OF THE UNITY OF THOUGHT. 621 



passed out of the phase which his thought represents 

 and sought for that unity of thought and feeling which 

 he himself considered to be unattainable by human 

 reason. 



In fact, the position which Jacobi occupied could not 

 in the long-run be maintained. It marks a transitional 

 phase, a compromise, and was as such indicative of a 

 want of confidence in the powers of the human mind 

 to solve its greatest and fundamental problem. Thus 

 Goethe separated from him because he felt that in his 

 own poetical conception of nature he had discovered that 

 unity and harmony, that comprehensive aspect, which 

 Jacobi himself never reached. Fichte went beyond 

 him, or rather absorbed the truth of Jacobi's philosophy 

 of Belief, in a higher conception of Faith and Religion, 

 which he developed in his later philosophical writings. 

 And, lastly, so far as Jacobi's actual religious position 

 was concerned, he never arrived at a definition of the 

 relation of natural (rational) and historical (revealed) 

 religion. He looked upon both as a revelation. 



Now, what was termed Natural Religion — whether 

 such a body of doctrine can be reasonably established or 

 not — has certainly never exerted a lasting moral or 

 spiritual influence unless it has attached itself to some 

 historical or traditional authority. Thus we find that 

 Schleiermacher, in the course of his philosophical de- 

 velopment, took up more and more the position of a 

 teacher and interpreter of Christian dogmatics and 

 ethics. And in the hands of some of Schleiermacher's 

 successors, notably of Albrecht Ritschl, we find that the 

 reliance on natural religion, on a philosophical as dis- 



