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LECTURES
ON
GEEMAN THOUGHT
LONDON : PBINTED BY
SP0TTI8W00DB AND CO., NEW-STRKET SQTIARH
AND PAEIilAMKNT STEEET
ir-iio ^"^ '■'■•
SIX LECTUEES
ON THE
HISTORY OF GERMAN THOUGHT
From the SEVEN YEARS' WAR to GOETHE'S DEATH
DEUVERED AT THE
ROYAL INSTITUTION OF GREAT BRITAIN
May & June 1879
BY
KARL HILLEBRAND
LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
1880
All rights reserved
rJ
iLX
^"^ LIBRARY
^ / UNIVERSITY OF CATJFORNW
SANTA BARBARA
^r
PEEFACE.
Readers acquainted with German, who may wish to follow
up the necessarily brief indications of the present lectures,
will find fm^ther information in the numerous histories of
German civilisation, literature, and philosophy, more
especially in the works of Biedermann and G. Frejrtag
on the first subject, of Jos. Hillebrand and H. Hettner
on the second, of E. Zeller on the third. In the following
pages the lecturer has kept almost exclusively to the works
of the great German writers themselves and to the follow-
ing, amongst many hundred, special works : Dieterich on
Kant, Haym on Herder, Helmholtz on Goethe as a
naturalist, Dilthey on Schleiermacher, H. Hettner and
Haym on the romantic school. No fault, the author
hopes, will be found with him for having reproduced
here and there the conclusions of his own earher essays
on Winckelmann, Wieland, Lessing, Herder, W. von
Humboldt, Caroline Schlegel, H. Heine, Gervinus, L.
Hoensser, the Berlin Society from 1789 to 1815, the
German Unity Question from 1815 to 1866, the history
of classical philology in Germany, &c. &c. (published
between 1865 and 1872 in the ' Revue moderne,' the
VI PEEPACE.
' Revue des Deux Mondes,' the ' Journal des Debats ; '
the ' Nuova Antologia ; ' the ' Preussische Jahrblicher ; '
the ' Fortnightly Review,' and the ' North American
Review.') They were so many preparatory studies for
a general work on the subject, which has never been more
than a project, the author having since abandoned this,
for an entirely diffei-ent field of research,
K. H.
CONTENTS.
LECTURE I.
PAGE
Inteodttction. — On the Part op the Fiye Great
European Nations in the M^ork op Modern
CDLTrEE (1450-1850) 1
LECTURE IL
The Starting-point and First Stages of Modern
Germany (1648-1760) 37
LECTURE III.
The Seeds of German Thoitght (1760-1770) . . 79
LECTURE IV.
The Reign of Herder (1770-1786) . . . .117
LECTURE V.
The Triumtirate op Goethe, Kant, and Schtller
(1787-1800) 173
viii CONTENTS.
LECTURE VI.
PAGE
The Romantic School (1800-1825) . . . .228
EPILOGUE.
' Young Gekmany ' and ' Little Germany ' (1825-
1860) 264
LECTURES
ON
GEEMAN THOUGHT.
LECTUEE I.
INTRODUCTION — ON THE PART OF THE FIVE EURO-
PEAN NATIONS IN THE WORK OF MODERN
CULTURE.
1450-1850.
Ladies and Gentlemen, — You will readily believe
me, when I say that I begin these lectures with
great apprehension. It is the first time that I am
called upon to address an English public ; and I
am to address it in its own language, the most
precise and at the same time the supplest of
instruments in the skilful hands of those who are
used to it from their infancy, and have a complete
mastery of it ; but a dangerous one for a foreigner,
ever liable to miss the just measure and the right
expression, weighing too much here, gliding too
Z INTEODUCTION.
lightly there, and becoming to a certain degree
the slave of the enmne of -which he oug-ht to be
the absolute ruler. I know that the audience I
have the honour to address is, if not a, parterre de
rois, at least a parterre of gentlemen, and that
consequently it will be as lenient to a guest as
it would have a right to be severe, if it were to
assume the functions of an impartial judge.
Nevertheless, I have thought it my duty not to
rely too exclusively on your hospitable indulgence,
or to overrate my strength in launching into these
new waters without the swimming-apparatus of pen
and ink. However alive I may be to the advantage
of speaking over reading, I must forego that advan-
tage and bring you my thoughts already made,
as it were, and congealed, instead of letting them
flow and expand naturally from the running spring
of the spoken word.
What renders the honour bestowed upon me
of addressing so select a public more perilous
still, is the consciousness that I have but an
imperfect control, not only of the language of
words, but also of the language of thought, pre-
dominant in this country and in our days — an
idiom, I am afraid, which I have still to learn.
Every country and every time indeed has its own
INTRODUCTION. 3
intellectual atmosphere ; and a Spaniard who in
the sixteenth century might have spoken French
as well as a Parisian, would have failed to un-
derstand Voltaire or Diderot, if he had come to
Paris a hundred years ago, as they in turn would
have failed to understand him. Now, I am per-
fectly aware that the intellectual atmosphere
of the England of to-day — which is fast becom-
ing the intellectual atmosphere of all Europe —
is not the one in which my generation has been
bred and reared. If I, for instance, have lived
long and intimately with the English of the past,
I know little of the English of to-day, or, to
speak more precisely, I rather know about them
than know them. In the whole tendency of my
mind, in my entire way of looking at things —
religious and moral, historical and scientific — I
have remained a thorough Continental, nay, a
thorough German, whereas the younger generation
of Europe is entering more and more every day
into the intellectual current which sprang up in
this island towards 1860, and has since spread
over the greater part of the Continent.
But this will require an explanation which
will lead us at once into the subject of these
lectures.
4 INTRODUCTION.
We may consider medieval Europe as one vast
family, which, for a time, thought that it might
Unity of remain for ever under the same roof, and
Europe. -^qj.]j {^1 common at the great work of
civilisation. One language, Latin — one Faith,
the Catholic — one Law, the Eoman — one Sover-
eign, the Emperor — were to rule supreme, and
shelter all the members of the family. In reality
this ideal was never completely attained. Yet it
governed men's minds during the whole Middle
Ages, and even in after-times haunted certain
intellects, which were thirsting for unity and
order, but were unable to find them in variety and
liberty. The law of nature nevertheless was
stronger than the laws of men : Europe outgrew
the parental house, however spaciously it seemed
constructed. 'No sooner had every hearth its
own familiar language, than those who were
assembled around it wished to give vent in
that language to the thoughts and feelings
of both their every day and their ideal life.
From the day when a philosophical thought
was expressed in a national language, that
division of Europe had begun, which, during
the fifteenth century, resulted in the national
monarchies of England, France, and Spain, in
UNITY OF EUROPE. 5
the Italian renaissance, and tlie reformation in
Germany.
The division, not the disunion. The work
which Europe had done collectively and simulta-
neously till then was henceforward to be done
separately and successively, so that, as Algarotti
said of his own nation, ' the one who had got up
early before the others, and drudged a good deal,
might rest somewhat in the day-time.' Neverthe-
less the work done by modern Europe is truly one
work, although the workmen have several times
relieved each other, handing on to their successors
the torch of intellectual hfe :
Vitai lampada tradunt.
It is one stock, one capital — the capital of
humanity — which they have accumulated, each in
turn contributing the fruit of his labour.
I need scarcely warn you, gentlemen, that
these and similar expressions must not be taken
too strictly. Humanity is a living body, in which
every part is intimately connected with the other,
where every separation is felt like a sword-cut,
painful at once and endangering life. Still, as the
philosopher has a right to separate memory and
imagination, will and sensation, understanding
5 INTEODUCTION.
and reason, wliicli in reality form the living;
individual, so the historian must claim permis-
sion to divide mentally what in reality is closely
united. When England exercised for the first
time the intellectual hegemony over Europe, when
Gilbert and Harvey, Bacon and Hobbes, Newton
and Locke were writing and thinking, Italy had
her Galileo, France her Pascal, Germany her
Leibnitz. Still, for any impartial observer of the
history of thought, the focus of the movement was
in this island.
Italy was the first of the European nations
to come of age and grow impatient of the paternal
jjjj]^, authority. As early as the beginning of
1450-1525. ^Yie fifteenth century she boasted of a
poem in the national dialect, which summed up
the whole intellectual life of the middle ages ; and,
a century and a half later, she began to eman-
cipate herself from this very system of thought to
which Dante had given the most beautiful, as
well as the most adequate, expression. The day-
work of Italy may be reckoned from 1450 to 1525 ;
but I must once more beg that such limits may
be taken cum grano salts. Nobody can fix the
exact line where one's arm ceases and one's
shoulder begins ; still the anatomist must needs
THE ITALIAN EENAISSANCE. 7
make the division somewhere. Everybody has
present to his mind the events which, towards the
middle of the fifteenth century, awoke Italy, as
well as those more melancholy events which,
seventy-five years later, laid her in the grave, or at
least in a long and dull lethargy. You are all
aware how Italy discovered, as it were, the
treasures of Greek art and literature, how she
cleansed, mended, and made them accessible, and
rendered this purely lay and human civilisation the
basis of all modern culture. The important point
for us is to characterise in one word the nature of
the intellectual work accomplished by her In those
years of incessant and almost feverish labour.
The Italian Renaissance was the re-habilitation of
human nature ; and the instinct of history has
not been mistaken when, up to this day, it calls
the representative men of that age the Humanists,
their culture the humanistic. The Middle Ages
and Catholicism had subordinated the present to
the future, liberty to authority, the human to the
divine. They had declared flesh, i.e. the natural
instincts of man, sinful, and preached the sup-
pression or taming of them. The Italian Eenais-
sance reversed things. For the naive scepticism
of a Lorenzo and a Filelfo, an Angelo Poliziano
8 INTRODUCTION.
and a Marsilio Ficino, the present alone had
reality, and as such it was to be understood, de-
scribed, enjoyed, as the Greeks of Pericles' time
had tried to understand, describe, and enjoy it.
All that was in nature was good and beautiful, in-
stinct was the surest guide, natural forceand beauty
were the truest signs of and titles to superiority.
Let not the fact of their formal adherence to the
Church mislead you any more than their enthu-
siasm for Plato's lofty idealism. The Church
was for them nothing more than an indifferent
garment which a man would not needlessly ex-
change for another, or lay down altogether.
Platonism was a form of poetical dreaming,
not a philosophical conviction. What they
pursued was the knowledge of human nature,
mental and physical, and of human society,
not as they might be or ought to be, but as
they were. Whether Machiavelli is describing
political life as in his Prince, his Decades, his
History of Florence, or is depicting the social
life of his times as in his Comedies, he never
enters into the question of good or bad; he is
satisfied to understand things. So do the philo-
sophers, the poets, the artists of the time. For
them art is what Goethe proclaims it to be, what
THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE. 9
our century seems to have so utterly lost sight
of — ' the interpreter of nature,' nothing more,
nothing less.
This might have been harmless, as it was right,
if it had been limited to Art and Thought ; but it
was the pretension of the Eenaissance to make of it
the rule of life and action. Our temperament and
our mental character frame our opinions, mostly
without our knowing it ourselves. It was the sen-
suousness of their temperament and mind which
especially fitted the Italians for their historical
mission; but it also led them to such lengths that
they incurred the penalties attached to excessive
indulgence in one's own thoughts and inclinations.
They saw everything in the light of art, gave to
everything an artistic form, regarded everything,
public worship, the State, even private life, as
within the province of art ; and the thought that
they were living as the Greeks had done justified
everything in their eyes. They forgot that in
Greece ' the Muse accompanied life, and did not
direct it.' What it came to, the names of the
Sforza and the Borgia tell us forcibly enough.
A strong reaction set in — a double reaction ;
'^he one popular, appealing to the inward authority
of conscience ; the other coming from above and
10 INTRODUCTION.
endeavouring to restore the outward authority of
tradition and collective force : the Reformation of
Luther and the Society of Jesus. The former,
although prior in time, had its full influence upon
the strain of higher thought in Europe, only a
century later in England, only two centuries later
in Germany. The latter acted at once, and it
Spain ^^^ Spain which gave rise to this move-
1525-1600. j^g^^^ When, ten years after the founda-
tion of the Jesuit order by the Spaniard Ignatius
Loyola, the famous Council was opened at
Trent, it was Loyola's successor, the Spaniard
Lainez, who became at once the directing genius
of that great Assembly which renovated Catho-
licism by giving it the form in which it has lived
and prospered during the last three centuries. I
find our time somewhat inclined to underrate the
importance of the part played by SjDain in the
history of Euroj^ean thought. Of course hers was
above all a negative action ; but she acted also in
a positive way. Not only was the reorganisation
of the Church entirely her work ; the absolute
Monarchy of Divine Eight, as it flourished during
the seventeenth century, was equally of Spanish
origin. Think of the difference between the
medieval conception of sovereignty, and the one
INFLUENCE OF SPAIN. 11
which was the soul of Louis XIY., nay, even of
the Protestant James I. of England, and down to
the smallest German and Italian princelings of
that time ; between the variety of the feudal
royalty of the Middle Ages with its almost inde-
pendent vassals, and the uniformity of the modern
monarchy with its passive obedience and its
VEtat c'est moi. Now one might say, the mon-
archy of Louis XIY. was simply the despotism of
Philip II., tempered by the innate sense of the
French for measure and taste, enlivened by their
natural serenity and elegance. This, however, is
only one side of the question, and, for our object,
not the most important.
At the same time that the principle of
authority, both religious and political, received a
new impulse from Spain, and conquered after an
obstinate struggle the greater half of Europe,
extirpating Protestantism in Italy and in France,
in Belgium and in South Germany, in Bohemia
and Austria, literature and philosophy underwent
the same influence. At the very moment when
Italy lost the monopoly of Fine Arts, and high
schools of painting rose in Madrid, Seville, and the
Spanish Netherlands, a new poetry and a new
poetical style began to spread from Spain all over
12 INTRODUCTIOIT.
Europe. Not only Italian and German Marinists
were imitators of the Spanish Gongorists, even
your English Euphuism of Shakspeare's times
had its origin in the culteranismo of Spain ; and
not the form and style alone, but the spirit also,
and the subjects of literature during the first half
of the seventeenth century, were in the main
Spanish. Only think of Corneille's ' Cid,' written in
1636, of his ' Polyeucte,' which might figure among
Calderon's Atitos sagramentales. Even in the
second half of the century, Moliere takes the
subjects of his ' Festin de Pierre,' his ' Princesse
d'Elide,' his * Ecole de Maris,' from Moreto and
Tirso. Grimmelshausen introduces into Germany,
Scarron into Prance, the Roman 'picaresco of the
Spaniards, of which Lesage and Smollett became
the recognised masters in the following century.
Much greater still is the influence exercised by
Spain on the philosophical thought of Europe
during the seventeenth century. The death of
individuality which accompanied or followed the
Spanish rule in State, Church and School, wherever
it reached, threatened even speculative activity.
Not that the philosophy of Molina and Suarez — if
one may call philosophy what after all was only
theology — ever really penetrated into the higher
INFLUENCE OF SPAIN. 13
strata of intellectual life, even the elite of the
clergy protesting against it, as they did in our
days against the dogma of inftillibility ; but the
principle of authority which Spain had restored
all over the world was a powerful check on conti-
nental thought, a check sometimes beneficial, more
often most pernicious. There can be no doubt
that no society could live in the long run with the
principles, or rather the absence of principles, of
the Italian Renaissance. The restoration of
authority was the imposition of a salutary rein en
daring minds for whom the licet quia libet had
become a species of dogma. However, if you
think how Malebranche, and even Descartes, were
fettered in the movement of their thought by the
reigning dogmatism of their time, you may well
ask yourselves whether the benefit was not bought
too dear. Je trouve hon qu^on n'approfondisse pas
Fopinion de Copernic, says the great enemy of the
Jesuits himself. It was because Catholic Europe
did not dare to grapple with this opinion that the
leadership of modern thought passed from it to
the Protestant countries of England and Holland,
where there was no Holy Inquisition to interrupt
the researches of a Galileo, no unbending orthodoxy
to stop the mighty thought of a Pascal.
14 INTEODUCTIOX.
The Eeformation had been a popular move-
ment, not an aristocratical one, as scientific
Protestant- ^-ctivity must be everywhere and al-
*^'"' ways. The great Protestant men of
science of the preceding century, the Reuchlin
and Erasmus, the Henry Estienne and Justus
Scaliger, were sons of the Itahan Renaissance, not
of the German Eeformation. Their inspiration
was a thoroughly worldly one, they acted upon the
aristocracy of culture, not on the masses. The
Eeformation sprung more from a moral feeling of
revolt, than from an intellectual want of liberty.
This is the reason why I scarcely mention it
here, where I look only for the formation of
European thought, as it manifests itself in
the higher sphere of select intelligence. For,
whatever may be the character of moral life, in
intellectual life the pa^tc^s vivit genus humanum
will always remain a truth. If, however, the
Eeformation was not a philosophical movement in
its origin, it had the most momentous influence on
the philosophical movement by its consequences.
Modern Catholicism, indeed, such as it was shaped
by the Jesuits during the sixteenth century, if it
did not combat openly the classical civilisation
and literature which the Eenaissance had un-
PEOTESTANTISM. 15
covered, as it were, and given back to humanity,
jet knew how to paralyse its action in the most
effective way. Nowhere was the Greek and Latin
literature more industriously studied than in the
Jesuit schools ; but it was previously rendered
innocuous. The poison of free thought which it
contains was taken out of it, before it was served
to the youthful mind. The freest and most living
of all literatures became a collection of dead rhet-
orical formulae to be learnt by heart and to be used
as occasion demanded. The matter was repre-
sented as of no value whatever ; the form only as
a charming and clever play of the mind. Just so
three centuries later, when it was no longer pos-
sible to ignore the development of natural
sciences, the Jesuits reduced all the results of long
and universal research into manuals to be used
and mechanically applied in practical life, or to be
confided to memory for examination's sake, where
it answers so well, indeed, that the rue des Pastes
drills ten times more successful scholars for the ecole
polytechnique than any lay establishment, although
history does not say that it has produced one man
of science. For they are prudent enough to teach
the scientific data without awakening^ and stimu-
lating that spirit of research which is the ideal
16 INTRODUCTION.
value of natural science, as freedom of thought is
the true ideal value of ancient literature. Not so
Protestantism. That also had restored authority
in place of the theory of unlimited liberty which
in the times of Italian Eenaissance made caprice
the supreme arbiter of life. But its authority
was not an outward one ; it was the authority
of individual conscience. Its main principle
was free inquiry, first applied to the Bible ;
but once allowed to exercise itself, there was no
telling where it would stop, and in fact, it did not
stop at the Bible.
It was not the cradle of Protestantism, how-
ever, which first saw these fruits of the new faith.
German Protestantism was temporarily quenched,
when the reaction against Spanish dogmatism set
in in Europe ; and poor Kepler was almost stifled
in his attempts to develope the system of
Copernicus. Germany was engaged in the most
disastrous and barbarous war that the history of
mankind mentions in its annals, when the noble
scientific movement of the seventeenth century
En"-iand ^^^ ^^ ^^^ ^^^ vigour. It was reserved
1600-1700. ^^ England whose great Queen had saved
for her the treasure of religious independence, to
give the signal of the new march onward ; while
ENGLAND IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 17
Holland, which had come out victorious from
the long and manly struggle against Catholic
Spain, associated herself with England in the
glorious task.
This self-given task was the knowledge of nature
and its laws. The fifteenth century had, as it
were, restored the broken links of time ; the seven-
teenth unveiled space. The former had shown to
man his place in history, the latter was to assign
him his place in nature. The world was weary of
rhetoric and words, as well as of abstract, bottom-
less speculation. It thirsted for facts. It Lad
long enough accepted hond fide the ready-made
solutions of all questions oflPered to it by authority ;
it was resolved to inquire for itself into the causes of
things. The conclusions of an a priori philosophy
would no longer satisfy it. Secretly and almost
unconsciously it longed for a knowledge based
on observation, which should also be a methodical
knowledge. It was Bacon who gave words to the
innermost desire of his generation, when he in-
troduced and recommended the method of induc-
tion. No doubt, Copernicus had observed before
him and better than he did. Kepler was just then
practising ' induction,' from observations with
18 INTEODUCTION.
positive results, of which Bacon could not boast,
whilst Galileo was at the same moment employing
the experimental method which Bacon still used
very awkwardly. Nevertheless it is Bacon, not
Kepler or Galileo, who is rightly considered the
father of modern thought. Kepler and Galileo
indeed used the inductive and experimental
method somewhat as M. Jourdain made prose —
sans le savoir. Assuredly the progress of science
was not the less furthered because Galileo's grand
and simple nature, and Kepler's noble and unbend-
ing mind, were occupied with the search for truth
without being aware of the intellectual revolution
they helped to bring about. Nevertheless, for the
history of thought, the man who first spoke out
and formulated the new method with the full
consciousness of the momentous principle he
expressed, remains the representative man of the
age. It is the fashion nowadays, on the continent
at least, to look down upon Bacon, because he was
an indifferent observer and a sometimes puerile