SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 173 

 in Riga, afterwards spending some years travelling in Europe, and finally, 

 on Goethe's recommendation, becoming court chaplain at Weimar. At the 

 same time enthusiastic and irascible, he had great difficulty in getting on 

 with people; at times even he and Goethe would be on bad terms, but they 

 would soon become reconciled again. As a poet and student of folk-lore 

 Herder has contributed much to literary history. Pronounced romanticist 

 as he was, he sought earnestly for a uniform conception of existence; in these 

 efforts Spinoza was his principal master — he rescued the latter's writings 

 from oblivion and was an ardent supporter of the more mystical views con- 

 tained therein, whereas Kant's criticism attracted him but little. In his prin- 

 cipal work, Ideen xur Fhilosophie der Geschkhte der Menschheit, Herder tries to 

 prove how one and the same spirit dominates the whole of nature; all living 

 beings have been created -according to one common plan; their various char- 

 acteristics correspond to their peculiar functions in life, which finally reaches 

 full perfection in man. In the whole of this conception of the course of life 

 Herder is a precursor of the romantic philosophy, which left such a deep 

 impression even on biological history. 



JoHANN Gottlieb Fichte (1761-18 14) is generally regarded as the first 

 of the purely romantic philosophers. The son of poor parents, he suffered 

 many hardships before becoming a professor, first at Jena, where, on account 

 of his strictly moral principles, he came into conflict with both professors 

 and students and was finally dismissed for "atheism"; and then in Berlin, 

 where he worked hard for the elevation of morals and of the national spirit 

 under the oppression of Napoleon's rule. His philosophy, too, is mostly 

 concerned with ethics; he is of only indirect importance in biological history, 

 as having been the teacher of Scheiling, the founder of natural philosophy. 

 Fichte bases his philosophical speculation on Kant, but he also felt the in- 

 fluence of Spinoza. Kant thought that our consciousness gives us the idea 

 that we have of a thing, whereas the thing itself is unknown to us. Fichte 

 also starts from the idea of consciousness, but denies the existence of the 

 thing in itself: he believes that the consciousness or the ego, ''das Ich," as 

 he calls it, is the only true thing existing; through its operation it then gives 

 rise to existence apart from itself — "the ego places the non-ego," runs 

 the oft-quoted phrase, which primarily refers to the creative work which 

 the moral will of man performs, for the moral will is man's true ego and the 

 central point in the whole of Fichte's extremely abstract and involved spec- 

 ulations. But besides the individual ego, Fichte assumes an "absolute ego" 

 — a kind of world-soul, which can be attained by man only through "in- 

 tellectual intuition" — a kind of mystical impulse on the model of Spinoza. 

 It was Scheiling who further developed his idea, making it one of the foun- 

 dations of his natural philosophy. 



Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was born at Leonberg in 



