Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/495

 FRANZ VON BAADER. 473 sisted only of a series of brief treatises, were collected (16 vols., 1851-60) by his most important adherent, Franz Hoffman* (at his death in 1881 professor in Wiirzburg). Baader may be characterized as a mediaeval thinker who has worked through the critical philosophy, and who, a believing, yet liberal Catholic, endeavors to solve with the instruments of modern speculation the old Scholastic problem of the reconciliation of faith and knowledge. His themes are, on the one hand, the development of God, and, on the other, the fall and redemption, which mean for him, however, not merely inner phenomena, but world-events. He is in sympathy with the Neoplatonists, with Augus- tine, with Thomas Aquinas, with Eckhart, with Paracel- sus, above all, with Jacob Bohme, and Bohme's follower Louis Claude St. Martin (1743-1804), but does not over- look the value of the modern German philosophy. With Kant he begins the inquiry with the problem of knowledge ; with Fichte he finds in self-consciousness the essence, and not merely a property, of spirit ; with Hegel he looks on God or the absolute spirit not only as the object, but also as the subject of knowledge. He rejects, however, the autonomy of the will and the spontaneity of thought ; and though he criticises the Cartesian separation between the thought of the creator and that of the creature, he as little approves the pantheistic identification of the two — human cognition participates in the divine, without constituting a part of it. In accordance with its three principal objects, " God, Nature, and Man," philosophy divides into fundamental science (logic or the theory of knowledge and theology), the philosophy of nature (cosmology or the theory of creation and physics), and the philosophy of spirit (ethics and sociology). In all its parts it must receive religious treatment. Without God we cannot know God. In our cog- nition of God he is at once knower and known ; our being and all being is a being known by him ; our self-conscious- ness is a consciousness of being known by God : cogitor, expounded Baader's system. See also Baumann's paper in the Philosophische Monatshefte, vol. xiv., 1878, p. 'iil seq.
 * Besides Hoffman, Lutterbeck and Hamberger have described and