Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/713

No. 6.] speaking of any individual, that this basal force acquired its highest development. Nor can we regard it as a fixed definite quantity; it is an X, unknown and unknowable. Also, the impenetrability of inorganic matter shows that we cannot ascribe to it any definite force. It is rather an inexhaustible fountain, able to supply all kinds of forces as the occasion demands.

D. begins this second half of his paper by discussing the intellectual and spiritual movement, more especially in Germany, which preceded the Reformation. This movement of the Reformation he regards, not from the standpoint of church history or the history of dogma, but as an important link in the chain of intellectual processes in the sixteenth century. Of importance here is how a universalistic theism at the beginning of the sixteenth century became victorious in all Europe; how a new ideal of life arose out of the changed conditions of society. In this condition of things lies the beginning of a new theology, freed from scholastic speculation, and founded on experience and the Christian literature. In inner experience and the critical history of Christianity this new theology has had its foundation until to-day. Through this theology insight into the moral autonomy of man has gradually been won. Erasmus, the Voltaire of the sixteenth century, is treated as the exponent of the new liberal direction; along with him as co-workers on the new theology D. discusses Reuchlin. This same combination of an universalistic theism with philological and partly quite radical criticism of the sources of Christianity, which we find in Reuchlin, is seen further in the Erfurt Humanists. The chief of these was Konrad Mudt (Mutianus Rufus). In conjunction with this universalistic theism there was developed in German-speaking countries a new ideal of religious life. In Italy the ascetic ideal had given way to that of a personality developed directly out of man's natural dispositions. Here was evolved in the fifteenth century the uomo universal. This is seen in the autobiography of Leon Battista Alberti and in the large outlines of the person of Lionardo da Vinci. These men rest entirely on themselves and strive to give their natural being its most perfect development. Rabelais gives expression to a related ideal in his characterization of the ideal cloister in Gargantua. In Pirkheimer we have the Italian ideal of the universal man embodied in a genuine German. Sebastian Brant