194 GERMAN' PHILOSOPItV. 



of man, in itself, isolated from everything that it reflects, from every- 

 thing that it encounters, from everything that it supposes is the sole ob- 

 ject of philosophy. Science thus conceived is at once both exact and 

 profound. It gives to reason absolute certainty, and absolute doubt to 

 everything else. If the world is problematic, if the human mind alone 

 is not so, the existence of the world depends entirely upon the human 

 mind, and reason creates everything that it conceives. This at least is 

 what Fjchte drew from Kantianism — Fichte that stoic patriot who be- 

 lieved in notliing but the soul and constructed upon the foundation of 

 spiritual independence the whole of morality and the whole of politics. 

 But if tlie thought produces everything that it comprehends, that which 

 exists, exists only in conformity with thought, and the world is identi- 

 cal with the intellect; the description of the ideal agrees with the de- 

 scription of the real, and natural philosophy has for its type the philosophy 

 of the liuman mind. It was to this that vox Schelling dared to push 

 his conclusions, and which he endeavored to establish with the double 

 power of system and imagination ; possessed as he was of the ability 

 like a Grecian ])hilosoplier to mingle physics and poetry, it is the same 

 system of universal identity that Hegel has invested with the vigorous 

 forms of an immense deduction, disguising hypothesis under the appear- 

 ance of algebra, and creating out of the whole a philosophy at once ro- 

 manesque and demonstrative. Thus the idea establishes nothing but it- 

 self, said Kant. Fichte added : the idea gives the being. The being re- 

 produces the idea, continued von Schelling. The idea is the being, 

 concluded Hegel. See how a sceptical idealism has renewed beneath 

 our eyes the pantheism of Spinoza."* 



It was thus that upon a recent occasion f endeavored to characterize 

 in a few words the developement of German philosophy from 1780 to 

 1830. Although these statements are summary, I believe them just, 

 and it is to explain them as well as to state their grounds that I devote 

 this introduction. Not that I am ignorant that, taken as a whole, the 

 German philosophy cannot be reduced to a summary so succinct. It 

 has presented during its course a spectacle most rich and varied. The 

 four names that have just been cited aie the greatest, but they are not 

 the only ones that deserve an extended memoir. There have been on 

 the other side of the Rhine, within the last sixty years, a great number 

 of collateral schools, opposite systems, episodical doctrines, attempts at 

 eclecticism which deserve a place in the science. But we are not here 



* Discours prononce dans !a seance publique annuelle do TAcadcinie des sci- 

 ences morales et politiques, le 17 raai, 1845. 



