It was his solution of the controversy
between the head and the heart that influenced Fichte, Schelling, and
Schleiermacher. They differed from Kant and among themselves in many
respects, but they all glorified the spirit, _Geist_, as the living,
active element of reality, and they all rejected the intellect as
the source of ultimate truth. They followed him in his
anti-intellectualism, but they did not avoid, as he did, the
attractive doctrine of an inner intuition; according to them we can
somehow grasp the supersensible in an inner experience which Fichte
called intellectual, Schelling artistic, Schleiermacher religious. The
bankruptcy of the intelligence was overcome in their systems by the
discovery of a faculty that revealed to them the living, dynamic
nature of the universe. They were all more or less influenced by the
romantic currents of the times, seeking with Herder and Jacobi an
approach to the heart of things other than through the categories
of logic. Like Lessing and Goethe, they were also attracted to
the pantheistic teaching of Spinoza, though rejecting its rigid
determinism so far as it might affect the human will. They likewise
accepted the idea of development which the leaders of German
literature, Lessing, Herder, and Goethe, had already opposed to the
unhistorical _Aufklaerung_, and which came to play such a prominent
part in the great system of Hegel.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25