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a movement of speculative theology, attended or followed by an effort to find in inductive science a practical guide of life. For the present, our argument deals only with the former.

The special movement of thought in which we are now interested may be said to date back as far as the vehement and rather febrile protest of Rousseau against the materialism of his own day. For it happened that, in 1761, Frederick Henry Jacobi, then a youth of eighteen, was living in Geneva as a business clerk, and that here he was powerfully influenced by Rousseau's writings, particularly Emile and the Savoyard Vicar. Personally, he was repelled from Rousseau by the Confessions, and came under quite a different influence; * but he kept a great esteem for what he regarded as the finest genius of France, and owed to that example his "leap" (Sprung) from materialism to the condition of mind which takes spiritual realities for granted. "You see," said he to a friend in his old age, "I am still the same, a pagan in my understanding, but a Christian to the bottom of my heart."

Jacobi (1743-1819) is generally recognized as the earliest witness or interpreter of that powerful movement of religious thought in Germany, which is still one of the most. vital intellectual forces of the day. In particular, his name is held to stand for the opinion that spiritual things are "perceived" by an interior or transcendental sense, as precisely and legitimately as, for example, visible things are perceived by the eye. If he did put his doctrine in that form, it must have been apparently, by way not of dogma, but illustration. At twenty-one, he had "plunged into Spinoza"; and he is considered to have done the German mind the service of reviving the memory of the great Pantheist.. But he is far from being satisfied with that line of thought, "Speculation alone," he says, "attains only to [the idea of] Substance, a blank Necessity.' "What I need," he says

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In particular that of Bonnet, who seems to have been the recognized head of an emotional religious movement, and author of certain pious meditations upon Nature, which the young Jacobi "knew almost by heart."- See Hettner, History of German Literature, vol. iii., pp. 316–324.

again, "is not a truth which should be of my making, but that of which I myself should be the creature.” *

Far from the logical consistency which most Germans affect in their religious philosophy, Jacobi is very impatient of method. All logic, he holds, leads to fatalism; and to each of the great speculative schools of his day he finds himself equally opposed. "All philosophy," he says, "built upon thought that can be clearly stated to the intellect (begreifsmässige), gives for bread a stone, for God's living personality the mechanism of Nature, for free will a rigid Necessity." "In proceeding from Nature we find no God: God is first, or not at all." "We know the truth not (according to Kant) by reason, but by faith, feeling, instinct," for he employs all these terms to convey his meaning: Words, dear Jacobi, words," said the cool critic, Lessing.

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It is the first step that costs. This "first step" Jacobi seems never to have been able to make clear to his own mind, much less to other minds. It is, after all, a “leap,” a feat impossible to logic, and good only in fact to him who is already on the other side of the logical gulf. At least, it is a reality he is striving for, not a figment of the brain: he "would fain keep the pearl, while materialist and idealist divide the shell between them." His thought is true in this that religion is, as he says, a matter not of theory, but of life; known not by inference from some other thing, but as a primary fact of experience, "given in our own free act and deed." Perhaps his best statement of the thought is that "reason, as distinct from sense, perceives not only objects that are good, beautiful, and true, but that which is primarily or ideally good, beautiful, and true"; and, "because one sees this face, he knows that a spirit lives in him and a spirit above him." Again, let us do Jacobi the justice of hearing him in his own words:

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As religion makes a man a man, and as that alone lifts him above the brutes, so too it makes him a philosopher. As piety strives by devout purpose to fulfil the will of God, so religious insight seeks to know and *Biedermann, iv., 850.

understand the Unknown (Verborgene). It was the aim of my philosophy to deal with this religion, the centre of all spiritual life; not the acquisition of further scientific knowledge, which may be had without philosophy. Communion with nature should help me to communion with God. To rest in nature and learn to do without God, and to forget him in it, I would not.

I have been young, and now am old; and I bear witness that I have never found thorough, pervading, enduring virtue with any but such as feared God, not in the modern, but in the old childlike way. And only with such, too, have I found joy in life,- a hearty, victorious gladness, of so distinct a kind that no other is to be compared with it.

Light is in my heart; but, as soon as I would bring it into my understanding, it goes out. Which of these two lights is true,- that of the understanding, which indeed shows clearly defined forms, but back of them a bottomless abyss, or that of the inward glow, which gives promise of outward light, but lacks clear intelligence? Can the soul of man win truth except by combination of the two? and is that combination conceivable unless by miracle?

We are already on the high road to mysticism. But Jacobi, we should bear in mind, was not a philosopher trained in the methods of the schools. He was educated (as we have seen) to business life, and only by strong bent of genius became a man of thought and a man of letters. Naturally, his illogical methods scandalized the university men, those aristocrats and monopolists of learning. "This reckless fashion," says Kant, "of rejecting all formal thought as pedantry betrays a secret purpose, under the guise of philosophy, of turning in fact all philosophy out of doors."

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In short, the real aim of Jacobi was—as he very frankly says himself not to give a logical and coherent philosophy of religion. This, he was firmly convinced, was to belie its very nature,- as Kant himself seems to grant, when he puts it in the field of practical and not of speculative reason. What he would do is to register a fact of psychology, not a process of logic. The "act of faith," as we call it, by which the mind plants itself on truth of the spiritual order, is in fact, as he states it, a "leap" into the dark.*

*Compare Longfellow's poetic expression of the same experience:

"So the feeble hands, and helpless,

Groping blindly in the darkness,

Touch God's right hand in that darkness,

And are lifted up, and strengthened."-Hiawatha.

The psychology is precisely the same as Luther's: "Believe that you are a child of God, and in that act you are his child."

convinced

No process of demonstration, it is likely, e anybody of what we must take to be the primary data of the religious life. Belief in the sense in which religionists use the word-is not an intellectual process: it is a vital one. A man shall listen half a lifetime to the most faultless argument in proof of some system of doctrine. He accepts the premises; he assents to the conclusion, perhaps; but he remains at heart a doubter. Some day, a thought strikes him suddenly, and shows things in another light. Or he goes into a conventicle, or is surprised by a sudden peril, or some unexpected word of sympathy melts him, and from that hour he believes. Not only the one point that is touched, but all the latent creed in him, become luminous in the glow of that emotion; as when an electric spark leaps from point to point, making a device or a picture of vivid light. It has suddenly become true to him, and he implicitly accepts it all. Without a particle of new evidence, he believes in the popular vision of heaven and hell, which was a horrid dream to him before; in the Trinity and Atonement, which till now were downright falsehood to him; in the absolute authority of Bible or creed, which he had held to be the. height of unreason. All at once,

these things have become vivid and intense realities to his mind. As an intellectual process, it is worthless. As a vital one, it may carry with it the most far-reaching consequences, and be, what it is generally called, the regeneration of the man.

All this is the every-day experience of what is technically known as "conversion." It takes place not only on the lower levels of intelligence or culture, as we might be apt to think, but in a mind of force, gravity, and breadth, like that of Chalmers; in a mind, brilliant, social, worldly, like that of Wilberforce. These deep springs of life are not touched by a logical process. That, in general, only trims and pares down the spontaneous growth. The chance always is that it will cut so deep to the quick as to maim the life. It is by sympathy, by reverence, by the kindling of affection, that men believe. Then, their faith, like a

flame, seizes and appropriates such material as lies nearest at hand.

We may easily conceive this faith, in great intensity, combined with very simple elements of intellectual belief. The mere emotion of piety, however, will hardly subsist without something in the mind to feed on. Some intellectual element appears to be involved in the experience itself, some article of faith implicitly, if not explicitly, held. What this is, in the most simple and fundamental form, we find asserted and (if it may be) legitimated in Jacobi's philosophy of religion. Of this, we have now two things to ob

serve.

In the first place, it includes two things quite distinct from each other, the psychological fact and the logical influence. The fact of experience is undeniable, but what can it be said to prove? Evidently, not all the beliefs associated with it in the believer's mind,-not the Scotch Calvinism of Chalmers, not the evangelical creed of Wilberforce. The interior vision, which is asserted to behold eternal realities, views them (as Paul says) "in a mirror.” That mirror cannot possibly be anything else than the mind of the beholder. What he sees is, primarily, his own thought. The object seen is simply the reflection of the subject which sees.* "God," said Fontenelle, "made man in his own image; but, then, man does the same by him." In the language of the Psalmist, God shows himself to the merciful as merciful, to the upright as righteous, to the pure as pure, to the violent as wrathful. Probably no case of such interior perception on record is more vivid and genuine than Loyola's vision of the Trinity, or the disordered fancy that both saw and handled the sacred Heart. Yet we do not hold such things as testimony of any fact beyond the mental condition of those to whom they were the most convincing of realities.

In the second place, not only the experience can be no evidence to any other than the believer himself. It is not,

*The reader will recall that Speculation is derived from speculum, which means "a mirror."

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