The Spirit of Modern Philosophy/Lecture 6

by Josiah Royce

LECTURE VI

THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY

Fichte, as we have seen, had begun by setting aside Kant’s things in themselves. What, after all, thinks he, is the use of even mentioning such mysteries as the dead things in themselves, whereof you only declare that they are unknowable? What if they are said to exist? Unless we can know them, they are to us as good as nought. But now, for others besides Fichte, Kant’s things in themselves used at that time to be objects of no little sport, — sport which took, of course, a rather heavy and German form, but which was very well warranted by the situation. The things in themselves of Kant’s theoretical philosophy, the sources of all our experience, but themselves never experienced, were too dim and distant to seem to a further reflection anything but chimeras. An epigram, usually attributed to Schiller, compared them to useless household furniture, once the pride of that very form of metaphysic which Kant’s “Critique” had undertaken to slay. For this old metaphysic had pretended to know them. Now that the pretentious doctrine is dead, what is the use of the abandoned furniture?

“Da die Metaphysik vor Kurzem unbeerbt abging

Werden die Dinge an sich morgen sub hasta verkauft.”^[1]

But the house of our philosophy thus once emptied of cumbersome furniture, Fichte had found himself able to fill it in his own fashion with the rarest treasures of truth. The real thing in itself, according to Fichte, is the active I, the Ego, the subject of self-consciousness. This each of us knows in his own person. To watch the activity of this great source of our being, to sound the depths of its endless nature, is to come to the true knowledge of God and of things which Spinoza already demanded for the wise man, and which Kant sought in vain in the external world. We and our world exist together. Our world is the expression of our character. As a man thinketh, so is he; but with equal truth, according to Fichte, as a man is, so thinks he. He sees himself in all he sees. And this self that a man sees crystallized in all his world of sense, of society, and of philosophy, is simply his own fashion of conduct, his busy world-building temperament. At the outset of life each personal self says, “I must exist, I will exist.” But no one can exist unless he is ready to act. My life, my existence, is in work. I toil for self-consciousness, and without toil no consciousness. But once more, also, I can only work if I have a task, something foreign to me, a not-self to influence and finally to conquer. Therefore it is, thinks Fichte, that I stand from the beginning in the presence of a world which seems external. My deeper self unconsciously produces this foreign world, and then bids me win my place therein. The material things yonder are therefore just the products of my unconscious activity. Their office it is to give me something to do; they are the outer embodiment of my duty; they are my moral law made manifest to sense. You and I see the same world about us merely because we, as moral beings, need and choose common tasks. And, in a deeper sense, the reason why you and I see the same world is that we are actually fragmentary manifestations of one infinite self, whose ultimate nature we can never fathom, but whose world is through and through a world of common tasks, — a world of a moral order, whereof we are all instruments.

I.

In the present lecture we have to follow the further story of German idealism as exemplified in the views and experiences of a number of persons who, for lack of a better name, are usually classed together as constituting the German Romantic School. The peculiar character of our undertaking in this course bids us attend as much as possible to the relations between philosophy and life. Where, as in the case of the German romantic school, a group of writers tried to embody a philosophy in a literary movement, and to translate their own lives directly into philosophy, such a phenomenon cannot but be of great service to our purpose. And therefore I shall spend time upon matter that will indeed lack the technicality inseparable from even the most general account of Kant’s philosophy, but that will still have its bearing on our general task. In fact, my discussion will for the time leave the field of technical philosophy almost altogether, and for the rest of this lecture I shall speak of thoughts that will have their more metaphysical bearings shown only in later lectures.

I mentioned in the last lecture how Fichte’s philosophy is an example of that beautiful waywardness which is everywhere characteristic of the Germany of the classical and romantic periods. For the rest, to particularize concerning this waywardness as it shows itself in Fichte, he is, after all, a very arbitrary thinker. His system has vast gaps in it. You in vain seek to get from Fichte, for instance, any precise deduction of how the world of our senses, down to its very details, is an embodiment of the moral law. We, in this age, whose world is so full of material facts, whose science has delved so deeply into physical nature, whose industrial art is so multiform in its inventions, whose whole view of man makes him so dependent for his health, his fortune, and his very reason, upon physiological conditions, feel at once the great gulf that divides Fichte’s ethical idealism from the world of the natural order. We honor the stern enthusiasm of this idealist, but we find in his system the record of a distinctly individual experience. That he has a hold upon a very genuine truth we ought to recognize; but we cannot read his fearless and often intolerant essays without becoming aware that it has not pleased God to create any perfectly orthodox Fichtean, save Fichte himself. Many of us will no doubt call ourselves, with Fichte, ethical idealists, since we indeed hold that the world is through and through a moral order; but his way of showing how it is a moral order will not content us. I, the active being, shall create this sense-world of mine unconsciously, for the sake of having my task, the material of my duty, made manifest to my senses. Very good, but why, then, do I create a world that has a belt of asteroids in it between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter? What portion of my personal and private duty do the comets, or the jellyfishes, or the volcanoes, or the mosquitoes, make manifest to my senses? What part has the Silurian period in the scheme of my moral order? And of what ethical value to me are the properties of the roots of algebraic equations, or the asymptotes of an hyperbola? In the world of this moral order, you see, there is a great deal that will not easily submit to my ethical interpretation. But if we say, with Fichte, that the real world is after all not the world of just my private and individual moral order, but the world of God’s infinite ethical activity, so much the more is it incumbent upon us to be industrious in our efforts to comprehend the spirituality of the truths of nature by means of formula that are more submissive to facts, more widely sensitive to the varied aspects of reality, less impatient of mystery, than were Fichte’s impetuous undertakings. If God’s world is through and through, moral, it is also through and through complicated, profound and physical.

Well, the story of the romantic school is the story of the enlargement of Fichte’s onesidedness through the appearance, in the first place, of other not less arbitrary doctrines, which sought to interpret the whole world in terms of our spiritual interests, but which expressed other interests than those that he made central. And, for the rest, this story is also the tale of the gradual fixing of all such waywardness into the directions that have proved so fruitful in the recent decades of modern research. We are too frequently disposed to fancy that the philosophy of the period of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel is something very remote from the philosophy of our own day. That philosophy, we say, was above all just wayward, fantastic, regardless of the limits of human knowledge, indifferent to science, unwisely imaginative. Nowadays we have changed all that, have abandoned romantic wanderings, have come to respect the facts of science, and to let the mysteries alone. But such a view of our relations to the age of the romantic school is not precisely historical; and wherein it is not precisely historical I want to make plain to you. Deeper than the contrast between that age and ours is, as we shall soon see, the relationship between the two. Our age, as we shall learn, contains merely what was implicit in the very waywardness of that revolutionary period. Their youthful enthusiasms, at first vague, wandering, conflicting, took form at length through growth, and produced, in their maturity, our modern doctrine of evolution, our modern efforts to bring into close relation the natural and the spiritual, our whole modern many-sidedness of interest and experience. The romantic period was the time of bloom and of flowers. Our period, if you will, is, in its matter-of-fact and apparently prosaic realism, the time of the ripened seeds, a time which the warm-hearted usually scorn as a bleak and autumnal period of dry seed-pods and chilly night airs. But the wise love such ages of ripening and of harvest; for they know that a richer growth is erelong to spring from all these barren-seeming seed-kernels of truth. But such metaphors apart, what I want to insist upon is the essential unity of recent philosophy amidst all its transformations. Properly viewed, the lesson of the most fantastic speculations of the later German metaphysic is precisely the lesson which the thought of to-day is trying to express and to utilize. To understand the meaning of contemporary thought, say concerning evolution, apart from a comprehension of the period from Kant to Hegel, is therefore, indeed, like trying to appreciate the mature and prosaic, but successful man, without some reference to the splendid dreams of his youth. We have never wholly broken with the romantic period. We have only grown older, and possibly a little more saddened; but those earlier ideals live still in our breasts, only I should be glad if we were better aware of the fact than sometimes we are.

Our immediate task in the coming lectures is thus twofold. We want first to show how the romantic school, far outdoing the waywardness of Fichte, supplemented his one-sided interpretation of things by other, equally idealistic and much more fantastic, interpretations of reality. And, secondly, we want to show how our own more realistic age expresses, after all, not so much an abandonment of the true spirit of this idealistic period, as a fixation and a maturing of some of its deepest interests. And now, as to the romantic school itself, what, first of all, is the meaning of the word?

II.

German literature, in its great modern outgrowth, began, as you know, with Lessing’s early works, just after the middle of the eighteenth century, and ended with the death of its last prominent representative, Heine, in 1856. But the principal productions of this century of literary activity belong to a very much briefer period. Lessing was a sort of forerunner of the classical age. Long as was Goethe’s literary life, his best years are those between 1770 and Schiller’s death in 1805. And to the credit of these thirty-five years may be reckoned much the larger half of the literary and a decidedly large fraction of the philosophical work of the whole great century of German mental life. Not only was this most productive period decidedly brief, but the geographical limitations of the intenser literary interest, at any rate, in view of the fact that Germany had no natural literary capital, are decidedly noteworthy. Two circles, the court at Weimar and the university a few miles distant at Jena, were, between 1775 and 1805, far and away the chief influences in German literature and philosophy. At Weimar, Goethe and Schiller were for a time together. In Jena, Schiller himself taught for some years, while Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel all began their academic activity there. After 1800, indeed, Berlin became a centre second in importance only to Weimar, while the university at Jena sadly declined. But not until still later was intellectual activity of high rank observable all over Germany from Berlin to Heidelberg, and from Munich to the Rhine. However, as the streams spread they lost their swiftness, and erelong, for the intense life of the great years, there was substituted more and more of that fruitful but quiet industry of minute German scholarship, to which we all owe so much.

The years from 1770 to 1805, and the circles of Weimar, of Jena, and, in a less degree, of Berlin, are therefore central in importance in the history of German thought. But now, as must be pointed out, even here there are to be specially mentioned, as of most critical significance, ten years out of these thirty-five. They were the flower of the flower for German life. These were the last ten years of Schiller’s career, when his friendship with Goethe was most intimate, and when also, in addition to the great classical poets, a new generation of ambitious young men began to appear upon the scene. You must remember that, in 1800, Goethe was fifty-one and Schiller forty-one years old; and at such an age men who have become early famous are certain to find themselves surrounded by circles of eager and often envious youth, whose hearts have been set on fire by the example of the elder geniuses, and who themselves are minded to do even better than their betters. So it was with Goethe and Schiller. The young generation already swarmed all about them in Jena and in Weimar. It was a matter of course, in that day and region, that if you were young, and were anybody at all, you were a genius. The only question was what sort of a genius, in your lordly spiritual freedom, you had chosen to be. Four sorts of geniuses were especially popular, and all four sorts were as plenty as blackberries. There was the romancer of genius, who was plotting to outdo Wilhelm Meister. There was the dramatist of genius, who was disposed to banish Schiller’s plays into oblivion, so soon as he himself had learned his trade. There was the critic of genius, who had grasped the meaning and lesson of the literature of the ages, and who was especially fond of contrasting the Greek tragedy with Shakespeare, and of laying down poetical laws for all future time. And finally there was the philosopher of genius, whose business it was first of all to transcend Kant, and secondly to transcend everybody else. Best indeed was your lot in case you chose to exemplify in your person all four sorts of genius at once, as, for instance, the young Friedrich Schlegel for a while delighted to do. Your inner experiences were then simply inimitable. In brief, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.”

We may smile a little at all this ferment of ambitious hopes, but we can never be too grateful for what that brief period accomplished for us. It gave us philosophical ideas that, fragmentary though they were, will never be forgotten, and it produced some enduring poetry and romance, in addition to what Goethe and Schiller wrote, and of no small merit at that. Now from these circles of the younger geniuses, one especially stands out in interesting prominence. It is the circle which delighted to call itself the Romantic School. From its often crude efforts sprang a movement, the romantic movement in a wider sense, which lasted far on into our own century. It is this romantic movement in the wider sense that has proved the most characteristic outcome of modern German life as it was before 1848. To the romantic movement must be credited the whole wealth of German tales and songs that we love best after the greatest works of Goethe and of Schiller. The same general movement had its part in nourishing and in inspiring the music of modern Germany from Beethoven to Wagner. In brief, without this movement, German thought and German emotion would have no such meaning as they have for us to-day.

But in the narrower sense, the name Romantic School was originally applied only to the little company of young men, all born somewhere between 1765 and 1775, of whom the most prominent were the two Schlegels, Augustus and his brother Friedrich, Ludwig Tieck, romancer and dramatist, Novalis (whose real name was Friedrich v. Hardenberg), the philosopher Schelling, and the theologian Schleiermacher. The Schlegels were the critics of the school, and were also men of considerable metaphysical interest. Novalis, who died very young, touches, in his fragmentary remains, upon all the characteristic interests of the romanticists; he is philosophical, poetical, critical; but he is everywhere and always the born dreamer. Schelling was intimately associated in a personal sense with all his fellow romanticists. If his intense metaphysical tastes kept him from attempting very seriously either dramas or romances, his early speculations bear everywhere the mark of his friendships; they are the work of a restless and artistic soul, who loved the universe with a sort of tender passion, and whose philosophy is, even in its most technical subtleties, as much the confession of a fiery heart as it is the outcome of a brilliant imagination and a wonderfully skillful wit. I have preferred rather to discuss the philosophy of the romantic school under this name than to confine my title or my survey to Schelling, the representative philosopher of the little group, because it is here the movement that expresses itself in the man, not the man who masters the movement. Schelling was himself, always, even as philosopher, a creature of the moment. His moments were indeed often very great ones and might need each a whole volume to express itself. But Schelling is not, like Kant, a systematic and long-plotting thinker; nor yet, like Fichte, a man who, after many adventures, is completely overwhelmed and thenceforth possessed by a single idea. No, Schelling possesses directly the wavering passion of his romantic friends. His kaleidoscopic philosophy, which changed form with each new essay that he published, was like their whole scheme of life and of art. Trust your genius; follow your noble heart; change your doctrine whenever your heart changes, and change your heart often. Such is the practical creed of the romanticists. The world, you see, is after all the world of the inner life. Kant cut us off from things in themselves; Fichte showed us that it is the I, the self, that makes the world. Let us accept this lesson. The world is essentially what men of genius make it. Let us be men of genius, and make what we choose. We shall then be as gods, knowing good and evil.

Herein, as you see, lies at once the great difference between the romantic school and Fichte. Fichte had said: The world is the world as self-consciousness builds it; but the essence of self-consciousness is the moral will, the will to act dutifully, steadfastly, nobly, divinely; and therefore the world is duty solidified to oar senses. The romantic spirit says from the very start: The world is indeed the world as self-consciousness builds it; but the true self is the self that men of genius, poets, constructive artists know; hence the real world is such as to satisfy the demands of the man of genius, the artist. Emotion, heart-experience, longings, divinations of the soul, are the best instruments for the philosopher. Dream out your world. It is after all but a dream of the inner life, this vast universe about us. The noblest dreamer will be the man to understand it the best.

The distinguishing features of this group of young men were then, to sum up, so far, these: they proposed in common to create a new literary movement; and whilst they were rather speculative metaphysicians than true poets, they were nevertheless rather romancers than soberly constructive philosophers. They therefore suggest rather than complete. Their lesson is of more importance to us than are their systems. At the start, that is, in the years about 1795, they were under the influence of Fichte, but his ethical idealism soon grew too stern for them. They interpreted the world rather in terms of sentiment and of bold divination than in terms of the moral law. For the rest, external nature interested them, even in their most idealistic moods, more than it had interested Fichte. Of course, the external world is for them too only mind solidified, only a mass of ideas seen from without. But they are dissatisfied with Fichte’s moral law as a full account of the essence of this outer mirage of our senses. Art, they hold, is as suggestive as morality for the speculative thinker. Nature is therefore a work of unconscious art, a form which the great Genius of the world gives to his experiences. God is an artist, a poet, who pours out the wealth of his beautiful life in all the world of sense. Of this God, we too are embodiments; only we are not blind, as his other works are. We are conscious, and therefore it is that we see in sense-form, in nature, our own ideals crystallized. The more inner experiences we ourselves have, the more feelings, longings, ideas we possess, the more means we shall therefore have of interpreting nature. It is in vain, think these men, that you gather and heap up natural facts, if you have no heart. Only a poet can understand nature, for the true laws of nature are through and through analogous to the laws of the heart. If (so the romanticists would say), if we have ever been in love, then and then only we know why the plants grow towards the sunlight, or the free-swinging needles turn to the pole, or why the planets are loyal to the sun. If we are artistically complete in our inner natures, then we comprehend why the crystals love their regular forms. To understand the difference between organic and inorganic matter, you have again to study first your own inner consciousness, and to examine its various stages, as they lead up from disorganized sensations to clear and organic reason. For the forms of matter in the outer world are symbolic, are precisely analogous, stage for stage, to these processes of the inner life. In brief, to study nature is to sympathize with nature, to trace the likenesses between the inner life and the magnets, the crystals, the solar systems, the living creatures, of the physical world. It is the part of genius to feel such sympathies with things; it is the part of philosophy to record your sympathies. Artists are often unconscious philosophers, but great philosophers, from this romantic point of view, are never more than consummate artists. Feeling is an indispensable guide to reason. We should never know God did we not share his nature in our emotions. He is only the many-sided and infinite genius. We appreciate him because we young romanticists are geniuses ourselves.

III.

Such philosophy as this was, of course, capable of innumerable forms. Let us illustrate more in detail from the work of particular men: Best do they comprehend truth, declares in substance the young Friedrich Schlegel, best do they comprehend truth who have experienced the most moods. The truly philosophical attitude towards life and reality is therefore one of a sort of courageous fickleness. Schlegel himself called it the romantic irony, and endeavored to found a system upon it. This is his rather grotesque attempt to revive the Socratic method and doctrine. Socrates had founded his whole life as a conversational teacher, who never preached but always asked questions, upon a sort of ironical confession that he was not wise. “This,” he used to affirm, “is my only wisdom, to know that I am an utterly ignorant man.” Well, somewhat so, but still with a difference, thinks Schlegel, the romantic genius confesses that marvelous as is his present divination of the truth of things, it is, after all, a quick divination, so to speak, which will away again erelong, and will give place to some other theory, equally creditable to its clever possessor, equally true, but also equally fickle and therefore false. “The deepest truth known to me is that erelong my present truth will change:” such, thinks Schlegel, is true wisdom. For the world, as you see, is the world for the self, for the inner life, for the heart. And the heart is so strong and lively a thing that it will change frequently. “The world exists for me; and to-morrow I propose to make a new world:” such is Schlegel’s early interpretation of the essence of Fichte’s view. But alas, Fichte’s ethical idealism, with the moral law left out, is too grotesque in its mutilation to become a coherent doctrine. Friedrich Schlegel gave up this fickleness in later years, went over to the Catholic church, and devoted himself otherwise to Oriental studies, wherein be well earned a high and honorable rank. His stupendous poetical genius somehow never came to flower, much less to fruit, and remained therefore a secret close locked in his bosom. He assures us that he possessed it, and no doubt he knew, for in those days, as you are aware, the inner life knew everything.

Novalis, our second illustration, is a more interesting character. His was a profound and noble nature, but fate forbade him to reach maturity. To his beautiful and baffling fragments the sensitive reader returns ever and anon afresh, perplexed, disappointed, and yet always delighted. Novalis never lived to finish anything. His philosophical fragments are after all, however, the best brief compend you could find of the essence of the romantic philosophy, in all its spiritual depth and in all its waywardness. For Friedrich Schlegel, in his metaphysical capacity, as you have just seen, I cannot feel any serious respect. He was wayward and he was not deep. But Novalis every one who knows him truly must thoroughly love. His childlike straightforwardness, his amiable plasticity, not to say innocent fickleness of character, his real strength of ideals withal, his sensitiveness to truth, even his very incapacity (so characteristic of his school) to do more than turn chance jewels of truth over and over and hold them up to the light — all these things fascinate us. He is not exactly a great thinker, but of his kind he is so charming. Novalis, or Friedrich von Hardenberg, was born in 1772, the second child of a large and very affectionate family. His childhood was sickly, and until he was nine years old, while he was the object of the kindest care, his mind seemed in no wise extraordinary. Then suddenly, after an acute affection, his health bettered, and he appeared to wake, “as if from sleep,” as his biographer says. He was now a quick-witted, studious and imaginative boy, a great inventor and narrator of fantastic fairy tales, tender-hearted, genial, a lover of mystery. From 1790 to 1793 he attended several universities, was then nearly attracted into a soldier’s life by the excitement of the revolutionary period, but was erelong led into the hardly less exciting hopes and struggles of the new literary and philosophical movement, through an acquaintance with Friedrich Schlegel and with Fichte himself, who was then at the height of his earlier professional successes. In Arnstadt, in Thuringia, where Novalis went to learn a more practical profession, in government service, he met and loved a very young girl, Sophie von Kühn. Her eyes suggested to him the famous blaue Blume, which in his romance, “Heinrich v. Ofterdingen,” he afterwards made the symbol of the romantic ideal itself, the mysterious wonder of magic that his hero sees in dream and thenceforth seeks. Readers of Heine’s book on the Romantic School will remember this Blue Flower. Sophie was not yet fourteen when Friedrich v. Hardenberg was betrothed to her. They were never married; and three years later she died, after a long illness, constantly watched to the end by her devoted lover, to whom by this time the worship of his love had become a religion. Her death was the turning-point of his brief career. His mourning for her took a form worthy of a romantic philosopher. He dated a new sacred era from the day of her death, and kept a diary in accordance with his thus established chronology. The diary, which is unfortunately somewhat brief, is devoted to meditations intended to prepare him to meet her in the life beyond. And as for this meeting, he decides to bring it about in a way which shall express and conform his ardent faith in Fichtean principles. Fichte, namely, has said that our will is the master of the universe. Well, to be sure, suicide, in the ordinary sense, is not the philosopher’s way to the other world; but may not one by sheer force of will so purify himself as to become spiritually fit to live in the higher life, and thereupon, not indeed by any mere fading away, but by one supreme Entschluss, one resolution, made for and by his deeper self, simply transfer himself, in a single glorious moment, to the realm of free spirits? Friedrich persuades himself that this is possible, and decides to give himself just one year to prepare his soul for the final act of faith. He will not go to her in weakness, nor through the door of illness or of violence. In the full glow of health, in the ecstasy of a pure love, he will make himself ready, and then he will pass over in one instant to Sophie’s side. You may be reminded here of the lover in a song which Schubert’s music has rendered so familiar and tear-compelling. I mean the little romanza called “Rosamunde;” save, indeed, that das Ende vom Lied, in case of Novalis, is somewhat different. During this time of mourning he planned his wonderful Hymns to the Night, very brief and mystical rhapsodies in Ossianic prose, interspersed with verse. His diary, however, soon complains that it is a little hard to be quite healthy and still to remain wholly unworldly. One has so many temptations to forgetfulness of lofty ideals. One is, after all, but twenty-six; one loves discussion, friends, philosophy; one plainly has even a good appetite; and alas! this world is so fair, this age in which one lives is so inspiring! Nay, one is not yet quite worthy of the world of free spirits, nor of Sophie. So the days go by; and when the year of the preparation for the great Entschluss is done, not Novalis, but Sophie has passed — this time not merely into the world of spirits, but even into the realm of the pure Platonic Ideas themselves. Novalis still worships her glorified essence, but as for his noble Fichtean self, it continues to surround itself with the sense-facts of the terrestrial order, and now perceives its duty made manifest to its eyes in the person of one Julie Charpentier; for to her Novalis is by this time betrothed after the fashion of the visible world.

I assure you that I do not repeat this very well-known and even rather famous story here either in any spirit of scoffing, or for the sake of a digression. I can far better suggest the inner sense and the essence of this whole romantic idealism, in all its beauty and its waywardness, by such a tale as this of the love of Novalis than by a much longer homily. Here, you see, is the romantic interpretation of Fichte’s doctrine. You see the spirituality, the tenderness, the perfectly honest sentiment of it all; and you also see the essential fickleness, the inevitable arbitrariness, of an idealism that has not yet found any truly objective standards. In a less gentle soul than Novalis this arbitrariness would become cynical. Such noble sentiments have, you see, their even ghastly dangers. Is it feeling that guides you in your interpretation of the world? Are your ideas simply plastic? Do you make your world solely through your own mind? Alas! as Hegel afterwards said, feeling is the mere soil of the forest of life; and from the same soil the noblest tree or the hatefulest weed may spring. Suppose the resolution of Novalis had been by chance not only less fickle, but also less noble; might not his subjective idealism have justified equally well a fierce rebellion against all that humanity justly holds dearest, instead of a mere indifference to what common sense calls obvious? In the later history of the romantic movement the fickleness of wayward idealism did indeed work itself out to the extreme of its painful dialectics, and if you want to know the results, Amadeus Hoffmann’s tales of horror, or our own Edgar Poe’s gloom, will tell you enough of the story to let you see one of its endings. The Nihilism and the Pessimism of more recent days will give you another outcome of that arbitrary idealism which knows no law. And the lightning of Heine’s scorn will show you yet further glimpses of the same lurid world in a fashion that will leave you undecided whether to laugh or to weep. And yet, all this must not discourage true idealism, and does not discourage it. What I mean is just what I have already repeatedly pointed out: That as arbitrariness in our interpretation of things is the curse of immature idealism, mature idealism will certainly find out how to return to an order as fixed and as supreme as was Spinoza’s substance.

IV.

Schelling, finally, the prince of the romanticists, is an interesting example of a growth of spirit whereby a great thinker was indeed led from Fichte back to Spinoza. Only to the end, while Schelling became the firmest of believers in a supreme and substantial order of things, which impresses itself upon our reason from above, and which we are all forced to obey and to accept, his method remains wayward, imaginative, and, with all his genius, immature. His Spinozism is such as Spinoza could never have pretended to comprehend; his idealism early became such as to excite first the suspicion, and finally the violent condemnation of Fichte; and his whole work is such as only a great genius could have begun, and only a romanticist could have left in the chaos wherein, after a very long life, he finally left it.

Even our brief glance at Schelling’s character must take into account the remarkable woman whose counsel and affection made a great part of his most productive years possible. I doubt whether Schelling, even as philosopher, can be well understood apart from Caroline. She herself was the idol of the whole romantic circle. Her maiden name was Michaelis; she was twelve years the senior of Schelling. When Schelling first met her, himself then early in his twenties, she was already married a second time, and to Augustus Schlegel. Her daughter by her first marriage, Auguste Böhmer, died in 1800, aged seventeen. As Schlegel, during the closing years of the century, lived in Berlin, and Caroline in Jena, their marriage, although friendly, was not precisely the first interest of either member of the wedded pair. The romantic school, with philosophical consistency, believed in applying their principle of waywardness to marriage also, and approved of elective affinities; and accordingly, absolutely without an unkind word, the marriage of the Schlegels was ultimately dissolved by means of a decree of the obliging Duke at Weimar, and Schelling married Caroline in 1803, after several years of friendship and correspondence. Schelling and Caroline remained on the best terms with Augustus Schlegel until Caroline’s death in 1809.

Caroline’s letters to Schelling, between 1799 and 1803, are certainly much more than interesting. The wonderful charm of this herrliche Frau is once for all an irresistible sensation as you read her intimate self-confessions. She is a marvelous compound of the pathetic, the roguish, the wise, the gay, the deeply sad, and the singularly thoughtful. She has seen, felt, suffered, struggled; and she has conquered. She loves power intensely, is a very good hater, and yet, she has also a childlike and playful gentleness that fairly disarms you. When she is deep in trouble, a light or perhaps a bitter laugh is never far away, wherewith she wins again her composure. She is, in her romantic fashion, as high-minded as she is absolutely fearless, — a sort of Penthesilea, only vastly more tender, and with the heart of a bereaved mother, as well as with the temper of a trained warrior. To her husband Schlegel, in Berlin, she writes meanwhile as straightforwardly and lengthily as you please; only to him she has more to say about literary matters. Philosophy she thought of often, and with just the easy swift insight into subtleties which must have enlightened the young Schelling more than once. Only system-making she regarded with indifference. Hence it was, in part, for her admiration that Schelling must have thought out his subtle, but unsystematic fragments of philosophic creation. They frequently discussed such matters together. Once in conversation, as she writes in 1801 to her husband Schlegel, she and Schelling fell to inventing an appropriate motto in verse for Fichte (the “Sun-clear,” as she calls him, after the title of one of his essays, the “Sun-clear Exposition of the Essence of Recent Philosophy”), whose solemn and devout appeals to his readers to be honorable men for once, and agree with him, were then growing rather wearisome. They hit upon Hamlet’s —

“Doubt that the stars are fire,

Doubt that the planets move.”

That had an idealistic sound, and seemed to begin a fitting motto for Fichte. They took these lines, of course, in the current German translation, and then Caroline’s wit wrought out this as the whole motto: —

“Zweifle an der Sonne Klarheit,

Zweifle an der Sterne Licht,

Leser, nur an meiner Wahrheit

Und an deiner Dummheit nicht.”

I venture, with hesitation, to imitate Caroline in English, but at a long distance, thus: —

“Doubt that the stars are fire,

Doubt all the things of sense,

But, reader, doubt not I am wise,

And thy poor wits are dense.”

But Caroline had not only the power to criticise Fichte in this fashion; she knew also how to write an excellent contrast between Fichte’s genius and Schelling’s, as follows, in a letter to her young friend himself, who did not marry her until two years later: “It is growing more and more needful now that you produce something eternal, without making so much ado about it. Surely, my dearest friend, you aren’t asking my opinion about Fichte’s power, although you seem to come near it. I have always felt that, with all his incomparable skill in thinking, he has his limits; only, as I have thought, the reason is that he fails of the divine instinct that you possess; and if you have broken through his charmed circle, then I feel as if it was not so much because you are a philosopher, but because you have poetry in you, while he has none. I suppose I use the word ‘philosopher’ wrongly. If I do, laugh at me. But it is poetical inspiration that has led you to production, as it is simply sharpness of seeing that has led him to consciousness. He has the bright light, but you have the glowing fire; his gift can illuminate, only yours can produce. There, haven’t I put that right neatly? As if one should see an immeasurable landscape through a keyhole.”

You will now indeed be anxious to learn something of how Schelling had broken through Fichte’s charmed circle. Well, his most technical thought will be mentioned next time, when I compare him with Hegel, in whose company he worked for a brief, but important period. For this most significant deed of Schelling’s can only be understood in his relations with Hegel. Of Schelling, the poetical friend of Caroline, and the brilliant young creator of the so-called Naturphilosophie, I have yet to say a word to-day. The most fruitful problem of Fichte’s system was, of course, the problem of the relation of my conscious self to my deeper self, of my private thought to the universal and divine thought, whereof I am the transient expression. Now, it early occurred to Schelling that Fichte had not made all that he could of this relation between the humanly conscious and the divine Ego. My external world, says Fichte, is the product of my own unconscious act; and this act, unconscious to me, is ultimately an expression of God’s eternal activity itself. Well, then, is not the true idealism this? The outer world of sense has no existence except as a manifestation of the spirit. And there is but one spirit, after all; but this spirit extends far beyond my little self. He is the spirit of nature. You cannot comprehend him if you look only within. In you he is indeed the same that he is yonder in nature, only in nature his will is writ large, in dead and in living forces, in gravitation, in magnetism, in electricity, in vitality. Study these things, not as if they were ever utterly dead things in themselves, but as being other expressions of precisely the same life that is writ fine in your consciousness. Thus, by reversing, as it were, the Fichtean telescope, you see the human subject indeed as the central being of the human world, only in himself he now appears less imposing. Turning, however, the right end of the glass towards nature, you see therein the life of humanity typified, symbolized, crystallized, as it were; for spirit comes to itself in man only because it has first expressed itself in nature, and is now striving in us to become conscious of its own work. Thus viewed, man is indeed simply an evolution from nature; and Schelling indeed holds that a theory of the evolution of consciousness is needed as a complement to Fichte’s theory. “In autumn, 1798, I entered upon my lectures at Jena,” says Schelling himself, in one of his autobiographical statements, “full of the thought that the way from nature to spirit must be as possible as the reverse way, upon which Fichte had entered.” Here, then, is Schelling’s epoch-making idea, and you will see hereafter that it is the idea which modern philosophic thought will henceforth be seeking to define. To complete the undertaking of idealism, you need a theory of the facts of nature, so interpreted as to be in harmony with the view that only ideas are the realities, and yet so adapted to experience as to free your idealism from the arbitrariness of the inner life of mere finite selves. Can we, then, prove that the very spirit whose life our own consciousness expresses is already present outside and beyond us, weaving the web of the external world, giving it substance, and yet preserving its ideality and its harmony with our inner life? If we can, then, our doctrine will become what is teclinically called objective idealism. The outer world is, then, God’s thought shown to our eyes; the inner world is God’s thought become conscious of itself. This doctrine was the centre of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, Unfortunately he was no man to prove such a theory. He could only suggest, develop imaginatively, and in later essays treat with a marvelous, but fragmentary technical skill. As poet, he indeed broke through Fichte’s charmed circle; but as poet, he never stated the essence of his Naturphilosophie more clearly or more boldly than he did in a poetic fragment written under the eyes of Caroline, and meant largely for her approval. Of this production he himself never published more than a brief portion; in later years it has been printed from his papers. I refer to his whimsically so-called Epikurisch Glaubensbekenntniss Heinz Widerporstens, “Epicurean Confession of Faith of Hans Bristleback.”

In this thoroughly wayward sketch in verse, Schelling assumes a grotesque name and character, in order to give himself greater freedom to express the heart of his Naturphilosophie in the boldest and most pantheistic terms. The meter is borrowed from the well-known revival, in Goethe’s “Faust,” of the old Knittelvers, or free rhyme of early German poetry. Schelling’s hero, in whose character he speaks, is supposed to be trying to play the irreligious materialist, whom the priests have been driving to despair, and who at last rebels. Nature is his religion, he says. He loves good cheer and fair faces, and he hates superstition. Isn’t this world of the senses after all the genuine thing? Heinz grows fairly rollicking in his materialistic and epicurean speeches. Suddenly, without warning, he assumes another tone, From beneath the mask of the epicurean, the voice of the romantic mystic sounds. Why, then, is this world of the senses the world for the truly wise man? Because it is but the embodiment of one eternal and divine spirit. Then follows a Schellingian sketch of a process of evolution which, proceeding through the animals, culminates in us. The world of nature is thus full of the struggle of the great spirit to win his own higher life. The end and crown of this whole process is man. In him, blind nature gets a voice; in him the spirit comes to himself. And all the universe is one glorious life, in whose contemplation the mystic soul rejoices.

Let me give you, as a close, my own hasty rendering ot some of Schelling's curious lines, with a certain effort to preserve the unequal metre and even the very unequal worth of the original. The Knittelvers, at its noblest, is only a sort of glorified doggerel, and is never easy to manage in translation; but I must suggest to you a little of the romantic intoxication of this sort of pantheism, so characteristic of one great tendency in German thought.

After his introductory denunciation of priestcraft, asceticism, and superstition, the gay Heinz is made to run on thus, speaking of course in character: —

“Therefore religion I forsake,

All superstitious ties I break,

No church will I visit to hear them preach,

I have done with all that the parsons teach.

And yet there is one faith that masters my will,

Glows in my verse, and inspires me still.

Daily my heart with delight doth thrill,

Eternally showing

New form; till I knowing,

This faith so clear.

This light so near,

This poem undying,

Must witness its truth beyond denying;

So that I can nothing hold nor conceive

Save what it counsels me to believe;

Nor aught as certain or right maintain,

Save what it reveals to my eyes so plain.

• • •

Thus, then, in my heart am I freed from fear,

Sound in body and soul stand here,

And may, instead of posture and prayer,

Instead of losing my way in the air,

Here on the earth, in her blue eyes see

The deepest depths that exist for me.

Nay, and why should I in the world suffer dread,

I, who know the world from the foot to the head?

’T is a tame creature, is it not?

When has it ever its bonds forgot?

Yields to the yoke of all-ruling law,

Crouches at my feet in awe.

• • •

Within it a giant spirit doth dream.

But his soul is a frozen lava stream;^[2]

From his narrow house he cannot away.

Nor his iron chains escape for a day.

Yet often he flutters his wings in his sleep.

Mightily stirs in his dungeon-keep,

Travails in dead and in living things

To know his will and to free his wings.^[3]

• • •

His power, that fills the veins with ore.

And renews in the spring the buds once more.

Labors unceasing in darkness and night,

In all nature’s nooks and crannies for light.

Fears no pang in its fierce desire

To live and to conquer and win its way higher.

Organs and members it fashions anew,

Lengthens or shortens, makes many or few.

And wrestles and writhes in its search till it find

The form that is worthiest of its mind.

Struggling thus on life intent.

Against a cruel environment.

It triumphs at last, in one narrow space,

And comes to itself in a dwarfish race.

That, fair of form, of stature erect,

Stands on earth as the giant’s elect,

Is called in our speech the son of man,

Outcome and crown of the spirit’s plan.

From iron slumber, from dreaming set free,

Now marvels the spirit who he may be.

Looks on himself with wondering gaze,

Measures his limbs in dim amaze,

Longs in terror once more to be hid

In nature’s slumber, of sentience rid.

But nay, his freedom is won for aye,

No more in nature’s peace may he lie;

In the vast dark world that is all his own,

He wanders his life’s narrow path alone.

Yes, he even fears, in his visions dim,

That the giant himself may be wroth with him.

And like Saturn of old, in godlike scorn,

Devour his children scarcely born;

Know not that he himself is the Sprite

That longingly toiled in the world’s dark night;

Peoples the void with the ghosts of his fear.

Yet could he say, the Giant’s peer: —

I am the God who nature’s bosom fills,

I am the life that in her heart’s blood thrills.^[4]

From the first quiver of her mystic power.

Until of life there came that primal hour,

When force new form and body power assumed.

And flowers the beauty showed that lay entombed, —

Yes, now, wherever light, as dawn begins,

A new created world from chaos wins, —

And in the thousand eyes that, from the sky,

Show night and day the heavenly mystery, —

Onwards, to where, in thought’s eternal truth

Nature’s deep self rewords itself in truth, —

There stirs one might, one pulse-beat all sufficing,

All power retaining, aye, — and sacrificing.”

Notes

1. That is, freely translated: —
   “Notice: The late metaphysic is dead without heirs, and to-morrow
   All the things in themselves shall under the hammer be sold.”
2. “Steckt zwar ein Riesengeist darinnen,
   Ist aber versteinert mit seinen Sinnen.”
3. “In todten und lebendigen Dingen
   Thut nach Bewusstseyn mächtig ringen.”
4. “lch bin der Gott der sie im Busen trägt,
   Der Geist der sich in allem bewegt.”