satisfactory than the partial views which he wishes to reconcile.  A single example may be given of this conciliatory tendency:  space, time, and the categories are not only subjective forms of knowledge, but at the same time objective forms of reality.  “Not only” is the watchword of his philosophy, which became the prototype of the numberless “ideal realisms” with which Germany was flooded after Hegel’s death.  If the skeptical and eclectic movements, which constantly make their appearance together, are elsewhere divided among different thinkers, they here come together in one mind in the form of a mediating criticism, which, although it argues logically, is yet in the end always guided by the invisible cords of a feeling of justice in matters scientific.  In its weaker portions Schleiermacher’s philosophy is marked by lack of grasp, pettiness, and sportiveness.  It lacks courage and force, and the rare delicacy of the thought is not entirely able to compensate for this defect.  In its fear of one-sidedness it takes refuge in the arms of an often faint-hearted policy of reconciliation.

We shall not discuss the specifically theological achievements of this many-sided man, nor his great services in behalf of the philological knowledge of the history of philosophy—­through his translation of Plato, 1804-28, and a series of valuable essays on Greek thinkers—­but shall confine our attention to the leading principles of his theory of knowledge, of religion, and of ethics.

The Dialectic[1] (edited by Jonas, 1839), treats in a transcendental part and a technical or formal part of the concept and the forms of knowledge. Knowledge is thought.  What distinguishes that thought which we call knowledge from that other thought which does not deserve this honorable title, from mere opinion?  Two criteria:  its agreement with the thought of other thinkers (its universality and necessity), and its agreement with the being which is thought in it.  That thought alone is knowledge which is represented as necessarily valid for all who are capable of thought, and as corresponding to a being or reproducing it.  These two agreements (among thinkers, and of thought with the being which is thought) are the criteria of knowledge—­let us turn now to its factors.  These are essentially the two brought forward by Kant, sensibility and understanding; Schleiermacher calls them the organic function and the intellectual function.  The organic activity of the senses furnishes us, in sensations, the unordered, manifold material of knowledge, which is formed and unified by the activity of reason.  If we except two concepts which limit our knowledge, chaos and God—­absolute formlessness or chaos is an idea just as incapable of realization as absolute unity or deity—­every actual cognition is a product of both factors, of the sensuous organization and of reason.  But these two do not play equal parts in every cognitive act.  When the organic function is predominant we have perception;