be ready to adopt the name
Semi-Kantians, given
by Fortlage to the members of the opposition,—a
title which seems the more fitting since each of them
appropriates only a definitely determinable part of
Kant’s views, and mingles a foreign element
with it. In Fries this non-Kantian element comes
from Jacobi’s philosophy of faith; in Herbart
it comes from the monadology of Leibnitz, and the
ancient Eleatico-atomistic doctrine; in Schopenhauer,
from the religion of India and (as in Beneke) from
the sensationalism of the English and the French.
We can only hint in passing at the parallelism which
exists between the chief representatives of the idealistic
school and the leaders of the opposition. Fries’s
theory of knowledge and faith is the empirical counterpart
of Fichte’s Science of Knowledge. Schopenhauer,
in his doctrine of Will and Idea, in his vigorously
intuitive and highly fanciful view of nature and art,
and, in general, in his aesthetical mode of philosophizing,
with its glad escape from the fetters of method, has
so much in common with Schelling that many unhesitatingly
treat his system as an offshoot of the Philosophy
of Nature. The contrast between Herbart and Hegel
is the more pronounced since they are at one in their
confidence in the power of the concept. The most
conspicuous point of comparison between the metaphysics
of the two thinkers is the significance ascribed by
them to the contradiction as the operative moment
in the movement of philosophical thought. The
attitude of hostility which Schleiermacher assumed
in relation to Hegel’s intellectualistic conception
of religion induced Harms to give to Schleiermacher
also a place in the ranks of the opposition. Following
the chronological order, we begin with the campaign
opened by Fries under the banner of anthropology against
the main branch of the Kantian school.
%1. The Psychologists: Fries and Beneke.%
Jacob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843) was born and reared
at Barby, studied at Jena, and habilitated at the
same university in the year 1801; he was professor
at Heidelberg in 1806-16, and at Jena from 1816 until
his death. His chief work was the New Critique
of Reason, in three volumes, 1807 (2d ed., 1828
seq.), which had been preceded, in 1805, by
the treatise Knowledge, Faith, and Presentiment.
Besides these he composed a Handbook of Psychical
Anthropology, 1821 (2d ed., 1837 seq.),
text-books of Logic, Metaphysics, the Mathematical
Philosophy of Nature, and Practical Philosophy and
the Philosophy of Religion, and a philosophical novel,
Julius and Evagoras, or the Beauty of the Soul.