Many of their works are translated into German; several of these on ethics or morality are translated by Garve, for instance, who also translated Cicero De Officiis, and they are written in a manner similar to that of Cicero when he uses the expression Insitum est a natura (Vol. I. p. 93). This moral sentiment and the ordinary human understanding hereafter formed the common principle to a whole succession of Scots, such as Thomas Reid, Beattie, Oswald, and others; in this way they frequently made sagacious observations, but with them speculative philosophy quite disappears. One special characteristic of these Scottish philosophers is that they have sought accurately to define the principle of knowledge; but on the whole they start from the same point as that which was in Germany likewise accepted as the principle. That is to say they represented the so-called healthy reason, or common-sense (sensus communis), as the ground of truth. The following are the principal members of this school, each of whom has some special feature distinguishing him from the rest.
1. Thomas Reid 2. James Beattie 3. James Oswald 4. Dugald Stewart C. French Philosophy 1. The Negative Aspect 2. The Positive Aspect a. Materialism b. Robinet 3. Idea of a Concrete Universal Unity a. Opposition between Sensation and Thought b. Montesquieu c. Helvetius d. Rousseau D. The German Illumination 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 B. Kant Critique of Pure Reason Critique of Practical Reason Critique of Practical Judgment C. Fichte 1. The First Principles of Fichte's Philosophy 2. Fichte's System in a Re-constituted Form 3. The More Important of the Followers of Fichte a. Friedrich von Schlegel b. Schleiermacher c. Novalis d. Fries, Bouterweck, Krug D. Schelling E. Final ResultFootnotes 1. In the lectures of 1825-1826 and 1829-1830 Berkeley was passed over by Hegel; in both courses Hume follows directly after the Scottish and French philosophers, and thus comes immediately before Kant; in the course of 1825-1826 the French philosophy precedes the Scottish also.
INAUGURAL ADDRESS
