[Footnote 3:  Nicolai:  Library of Belles Lettres, from 1757; Letters on the Most Recent German Literature, from 1759; Universal German Library, from 1765; New Universal German Library, 1793-1805.]

Among the psychologists J.N.  Tetens, whose Philosophical Essays on Human Nature, 1776-77, show a remarkable similarity to the views of Kant,[1] takes the first rank.  The two thinkers evidently influenced each other.  The three fold division of the activities of the soul, “knowing, feeling, and willing,” which has now become popular and which appears to us self-evident, is to be referred to Tetens, from whom Kant took it; in opposition to the twofold division of Aristotle and Wolff into “cognition and appetition,” he established the equal rights of the faculty of feeling—­which had previously been defended by Sulzer (1751), the aesthetic writer, and by Mendelssohn (1755, 1763, 1785).  Besides Tetens, the following should be mentioned among the psychologists:  Tetens’s opponent, Johann Lossius (1775), an adherent of Bonnet; D. Tiedemann (Inquiries concerning Man, from 1777), who was estimable also as a historian of philosophy (Spirit of Speculative Philosophy, 1791-97); Von Irwing (1772 seq.; 2d ed., 1777); and K. Ph.  Moriz (Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenlehre, from 1785).  Basedow (died 1790), Campe (died 1818), and J.H.  Pestalozzi (1745-1827) did valuable work in pedagogics.

[Footnote 1:  Sensation gives the content, and the understanding spontaneously produces the form, of knowledge.  The only objectivity of knowledge which we can attain consists in the subjective necessity of the forms of thought or the ideas of relation.  Perception enables us to cognize phenomena only, not the true essence of things and of ourselves, etc.]

One of the clearest and most acute minds among the philosophers of the Illumination was the deist Hermann Samuel Reimarus[1] (1694-1768), from 1728 professor in Hamburg.  He attacks atheism, in whatever form it may present itself, with as much zeal and conviction as he shows in breaking down the belief in revelation by his inexorable criticism (in his Defense, communicated in manuscript to a few friends only).  He obtains his weapons for this double battle from the Wolffian philosophy.  The existence of an extramundane deity is proved by the purposive arrangement of the world, especially of organisms, which aims at the good—­not merely of man, as the majority of the physico-theologists have believed, but—­of all living creatures.  To believe in a special revelation, i.e., a miracle, in addition to such a revelation of God as this, which is granted to all men, and is alone necessary to salvation, is to deny the perfection of God, and to do violence to the immutability of his providence.  To these general considerations against the credibility of positive revelation are to be added, as special arguments against