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Incapable of foresight, the nobles were the first to break with the traditions that were their only raison d'etre. As steeped in humanitarianism and rationalism as the bourgeoisie of to- day, they continually sapped their own privileges by their criticisms. As to-day, the most ardent reformers were found among the favourites of fortune.
Reality, according to him, is whatever agrees with truth, and truth is founded solely on our primal duty. This fantastic flight, together with Mr. Joachim's candid confession of failure in his book The Nature of Truth, seems to me to mark the bankruptcy of rationalism when dealing with this subject.
The system of Spinoza, as developed in his "Tractatus Theologico-politicus," and, still more, in his "Ethica," a posthumous publication, may be said to contain the germs of the whole system both of Theological and Philosophical Rationalism which was subsequently unfolded, in the Church, by Paulus, Wegscheider, and Strauss, and, in the Schools, by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.
Anthony Gunther, had allowed himself to drift from the sure ways of tradition, imperceptibly gliding into rationalism, and confounding reason and faith. His ideas had partisans in several countries of Germany. The vigilant eye of Pius IX. discovered in them germs of heresy, which it was important to check before they attained development.
In all these schools, called schools of Rationalism in Germany, Socialism in England, and by various other names in various countries which they infest, this is the universal cant. The first step of all these philosophical moralists and regenerators of the human race is to attack the agency through which religion and Christianity are administered to man.
Humanism is said to be opposed to rationalism, or to nationalism, or specialization, or paganism, or Germanism as a whole, humanism often being thought of as the spirit of Greek or Christian thought and philosophy. There is truth, we should say, in these views.
I need not dwell on this undisguised and blazing fact, on the rationalism which became the fashion in Germany, and which spread so disastrously over other countries, penetrating even into the inmost sanctuaries of theological instruction. All this may be progress; but to my mind it tended to extinguish the light of faith, and fill the seats of learning with cynics and unbelieving critics.
The debt of Schleiermacher to that movement has been already hinted at. It was the revolt of those who had this in common with the pietists, that they hated and despised the outworn rationalism. They thought they wanted no religion. It is open to us to say that they misunderstood religion. It was this misunderstanding which Schleiermacher sought to bring home to them.
In it I learned "that inconceivability is not a criterion of impossibility," as rationalism claims. On the other hand, that we know things to be true that are just as inconceivable as that there can be two mountains without a valley between. Let me introduce a few of these contradictions or inconceivabilities.
And if Krause struck some roots here more numerous and more permanent than is commonly supposed it is because Krause had roots in pietism, and pietism, as Ritschl has demonstrated in his Geschichte des Pietismus, has specifically Catholic roots and may be described as the irruption, or rather the persistence, of Catholic mysticism in the heart of Protestant rationalism.
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