Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 by Various
page 92 of 330 (27%)
page 92 of 330 (27%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
selbstgenügsames Ichlein_." The untranslatable beauty of the German is in
the diminutive with which the sentence closes. It is difficult to say whether Menzel or Schlegel shows the greater hostility to the poor Berlin philosopher.] Such, shortly, so far as we can gather, is the main scope, popularly stated, of Frederick Schlegel's philosophy, as it is delivered in his two first lectures on the philosophy of life, the first being titled, "Of the thinking soul, or the central point of consciousness;" and the second, "Of the loving soul, or the central point of moral life." The healthy-toned reader, who has been exercised in speculations of this kind, will feel at once that there is much that is noble in all this, and much that is true; but not a little also, when examined in detail, of that sublime-sounding sweep of despotic generality, (so inherent a vice of German literature,) which delights to confound the differences, rather than to discriminate the characters, of things; much that seems only too justly to warrant that oracular sentence of the stern Fichte with which we set out, "_The younger brother wants clearness_;" much that, when applied to practice, and consistently followed out in that grand style of consistency which belongs to a real German philosopher, becomes what we in English call Puseyism and Popery, and what Goethe in German called a "_chewing the cud of moral and religious absurdities_." But we have neither space nor inclination, in this place, to make an analysis of the Schlegelian philosophy, or to set forth how much of it is true and how much of it is false. Our intention was merely to sketch a rapid outline, in as popular phrase as philosophy would allow itself to be clothed in; to finish which outline without extraneous remark, with the reader's permission, we now proceed. If man be not, according to Aristotle's phrase, a [Greek: zôon logikon] in his highest faculty, a _ratiocinative_, but rather an emotional and |
|