Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was born in 1768 at Breslau, and died in 1834 in Berlin, where he had become preacher at Trinity church in 1809, professor of theology in 1810, member of the philosophical section of the Academy in 1811, and its secretary in 1814.  Reared in the Moravian schools at Niesky and Barby, he studied at Halle; and, between 1794 and 1804, was a preacher in Landsberg on the Warthe, in Berlin (at the Charite Hospital), and in Stolpe, then professor in Halle.  He first attracted attention by the often republished Discourses on Religion addressed to the Educated among those who despise it, 1799 (critical edition by Puenjer, 1879), which was followed in the succeeding year by the Monologues, and the anonymous Confidential Letters on Lucinde (Lucinde was the work of his friend Fr. Schlegel).  Besides several collections of sermons, mention must further be made of his Outlines of a Critique of Previous Ethics, 1803; The Celebration of Christmas, 1806; and his chief theological work, The Christian Faith, 1822, new edition 1830.  In the third (the philosophical) division of his Collected Works (1835-64) the second and third volumes contain the essays on the history of philosophy, on ethical, and on academic subjects; vols. vi. to ix., the Lectures on Psychology, Esthetics, the Theory of the State, and Education, edited by George, Lommatsch, Brandis, and Platz; and the first part of vol. iv., the History of Philosophy (to Spinoza), edited by Ritter.  The Monologues and The Celebration of Christmas have appeared in Reclam’s Bibliothek.

Schleiermacher’s philosophy is a rendezvous for the most diverse systems.  Side by side with ideas from Kant, Fichte, and Schelling we meet Platonic, Spinozistic, and Leibnitzian elements; even Jacobi and the Romanticists have contributed their mite.  Schleiermacher is an eclectic, but one who, amid the fusion of the most diverse ideas, knows how to make his own individuality felt.  In spite of manifold echoes of the philosophemes of earlier and of contemporary thinkers, his system is not a conglomeration of unrelated lines of thought, but resembles a plant, which in its own way works over and assimilates the nutritive elements taken up from the soil.  Schleiermacher is attractive rather than impressive; he is less a discoverer than a critic and systematizer.  His fine critical sense works in the service of a positive aim, subserves a harmonizing tendency; he takes no pleasure in breaking to pieces, but in adjusting, limiting, and combining.  There is no one of the given views which entirely satisfies him, none which simply repels him; each contains elements which seem to him worthy of transformation and adoption.  When he finds himself confronted by a sharp conflict of opinion, he seeks by careful mediation to construct a whole out of the two “half truths,” though this, it is true, does not always give a result more