Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Hermann Ulrici

ULRICI, Hermann (1806-1884), one of the most active philosophical writers in Germany since Hegel's death, was born at Pfbrten, Prussia, on March 23, 1806. Educated for the law, he gave up his profession upon the death of his father in 1829, and after four years of further study, devoted to literature, philosophy, and science, qualified as a university lecturer. In 1834 he was called to a professorship at Halle, where he remained till his death on the 11th January 1884. His first works were in the domain of literary criticism. His treatise On Shakespeare's Dramatic Art (1839) has been translated into English. In 1841 he published a work Ueber Princip u. Methode der Hegelsclien Philosophic, in which he subjected Hegel's system to a severe criticism. The critical attack was continued in the Grundprincip der Philosophic (1845-6), which at the same time expounds his own speculative position; to this must be added as complementary his System der Logik (1852). His later works, dealing with perennial problems of philosophy, have found a more extended circle of readers. Such are Glauben und Wissen (1858), Gott und die Natur (1862, 3d ed. 1875), Gott und der Mensch (2 vols., 1866-73, 2d ed. 1874). From 1847 onward Ulrjci was associated with the younger Fichte in the editorship of the Zeitschrift fur Philosophie.

His philosophical standpoint may be characterized as a reaction from the pantheistic tendency of Hegel's idealistic rationalism towards a more pronouncedly theistic position. The Hegelian identity of being and thought is also abandoned and the truth of realism acknowledged, an attempt being made to exhibit idealism and realism as respectively incomplete but mutually complementary systems. Ulrici's later works, while expressing the same views, are largely occupied in proving the existence of God and the soul from the basis of scientific conceptions, and in opposition to the materialistic current of thought then popular in Germany.