qualified as a teacher of political economy in the university of Vienna. The following year, however, he transferred his services to the university of Innsbruck, where he became professor in 1884. In 1889 he became councillor in the ministry of finance, and represented the government in the Lower House on all questions of taxation. In 1895 and again in 1897–1898 he was minister of finance. In 1899 he was made a member of the Upper House, and in 1900 again became minister of finance. One of the leaders of the Austrian school of economists, he has made notable criticisms on the theory of value in relation to cost as laid down by the “classical school.” His more important works are Kapital und Kapitalzins (Innsbruck, 1884–1889), in two parts, translated by W. Smart, viz. Capital and Interest (part i., 1890), and The Positive Theory of Capital (part ii., 1891); Karl Marx and the Close of his System (trans. A. M. Macdonald, 1898); Recent Literature on Interest (trans. W. A. Scott and S. Feilbogen, 1903).
BOEHME (or Behmen), JAKOB (1575–1624), German mystical
writer, whose surname (of which Fechner gives eight German
varieties) appears in English literature as Beem, Behmont, &c.,
and notably Behmen, was born at Altseidenberg, in Upper
Lusatia, a straggling hamlet among the hills, some 10 m. S.E. of
Görlitz. His father was a well-to-do peasant, and his first
employment was that of herd boy on the Landskrone, a hill in
the neighbourhood of Görlitz; the only education he received
was at the town-school of Seidenberg, a mile from his home.
Seidenberg, to this day, is filled with shoemakers, and to a shoemaker
Jakob was apprenticed in his fourteenth year (1589),
being judged not robust enough for husbandry. Ten years later
(1599) we find him settled at Görlitz as master-shoemaker, and
married to Katharina, daughter of Hans Kuntzschmann, a
thriving butcher in the town. After industriously pursuing his
vocation for ten years, he bought (1610) the substantial house,
which still preserves his name, close by the bridge, in the Neiss-Vorstadt.
Two or three years later he gave up business, and did
not resume it as a shoemaker; but for some years before his
death he made and sold woollen gloves, regularly visiting Prague
fair for this purpose.
Boehme’s authorship began in his 37th year (1612) with a treatise, Aurora, oder die Morgenröte im Aufgang, which though unfinished was surreptitiously copied, and eagerly circulated in MS. by Karl von Ender. This raised him at once out of his homely sphere, and made him the centre of a local circle of liberal thinkers, considerably above him in station and culture. The charge of heresy was, however, soon directed against him by Gregorius Richter, then pastor primarius of Görlitz. Feeling ran so high after Richter’s pulpit denunciations, that, in July 1613, the municipal council, fearing a disturbance of the peace, made a show of examining Boehme, took possession of his fragmentary quarto, and dismissed the writer with an admonition to meddle no more with such matters. For five years he obeyed this injunction. But in 1618 began a second period of authorship; he poured forth, but did not publish, treatise after treatise, expository and polemical, in the next and the two following years. In 1622 he composed nothing but a few short pieces on true repentance, resignation, &c., which, however, devotionally speaking, are the most precious of all his writings. They were the only pieces offered to the public in his lifetime and with his permission, a fact which is evidence of the essentially religious and practical character of his mind. Their publication at Görlitz, on New Year’s day 1624, under the title of Der Weg zu Christo, was the signal for renewed clerical hostility. Boehme had by this time entered on the third and most prolific though the shortest period (1623–1624) of his speculation. His labours at the desk were interrupted in May 1624 by a summons to Dresden, where his famous “colloquy” with the Upper Consistorial court was made the occasion of a flattering but transient ovation on the part of a new circle of admirers. Richter died in August 1624, and Boehme did not long survive his pertinacious foe. Seized with a fever when away from home, he was with difficulty conveyed to Görlitz. His wife was at Dresden on business; and during the first week of his malady he was nursed by a literary friend. He died, after receiving the rites of the church, grudgingly administered by the authorities, on Sunday, the 17th of November.
Boehme always professed that a direct inward opening or illumination was the only source of his speculative power. He pretended to no other revelation. Ecstatic raptures we should not expect, for he was essentially a Protestant mystic. No “thus saith the Lord” was claimed as his warrant, after the manner of Antoinette Bourignon, or Ludowick Muggleton; no spirits or angels held converse with him as with Swedenborg. It is needless to dwell, in the way either of acceptance or rejection, on the very few occasions in which his outward life seemed to him to come into contact with the invisible world. The apparition of the pail of gold to the herd boy on the Landskrone, the visit of the mysterious stranger to the young apprentice, the fascination of the luminous sheen, reflected from a common pewter dish, which first, in 1600, gave an intuitive turn to his meditations, the heavenly music which filled his ears as he lay dying—none of these matters is connected organically with the secret of his special power. The mysteries of which he discoursed were not reported to him: he “beheld” them. He saw the root of all mysteries, the Ungrund or Urgrund, whence issue all contrasts and discordant principles, hardness and softness, severity and mildness, sweet and bitter, love and sorrow, heaven and hell. These he “saw” in their origin; these he attempted to describe in their issue, and to reconcile in their eternal result. He saw into the being of God; whence the birth or going forth of the divine manifestation. Nature lay unveiled to him, he was at home in the heart of things. “His own book, which he himself was,” the microcosm of man, with his threefold life, was patent to his vision. Such was his own account of his qualification. If he failed it was in expression; he confessed himself a poor mouthpiece, though he saw with a sure spiritual eye.
It must not be supposed that the form in which Boehme’s pneumatic realism worked itself out in detail was shaped entirely from within. In his writings we trace the influence of Theophr. Bombast von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus (1493–1541), of Kaspar Schwenkfeld (1490–1561), the first Protestant mystic, and of Valentin Weigel (1533–1588). From the school of Paracelsus came much of his puzzling phraseology,—his Turba and Tinctur and so forth,—a phraseology embarrassing to himself as well as to his readers. His friends plied him with foreign terms, which he was delighted to receive, interpreting them by an instinct, and using them often in a corrupted form and always in a sense of his own. Thus the word Idea called up before him the image of “a very fair, heavenly, and chaste virgin.” The title Aurora, by which his earliest treatise is best known, was furnished by Dr Balthasar Walther. These, however, were false helps, which only serve to obscure a difficult study, like the Flagrat and Lubet, with which his English translator veiled Boehme’s own honest Schreck and Lust. There is danger lest his crude science and his crude philosophical vocabulary conceal the fertility of Boehme’s ideas and the transcendent greatness of his religious insight. Few will take the pains to follow him through the interminable account of his seven Quellgeister, which remind us of Gnosticism; or even of his three first properties of eternal nature, in which his disciples find Newton’s formulae anticipated, and which certainly bear a marvellous resemblance to the three ἀρχαί of Schelling’s Theogonische Natur. Boehme is always greatest when he breaks away from his fancies and his trammels, and allows speech to the voice of his heart. Then he is artless, clear and strong; and no man can help listening to him, whether he dive deep down with the conviction “ohne Gift und Grimm kein Leben,” or rise with the belief that “the being of all beings is a wrestling power,” or soar with the persuasion that Love “in its height is as high as God.” The mystical poet of Silesia, Angelus Silesius, discerned where Boehme’s truest power lay when he sang—
| “Im Wasser lebt der Fisch, die Pflanze in der Erden, |
