was brought before a court-martial in Vienna, which convicted him of having sold and withdrawn commissions to his officers without the queen’s leave, punished his men without heed to the military code, and drawn pay and allowance for fictitious men. Much was allowed to an irregular officer in all these respects, but Trenck had far outrun the admitted limits, and above all his brutalities and robberies had made him detested throughout Austria and Silesia. A death sentence followed, but the composition of the court-martial and its proceedings were thought to have been such as from the first forbade a fair trial, and the sentence was commuted by the queen into one of cashiering and imprisonment. The rest of his life was spent in mild captivity in the fortress of Spielberg, where he died on the 4th of October 1749.
His cousin, Friedrich, Freiherr von der Trenck (1726–1794), the writer of the celebrated autobiography, was born on the 16th of February 1726 at Konigsberg, his father being a Prussian general. After distinguishing himself for his quickness and imagination at the university of Konigsberg, he entered the Prussian army in 1742, and soon became an orderly officer on Frederick’s own staff. But within a year he fell into disgrace because of a love affair—whether real or imaginary—with the king’s sister Princess Amalie, and when in 1743 his Austrian cousin presented him with a horse and opened a correspondence, Frederick had him arrested, a few days after the battle of Soor, and confined in the fortress of Glatz, whence in 1746 he escaped. Making his way home and thence to Vienna, in the vain hope of finding employment under his now disgraced cousin, he finally met a Russian general, who took him into the Russian service But, receiving news that owing to his cousin’s death he had become the owner of the family estates, he returned to Germany almost immediately He was made a captain of Austrian cavalry, but never served, as his time was fully taken up with litigation connected with the inherited estates. In 1754 he visited Prussia, but was there arrested and confined in Magdeburg for ten years, making frequent attempts, of incredible audacity, to escape from the harshness of his gaolers. But after the close of the Seven Years' War, Maria Theresa requested that he should, as being a captain in her service, be at once released. Trenck then spent some years in Aix-la-Chapelle, managing an agency for Hungarian wines and publishing a newspaper, and on the failure of these enterprises he returned to his Hungarian estates. Here he composed his celebrated autobiography and many other writings. He visited England and France in 1774–1777, and was afterwards employed by the government in diplomatic or secret service missions. After the death of Frederick the Great he was allowed to enter Prussia, and stayed in Berlin for two years. In 1788 he visited Paris, where he was the hero of society for a moment; next year he returned to Hungary in order to collect his writings in a uniform edition, but in 1791 he returned to Paris to be a spectator of the Revolution, and after living in safety throughout the Terror he was at last denounced as an Austrian spy and guillotined on the 25th of July 1794.
His autobiography, which has been translated into several languages, first appeared in German at Berlin and Vienna (13 vols.) in 1787. Shortly afterwards a French version, by his own hand, was published at Strassburg. His other published works are in eight volumes and appeared shortly after the autobiography at Leipzig. A reprint of the autobiography appeared in 1910 in “Reclam’s Universal Series.”
See Wahrmann, Leben und Thaten des Franz, Freiherr von der Trenck and Friedrich Freiherrn von der Trencks Leben, Kerker und Tod (both published at Leipzig in 1837).
TRENDELENBURG, FRIEDRICH ADOLF (1802–1872), German philosopher and philologist, was born on the 30th of November 1802 at Eutin, near Lübeck. He was educated at the universities of Kiel, Leipzig and Berlin. He became more and more attracted to the study of Plato and Aristotle, and his doctor’s dissertation (1826) was an attempt to reach through Aristotle’s criticisms a more accurate knowledge of the Platonic philosophy (Platonis de ideis el numeris doctrina ex Aristotele illustrata). He declined the offer of a classical chair at Kiel, and accepted a post as tutor to the son of an intimate friend of
Altenstein, the Prussian minister of education. He held this position for seven years (1826–1833), occupying his leisure time with the preparation of a critical edition of Aristotle’s De anima (1833; 2nd ed. by C. Belger, 1877). In 1833 Altenstein appointed Trendelenburg extraordinary professor in Berlin, and four years later he was advanced to an ordinary professorship. For nearly forty years he proved himself markedly successful as an academical teacher, during the greater part of which time he had to examine in philosophy and pedagogics all candidates for the scholastic profession in Prussia. In 1865 he became
involved in an acrimonious controversy on the interpretation of Kant’s doctrine of Space with Kuno Fischer, whom he attacked in Kuno Fischer und sein Kant (1869), which drew forth the reply Anti-Trendelenburg (1870). He died on the 24th of January 1872.
Trendelenburg’s philosophizing is conditioned throughout by his loving study of Plato and Aristotle, whom he regards not as opponents but as building jointly on the broad basis of idealism. His own standpoint may almost be called a modern version of Aristotle thus interpreted. While denying the possibility of an absolute method and an absolute philosophy, as contended for by Hegel and others, Trendelenburg was emphatically an idealist in the ancient or Platonic sense; his whole work was devoted to the demonstration of the ideal in the real. But he maintained that the procedure of philosophy must be analytic, rising from the particular facts to the universal in which we find them explained. We divine the system of the whole from the part we know, but the process of reconstruction must remain approximative. Our position forbids the possibility of a final system. Instead, therefore, of constantly beginning afresh in speculation, it should be our duty to attach ourselves to what may be considered the permanent results of historic developments. The classical expression of these results Trendelenburg finds mainly in the Platonico-Aristotelian system. The philosophical question is stated thus : How are thought and being united in knowledge ? how does thought get at being? and how does being enter into thought? Proceeding on the principle that like can only be known by like, Trendelenburg next reaches a doctrine peculiar to himself (though based upon Aristotle) which plays a central part in his speculations. Motion is the fundamental fact common to being and thought ; the actual motion of the external world has its counter- part in the constructive motion which is involved in every instance of perception or thought. From motion he proceeds to deduce time, space and the categories of mechanics and natural science. These, being thus derived, are at once subjective and objective in their scope. It is true matter can never be completely resolved into motion, but the irreducible remainder may be treated like the πρώτη ὕλη of Aristotle as an abstraction which we asymptotically approach but never reach. The facts of existence, however, are not adequately explained by the mechanical categories. The- ultimate interpretation of the universe can only be found in the higher category of End or final cause. Here Trendelenburg finds the dividing line, between philosophical systems. On the one side stand those which acknowledge none but efficient causes—which make force prior to thought, and explain the universe, as it were, a tergo. This may be called, typically, Democritism. On the other side stands the “organic” or teleological view of the world, which interprets the parts through the idea of the whole, and sees in the efficient causes only the vehicle of ideal ends. This may be called in a wide sense Platonism. Systems like Spinozism, which seem to form a third class, neither sacrificing force to thought nor thought to force, yet by their denial of final causes inevitably fall back into the Democritic or essentially materialistic standpoint, leaving us with the great antagonism of the mechanical and the organic systems of philosophy. The latter view, which receives its first support in the facts of life, or organic nature as such, finds its culmination and ultimate verification in the ethical world, which essentially consists in the realization of ends. Trendelenburg’s Naturrecht may, therefore, be taken as in a manner the completion of his system, his working out of the ideal as present in the real. The ethical end is taken to be the idea of humanity, not in the abstract as formulated by Kant, but in the context of the state and of history. Law is treated throughout as the vehicle of ethical requirements. In Trendelenburg’s treatment of the state, as the ethical organism in which the individual (the potential man) may be said first to emerge into actuality, we may trace his nurture on the best ideas of Hellenic antiquity.
Trendelenburg was also the author of the following: Elementa logices Aristotelicae (1836; 9th ed., 1892; Eng. trans., 1881), a selection of passages from the Organon with Latin translation and notes, containing the substance of Aristotle's logical doctrine, supplemented by Erläuterungen zu den Elementen der Aristotelischen Logik (1842; 3rd ed. 1876); Logische Untersuchungen (1840; 3rd ed. 1870), and Die logische Frage in Hegels System (1843), important factors in the reaction against Hegel; Historische Beiträge zur Philosophie