Volume 3

A history of philosophy / by Johann Eduard Erdmann ; translated and edited by Williston S. Hough.

  • Erdmann, Johann Eduard, 1805-1892.
Date:
[1997]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A history of philosophy / by Johann Eduard Erdmann ; translated and edited by Williston S. Hough. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of the primal-positions, together with the distinction he makes between these and the (uniting) monads and (conscious) spirit-monads, belongs to a somewhat later time. In the ontology, the primal-positions which are to be conceived of as the work of the primal-Spirit, are especially spoken of as a means of deliverance from Pantheism ; and in this connection Herbart alone is credited with having recognised a part of the truth. It was unfortunate both for the reception and the comprehension of Fichte’s system, that the Ontology appeared without the parts constituting the Philosophy of the Real ; for when in the former mention is made of assimilation, soul, spirit, primal-spirit, and so on, little help is to be got from the repeated warnings that all this must be understood only ontologically, and not at all in the sense of a Philosophy of the Real. Even those who interested themselves in Fichte could not get rid of the feeling that it was unfortunate that he did not even prepare for his own use an encyclopedic survey of his system, and thus avoid including in formal philosophy what belonged to the Philosophy of the Real. It was still more unfortunate that the doctrine of Ideas, about which he had remarked that it coincided with speculative theology, did not appear simul- taneously with the doctrine of Categories. To assert that speculative theology was a formal science, did not please the one side ; to say that in it the negative dialectic was to make way for the positive, appeared to the other side to separate it too much from the rest of ontology. Finally, still others saw in Fichte’s remark, that after formal philosophy was com- pleted, there still remained, as real objects, God, nature, and spirit, the announcement of two different theologies, a formal and a real. His essay, written in 1838, On the Relation betwee^i Formal and Real Principles, which w'as the above- mentioned Circular Letter to Sengler, did not satisfy even his friends, who advised him to finish his system with speculative theology, and not, as he here does, with the philosophy of history. The points of contact between Fichte and Weisse were so many, that when the former founded the Zeitschrift fiir Philosopliie ^ind speculative Theologie (appeared from 1837-42 in Bonn, and then in Tubingen, and from 1847 in Halle under the editorship of Fichte and Ulrici, who were joined by Wirth in 1852), and Weisse became one of the most constant contributors, the public got accustomed to regard the standpoint of the two men as one and the same. This feeling