PHILOSOPHY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 221 



lays emphasis on mechanism, the other on spirit. Yet it is most 

 interesting to notice how many of the early workmen in the investi- 

 gation of the principle of the conservation and correlation of energy 

 took their point of departure from distinctly teleological and spiritual 

 conceptions. " I was led," said Colding, to take an extreme case, 

 at the Natural Science Congress at Innsbruck, 1869, " to the idea of 

 the constancy of national forces by the religious conception of life." 

 And even Moleschott, in his Autobiography, posthumously published, 

 declares : " I myself was well aware that the whole conception might 

 be converted; for since all matter is a bearer of force, endowed with 

 force or penetrated with spirit, it would be just as correct to call it 

 a spiritualistic conception." On the other hand, the modern, better 

 instructed Idealism is much inclined, both from the psychological and 

 from the more purely philosophical points of view, to regard with 

 duly profound respect all the facts and laws of that mechanism of 

 Reality, which certainly is not merely the dependent construction 

 of the human mind functioning according to a constitution that 

 excludes it from Reality, but is rather the ever increasingly more 

 trustworthy revealer of Reality. This tendency to a union of the 

 claims of both Realism and Idealism is profoundly influencing the 

 solution of each one of these problems which the Kantian criticism 

 left to the philosophy of the nineteenth century. In respect of the 

 epistemological problem, philosophy as I have already said 

 is not likely again to repeat the mistakes either of Kant or of the 

 dogmatism which his criticism so effectually overthrew. It was a 

 wise remark of the physician Johann Benjamin Erhard, in a letter 

 dated May 19, 1794, a propos of Fichte: "The philosophy which 

 proceeds from a single fundamental principle, and pretends to deduce 

 everything from it, is and always will remain a piece of artificial 

 sophistry: only that philosophy which ascends to the highest prin- 

 ciple and exhibits everything else in perfect harmony with it, is the 

 true one." This at least ought one would say to have been 

 made clear by the century of discussion over the epistemological 

 problem, since Kant. You cannot deduce the Idea from the Reality, 

 or the Reality from the Idea. The problem of knowledge is not, as 

 Fichte held in the form of a fundamental assumption, an alternative 

 of this sort. The Idea and Reality are, the rather already there, 

 and to be recognized as in a living unity, in every cognitive experi- 

 ence. Psychology is constantly adding something toward the pro- 

 blem of cognition as a problem in synthesis; and is then in a way 

 contributing to the better scientific understanding of the philo- 

 sophical postulate which is the confidence of human reason in its 

 ability, by the harmonious use of all its powers, progressively to 

 reach a better and fuller knowledge of Reality. 



The ontological problem will necessarily always remain the un- 



