is true, and no fanatic can prove the contrary." Krug
went so far in 1705 as to deny to Christian truth any more permanent worth than that of the teachings of any other transitory system of philosophy. "Let no one say- that God Could make none other than a perfect revela- n. There is no perfect revelation. The utterances of holy men spring up from their soulsjusl as the utter- ances of other men; hence tiny necessarily bear the coloring of the environment from which they sprang." Such sentiments were legislatively condemned in some parts of Germany; but nol so in Prussia. Here the
Chief i liuivl, councillor, Teller, on being asked whether
any positive confession was any longer to be exacted of
candidates for Church member-hip. replied that, apart from baptism and the eucharist, no other yoke was to be imposed; on the contrary, every applicant was to be unhesitatingly received with the simple formula: -I baptize thee upon thy confession of Christ, the founder of a more spiritual and more joyous religion than that of the society [the world] to which thou bast hitherto belonged."
With the changed phase of things at the close of the 18th century, the term - rationalism" came into more frequent use. At lirst it was chiefly used by opponents. .Men like Gabler contrasted rationalism with the funda- mental principle of Protestantism, to wit, the normative authority of the Bible, Bhowing the utter inconsistency of the two. Henceforth it is used mainly as a term of reproach: it was never cordially accepted by those to whom it was applied.
As soon as rationalism became clearly conscious of il- attitude towards revelation, it felt more fully than ever the necessity of defining its own fundamental principles. Also an external stimulus urged ii to this step. Hith- erto it had peaceably reclined its head on the bosom of each successively rising system of philosophy; but since the rise of the speculative systems of Fichte and Schel- ling, such an alliance was impossible. The haughty speculative systems disdained to fraternize with the superficial reasonings of the "sound human understand- ing." Also, even rationalism stood aghast at the bot- tomless abyss of the pantheistic mysticism of Schelling; and numerous works of rationalistic source assailed the new ••atheism." lint the empirical platitudes of ration- alism met with only ridicule and sneers from the new lords of the intellectual world. Fichte, Schelling. and Gothe agreed in Btigmatizing the best principles and the whole system of the rationalists as commonplace and vulgar.
Ai list, however, there appeared a system of philoso- phy under the wings of which the rationalists felt that they could flee for refuge; ihiswas the faith-philosophy of Jacobi. The radical weakness of the old rationalism was that it -axe no scope to the spontaneities of senti- ment and the heart, but rather measured everything by the cohl, dry processes of argumentation. It was utterly ungenial, unpoetic; a mere probability was the highest word it could say in behalf of the most central truths.
Ih'' Byste i .lac. .hi remedied this. It supplemented
the coldness of mere intellectual probability by the •'immediate certainty of feeling:" it restored to faith ii- colegitimacy with knowledge. Accordingly, all the belter representatives of honest rationalism hailed the faith-philosophy of Jacobi, and used it to re-cue the sinking bark of the current theology. Notahh wa- this
the case with Gabler, who now urged as the deepest proof of the truth of religion a " Nbthigungsgcfuhl mit Iran— pro, hen <l< r allgenieinen Yeriiunl I " that is. he held that religious truth commend- itself directly to our inner consciousness «iih all the compelling force of in- tuition. From this time forward it became common to lay great stress upon what, with Kant, was the impera- tive of the practical reason, and to style it the faith of rea-on < Vernunftglauben). This procedure was partial- ly justified by Kant himself, who claimed to h limits to reason only in order to give greater play to faith. 1 1 was still more justified by the Half-Kantians, such as Bouterweck, who derives all the idea- of reason •
RATIONALISM
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RATIONALISM
from a so-called truth-feeling and truth-faith. This is the philosophic ground upon which are hased the defini- tions of reason and the understanding as given in the theology of Bretschneider and Wegschcider; to wit, that reason is the faculty for generating ideas directly out of consciousness without the intervention of the discur- sive activity, while understanding is the faculty for con- firming and elucidating these ideas.
Thus rationalism has, since the beginning of the 19th century, made considerable advances beyond its previous dry and shallow common-senseism. It was helped to this by the philosophy of Fries, who, by his doctrine of faith and insight, placed reason in antagonism to the understanding; and still more so when this philosophy was adopted by the gifted and noble-minded De Wette. For a long while yet — into the third decade — the tone and foibles of rationalism remained largely the same as those given to it by the abstract, shallow prosiness of Nicolai and of Teller, of Semler, and in some respects of Gabler. Rbhr and Paulus follow in the steps of Teller ; Bretschneider and Wegscheider reproduce much of the loose syncretism of a Semler. The chief scientific weak- ness of Wegsch eider's celebrated Inslitutiones lies in its dearth of definitely fixed ideas and in its avoidance of decided utterances. He asserts: "In rebus gravissimis ad religionem pertinentibus convenire omnes gentes." Hasc raises the question whether any real student of the history of philosophy could agree to this. Wegscheider's only defence is to timidly insert a. fere omnes. He re- iterates the old demonstrations of the existence of God; and when Kant's antinomies stare him in the face, he concedes that, taken singly, these demonstrations are not conclusive, but thinks that they are so when token j all together. Hahn declares that deism and naturalistic j rationalism are identical. Wegscheider indignantly pro- tests, inasmuch as rationalism accepts revelation thus far: " that God endowed the founder of Christianity with extraordinary inner gifts, and gave him many outward tokens of special guidance."