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 4 7 6 SCHLEIERMA CHER. ics, the Theory of the State, and Education, edited by George, Lommatsch, Brandis, and Platz; and the first part of vol. iv., the History of Philosophy (to Spinoza), edited by Ritter. The Monologues and The Celebration of Christmas have appeared in Reclavis BibliotJiek. Schleiermacher's philosophy is a rendezvous for the most diverse systems. Side by side Vv'ith ideas from Kant, Fichte, and Schelling we meet Platonic, Spinozistic, and Leibnitzian elements; even Jacobi and the Romanticists have contributed their mite. Schleiermacher is an eclectic, | but one who, amid the fusion of the most diverse ideas, knows how to make his own individuality felt. In spite of manifold echoes of the philosophemes of earlier and of con- temporary thinkers, his system is not a conglomeration of unrelated lines of thought, but resembles a plant, which in its own way works over and assimilates the nutritive elements taken up from the soil. Schleiermacher is attractive rather than impressive; he is less a discoverer than a critic and systematizes His fine critical sense works in the service of a positive aim, subserves a harmonizing tendency ; he takes no pleasure in breaking to pieces, but in adjusting, lim- iting, and combining. There is no one of the given views which entirely satisfies him, none which simply repels him ; each contains elements which seem to him worthy of trans- formation and adoption. When he finds himself confronted by a sharp conflict of opinion, he seeks by careful mediation to construct a whole out of the two "half truths," though this, it is true, does not always give a result more satisfac- tory than the partial views which he wishes to reconcile. A single example may be given of this conciliatory tend- ency: space, time, and the categories are not only subjective forms of knowledge, but at the same time objective forms of reality. " Not only " is th-^ watchword of his philos- ophy, which became the prototype of the numberless "ideal-realisms" with which Germany was flooded after Hegel's death. If the skeptical and eclectic movements, which constantly make their appearance together, are else- where divided among different thinkers, they here come together in one mind in the form of a mediating criticism, which, although it argues logically, is yet in the end always