Method of Treatment Adopted in this History of Philosophy.
As regards external history I shall only touch upon that which is the concern of universal history, the spirit or the principle of the times, and hence I will treat of conditions of life in reference to the outstanding philosophers. Of philosophies, however, only those are to be made mention of the principles of which have caused some sensation, and through which science has made an advance;hence I shall put aside many names which would be taken up in a learned treatise, but which are of little value in respect to Philosophy. The history of the dissemination of a doctrine, its fate, those who have merely taught a particular doctrine, I pass over, as the deduction of the whole world from one particular principle.
The demand that in Philosophy an historian should have no system, should put into the philosophy nothing of his own, nor assail it with his ideas, seems a plausible one. The history of Philosophy should show just this impartiality, and it seems, in so far that to give only summaries of the philosophers proves a success. He who understands nothing of the matter, and has no system, but merely historic knowledge, will certainly be impartial. But political history has to be carefully distinguished from the history of Philosophy. That is to say, though in the former, one is not indeed at liberty to limit oneself to representing the events chronologically only, one can yet keep to what is entirely objective, as is done in the Homeric epic. Thus Herodotus and Thucydides, as free men, let the objective world do freely and independently as it would; they have added nothing of their own, neither have they taken and judged before their tribunal the actions which they represented.
Yet even in political history there is also a particular end kept in view. In Livy the main points are the Roman rule, its enlargement, and the perfecting of the constitution; we see Rome arise, defend itself, and exercise its mastery. It is thus that the self-developing reason in the history of Philosophy makes of itself an end, and this end is not foreign or imported, but is the matter itself, which lies at the basis as universal, and with which the individual forms of themselves correspond. Thus when the history of Philosophy has to tell of deeds in history, we first ask, what a deed in Philosophy is;and whether any particular thing is philosophic or not. In external history everything is in action-certainly there is in it what is important and that which is unimportant-but action is the idea immediately placed before us. This is not the case in Philosophy, and on this account the history of Philosophy cannot be treated throughout without the introduction of the historian's views.
MODERN PHILOSOPHY
INTRODUCTION
IF we cast a glance back over the period just traversed, we find that in it a turning-point had been reached, that the Christian religion had placed its absolute content in the mind and will of man, and that it was thus, as a divine and supersensuous content, separated from the world and shut up within itself in the centre-point of the individual. Over against the religious life an external world stood as a natural world - a world of heart or feeling, of desire, of human nature - which had value only in as far as it was overcome. This mutual independence of the two worlds had much attention bestowed on it throughout the Middle Ages; the opposition was attacked on all quarters and in the end overcome. But since the relation of mankind to the divine life exists upon earth, this conquest at first presented the appearance of bringing with it the destruction of the church and of the eternal through the sensuous desires of man. The eternal truth was likewise grafted upon the dry, formal understanding, so that we might say that the separation of self-consciousness has in itself disappeared, and thereby a possibility has been given of obtaining reconciliation. But because this implicit union of the Beyond and the Here was of so unsatisfactory a nature that the better feelings were aroused and forced to turn against it, the Reformation made its appearance, partly, no doubt, as a separation from the Catholic Church, but partly as a reformation from within. There is a mistaken idea that the Reformation only effected a separation from the Catholic Church; Luther just as truly reformed the Catholic Church, the corruption of which one learns from his writings, and from the reports of the emperors and of the empire to the Pope; if further evidence be required, we need only read the accounts given even by the Catholic bishops, the Fathers of the councils at Constance, Basle, &c., of the condition of the Catholic priesthood and of the Roman Court. The principle of the inward reconciliation of spirit, which was in itself the very Idea of Christianity, was thus again estranged, and appeared as a condition of external, unreconciled alienation and discord; this gives us an example of the slow operation of the world-spirit in overcoming this externality. It eats away the inward substance, but the appearance, the outward form, still remains; at the end, however, it is an empty shell, the new form breaks forth. In such times this spirit appears as if it - having so far proceeded in its development at a snail's pace, and having even retrograded and become estranged from itself - had suddenly adopted seven-leagued boots.
Since thus the reconciliation of self-consciousness with the present is implicitly accomplished, man has attained to confidence in himself and in his thought, in sensuous nature outside of and within him; he has discovered an interest and pleasure in ****** discoveries both in nature and the arts.
