286 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



physical, mental, and moral life and the creative 

 activity exhibited in poetry, the fine arts, and music. 

 It is certainly an irony of fate that the thought of 

 Schopenhauer, which reduces all reality to will and 

 effort, was doomed to lead to a purely contemplative 

 system, ending in quietism, pessimism, inaction, and 

 despair ; whereas the intellectual intuition of Fichte and 

 Schelling was further on developed into the great 

 intellectual system of Hegel which, be it tenable or not, 

 has certainly been most fruitful in suggesting, promot- 

 ing, and guiding an enormous volume of strenuous 

 mental labour and research, with far - reaching conse- 

 quences in practical life. 



We must now ask. How did the religious problem, 

 the problem of the spirit, fare in this intellectual 

 revolution which centred in Kant ? If we view the 

 peculiar development of religious speculation in Ger- 

 many from an English point of view, we may divide 

 it, as 1 have hinted above, into two separate lines 

 of thought promoted by different interests — the 

 theological and the philosophical interest. The move- 

 ments coincided in two points, they both strove 

 after an independent scientific expression, a systematic 

 and teachable body of doctrine, and they both aimed 

 at a spiritual deepening. But, corresponding to the 

 two meanings which the German equivalent for " spirit " 

 has, this deepening was attempted in two ways. On 

 the one side we find an effort towards what one would 

 term in English a spiritual revival, corresponding some- 

 what to the religious revival which took place in this 



