But this First Cause, God, is according to Robinet a creative God, He has brought Nature into existence; so that for him the only possible knowledge is that of Nature. “There is only One Cause. The eternal Cause, who so to speak had sown (_engrainé_) events one in the other, in order that they might without fail follow one upon another as He chose, in the beginning set in motion the endless chain of things. Through this permanent impression the Universe goes on living, moving and perpetuating itself. From the unity of cause there follows the unity of activity, for even it does not appear as something to be more or less admitted. By virtue of this single act all things come to pass. Since man has made Nature his study, he has found no isolated phenomenon, and no independent truth, because there are not and cannot be such. The whole sustains itself through the mutual correspondence of its parts.”[308] The activity of Nature is one, as God is One.
This activity, more particularly regarded, signifies that germs unfold themselves in everything: everywhere there are organic Beings which produce themselves; nothing is isolated, everything is combined and connected and in harmony. Robinet here goes through the plants, the animals, and also the metals, the elements, air, fire, water, &c.; and seeks from them to demonstrate the existence of the germ in whatever has life, and also how metals are organized in themselves. “The example of the polypus is convincing as to the animal nature (_animalité_) of the smallest portions of organized matter; for the polypus is a group of associated polypi, each of which is as much a true polypus as the first.
It stands proved that from the same point of view the living consists only of the living, the animals of minute animals, every animal in particular of minute animals of the same kind, a dog of dog-germs, man of human germs.” In proof of this Robinet states in a “Recapitulation” that “animal sperm swarms with spermatic animalcules.” Since he then connects every propagation properly so-called with the co-operation of both sexes, he alleges that every individual is inwardly or also in the external organs a hermaphrodite. Of the minerals he says: “Are we not compelled to regard as organic bodies all those in which we meet with an inward structure such as this? It presupposes throughout a seed, seed-granules, germs, of which they are the development.” In the same way the air must have its germ, which does not come to reality until it is nourished by water, fire, &c. “The air, as principle, is only the germ of the air; as it impregnates or saturates itself in varying degrees with water and fire, it will gradually pass through different stages of growth: it will become first embryo, then perfect air.”[309] Robinet gives the name of germ to the simple form in itself, the substantial form, the Notion.
Although he seeks to prove this too much from the sensuous side, he yet proceeds from principles in themselves concrete, from the form in itself.
He speaks also of the evil and good in the world. The result of his observation is that good and evil balance each other; this equilibrium constitutes the beauty of the world. In order to refute the assertion that there is more good than evil in the world, he says that everything to which we reduce the good consists only in an enjoyment, a pleasure, a satisfaction; but this must be preceded by a want, a lack, a pain, the removal of which constitutes satisfaction.[310] This is not only a correct thought empirically, but it also hints at the deeper idea that there is no activity except through contradiction.
3. IDEA OF A CONCRETE UNIVERSAL UNITY.
The result of the French philosophy is that it insisted on maintaining a general unity, not abstract, but concrete. Thus Robinet now propounded the theory of a universal organic life, and a uniform mode of origination; this concrete system he called Nature, over which God was set, but as the unknowable; all predicates which could be expressed of Him contained something inapplicable. We must admit that grand conceptions of concrete unity are to be found here, as opposed to the abstract metaphysical determinations of the understanding, _e.g._ the fruitfulness of Nature. But, on the other hand, the point of most importance with these philosophers is that what is to be accepted as valid must have presence, and that man in all knowledge must be himself the knower; for, as we may see, those philosophers made war on all external authority of state and church, and in particular on abstract thought which has no present meaning in us. Two determinations found in all philosophy are the concretion of the Idea and the presence of the spirit in the same; my content must at the same time be something concrete, present. This concrete was termed Reason, and for it the more noble of those men contended with the greatest enthusiasm and warmth. Thought was raised like a standard among the nations, liberty of conviction and of conscience in me. They said to mankind, “In this sign thou shalt conquer,” for they had before their eyes what had been done in the name of the cross alone, what had been made a matter of faith and law and religion—they saw how the sign of the cross had been degraded.
For in the sign of the cross lying and deceit had been victorious, under this seal institutions had become fossilized, and had sunk into all manner of degradation, so that this sign came to be represented as the epitome and root of all evil. Thus in another form they completed the Reformation that Luther began. This concrete had manifold forms; social instincts in the practical sphere, laws of nature in the theoretical.
There is present the absolute impulse to find a compass immanent in themselves, _i.e._ in the human mind. For the human mind it is imperative to have a fixed point such as this, if, indeed, it is to be within itself, if it is to be free in its own world at least. But this striving after really present vitality took forms which as by-paths were themselves one-sided. In this striving after unity, which was, however, concrete unity, the further varieties of the content likewise lie.
On the theoretic side of their philosophy, therefore, the French proceeded to materialism or naturalism, because the requirements of the understanding, as abstract thought, which from a firmly fixed principle allows the most monstrous consequences to be drawn, drove them to set up one principle as ultimate, and that a principle which had at the same time to be present and to lie quite close to experience. Hence they accept sensation and matter as the only truth, to which must be reduced all thought, all morality, as a mere modification of sensation. The unities which the French propounded were in this way one-sided.
a. OPPOSITION OF SENSATION AND THOUGHT.
To this one-sidedness belongs the opposition between _sentir_ and _penser_, or else, if you like, their identity, making the latter only a result of the former; there is not, however, any speculative reconciliation of this opposition in God, such as we find in Spinoza and Malebranche. This reduction of all thought to sensation, which in certain respects took place with Locke, becomes a widely extended theory. Robinet (_De la Nature_, T. I. P. IV. chap. iii. pp. 257-259) lights also on this opposition, beyond which he does not get, that mind and body are not separate, but that the manner in which they are united is inexplicable.
The _Système de la Nature_ (T. I. chap. x. p. 177) is marked by an especially plain reduction of thought to sensation. The leading thought is this: “Abstract thoughts are only modes in which our inmost organ views its own modifications. The words goodness, beauty, order, intelligence, virtue, &c., have no meaning for us if we do not refer and apply them to objects which our senses have shown to be capable of these qualities, or to modes of being and acting which are known to us.” Thus even psychology passed into materialism, as for instance we may find in La Mettrie’s work _L’homme Machine_: All thought and all conception have meaning only if they are apprehended as material; matter alone exists.
b. MONTESQUIEU.
Other great writers have opposed to the above the feeling in the breast, the instinct of self-preservation, benevolent dispositions towards others, the impulse to fellowship, which last Puffendorf also made the foundation of his system of law (_supra_, p. 321). From this point of view much that is excellent has been said. Thus Montesquieu, in his charming book, _L’Esprit des Lois_, of which Voltaire said it was an _esprit sur les lois_, regarded the nations from this important point of view, that their constitution, their religion, in short, everything that is to be found in a state, constitutes a totality.
c. HELVETIUS.
This reduction of thought to feeling in the case of Helvetius takes the form that if in man as a moral being a single principle is sought, this ought to be called self-love, and he endeavoured to demonstrate by ingenious analysis that whatever we term virtue, all activity and law and right, has as its foundation nothing but self-love or selfishness, and is resolvable thereinto.[311] This principle is one-sided, although the “I myself” is an essential moment. What I will, the noblest, the holiest, is _my_ aim; I must take part in it, I must agree to it, I must approve of it. With all self-sacrifice there is always conjoined some satisfaction, some finding of self; this element of self, subjective liberty, must always be present. If this is taken in a one-sided sense, there may be consequences drawn from it which overthrow all that is sacred; but it is found in equal degree in a morality as noble as any possibly can be.
d. ROUSSEAU.
In connection with the practical side of things this particular must also be noted, that when the feeling of right, the concrete practical mind, and, speaking generally, humanity and happiness were made the principle, this principle, universally conceived, had certainly the form of thought; but in the case of such concrete content derived from our impulse or inward intuition, even though that content were religious, the thought itself was not the content. But now this further phase appeared, that pure thought was set up as the principle and content, even if again there was lacking to this content the true consciousness of its peculiar form; for it was not recognized that this principle was thought. We see it emerge in the sphere of will, of the practical, of the just, and so apprehended that the innermost principle of man, his unity with himself, is set forth as fundamental and brought into consciousness, so that man in himself acquired an infinite strength. It is this that Rousseau from one point of view said about the state. He investigated its absolute justification, and inquired as to its foundation. The right of ruling and associating, of the relation of order, of governing and being governed, he apprehends from his own point of view, so that it is made to rest historically on power, compulsion, conquest, private property, &c.[312] Rousseau makes free-will the principle of this justification, and without reference to the positive right of states he made answer to the above question (chap. iv. p. 12), that man has free-will, because “liberty is the distinguishing feature of man. To renounce his liberty signifies to renounce his manhood. Not to be free is therefore a renunciation of a man’s rights as a human being, and even of his duties.” The slave has neither rights nor duties. Rousseau therefore says (chap. vi. p. 21): “The fundamental task is to find a form of association which will shield and protect with the power of the whole commonwealth combined the person and property of every one of its members, and in which each individual, while joining this association, obeys himself only, and thus remains as free as before. The solution is given by the Social Contract;” this is the association of which each is a member by his own will. These principles, thus abstractly stated, we must allow to be correct, yet the ambiguity in them soon begins to be felt. Man is free, this is certainly the substantial nature of man; and not only is this liberty not relinquished in the state, but it is actually in the state that it is first realized. The freedom of nature, the gift of freedom, is not anything real; for the state is the first realization of freedom.
The misunderstanding as to the universal will proceeds from this, that the Notion of freedom must not be taken in the sense of the arbitrary caprice of an individual, but in the sense of the rational will, of the will in and for itself. The universal will is not to be looked on as compounded of definitively individual wills, so that these remain absolute; otherwise the saying would be correct: “Where the minority must obey the majority, there is no freedom.” The universal will must really be the rational will, even if we are not conscious of the fact; the state is therefore not an association which is decreed by the arbitrary will of individuals. The wrong apprehension of these principles does not concern us. What does concern us is this, that thereby there should come into consciousness as content the sense that man has liberty in his spirit as the altogether absolute, that free-will is the Notion of man.
Freedom is just thought itself; he who casts thought aside and speaks of freedom knows not what he is talking of. The unity of thought with itself is freedom, the free will. Thought, as volition merely, is the impulse to abrogate one’s subjectivity, the relation to present existence, the realizing of oneself, since in that I am endeavouring to place myself as existent on an equality with myself as thinking. It is only as having the power of thinking that the will is free. The principle of freedom emerged in Rousseau, and gave to man, who apprehends himself as infinite, this infinite strength. This furnishes the transition to the Kantian philosophy, which, theoretically considered, made this principle its foundation; knowledge aimed at freedom, and at a concrete content which it possesses in consciousness.
D. THE GERMAN ILLUMINATION.
The Germans were at this time quietly drifting along in their Leibnitzo-Wolffian philosophy, in its definitions, axioms and proofs.
Then they were gradually breathed upon by the spirit of foreign lands, they made acquaintance with all the developments which there came to pass, and took very kindly to the empiricism of Locke; on the other hand they at the same time laid aside metaphysical investigations, turned their attention to the question of how truths can be grasped by the healthy human understanding, and plunged into the _Aufklärung_ and into the consideration of the utility of all things—a point of view which they adopted from the French. Utility as the essence of existent things signifies that they are determined as not being in themselves, but for another: this is a necessary moment, but not the only one. The German _Aufklärung_ warred against ideas, with the principle of utility as its weapon. Philosophic investigations on this subject had degenerated into a feeble popular treatment of it which was incapable of going deeper; they displayed a rigid pedantry and an earnestness of the understanding, but were unspiritual. The Germans are busy bees who do justice to all nations, they are old-clothesmen for whom anything is good enough, and who carry on their haggling with everyone. Picked up as it was from foreign nations, all this had lost the wit and life, the energy and originality which with the French had made the content to be lost sight of in the form. The Germans, who honestly sift a matter to its root, and who would put rational arguments in the place of wit and vivacity, since wit and vivacity really prove nothing, in this way reached a content which was utterly empty, so much so that nothing could be more wearisome than this profound mode of treatment; such was the case with Eberhard, Tetens, and those like them.
Others, like Nicolai, Sulzer and their fellows, were excellent in their speculations on questions of taste and the liberal sciences; for literature and art were also to flourish among the Germans.
But with all this they only arrived at a most trivial treatment of æsthetics—Lessing[313] called it shallow chatter. As a matter of fact, indeed, the poems of Gellert, Weisse and Lessing sank almost, if not quite as much into the same poetic feebleness. Moreover, previous to the philosophy of Kant, the general principle was really the theory of happiness, which we have already met with in the philosophy of the Cyrenaics (Vol. I. p. 477), and the point of view of pleasant or unpleasant sensations held good among the philosophers of that time as an ultimate and essential determination. Of this manner of philosophizing I will quote an example which Nicolai gives in the account of a conversation which he had with Mendelssohn: what is in question is the pleasure in tragic subjects which is held to be awakened even by means of the unpleasant emotions depicted in a tragedy: HERR MOSES.
“The power of having an inclination for perfections and of shunning imperfections is a reality.” Therefore the exercise of this power brings a pleasure with it, which, however, is in nature comparatively less than the displeasure which arises from the contemplation of the object.
I.
Yet even then, when the violence of passion causes us unpleasant sensations, the movement (what else is this movement than the power of loving perfections, &c.?) which it brings with it has still delights for us. It is the strength of the movement which we enjoy, even in spite of the painful sensations which oppose what is pleasant in the passion, and in a short time obtain the victory.
HERR MOSES.
In a stage play, on the contrary, as the imperfect object is absent, pleasure must gain the upper hand and eclipse the small degree of displeasure.
I.
A passion therefore which is not followed by these results must be altogether pleasant. Of this sort are the imitations of the passions which the tragedy affords.”[314] With such vapid and meaningless drivel they rambled on. In addition to these, the eternity of punishment in hell, the salvation of the heathen, the difference between uprightness and godliness, were philosophic matters on which much labour was expended among the Germans, while the French troubled themselves little about them. Finite determinations were made to hold good against the infinite; against the Trinity it was asserted that One cannot be Three; against original sin, that each must bear his own guilt, must have done his own deeds of himself, and must answer for them; in the same way against redemption, that another cannot take upon himself punishment that is due; against forgiveness of sin, that what is done cannot be rendered undone; to sum up generally, the incommensurability of the human nature with the divine. On the one side we see healthy human understanding, experience, facts of consciousness, but on the other side there was still in vogue the Wolffian metaphysics of the dry, dead understanding; thus we see Mendelssohn take his stand by the healthy human understanding, and make it his rule.
Some movement was brought into this authority, which had settled into perfect peace and security and let no dreams of other matters cross its path, by the chance dispute of Mendelssohn with Jacobi, first as to whether Lessing had been a disciple of Spinoza, and then regarding the doctrines of Spinoza himself. On this occasion it came to light how much Spinoza was really forgotten, and in what horror Spinozism was held. But while Jacobi in this way once more unexpectedly brought to remembrance in connection with Spinozism a quite different content of philosophy, faith, _i.e._ the simply immediate certainty of external, finite things, as well as of the divine (which faith in the divine he called reason) was certainly placed by him, as an independent thinker, in opposition to mediating knowledge, which he apprehended as mere understanding. This continued until Kant gave a new impulse in Germany to philosophy, which had died out in the rest of Europe.
As far as the transition to modern German philosophy is concerned, it is from Hume and Rousseau, as we have said (pp. 369, 374, 402), that it took its start. Descartes opposes extension to thought, as what is simply one with itself. He is charged with dualism, but, like Spinoza and Leibnitz, he did away with the independence of the two sides, and made supreme their unity, God. But, as this unity, God is first of all only the Third; and He is further determined in such a way that no determination pertains to Him. Wolff’s understanding of the finite, his school metaphysics generally, his science of the understanding, and his divergence into the observation of nature, after it has grown strong in its conformity with law and in its finite knowledge, turns against the infinite and the concrete determinations of religion, and comes to a standstill with abstractions in his _theologia naturalis_; for the determinate is his domain. But from this time an utterly different point of view is introduced. The infinite is transported into abstraction or incomprehensibility. This is an incomprehensible position to adopt.
Nowadays it is looked on as most pious, most justifiable. But as we see the third, the unity of differences, defined as something which cannot be thought or known, this unity is not one of thought, for it is above all thought, and God is not simply thought. Nevertheless this unity is defined as the absolutely concrete, _i.e._ as the unity of thought and Being. Now we have come so far that this unity is a unity simply in thought, and pertaining to consciousness, so that the objectivity of thought—reason—comes forth as One and All. This is dimly conceived by the French. Whether the highest Being, this Being divested of all determination, is elevated above nature, or whether nature or matter is the highest unity, there is always present the establishing of something concrete, which at the same time belongs to thought. Since the liberty of man has been set up as an absolutely ultimate principle, thought itself has been set up as a principle. The principle of liberty is not only in thought but the root of thought; this principle of liberty is also something in itself concrete, at least in principle it is implicitly concrete. Thus far have general culture and philosophic culture advanced.
Since what is knowable has now been placed entirely within the sphere of consciousness, and since the liberty of the spirit has been apprehended as absolute, this may be understood to mean that knowledge has entered altogether into the realm of the finite. The standpoint of the finite was at the same time taken as ultimate, and God as a Beyond outside consciousness; duties, rights, knowledge of nature, are finite. Man has thereby formed for himself a kingdom of truth, from which God is excluded; it is the kingdom of finite truth. The form of finitude may here be termed the subjective form; liberty, self-consciousness [Ichheit] of the mind, known as the absolute, is essentially subjective—in fact it is the subjectivity of thought. The more the human reason has grasped itself in itself, the more has it come down from God and the more has it increased the field of the finite. Reason is One and All, which is at the same time the totality of the finite; reason under these conditions is finite knowledge and knowledge of the finite. The question is, since it is this concrete that is established (and not metaphysical abstractions), how it constitutes itself in itself; and then, how it returns to objectivity, or abrogates its subjectivity, _i.e._ how by means of thought God is to be again brought about, who at an earlier time and at the beginning of this period was recognized as alone the true. This is what we have to consider in the last period, in dealing with Kant, Fichte, and Schelling.
SECTION THREE RECENT GERMAN PHILOSOPHY In the philosophy of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, the revolution to which in Germany mind has in these latter days advanced, was formally thought out and expressed; the sequence of these philosophies shows the course which thought has taken. In this great epoch of the world’s history, whose inmost essence is laid hold of in the philosophy of history, two nations only have played a part, the German and the French, and this in spite of their absolute opposition, or rather because they are so opposite. The other nations have taken no real inward part in the same, although politically they have indeed so done, both through their governments and their people. In Germany this principle has burst forth as thought, spirit, Notion; in France, in the form of actuality. In Germany, what there is of actuality comes to us as a force of external circumstances, and as a reaction against the same. The task of modern German philosophy is, however, summed up in taking as its object the unity of thought and Being, which is the fundamental idea of philosophy generally, and comprehending it, that is, in laying hold of the inmost significance of necessity, the Notion (_supra_, p. 360). The philosophy of Kant sets forth, in the first place, the formal aspect of the task, but it has the abstract absoluteness of reason in self-consciousness as its sole result, and, in one respect, it carried with it a certain character of shallowness and want of vigour, in which an attitude of criticism and negativity is retained, and which, as far as any positive element is concerned, adheres to the facts of consciousness and to mere conjecture, while it renounces thought and returns to feeling. On the other hand, however, there sprang from this the philosophy of Fichte, which speculatively grasps the essence of self-consciousness as concrete egoism, but which does not reach beyond this subjective form pertaining to the absolute. From it again comes the philosophy of Schelling, which subsequently rejects Fichte’s teaching and sets forth the Idea of the Absolute, the truth in and for itself.
A. JACOBI.
In connection with Kant we must here begin by speaking of Jacobi, whose philosophy is contemporaneous with that of Kant; in both of these the advance beyond the preceding period is very evident. The result in the two cases is much the same, although both the starting point and the method of progression are somewhat different. In Jacobi’s case the stimulus was given mainly by French philosophy, with which he was very conversant, and also by German metaphysics, while Kant began rather from the English side, that is, from the scepticism of Hume. Jacobi, in that negative attitude which he preserved as well as Kant, kept before him the objective aspect of the method of knowledge, and specially considered it, for he declared knowledge to be in its content incapable of recognizing the Absolute: the truth must be concrete, present, but not finite.
Kant does not consider the content, but took the view of knowledge being subjective; and for this reason he declared it to be incapable of recognizing absolute existence. To Kant knowledge is thus a knowledge of phenomena only, not because the categories are merely limited and finite, but because they are subjective. To Jacobi, on the other hand, the chief point is that the categories are not merely subjective, but that they themselves are conditioned. This is an essential difference between the two points of view, even if they both arrive at the same result.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, born at Düsseldorf in 1743, held office first in the Duchy of Berg, and then in Bavaria. He studied in Geneva and Paris, associating in the former place with Bonnet and in the latter with Diderot. Jacobi was a man of the highest character and culture.
He was long occupied with State affairs, and in Düsseldorf he held a public office which was connected with the administration of the finance department in the State. At the time of the French Revolution he was obliged to retire. As a Bavarian official he went to Munich, there became President of the Academy of Sciences in 1804, which office he, however, resigned in 1812; for in the Napoleonic period Protestants were decried as demagogues. He lived at Munich till the end of his life, and died at the same place on the 10th of March, 1819.[315] In the year 1785, Jacobi published Letters on Spinoza, which were written in 1783, on the occasion of the dispute with Mendelssohn above-mentioned (p. 406); for in none of his writings did Jacobi develop his philosophy systematically, he set it forth in letters only. When Mendelssohn wished to write a life of Lessing, Jacobi sent to ask him if he knew that “Lessing was a Spinozist” (Jacobi’s Werke, Vol. IV. Sec. 1, pp. 39, 40). Mendelssohn was displeased at this, and it was the occasion of the correspondence. In the course of the dispute it was made evident that those who held themselves to be professed philosophers and possessed of a monopoly of Lessing’s friendship, such as Nicolai, Mendelssohn, &c., knew nothing about Spinozism; not only was there manifested in them the superficial character of their philosophic insight, but ignorance as well; with Mendelssohn, for instance, this was shown respecting even the outward history of the Spinozistic philosophy, and much more regarding the inward (Jacobi’s Werke, Vol. IV. Sec. 1, p. 91). That Jacobi asserted Lessing to be a Spinozist, and gave a high place to the French—this serious statement came to these good men as a thunderbolt from the blue.
surprised that he also made pretensions to knowledge, and of such a “dead dog” as Spinoza (_ibidem_, p. 68). Explanations followed upon this, in which Jacobi further developed his philosophic views.
Mendelssohn is directly opposed to Jacobi, for Mendelssohn took his stand on cognition, placed true existence immediately in thought and conception, and maintained: “What I cannot think as true does not trouble me as doubt. A question which I do not understand, I cannot answer, it is for me as good as no question at all.”[316] He continued to argue on these same lines. His proof of the existence of God thus carries with it this necessity of thought, viz. that actuality must plainly be in thought, and a thinker must be presupposed, or the possibility of the actual is in the thinker. “What no thinking Being conceives as possible is not possible, and what is thought by no thinking creature as actual cannot be actual in fact. If we take away from anything whatsoever the conception formed by a thinking Being that that thing is possible or actual, the thing itself is done away with.” The Notion of the thing is thus to man the essence of the same. “No finite Being can think the actuality of a thing in its perfection as actual, and still less can he perceive the possibility and actuality of all present things. There must thus be a thinking Being or an understanding which in the most perfect way thinks the content of all possibilities as possible, and the content of all actualities as actual; _i.e._ there must be an infinite understanding, and this is God.”[317] Here on the one hand we see a unity of thought and Being, on the other the absolute unity as infinite understanding—the former is the self-consciousness which is apprehended as finite merely. Actuality, Being, has its possibility in thought, or its possibility is thought; it is not a process from possibility to actuality, for the possibility remains at home in the actuality.
Jacobi maintains against these demands of thought—and this in one view is the chief thought in his philosophy—that every method of their demonstration leads to fatalism, atheism, and Spinozism,[318] and presents God as derived and founded upon something else; for comprehending Him signifies demonstrating His dependence. Jacobi thus asserts that mediate knowledge consists in giving a cause of something which has in its turn a finite effect, and so on; so that a knowledge such as this can all through relate to the finite only.
Jacobi further states upon this subject, in the first place, that “Reason”—later on when he distinguished reason and understanding (of which more hereafter[319]), he altered it to understanding[320]—“can never bring to light more than the conditions of what is conditioned, natural laws and mechanism. We comprehend a thing when we can deduce it from its proximate causes,” and not from the remoter causes; the most remote and quite universal cause is always God. “Or” we know the thing if we “perceive its immediate conditions as they come in due succession.
Thus, for instance, we comprehend a circle when we can clearly represent to ourselves the mechanism of its origination or its physical conditions; we know the syllogistic formulæ when we have actually come to know the laws to which the human understanding is subject in judgment and conclusion, its physical nature and its mechanism. For this reason we have no conceptions of qualities as such, but only intuitions. Even of our present existence we have a feeling only, but no conceptions.
Genuine conceptions we have merely of figure, number, position, movement and the forms of thought; qualities are known and understood, if they are traced back to these and objectively annulled.” This is undoubtedly really finite knowledge, which is to give the determinate conditions of anything determinate, to demonstrate it as resulting from another cause, in such a way that each condition is again conditioned and finite.
Jacobi continues: “The business of reason is really progressive union and connection, and its speculative business is union and connection in accordance with the known laws of necessity, _i.e._ of identity.
Everything that reason can bring forth by means of analysis, combination, judgment, conclusion, and re-conception, consists in nothing but things of nature” (_i.e._ finite things), “and reason itself, as a limited existence, belongs to these things. But the whole of nature, the sum of all conditioned existence, cannot reveal more to the investigating understanding than what is contained in it, namely, manifold existence, changes, a succession of forms” (the conditioned), “and not an actual beginning” (of the world), “nor a real principle of any objective existence.”[321] But Jacobi in the second place here accepts reason in a wider sense and says: “If we understand by reason the principle of knowledge generally, it is the mind from which the whole living nature of man is constituted; through it man arises; he is a form which it has adopted.” With this Jacobi’s view of the attempt to know the unconditioned is connected. “I take the whole human being, and find that his consciousness is composed