religion to the future, and find the happiness of humanity in this present life. Besides, the leaders of the Socialists, who give the cue in this respect, are for the most part men of education, who, at all events in Germany, have been trained in Feuerbach's ideas. The great mass of their followers are tolerably indifferent in this respect. Driven by the consciousness of their necessities, they throw themselves into the arms of him who promises them a decided improvement, or even a decided struggle and prospect of revenge, whether in other respects he favours Papal infallibility or Atheism. For many years Socialism has learnt to hate the Church as the partner of the State; but as soon as serious difference occurs between the Church and the State, a portion of the Socialists-very imprudently but very naturallybegin to coquette with the Church. Revolution is with. the extreme leaders of this party their only aim, and it is in the nature of circumstances that only extreme leaders are possible, because only extreme tendencies move the masses. Should Socialism ever attain this immediate but purely negative aim, and then, amidst general confusion, have to give shape to its ideas, the cool sway of abstract understanding will hardly maintain its predominance. If it comes to the dissolution of our present civilisation, it will hardly be that any existing Church, and still less Materialism, will succeed to the inheritance, but from some unsuspected corner will emerge some utter absurdity, like the Book of Mormon or Spiritualism, with which the justified ideas of the epoch will fuse themselves, to found a new centre of universal thought, to last perhaps for thousands of years.

There is but one means to meet the alternative of this revolution or of a dim stagnation; but this means does not consist, as Strauss thinks, in the cannon which are. to be directed against Socialists and Dem rats, but solely and entirely in the timely surmounting of Mate

rialism, and in the healing of the breach in our popular life which is produced by the separation of the educated from the people and its spiritual needs. Ideas and sacrifices may yet save our civilisation, and transform the path that leads through desolating revolution into a path of beneficent reforms.

CHAPTER IV.

THE STANDPOINT OF THE IDEAL.

MATERIALISM is the first, the lowest, but also comparatively the firmest stage in philosophy. Starting immediately from natural knowledge, it becomes a system by looking beyond the limits of this knowledge. The necessity that rules in the sphere of the natural sciences lends to the system which is most immediately based upon them a considerable degree of the uniformity and certainty of its separate parts. A reflexion of this certainty and necessity falls also upon the system as such, but this reflexion is deceptive. Precisely what makes Materialism a system, the fundamental hypothesis which elevates the particular branches of natural knowledge by a common bond into a whole, is not only its most uncertain part, but is, in fact, untenable before a deeper-going criticism. But exactly the same relation is repeated in the particular sciences upon which Materialism is based, and therefore, too, in all the separate parts of the system. The certainty of these parts is, rightly considered, nothing but the certainty of the facts of the science, and this is always greatest for the immediately given particular. The unity which makes the facts into a science and the sciences into a system is a product of free synthesis, and springs therefore from the same source as the creation of the ideal. While, however, this deals quite freely with the materials, synthesis in the province of science has only the freedom of its origin from the speculative mind of man. It is, on

the other hand, tied to the task of establishing the utmost possible harmony between the necessary factors of knowledge, which are independent of our will. As the artisan, in the case of an invention, is tied to its purpose, while at the same time the idea of it springs freely from his mind, so every true scientific induction is at once the accomplishment of a given task and a product of the speculative mind.

Materialism more than any other system keeps to reality, i.e., to the sum total of the necessary phenomena given to us by the compulsion of sense. But a reality such as man imagines to himself, and as he yearns after when this imagination is dispelled, an existence absolutely fixed and independent of us while it is yet known by us—such a reality does not exist and cannot exist, because the synthetic creative factor of our knowledge extends, in fact, into the very first sense-impressions and even into the elements of logic.40 The world is not only idea, but also our idea; a product of the organisation of the species in the universal and necessary characteristics of all experience; of the individual in the synthesis that deals freely with the object. We may also say that the reality is the phenomenon for the species, while the delusive appearance, on the contrary, is a phenomenon for the individual, which only becomes an error by reality, i.e., existence for the species, being ascribed to it.

But the task of producing harmony among phenomena and of linking the manifold that is given to us into unity belongs not merely to the synthetic factors of experience,

40 That to the principle A = A strictly understood reality nowhere corresponds, A. Spir has recently energetically insisted on and made it the basis of a philosophical system of his own. All the difficulties in volved in this fact may, however, be much more easily disposed of in another way. The principle A-A is indeed the basis of all knowledge, yet is not itself knowledge, but an act of

the mind, an act of primitive synthesis by which there is posited as the necessary starting-point of all thinking an equality or a persistence which are found in nature only relatively and approximately, but never absolutely and completely. The principle A-A accordingly indicates at the very threshold of logic the relativity and ideality of all our knowledge.

but also to those of speculation. Here, however, the connecting organisation of the species leaves us in the lurch: the individual speculates in his own fashion, and the product of this speculation acquires importance for the species, or rather for the nation and contemporaries, only in so far as the individual creating it is endowed with rich and normal talents and is typical in his modes of thought, while by his intellectual energy he is called to be a leader.

The conceptional poesy of speculation is, however, not even so completely free; it still strives, like empirical research, after a unitary exhibition of data in their connexion, but it lacks the guiding compulsion of the principles of experience. Only in poesy, in the narrower sense of the word, in poetry, is the ground of reality consciously abandoned. In speculation form has the preponderance over matter; in poetry it is completely dominant. The poet creates in the free play of his spirit a world to his own liking, in order to impress more vividly upon the easily manageable material a form which has its own intrinsic value and its importance independently of the problems of knowledge.

From the lowest stages of synthesis, in which the individual still appears completely bound by the characteristics of the species, up to its creative dominance in poetry, the essence of this act is always directed to the production of unity, of harmony, of perfect form. The same principle which rules absolutely in the sphere of the beautiful, in art and poetry, appears in the sphere of conduct as the true ethical norm which underlies all the other principles of morality, and in the sphere of knowledge as the shaping, form-giving factor in our picture of the world.

Although, therefore, the very picture of the world which the senses give us is involuntarily formed upon the ideal within us, yet the whole world of reality, as compared with the free creations of art, appears inharmonious and full of perversities. Here lies the source of all Optimism and

VOL. III.

Y