146 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts, and Letters. 



THE PHLOSOPHY OF F. H. JACOB! 



By Pkof. W. C. Sawteb. 



Nothing is quite so real to an animal as the food he eats and 

 the bed he sleeps upon. We are all animals and something more, 

 but there is a popular tendency among us to cherish the grossness 

 of the animal, and to smother and starve the heaven-born part 

 that struggles for recognition through perceptions more ethereal 

 than the animal knows, and longings that the animal cannot feel 

 and that material things can never satisfy. 



Assured that the meat by which man really grows is not that 

 which nourishes the body, we do well to sit at the feet of those 

 masters who offer to guide us out of this thralldom to the physi- 

 cal, and open our eyes upon the less palpable, but no less real, 

 world in the midst of which we so unconsciously walk ; for 



" The spirit world is not locked up ; 

 Thy feelings are closed, thy heart is dead." 



— Gcethe's Fatjst. 



F. H. Jacobi has the distinguished merit of establishing against 

 Kant the following point : The "Critique of Pare Reason " de- 

 nies that any casual nexus can be found between thinking and 

 any noumenal object or subject, while the " Critique of Practical 

 Eeason," ignoring the principle already laid down, boldly assumes 

 the transcendental as revealed by the phenomenal. Kant at- 

 tempted to find some impossible demonstration for that which is 

 undeniable and needs none, and thus threw a character of uncer- 

 tainty up3n the most positive knowledge that we have. 



The work entitled "Divine Things and Their Revelation," was 

 Jacobi's last, and probably contains the best exposition of his 

 distinguishing doctrines, especially his " faith-philosophy." For 

 this philosophy its author never claimed a place beside other sys- 

 tems, but, [perhaps eiven too hastily and modestly, granted the 

 argument to philosophers whose conclusions were revolting to 

 him, but whose^raethods seemed to him valid. He thus occupied 



