In France, after reaching its climax in
Voltaire, it ended in materialism, atheism, and fatalism; and in
England, where it had developed the empiricism of Locke, it came to
grief in the scepticism of Hume. If we can know only our impressions,
then rational theology, cosmology, and psychology are impossible, and
it is futile to philosophize about God, the world, and the human soul.
Consistently carried out, the logical-mathematical method seemed to
land the intellect in Spinozism or in materialism--in either case to
catch man in the causal machinery of nature. In this dilemma many were
tempted to throw reason overboard as an instrument of ultimate
truth, and to seek for certainty through other functions of the human
soul--in feeling, faith, or mystical vision of some sort; the claims
of the heart and will were urged against the proud pretensions of the
intellect (Hamann, Herder, Jacobi). Another way of escape was found
by substituting the organic conception of reality for the
logical-mathematical view of the _Aufklaerung_; nature and life,
poetry, art, language, political, social, and religious institutions
are not creations of reason, not things made to order, but
organic--products of evolution (Lessing, Herder, Winckelmann, Goethe).
Man, himself, moreover, is not mere intellect, but a being in whom
feelings, impulses, yearnings, will, are elements to be reckoned with.
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