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Updated: May 23, 2025
Eucken emphasises that the historical basis of Christianity is not Christianity itself, is not essentially religious; and he quotes Lessing, Kant, and Fichte to support him in his contention that a belief in such a historical basis is not necessary to religion, and may even prove harmful to it.
It may also be said and this is a characteristic which is not merely negative that all forms of Idealism agree in ascribing special significance to the moral and religious aspects of life. This holds true of the great idealists, different as their types of thought may be of Plato and Aristotle, of Spinoza and Leibniz, of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel.
Most of the great intellects of Germany Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Fichte, Schleiermacher had long passed away. Heinrich Heine died in Paris in 1856. Frederick Nietzsche was a youth, Richard Wagner's "Tannhäuser" had just been greeted, in the presence of the composer, with a storm of hisses in the Opera house at Paris.
As he read the volumes of Herder and Fichte which old Schulz had left him, he found souls like his own, not "sons of the soil" slavishly bound to the globe, but "spirits, sons of the sun" turning invincibly to the light wheresoever it comes. Whither should he go? He did not know. But instinctively his eyes turned to the Latin South.
The dignity of mind, and the right of the individual to its conscious use and possession, had been already clearly enunciated by Fichte, Herder, and others, who antedated Goethe. But Goethe went farther. He carried the discovery of the rights of the individual to its logical conclusion, which was, that the rights of every created thing should be given a hearing. This was absolutely new doctrine.
The great minds, however, which really bring the race further on its course, do not accompany it on the epicycles which it makes every time. This explains why posthumous fame is got at the expense of contemporary fame, and vice vers�. We have an instance of such an epicycle in the philosophy of Fichte and Schelling, crowned by Hegel's caricature of it.
"Tell me, Monsieur Fichte," she said one day, "could you in a short time, a quarter of an hour for example, give me a glimpse of your system and explain what you understand by your ME; I find it very obscure." The philosopher was amazed at what he thought her impertinence, but made the attempt through an interpreter. At the end of ten minutes she exclaimed, "That is sufficient, Monsieur Fichte.
Imperialism, I should say, is patriotism transfigured by a light from the aspirations of universal humanity; it is the passion of Marathon, of Flodden or Trafalgar, the ardour of a de Montfort or a Grenville, intensified to a serener flame by the ideals of a Condorcet, a Shelley, or a Fichte.
He carried his doctrine of the infallibility of conscience to extreme transcendentalism, attributing to it the faculty to perceive, not only the distinction between right and wrong, but also the nature of psychical facts and physical phenomena. He went as far as, if not farther than, Berkeley and Fichte, in Idealism, denying the existence of things outside of human ken.
He was the companion of Schiller, who believed that man would be regenerated through the influence of the beautiful; of Goethe, the grand patriarch of German literature; of Wieland, who has been called the Voltaire of Germany; of Herder, who wrote the outlines of a philosophical history of man; of Kotzebue, who lived in the world of romance; of Schleiermacher, the pantheist; of Schlegel, who gave to his country the enchanted realm of Shakespeare of the sublime Kant, author of the first work published in Germany on Pure Reason; of Fichte, the infinite idealist; of Schopenhauer, the European Buddhist who followed the great Gautama to the painless and dreamless Nirvana, and of hundreds of others whose names are familiar to and honored by the scientific world.
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