OF THE SPIRIT. 



311 



Nature.' Both these harmonised with the pantheistic 

 side of Schleiermacher's effusions, with his Spinozism. 

 But secondly, the subjective and individualising current 

 of thought which forms the other side of these same 

 writings found an eager response in the subjectivism 

 and the phantasies of the romantic school of which 

 Schleiermacher's personal friends, the brothers Schlegel, 

 formed the centre. However, neither the one nor the 

 other exhausted Schleiermacher's conception, and, as 

 the sequel has shown, both are in danger of losing the 

 truly religious interest and elaborating an sesthetical 

 substitute for it. The principal defect of the former, 

 the religion of pantheism with its impersonal deity, 

 is that it has no understanding for the existence of 

 sin and evil. The two greatest exponents of this view, 

 in their later poetical and philosophical speculations, 

 realised this defect. Goethe did so, when in the 

 later years of his life he completed and carried out 

 that greatest conception of his poetical genius which 

 accompanied him through the whole of his long poetic 

 career ; when he wrote the last acts of the second part 

 of " Faust." No such consummation was vouchsafed to 

 the philosopher Schelling, but we know how he, during 

 the last forty years of his life, laboured incessantly at 

 this, the supreme problem of human existence. The 

 defect of the opposite sesthetical school, of the roman- 

 ticists, was their extreme subjectivism in which they 

 imperceptibly abandoned all regard for the science and 

 morals of common-sense, losing in consequence, in spite 

 of brilliant creations, all power of contributing per- 

 manently to that intellectual and moral regeneration 



