Page:The Idealistic Reaction Against Science (1914).djvu/23

 tion of God in the mystical writings of Jacobi, and in the form of the primacy of practical reason in the work of Kant and Fichte, while in the revolt of the romanticists, the Schlegels, Tieck, Novalis, and Schelling, it takes on the new aspect of poetic intuition which ranks the concreteness of aesthetic vision higher than abstract mathematicism, the individual than the universal, the changeful life of history than the inflexible formulas of mechanical science. In Hegel reason strives to break away from the motionless formulas of the old logic and to comprehend within the triad of a higher dialectic that concrete development which eluded the schemes of mathematical intellectualism, but for all its gigantic efforts it fails to dominate the manifold complexity of experience, or to absorb into the idea the productive wealth of intuition and the vivid glow of feeling; and, while speculative Pan-logism is celebrating the funeral rites of the dead and gone divinities of the romanticists — art and religion, superseded now by thought — we behold the gods arising once more from the tombs to which Hegel and his teaching had consigned them — rising full of the ardour of youth in the mysticism of the later philosophy of Schelling, in the feeling and religious faith with which Schleiermacher and Hamilton sought to supplement our poor intellectual science of the finite and conditioned, in the belligerent will of Schopenhauer who strives to express his deep sense of rhythm in music, beyond the realm of precise concepts. The over-depreciation of scientific intellectualism and of mechanical and abstract mathematicism, which is characteristic of all idealistic speculation, and its claim to take the place of science and to substitute for it a fantastic system of natural philosophy are followed by a fresh glorification of the physical mathematical method, which in its turn, in the exaggerated reaction which set in, laid claim to the place of philosophy, thus invading the realm of the mind. Thus, passing over the criticism of Kant, we return to the