Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/499

 DIALECTIC. 477 guided by the invisible cords of 2, feeling oi justice in matters scientific. In its weaker portions Schleiermacher's phi- losophy is marked by lack of grasp, pettiness, and sport- iveness. It lacks courage and force, and the rare delicacy of the thought is not entirely able to compensate for this defect. In its fear of one-sidedness it takes refuge in the arms of an often faint-hearted policy of reconciliation. We shall not discuss the specifically theological achieve- ments of this many-sided man, nor his great services in behalf of the philological knowledge of the history of phi- losophy — through his translation of Plato, 1804-28, and a scries of valuable essays on Greek thinkers — but shall con- fine our attention to the leading principles of his theory of knowledge, of religion, and of ethics. The Dialectic* (edited by Jonas, 1839), treats in a tran- scendental part and a technical or formal part of the concept and the forms of knowledge. Knowledge is tiiought. What distinguishes that thought which we call knowledge from that other thought which does not deserve this honorable title, from mere opinion ? Two criteria; its agreement with the thought of other thinkers (its universality and necessity), and its agreement with the being which is thought in it. That thought alone is knowledge which is represented as necessarily valid for all who are capable of thought, and as corresponding to a being or reproducing it. These two agreements (among thinkers, and of thought with the being which is thought) are the criteria of knowledge — let us turn now to its factors. These are essentially the two brought forward by Kant, sensibility and understanding; Schleier- macher calls them the organic function and the intellectual function. The organic activity of the senses furnishes us, • in sensations, the unordered, manifold material of knowl- edge, which is formed and unified by the activity of reason. If we except two concepts which limit our knowl- edge, chaos and God — absolute formlessness or chaos is an idea just as incapable of realization as absolute unity or deity — every actual cognition is a product of both factors, 1871, and the Inquiries by Bruno Weiss in the Zeitschri/t fur Philosophie, vols. Ixxiii.-lxxv., 1878-79.
 * Cf . Quaebicker, Ueber SchUitrmachers erkenntnisstheoretische Grundansicht,