for without the conviction of the correspondence of thought and reality action would be fruitless and in the end impossible. It is above all the substance of religious feeling, which is the immediate consciousness of the unity of the world, of the absolute oneness behind the infinite multiplicity of contrasts ; indeed, it is the religious conviction of the unity which is the best guarantee of the truth of the suppositions of philosophy. It is " the religious consciousness of the iinity of the intellectual and physical world in God " which is to overcome the scepticism of the critical philosophy. But, though 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 differen- tiation, 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 necessary postulate, and it is no less inaccessible to religious feeling, though 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 "phan- tasm." 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 world, 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 quern 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 pan- theistic 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 conscious- ness. 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 omni- potence 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