22. The total performance of Kant thus left Germany with a powerful lead on the one hand towards that unbelief in religion which in the last reign had been fashionable, and on the other hand a series of prescriptions for compromise; the monarchy all the while throwing its weight against all innovation in doctrine and practice. In 1799 Fichte is found expressing the utmost alarm at the combination of the European despotisms to “rout out freethought”;255 and so strong did the official reaction become that in the opinion of Heine all the German philosophers and their ideas would have been suppressed by wheel and gallows but for Napoleon,256 who intervened in the year 1805. The Prussian despotism being thus weakened, what actually happened was an adaptation of Kant’s teaching to the needs alike of religion and of rationalism. The religious world was assured by it that, though all previous arguments for theism were philosophically worthless, theism was now safe on the fluid basis of feeling. On the other hand, rationalism alike in ethics and in historical criticism was visibly reinforced on all sides. Herder, as before noted, found divinity students grounding their unbelief on Kant’s teaching. Staüdlin begins the preface to his History and Spirit of Skepticism (1794) with the remark that “Skepticism begins to be a disease of the age”; and Kant is the last in his list of skeptics. At the close of the century “the number of Kantian theologians was legion,” and it was through the Kantian influence that “the various anti-orthodox tendencies which flourished during the period of Illumination were concentrated in Rationalism”257—in the tendency, that is, to bring rational criticism to bear alike on history, dogma, and philosophy. Borowski in 1804 complains that “beardless youths and idle babblers” devoid of knowledge “appeal to Kant’s views respecting Christianity.”258 These views, as we have seen, were partly accommodating, partly subversive in the extreme. Kant regards Jesus as an edifying ideal of perfect manhood, “belief” in whom as such makes a man acceptable to God, because of following a good model. “While he thus treats the historical account of Jesus as of no significance, except as a shell into which the practical reason puts the kernel, his whole argument tends to destroy faith in the historic person of Jesus as given in the gospel, treating the account itself as something whose truthfulness it is not worth while to investigate.”259 In point of fact we find his devoted disciple Erhard declaring: “I regard Christian morality as something which has been falsely imputed to Christianity; and the existence of Christ does not at all seem to me to be a probable historical fact”—this while declaring that Kant had given him “the indescribable comfort of being able to call himself openly, and with a good conscience, a Christian.”260

While therefore a multitude of preachers availed themselves of Kant’s philosophic licence to rationalize in the pulpit and out of it as occasion offered, and yet others opposed them only on the score that all divergence from orthodoxy should be avowed, the dissolution of orthodoxy in Germany was rapid and general; and the anti-supernaturalist handling of Scripture, prepared for as we have seen, went on continuously. Even the positive disparagement of Christianity was carried on by Kantian students; and Hamann, dubbed “the Magician of the North” for his alluring exposition of emotional theism, caused one of them, a tutor, to be brought before a clerical consistory for having taught his pupil to throw all specifically Christian doctrines aside. The tutor admitted the charge, and with four others signed a declaration “that neither morality nor sound reason nor public welfare could exist in connection with Christianity.”261 Hamann’s own influence was too much a matter of literary talent and caprice to be durable; and recent attempts to re-establish his reputation have evoked the deliberate judgment that he has no permanent importance.262

Against the intellectual influence thus set up by Kant there was none in contemporary Germany capable of resistance. Philosophy for the most part went in Kant’s direction, having indeed been so tending before his day. Rationalism of a kind had already had a representative in Chr. A. Crusius (1712–1775), who in treatises on logic and metaphysics opposed alike Leibnitz and Wolff, and taught for his own part a kind of Epicureanism, nominally Christianized. To his school belonged Platner (much admired by Jean Paul Richter, his pupil) and Tetens, “the German Locke,” who attempted a common-sense answer to Hume. His ideal was a philosophy “at once intelligible and religious, agreeable to God and accessible to the people.”263 Platner on the other hand, leaning strongly towards a psychological and anthropological view of human problems,264 opposed first to atheism265 and later to Kantian theism266 a moderate Pyrrhonic skepticism; here following a remarkable lead from the younger Beausobre, who in 1755 had published in French, at Berlin, a treatise entitled Le Pyrrhonisme Raisonnable, taking up the position, among others, that while it is hard to prove the existence of God by reason it is impossible to disprove it. This was virtually the position of Kant a generation later; and it is clear that thus early the dogmatic position was discredited.

23. Some philosophic opposition there was to Kant, alike on intuitionist grounds, as in the cases of Hamann and Herder, and on grounds of academic prejudice, as in the case of Kraus; but the more important thinkers who followed him were all as heterodox as he. In particular, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), who began in authorship by being a Kantian zealot, gave even greater scandal than the Master had done. Fichte’s whole career is a kind of “abstract and brief chronicle” of the movements of thought in Germany during his life. In his boyhood, at the public school of Pforta, we find him and his comrades already influenced by the new currents. “Books imbued with all the spirit of free inquiry were secretly obtained, and, in spite of the strictest prohibitions, great part of the night was spent in their perusal. The works of Wieland, Lessing, and Goethe were positively forbidden; yet they found their way within the walls, and were eagerly studied.”267 In particular, Fichte followed closely the controversy of Lessing with Goeze; and Lessing’s lead gave him at once the spirit of freethought, as distinct from any specific opinion. Never a consistent thinker, Fichte in his student and tutorial days is found professing at once determinism and a belief in “Providence,” accepting Spinoza and contemplating a village pastorate.268 But while ready to frame a plea for Christianity on the score of its psychic adaptation to “the sinner,” he swerved from the pastorate when it came within sight, declaring that “no purely Christian community now exists.”269 About the age of twenty-eight he became an enthusiastic convert to the Kantian philosophy, especially to the Critique of Practical Reason, and threw over determinism on what appear to be grounds of empirical utilitarianism, failing to face the philosophical issue. Within a year of his visit to Kant, however, he was writing to a friend that “Kant has only indicated the truth, but neither unfolded nor proved it,” and that he himself has “discovered a new principle, from which all philosophy can easily be deduced.... In a couple of years we shall have a philosophy with all the clearness of geometrical demonstration.”270 He had in fact passed, perhaps under Spinoza’s influence, to pantheism, from which standpoint he rejected Kant’s anti-rational ground for affirming a God not immanent in things, and claimed, as did his contemporaries Schelling and Hegel, to establish theism on rational grounds. Rejecting, further, Kant’s reiterated doctrine that religion is ethic, Fichte ultimately insisted that, on the contrary, religion is knowledge, and that “it is only a corrupt society that has to use religion as an impulse to moral action.”

But alike in his Kantian youth and later he was definitely anti-revelationist, however much he conformed to clerical prejudice by attacks upon the movement of freethought. In his “wander-years” he writes with vehemence of the “worse than Spanish inquisition” under which the German clergy are compelled to “cringe and dissemble,” partly because of lack of ability, partly through economic need.271 In his Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung (“Essay towards a Critique of all Revelation”), published with some difficulty, Kant helping (1792), he in effect negates the orthodox assumption, and, in the spirit of Kant and Lessing, but with more directness than they had shown, concludes that belief in revelation “is an element, and an important element, in the moral education of humanity, but it is not a final stage for human thought.”272 In Kant’s bi-frontal fashion, he had professed273 to “silence the opponents of positive religion not less than its dogmatical defenders”; but that result did not follow on either side, and ere long, as a professor at Jena, he was being represented as one of the most aggressive of the opponents. Soon after producing his Critique of all Revelation he had published anonymously two pamphlets vindicating the spirit as distinguished from the conduct of the French Revolution; and upon a young writer known to harbour such ideas enmity was bound to fall. Soon it took the form of charges of atheism. It does not appear to be true that he ever told his students at Jena: “In five years there will be no more Christian religion: reason is our religion”;274 and it would seem that the first charges of atheism brought against him were purely malicious.275 But his career henceforth was one of strife and friction, first with the student-blackguardism which had been rife in the German universities ever since the Thirty Years’ War, and which he partly subdued; then with the academic authorities and the traditionalists, who, when he began lecturing on Sunday mornings, accused him of attempting to throw over Christianity and set up the worship of reason. He was arraigned before the High Consistory of Weimar and acquitted; but his wife was insulted in the streets of Jena; his house was riotously attacked in the night; and he ceased to reside there. Then, in his Wissenschaftslehre (“Doctrine of Knowledge,” 1794–95) he came into conflict with the Kantians, with whom his rupture steadily deepened on ethical grounds. Again he was accused of atheism in print; and after a defence in which he retorted the charge on the utilitarian theists he resigned.

In Berlin, where the new king held the old view that the wrongs of the Gods were the Gods’ affair, he found harbourage; and sought to put himself right with the religious world by his book Die Bestimmung des Menschen (“The Vocation of Man,” 1800), wherein he speaks of the Eternal Infinite Will as regulating human reason so far as human reason is right—the old counter-sense and the old evasion. By this book he repelled his rationalistic friends Schelling and the Schlegels; while his religious ally Schleiermacher, who chose another tactic, wrote on it a bitter and contemptuous review, and “could hardly find words strong enough to express his detestation of it.”276 A few years later Fichte was writing no less contemptuously of Schelling; and in his remaining years, though the Napoleonic wars partly brought him into sympathy with his countrymen, from whom he had turned away in angry alienation, he remained a philosophic Ishmael, warring and warred upon all round. He was thus left to figure for posterity as a religionist “for his own hand,” who rejected all current religion while angrily dismissing current unbelief as “freethinking chatter.”277 If his philosophy be estimated by its logical content as distinguished from its conflicting verbalisms, it is fundamentally as atheistic as that of Spinoza.278 That he was conscious of a vital sunderance between his thought and that of the past is made clear by his answer, in 1805, to the complaint that the people had lost their “religious feeling” (Religiosität). His retort is that a new religious feeling has taken the place of the old;279 and that was the position taken up by the generation which swore by him, in the German manner, as the last had sworn by Kant.

But the successive philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, all rising out of the “Illumination” of the eighteenth century, have been alike impermanent. Nothing is more remarkable in the history of thought than the internecine strife of the systems which insisted on “putting something in the place” of the untenable systems of the past. They have been but so many “toppling spires of cloud.” Fichte, like Herder, broke away from the doctrine of Kant; and later became bitterly opposed to that of his former friend Schelling, as did Hegel in his turn. Schleiermacher, hostile to Kant, was still more hostile to Fichte; and Hegel, detesting Schleiermacher280 and developing Fichte, give rise to schools arrayed against each other, of which the anti-Christian was by far the stronger. All that is permanent in the product of the age of German Rationalism is the fundamental principle upon which it proceeded, the confutation of the dogmas and legends of the past, and the concrete results of the historical, critical, and physical research to which the principle and the confutation led.

24. It is true that the progressive work was not all done by the Rationalists so-called. As always, incoherences in the pioneers led to retorts which made for rectification. One of the errors of bias of the early naturalists, as we have noted, was their tendency to take every religious document as genuine and at bottom trustworthy, provided only that its allegations of miracles were explained away as misinterpretations of natural phenomena. So satisfied were many of them with this inexpensive method that they positively resisted the attempts of supernaturalists, seeking a way out of their special dilemma, to rectify the false ascriptions of the documents. Bent solely on one solution, they were oddly blind to evidential considerations which pointed to interpolation, forgery, variety of source, and error of literary tradition; while scholars bent on saving “inspiration” were often ready in some measure for such recognitions. These arrests of insight took place alternately on both sides, in the normal way of intellectual progress by alternate movements. All the while, it is the same primary force of reason that sets up the alternate pressures, and the secondary pressures are generated by, and are impossible without, the first.

25. The emancipation, too, was limited in area in the German-speaking world. In Austria, despite a certain amount of French culture, the rule of the Jesuits in the eighteenth century was too effective to permit of any intellectual developments. Maria Theresa, who knew too well that the boundless sexual licence against which she fought had nothing to do with innovating ideas, had to issue a special order to permit the importation of Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois; and works of more subversive doctrine could not openly pass the frontiers at all. An attempt to bring Lessing to Vienna in 1774, with a view to founding a new literary Academy, collapsed before the opposition; and when Prof. Jahn, of the Vienna University—described as “freethinking, latitudinarian, anti-supernaturalistic”—developed somewhat anti-clerical tendencies in his teaching and writing, he was forced to resign, and died a simple Canon.281 The Emperor Joseph II in his day passed for an unbeliever;282 but there was no general movement. “Austria, in a time of universal effervescence, produced only musicians, and showed zest only for pleasure.”283 Yet among the music-makers was the German-born Beethoven, the greatest master of his age. Kindred in spirit to Goethe, and much more of a revolutionist than he in all things, Beethoven spent the creative part of his life at Vienna without ceasing to be a freethinker.284 “Formal religion he apparently had none.” He copied out a kind of theistic creed consisting of three ancient formulas: “I am that which is”: “I am all that is, that was, that shall be”: “He is alone by Himself; and to Him alone do all things owe their being.” Beyond this his beliefs did not go. When his friend Moscheles at the end of his arrangement of Fidelio wrote: “Fine, with God’s help,” Beethoven added, “O man, help thyself.”285 His reception of the Catholic sacraments in extremis was not his act. He had left to mankind a purer and a more lasting gift than either the creeds or the philosophies of his age.