454 AMBROSE J. MCNICHOLL 



of Vico, for whom imagination was as important as reason, and 

 art and history more human and real sciences than mathematics 

 or physics; and the Enlightenment, centered on the glorification 

 of reason, brought forth Rousseau to champion the claims of 

 feeling and of the instinctive following of nature. The skeptical 

 movement, which provided the background to Descartes' efforts 

 to reform philosophy, contributed no little to underaiining the 

 confidence in reason; nor should one neglect the influence of 

 Protestantism, whether Lutheran or Calvinist, separating, and 

 even opposing, faith and reason, which was regarded as in- 

 trinsically corrupt. Bayle provides a telling example of the 

 union of skepticism with Calvinist anti-rationalism, and shows 

 us how far the break-up of the medieval synthesis had been 

 carried by the beginning of the eighteenth century.^ 



If Kant may be regarded as the culmination of rationalism, 

 he must also be seen as one of the main sources of the move- 

 ment away from reason, by making practical reason superior 

 to theoretical reason, in so far as morality alone can lead us 

 back to contact with reality. Fichte would develop this aspect 

 of the Kantian critique, using morality to explain the evolution 

 of all things from a primitive consciousness urged towards self- 

 perfection; whereas Schelling would conceive this primitive Ego 

 as primarily aesthetic, and regard the evolution of the universe 

 as an artistic creation, the work of imagination rather than of 

 reason. Such idealistic systems, and particularly the logical 

 monism of Hegel, did indeed continue the tradition of viewing 

 the universe as a cosmos, which is fully intelligible to the human 

 mind; but the universe so considered is not the world of every- 

 day experience, of resistant reality, but one subjectively con- 

 structed within the consciousness of the individual, through a 

 process whose inner spring and source is irrational. 



The nineteenth century, although dominated at first by 

 Idealism and later by Positivism, witnessed vigorous reactions 

 against both these trends, against Idealism in the name of 



■^ Cf . J. Collins, God in Modem Philosophy (Chicago: Kegnery, 1959), pp. 

 127-133. 



