140 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



through the German school of materialism in the middle 

 of the century down to the present age which has 

 witnessed the popularity of Haeckel's later writings. 

 A deeper philosophic insight has meanwhile gained 

 ground, and is slowly but surely passing away from 

 these ambitious and over-confident theories ; notably 

 the inability to lay down any mechanical device or 

 scheme which explains the phenomena of life from its 

 lowest forms up to the highest, such as consciousness 

 or individuality, has led to the tacit or open avowal 

 that the mechanical order is permeated by some other 

 principle for which science can find no definite expres- 

 sion but which becomes revealed and known, though 

 not defined, to us in our own self-consciousness and in 

 that of our fellow-men. But this is exactly what the 

 transcendentalists place at the head and beginning of 

 their systems, calling it by various names, such as the 

 Absolute, the Spirit, or the Divine. This means that 

 we are forced to maintain that the higher principle 



the sacred records were impressed 

 with an entirely novel view of the 

 world and human life, and that 

 they reported to the best of their 

 understanding — to which modern 

 scientific views were quite alien — 

 how this new faith had been borne 

 in upon them. A summary state- 

 ment of the controversy is given 

 in 'Ritschl's Life' (vol. i. p. 393 

 sqq.) Two aspects of the subject 

 seem to be not clearly separated 

 in this controversy. If a miracle 

 is defined as a unique event it is 

 impossible to judge it by analogj' 

 with other events without denj'ing 

 its unique character, and as such 

 both Schleiermacher and Ritschl 

 considered the whole of the Chris- 



tian dispensation. If, on the other 

 side, a miracle is defined as a 

 breach in the continuity or uni- 

 formity of natural events — or, as 

 it is termed, a break of the laws 

 of nature — the decision in any 

 single instance will depend not 

 only on a complete historical 

 record, if such were possible, but 

 also on an assurance that our 

 knowledge of the laws or the uni- 

 formity of nature is final and 

 complete. These two considera- 

 tions, as in the controversy just 

 mentioned, so also in many similar 

 ones, have not been clearly separ- 

 ated. The attempt at their clear 

 separation belongs to a more recent 

 phase of thought. 



