# Worldviews in the 19th Century

## GA 18a

### The Worldview of Factual Fanaticism

A monumental attempt to gain a comprehensive view of the world and life based on rigorous science was undertaken in France during the course of this century by Auguste Comte (1798-1857). This undertaking, which produced a comprehensive worldview in Comte's “Cours de philosophie positive” (6 volumes, 1830-1842), stands in stark contrast to the idealistic views in Germany during the first half of the century, as well as to all intellectual constructs that draw their conclusions from Lamarckian-Darwinian ideas of evolution, albeit to a lesser but still significant extent. Comte completely rejects what is at the center of Hegel's worldview, namely the observation and comprehension of one's own mind in human beings. He argues that if the human mind wanted to observe itself, it would have to divide itself into two personalities; it would have to slip out of itself and confront itself. Comte does not even accept psychology, which is not limited to physiological observation but seeks to examine mental processes in their own right. Everything that is to become the object of knowledge must relate to objective connections between facts and must be presented as objectively as the laws of mathematical sciences. And this also gives rise to Comte's opposition to what Spencer in England and the natural scientists in Germany, building on Lamarck and Darwin, have attempted. For Comte, the human species is fixed and unchangeable; he wants nothing to do with Lamarck's theory. Simple, transparent laws of nature, such as those applied by physics to its phenomena, are his ideals of knowledge. As long as a science does not yet work with such simple laws, it is unsatisfactory for Comte as knowledge. He is a mathematical mind. And anything that cannot be treated as transparently and simply as a mathematical problem is, in his view, still immature for science. Comte has no sense that the more one ascends from purely mechanical and physical processes to higher natural structures and to human beings, the more lively ideas are needed. His worldview thus takes on something dead and rigid. The whole world is presented as the workings of a machine. Comte overlooks the living everywhere; he drives life and spirit out of things and then merely explains what is mechanical and machine-like about them. In his presentation, the meaningful historical life of human beings appears like the conceptual image that astronomers construct of the movements of the heavenly bodies. Comte has constructed a ladder of sciences. Mathematics is the lowest level, followed by physics, chemistry, the science of living beings, and finally sociology, the study of human society. His aim is to make all these sciences as simple as mathematics. The phenomena dealt with by the individual sciences may always be different, but the laws are basically always the same.

In this direction, one can see the influence of the type of thinking that prevailed in France in the second half of the previous century, cultivated by Condillac (1715-1780), Helvetius (1715-1771), De La Mettrie (1709-1751) and which made such a repulsive impression on Goethe when he encountered it in Holbach's (1723-1789) “System of Nature” (cf. above p. 10f. [230f.]). Condillac saw all talk of an autonomous soul as superfluous. Individual sensations approach humans. Nothing else needs to be there to build something like a unified soul. They group themselves together, they chain themselves together, so that it appears as if they are parts of a whole, the soul. The human mind is an automaton constructed by sensations. Condillac asks his readers to imagine a statue that gradually acquires senses. First comes the sense of smell, then the sense of hearing, then the other senses. Nothing else is needed from within, nothing spiritual needs to be added; spiritual life is built up from sensory impressions in raw material. De La Mettrie also spoke about the nature of the human mind in “L'homme machine” (1748). Such hasty conclusions reflect the suggestive effect that the simple clarity of the laws of nature had on French thinkers, as presented, for example, in Newton's explanation of the forces in the universe. Voltaire (1694-1778) conveyed the spirit of such an explanation of nature to his compatriots in his Lettres sur les Anglais. The transparency of this explanation of nature was fascinating. Voltaire believed that only through such an explanation could one arrive at a history of the soul, while all other approaches were capable of providing at most a novel. He saw Condillac as the “great philosopher” who had grasped the meaning of such an explanation. That this is not actually a deeper insight into the nature of world phenomena, but rather a desire for simple, convenient orientation in the world, is most clearly evident in Voltaire. He does not have a deeper need to penetrate to the sources of being; he is also satisfied with a superficial idea, as long as it resembles an explanation. He easily overcomes the difficulty of how matter can produce the phenomena of the mind from within itself. "I am a body and I think, that is all I know; shall I now attribute to an unknown cause what I can so easily attribute to a fruitful cause that I know? Indeed, who is the man who, without absurd godlessness, could assert that it is impossible for the Creator to give thought and feeling to matter?" This is indeed convenient: one takes a simple network of natural laws and then as much of the old religious ideas as one needs to help the impotence of those natural laws get off the ground. Voltaire did not feel the profound thirst for knowledge that cannot tolerate the various needs of the human soul being satisfied from different sources. His intellect allowed him to be materialistic in his explanation of natural phenomena, but for moral needs he accepted the statement: “If there were no God, one would have to invent one.” Holbach, who in “The System of Nature” makes a real attempt at a comprehensive worldview from the standpoint of materialism, and who, due to the scope of observation at the time, considers nature and the moral world order in an inadequate manner, is unsympathetic to Voltaire. He liked Abbot Condillac better, who says: Give reason its materialism and religion its God and immortality. For Condillac sees no contradiction between positive religion and materialistic science. On the contrary, he says to himself: Let us satisfy reason with its materialistic urge; the spirit will then be all the more secure from its temptations.

The worldview based on scientific principles is given a firmer structure by Denis Diderot (1713-1784), who, by founding and directing the monumental work of the Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie, which appeared in 28 volumes between 1751 and 1772, He did immeasurable work to introduce this worldview into public education. Some of the ideas that only came to life in the nineteenth century are embedded in Diderot's writings as seeds. He already speaks of the gradual development of the highest organisms from inorganic structures; he even points to development through natural selection, to the demise of the non-viable, the inappropriate, and the survival of the perfect, the appropriate. He finds a transition from the inorganic to the organic by not allowing the two to be different in essence, but rather by seeing expressions of life at the lowest level in the forces of lifeless nature.

Like a legacy, the French spirit carried this worldview from the eighteenth into the nineteenth century. But it also inherited the opposite image: the rebellion of the human mind against its explanation from external natural processes. With all the one-sidedness, with all the radicalism, with the feeling and passion that speak when they gain the upper hand over the other soul forces, this rebellion arose in Jean Jaques Rousseau (1712-1778). What Condillac, Holbach, Voltaire, and Diderot sought to achieve in the external world through thoughtful observation of natural processes in humans, Rousseau strove to achieve through immersion in the unadulterated, unprejudiced nature of the human mind. He was convinced from the outset that the urge toward truth and naturalness is innate in humans. Humans can only have come to errors in their knowledge and moral actions by becoming unfaithful to their true nature. Rousseau wanted to return to innate ideas; he sought to live within himself. He did not want the truth captured by sophisticated thought processes, but rather that which gives immediate feeling. “If nature determines us to be healthy, then I dare to assert that the state of reflection is a state against nature, that a person who thinks is a degenerate creature.” That he dislikes any truth that is conveyed to him rather than springing from the heart through primal force can be seen in statements such as those in his “Emile,” where a pagan who is to be converted says: “You speak to me of a God who was born and died two thousand years ago at the other end of the world, in a place I do not know ... Why did your God allow the events I am to be taught about to take place so far away? Is it wrong not to want to know anything about what happens to those who live on the other side of the world?” In Rousseau's opinion, the God in whom one is to believe must raise his voice in one's own soul. Like a guardian, Rousseau stands at the gate of the human soul to prevent anything foreign from entering it. The growing human being should not learn; rather, he should be encouraged to develop all the knowledge and truth that lies dormant within him.

Rousseau deeply stirred the minds of his contemporaries and also of posterity. However, it would be an overestimation of his influence to claim that he had a profound effect on the development of worldviews in the nineteenth century. Just as he himself revelled in the vague, elemental world of emotion, so he could only excite feelings and sensations. In his bold demand for originality and naturalness, the best minds of the time felt a demand on themselves to proceed to their own examination. It was the tendencies inherent in Rousseau that had an effect, not the content of what he said. He did little to fill the soul with content, but he brought to general awareness the need for such fulfillment. Much has sprung from this awareness that has nothing to do with Rousseau's own views.

It was inevitable that a countercurrent would arise against the trend in the development of worldviews, which lay in the thoughtful observation of natural phenomena on the one hand and Rousseau's radical call for the unreserved development of human nature on the other. During the Revolution, those who clung to tradition and custom believed they saw the practical consequences of modern ideas. One can sense the feelings of such people reverberating in the remark made by K. Mager in his “History of French National Literature,” published in 1837: "A Frenchman who had returned to Paris after a long absence during the worst days of mob rule, when asked if he would find many things changed, replied: Not at all, he said, people are now merely doing in the streets what they have been saying in salons for many years. It was also said of Voltaire that when his Parisian friends visited him and began their “philosophical discourses” at the table, he quickly sent the servants away; he did not want, he said, to have his throat cut the following night."

One mind that had the courage to ruthlessly reject all modern education because of its dangerous nature was Joseph de Maistre (1754-1821). Written in 1811 but not published until 1821, this man's “Soirees de St. Petersbourg” contain pretty much everything the human spirit can muster against the beliefs that have developed over the last few centuries on the basis of knowledge of nature. If you want to know what to think, don't ask your mind and the observations of your senses; ask the abbots, the high officials of the state, the Pope. Not your reason, only authority alone can help you overcome error. It began with the Reformation, the great evil. Man began to trust himself to test the truth. The Enlightenment philosophers then took the matter to extremes. The disorder they caused in people's minds with their explanations of the sole rule of reason was unleashed in the revolutionary movement in France. The destruction of the spiritual order had to be followed by that of the social order; disbelief in authority turned into a bloody struggle against it. Maistre wants to bring about a complete reversal of the natural pursuit of enlightenment. What he calls dogma, he calls truth; the results of the explanation of nature, on the other hand, are “dogmas” to him. That water is composed of oxygen and hydrogen is a “dogma.” One may satisfy the intellect with such dogmas; but a mode of explanation based on such foundations must not be applied to the objects of the highest human interest, to the moral order of the world.

The waves made by the ideas of Holbach, Condillac, and Diderot are still clearly audible in the lectures on “The Relationship of the Soul to the Body” given by Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis in 1797-98 at the university established by the Convention in Paris. Nevertheless, they can be described as the beginning of the development of France's worldview in the nineteenth century. They express a clear awareness that Condillac's approach to the phenomena of mental life is too strongly modeled on the views one has of the purely mechanical processes of inorganic nature. In doing so, Cabanis remains true to the truly scientific approach. He is clear that mental phenomena must be viewed as strictly lawful and connected to the physical organism, just like, for example, the processes of respiration or digestion. He examines the influence of age, gender, lifestyle, and temperament on the way humans think and feel. He has a clear idea that the spiritual and the physical are not two entities that have nothing in common, but that they form an inseparable whole. What distinguishes him from his predecessors is not his basic view, but the way in which he develops it. They simply carry the views gained in the inorganic world into the spiritual world; Cabanis says to himself: Let us first consider impartially how we view the inorganic world, including the spiritual world; then it will tell us how it relates to the other phenomena of nature. Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836) proceeded in a similar manner. He, too, wanted to first look impartially at spiritual processes as they present themselves when approached without religious or scientific prejudice. According to this thinker, we are mistaken if we imagine the soul to be as automatic as Condillac and his followers did. We can no longer maintain this automatism if we look at ourselves honestly. We find no automaton within us, no being that is merely led by the hand from outside. We always find self-activity and self-existence within us. Indeed, we would know nothing of the effects of the outside world if we did not feel a disturbance in our own lives caused by collisions with the outside world. We experience ourselves; we develop our activity from within ourselves; but in doing so, we encounter resistance; we realize that not only are we there, but there is also something else that opposes us, an outside world.

Destutt de Tracy's thoughts express a clear parallelism with the worldview ideas that emerged in Germany around the same time. Johann Gottlieb Fichte's construction of a comprehensive world of ideas based solely on the fact of self-perception and self-activity (cf. Volume 1, p. 50ff. [71 ff.] of this history of worldviews) bears many similarities to the observations of “ideology.” This is the name that Destutt de Tracy and his like-minded colleagues gave to their approach. And in both cases, the impetus for this school of thought is similar. Fichte starts from Spinozism, which focuses on the eternal, iron law of the entire universe and seeks to weave the human spirit into this eternal necessity. Destutt de Tracy has Condillac as his predecessor, who wants to make the workings of the soul arise externally, like the functions of a machine. Fichte and de Tracy believe that they can only understand the spirit if they do not regard it as a being that is caused and composed by other entities, but if they immerse themselves above all in its own life. Within this general similarity, however, there are significant differences between the two thinkers. Fichte hovers in the highest regions of thought; he considers the thinking spirit, which creates itself through its thinking. He feels in an energetic way in his self-thinking a self-creation. I am not until I say to myself in my thoughts: I am; until I thus assign my existence to myself. Destutt de Tracy lacks this energy. He lives more in the realms of sensation and feeling. He observes the peculiarities of the soul as they manifest themselves, as inner life, without our first creating them ourselves through thought. The facts of spiritual life that are effective in us, but without our thinking intervention, are initially the object of his observation. Fichte considers the mental activity of the mind and is primarily concerned with its self-activity, its self-creation; de Tracy observes the inner world of sensation, feeling, and will as it is experienced, without really intervening in a creative way. Fichte considers facts of the soul that he must first create himself; de Tracy considers those that are found within oneself.

The parallelism with the German worldview is also expressed by two other French thinkers, Maine de Biran (1766-1824) and Andre-Marie Ampere (1775-1826). Biran is a subtle observer of the human mind. What appears in Rousseau as a tumultuous way of looking at things, caused only by a random whim, appears to us in Biran as clear, meaningful thinking. What is in man by the nature of his being, by his temperament; and what he makes of himself through his active intervention, his character: As a deeply thoughtful psychologist, Biran makes these two factors of his inner life the subject of his observations. He seeks out the ramifications and transformations of inner life; he finds the source of knowledge within the human being. The forces we come to know within ourselves are the intimate acquaintances of our lives; and we only know the outside world insofar as it is more or less similar and related to our inner world. What would we know about forces in the outside world if we did not really experience a force in our own soul and could therefore compare it with what we encounter in the outside world that is similar to a force? Biran is therefore tireless in his search for the processes in the human soul. He focuses his attention on the involuntary, unconscious aspects of inner life, on the spiritual processes that are already present in the soul when the light of consciousness appears in it. Biran's search for wisdom within the soul led him in later years to a peculiar mysticism. If we draw the deepest wisdom from the soul, we must also come closest to the primordial foundations of existence when we delve into ourselves. Experiencing the deepest processes of the soul is therefore living into the primordial source of existence, into the God within us.

The appeal of Biran's wisdom lies in the intimate way in which he presents it. He found no more suitable form of presentation than that of a “journal intime,” a diary-like form. Biran's writings, which provide the deepest insight into his world of thought, were only published after his death by E. Naville (cf. his "Maine de Biran. Sa vie et ses pensées,“ 1857; and the ”Œuvres inédites de M. de Biran" published by him). Public life in France at the beginning of the century was not conducive to the dissemination of unbiased worldviews. Only in a small circle could one develop one's thoughts undisturbed. Such a circle formed in Auteuil. Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy belonged to it as older men, Biran as a younger man. Among those who were already fully initiated into Biran's views during his lifetime was Ampere, who is significant as a natural scientist for his extension of Oersted's observations on the relationship between electricity and magnetism (cf. above p. 14 [235]). Biran's approach is more intimate, while Ampere's is more scientific and methodical. Ampere pursues, on the one hand, how sensations and ideas are linked in the soul and, on the other hand, how the mind, with the help of its thinking, arrives at a science of world phenomena.

The significance of this worldview, which can be seen as a continuation of Condillac's teachings, lies in its decisive emphasis on the soul's independent existence, its focus on the self-activity of the human inner personality, and the fact that all the minds considered here nevertheless work toward insights in the strict scientific sense. They examine the spirit scientifically, but they do not want to equate its manifestations with other processes in nature from the outset.

The parallelism with the development of the German worldview is not coincidental. During her travels through Germany, Madame de Staël became acquainted with the ideas of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schiller, and others, and transplanted them to France. Her book “On Germany,” published in 1810, brought German ideas into French intellectual life in abundance. It should also be noted that the Schlegel brothers had a stimulating effect on thinking in Paris during their stay there. The Swiss ambassador Stapfer, a man thoroughly familiar with the ideas of the German idealist philosophers, moved in the circle of Auteuil, where Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy, Biran, and others were working on the further development of the ideas of 18th-century French materialism. The turn toward idealism that the worldview in France took at this time appears to be the result of two elements: Rousseau's views and the German world of ideas. The emphasis with which Rousseau stressed what is present in man through the primal sources of his nature, and the German philosophy that led to the pinnacle of thought, brought about a departure from the purely mechanistic way of thinking of the materialists. Victor Cousin (1792-1868) became completely immersed in the German spirit. He undertook several trips through Germany and through them got to know the leading minds of the idealistic era personally. Hegel and Goethe made the deepest impression on him. He brought their idealism to France. He was able to make an impact through his captivating oratory skills, with which he made a deep impression, first as a professor at the École Normale (from 1814) and then at the Sorbonne. Cousin had taken from German intellectual life the idea that a satisfactory worldview could be gained not through the observation of the external world, but through that of the human spirit. He based what he wanted to say on self-observation of the soul. And from Hegel he learned that spirit, ideas, and thoughts prevail not only within human beings, but also outside in nature and in the course of historical life, that reason exists in reality. He taught the French that the character of a people or an era is not governed by blind chance or the arbitrariness of individuals, but that a necessary thought, a real idea, is expressed in it, and that a great man appears in the world only as the messenger of a great idea in order to realize it within the course of history. It must have made a deep impression on his French listeners, who had to comprehend the unprecedented storms of world history in the most recent phases of their people's development, to hear a brilliant orator explain the rationality of historical development on the basis of great worldview ideas.

Robert de Lamennais (1782-1854) presents a kind of counterpoint to Cousin's world of ideas. He sets himself up as a defender of higher worldview interests because he sees the indifference that prevails in wide circles toward these interests in his age as one of the saddest symptoms of humanity's decline. In his opinion, more harmful than a false worldview is the loss of faith that, through the proper use of one's mental powers, one can gain satisfying insights into the foundations of the world. However, he initially bases his aspirations on Catholicism and believes that the papacy must be recognized as having the mission of determining the spiritual goals of humanity. However, he soon learns how little his view of Catholicism corresponds to the intentions of the Roman church leaders. After the publication of his “Words of a Believer,” he is condemned by Rome as an unbeliever. Nevertheless, Lamennais is a genuine Christian thinker. Based on Christian beliefs, he develops a world of ideas, often of ravishing beauty and artistic power, but never built on reason left to its own devices, free and without prejudice.

Comte energetically and purposefully inserted himself into this course of French worldview development with his principle: only in science, which is based on such strict mathematical and observed truths as physics or chemistry, can the starting point for a worldview be sought. He can only consider human thinking that has arrived at this view to be mature. To get there, humanity had to go through two epochs of immaturity, one in which it believed in gods and another in which it devoted itself to abstract ideas. Comte sees the necessary course of human development in the ascent from the theological to the idealistic to the scientific worldview. In the first stage, humans imagined human-like gods in natural processes, who brought these processes about as arbitrarily as humans bring about their actions. Later, they replaced gods with abstract ideas such as life force, universal world reason, world purpose, etc. This phase of development must also give way to a higher one. It must be recognized that an explanation of world phenomena can only be found in observation and in the strictly mathematical and logical consideration of facts. Only what physics, chemistry, and the science of living beings (biology) explore in this way should be combined in thinking for the purpose of a worldview. It has nothing to add to what the individual sciences have explored, as theology does with its divine beings and idealistic philosophy with its abstract ideas. Even views on the course of human development, on the coexistence of people in the state, in society, etc., will only become completely clear when they seek laws like the strict natural sciences. The causes of why families, associations, legal views, and state institutions arise must be sought just as those why bodies fall to the ground or why the digestive organs of animals do their work. The science of human coexistence, of human development, sociology, is therefore particularly close to Comte's heart. He seeks to give it the rigorous character that other sciences have gradually assumed. In this regard, he had a predecessor in Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825). Saint-Simon had already put forward the view that humans would only become the perfect masters of their own destiny if they understood their own lives in the state, in society, and in the course of history in a strictly scientific sense and organized them in accordance with the laws of nature. Comte was on friendly terms with Saint-Simon for a time. He broke with him when the latter seemed to lose himself in all kinds of groundless dreams and utopias. Once he had embarked on this path, Comte continued to work with rare zeal. His “Cours de philosophie positive” is a grand attempt to develop the scientific achievements of his time into a worldview through mere orientational compilation and through the expansion of sociology in its spirit, without the aid of theological or idealistic ideas. Comte assigned the philosopher no other task than that of such an orientational compilation. He had nothing of his own to add to what the sciences had established about the connection between facts. This was the sharpest expression of the opinion that only the sciences, with their observation of reality and their methods, have a say when it comes to developing a worldview.

Within German intellectual life, Eugen Dühring (born 1833) emerged as an energetic advocate of this idea of the exclusive right of scientific thinking in 1865 with his “Natural Dialectic.” He then presented his views to the world in 1875 in his book “Course of Philosophy as a Strictly Scientific Worldview and Way of Life,” and in numerous other mathematical, scientific, philosophical, scientific-historical, and national economic writings. Dühring's entire oeuvre is based on a strictly mathematical and mechanistic way of thinking. Dühring is admirable in his thinking through of everything that can be achieved in world phenomena with mathematical regularity. But where such thinking does not suffice, he loses all ability to find his way in life. This intellectual character explains the arbitrariness and bias with which Dühring judges so many things. Where one must judge according to higher ideas, as in the complicated circumstances of human coexistence, he therefore has no other point of reference than his sympathies and antipathies, which have been planted in him by chance personal circumstances. He has become anti-Semitic because of this character trait; he, the mathematically objective mind, falls into complete arbitrariness when he attempts to evaluate human achievements of the historical past or the present. His sober mathematical way of thinking has led him to denounce a personality such as Goethe as the most unscientific mind of modern times, whose entire significance, in his opinion, is exhausted in a few lyrical achievements. One cannot go further in underestimating everything that transcends sober reality than Dühring has done in his book “The Greats of Modern Literature.” Despite this one-sidedness, Dühring is one of the most stimulating figures in the development of modern worldviews. No one who has immersed themselves in his thoughtful books can admit anything other than that they have had a profound effect on them.

Dühring uses the harshest expressions to describe all worldviews that are based on anything other than strictly scientific points of view. All such unscientific ways of thinking "are to be understood as childish immaturity or feverish impulses, or as the regression of senility, they may afflict entire epochs and sections of humanity or occasionally individual elements or degenerate strata of society, but they always belong to the realm of the immature, the pathological, or the overripe, already decomposed by decay“ (”Kursus der Philosophie," p. 44). He condemns the achievements of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel as the effusions of charlatan professorial wisdom; idealism as a worldview is, for him, a theory of madness. He wants to create a philosophy of reality that is natural because it “eliminates artificial and unnatural fabrications and, for the first time, makes the concept of reality the measure of all ideal conceptions”; reality is conceived by it “in a way that excludes any inclination toward a dreamlike and subjectively limited conception of the world.” (“Course of Philosophy,” p. 13)

Think like a proper mechanic, a proper physicist, who sticks to what the senses perceive, what the mind can logically combine and calculate. Anything beyond that is idle playing with concepts. So says Dühring. But he also wants to help this way of thinking achieve its full potential. Those who adhere exclusively to this way of thinking can be sure that it will provide them with insights into reality. All speculation about whether our thinking can actually penetrate the mysteries of world events, all research that, like Kant's, seeks to limit our cognitive abilities, springs from a logical fallacy. One should not fall into the self-denying sacrifice of reason, which does not dare to make any positive statements about the world. What we can know is a real, unclouded representation of reality. "The whole of things has a systematic structure and internal logical consistency. Nature and history have a constitution and development whose essence corresponds to a large extent to the general logical relationships of all concepts. The general properties and relationships of the concepts of thought with which logic deals must also apply to the particularly noteworthy case that its object is the totality of being together with its main forms. Since the most general thinking decides to a large extent what can be and how it can be, the highest principles and main forms of logic must also be given decisive significance for all reality and its forms“ (”Kursus der Philosophie," p. 11). Reality has created an organ in human thinking through which it can reproduce itself mentally, in an ideal image, and recreate itself spiritually. Nature is governed everywhere by a consistent lawfulness that is right in itself and cannot be criticized. How could it make sense to criticize the scope of thinking, the organ of nature? It is foolish to expect nature to create an organ through which it reflects itself only imperfectly or incompletely. The order and regularity outside in reality must therefore correspond to the logical order and regularity in human thought. “The ideal system of our thoughts is the image of the real system of objective reality; perfect knowledge has the same form in the form of thoughts as things have in the form of real existence.” Despite this general correspondence between thought and reality, the former still has the possibility of transcending the latter. Thought continues in the idea the tasks imposed on it by reality. In reality, every body is divisible, but only up to a certain limit. Thought does not stop at this limit, but divides further in the idea. Thought wanders beyond reality; it allows the body to be infinitely divisible, to consist of infinitely small parts. In reality, every body consists only of a very specific, finite number of small, but not infinitely small parts. - In this way, all concepts of infinity that transcend reality arise. One proceeds from each event to another that is its cause; from this cause back to its cause, and so on. As soon as thought leaves the ground of reality, it wanders into infinity. It imagines that for every cause another cause must be sought, that the world therefore has no beginning in time. Thought proceeds in a similar manner with regard to the filling of space. When it measures the space of the heavens, it finds other stars beyond the most distant ones; it goes beyond this real fact and imagines space to be infinite and filled with an endless number of celestial bodies. Dühring believes that we must be clear that all such notions of infinity have nothing to do with reality. They arise only because thought, using methods that correspond completely to reality, skims over it and thus reaches the infinite.

If thinking remains aware of this divergence from reality, then, in Dühring's view, there is no need to be cautious in transferring concepts borrowed from human activity to nature. Based on such points of view, Dühring does not even shy away from attributing imagination to nature in its creation, just as he does to humans in theirs. “Imagination reaches down into nature itself; like all thinking, it is rooted in impulses that precede finished consciousness and do not themselves constitute elements of subjective experience” (“Kursus der Philosophie,” p. 50). The idea defended by Comte that all worldviews should be nothing more than an arrangement of pure facts dominates Dühring so completely that he transfers imagination into the world of facts because he believes he must simply reject it when it appears in the realm of the human mind. Starting from these ideas, he also arrives at other transfers of such concepts, which are taken from human activity, to nature. For example, he thinks not only that humans can make unsuccessful attempts in their actions, which they abandon because they do not lead to the goal, but also that in the activities of nature one can see attempts in this or that direction. "The experimental nature of creations is anything but foreign to reality, and it is difficult to see why, out of deference to a superficial philosophy, the parallel between nature outside of humans and nature within humans should only be considered valid to a limited extent. [...] If the subjective error of thinking and imagining arises from the relative separateness and independence of this sphere, why should not a practical error or mistake of objective and non-thinking nature also be the result of a proportional separation and mutual alienation of its various parts and driving forces? A true philosophy that does not shy away from common prejudices will ultimately recognize the complete parallelism and consistent unity of constitution on both sides“ (”Kursus der Philosophie," § 51).

Dühring is therefore not reluctant to transfer the concepts generated by thought to reality. However, because he, by his very nature, only has a sense for mathematical ideas, the image he creates of the world also takes on a mathematical-schematic character. He rejects the approach developed by Darwin and Haeckel. He has no understanding for the search for reasons why one being develops from another. The mathematician also places shapes such as triangles, squares, circles, and ellipses side by side: why should one not be satisfied with a similar schematic juxtaposition in nature? Dühring focuses not on becoming in nature, but on the fixed forms that nature works out through combinations of its forces, just as the mathematician considers the specific, strictly defined spatial structures. And Dühring does not find it inappropriate to attribute to nature a purposeful striving toward such fixed structures. Dühring does not imagine this purposeful striving of nature as conscious action, as it develops in humans; but it is nevertheless just as clearly expressed in the actions of nature as the rest of the laws of nature. In this respect, Dühring's view is therefore the opposite of that held by F. A. Lange. Lange declares higher concepts, namely all those in which the imagination plays a part, to be justified fiction, while Dühring rejects all fiction in concepts, but instead attributes actual reality to certain higher ideas that he considers indispensable. It therefore seems entirely logical that Lange wants to deprive all ideas rooted in reality of their moral basis (cf. above p. 92. [328 f.]), and also when Dühring extends ideas that he considers valid in the realm of morality to nature as well. He is completely convinced that what happens in and through human beings is just as natural as inanimate processes. What is right in human life cannot be wrong in nature. Such considerations contributed to making Dühring an energetic opponent of Darwin's doctrine of the struggle for existence. If in nature the struggle of all against all were the condition for perfection, then it would have to be so in human life as well. "Such an idea, which above gives itself the appearance of scientificity, is the most immoral thing imaginable. In this way, the character of nature is understood in an anti-moral sense. It is not merely regarded as indifferent to better human morality, but as consistent with and in league with the bad morality to which crooks also pay homage“ (”Kursus der Philosophie," p. 164). What humans perceive as moral impulses must, in Dühring's view of life, already be inherent in nature. In nature, a striving toward morality must be observed. Just as nature creates other forces that combine purposefully to form solid structures, so it instills sympathetic instincts in humans. Through these instincts, humans allow themselves to be guided in their coexistence with their fellow humans. In humans, therefore, the activity of nature continues at a higher level. Dühring attributes to lifeless mechanical forces the ability to generate sensations from within themselves, like machines. “The mechanical causality of natural forces is, so to speak, subjectivized in fundamental sensation. The fact of this elementary process of subjectivization cannot apparently be explained further; for somewhere and under some conditions, the unconscious mechanics of the world must attain a sense of itself” (“Kursus der Philosophie,” § 147). But when it does so, it does not give rise to a new lawfulness, a realm of the spirit, but merely continues what was already present in unconscious mechanics. This mechanism is thus unconscious, but nevertheless wise, for “the earth with all that it produces, together with the causes of life preservation lying outside, namely in the sun, as well as including all influences originating from the surrounding world as a whole—this entire structure and arrangement must be regarded as essential for human beings, i.e., as being in accordance with their well-being” (“Kursus der Philosophie,” p. 177).

It is fanaticism about facts when Dühring attributes thoughts, even goals and moral tendencies, to nature without admitting that he is idealizing it. Higher ideas that transcend reality are part of explaining nature, but according to Dühring, such ideas cannot exist; consequently, he reinterprets them as facts. A similar fanaticism for facts was evident in the worldview of J. H. v. Kirchmann, who appeared with his “Philosophy of Knowledge” at the same time (1864) as Dühring with his “Natural Dialectic.” Only what is perceived is real: this is Kirchmann's starting point. Through his perception, man is connected with existence. Everything that man does not gain from perception must be eliminated from his knowledge of reality. He achieves this by rejecting everything that is contradictory. “Contradiction does not exist”; this is Kirchmann's second principle, alongside the first: “What is perceived exists.”

The worldview that Kirchmann develops would, if it understood itself correctly, have to regard knowledge as the most superfluous thing in the world. For if all existence is exhausted in what is perceived, then knowledge can be nothing more than a conceptual repetition of what is there even without knowledge. In fact, Kirchmann only accepts feelings and desires as states of the human soul that have an existence of their own. He contrasts knowledge with these existing states of the soul. "Knowledge forms a contrast to the other two states, feeling and desire ... Knowledge may be based on some mental process, perhaps similar to pressure or tension, but understood in this way, knowledge is not grasped in its essence. As knowledge, and only as such is it to be examined here, it conceals its own being and becomes merely the mirror of a foreign being. There is no better analogy for this than the mirror. Just as the mirror is all the more perfect the more it does not show itself, but only reflects a foreign being, so too is knowledge. Its essence is this pure reflection of a foreign being, without any admixture of its own state of being." However, one cannot imagine a stronger contrast to Hegel's conception than this view of knowledge. While in Hegel's thought, i.e., in what the soul brings to perception through its own activity, the essence of a thing comes to light, Kirchmann posits an ideal of knowledge in which it is a reflection of perception freed from the soul's own old ingredients. Faced with such a conception of knowledge, one must necessarily question the justification of knowledge. In asking such a question, there is no need to have the outdated idea in the background: What purpose would knowledge then serve? The question is asked in this outdated form when one says with Dühring: "The universe can only be designed to ultimately produce sensation everywhere and in the richest abundance. Sentient beings must be regarded as the purpose of all cosmic development, for a world that is completely unconscious would be a foolish half-measure and, so to speak, a stage without actors or spectators." But one must ask oneself: What could possibly cause humans to reconstruct the world that is already complete and ready for perception in the form of a mirror image? A person who sees through the mirror-like nature of knowledge would necessarily renounce knowledge, because they would have to consider themselves foolish if they wanted to burden themselves with a duplication of what already exists. A lady who uses a mirror can invoke the reasonable argument that she cannot see herself; but the world of perception can be seen without a mirror. In Kirchmann's mirror theory, the worldview that does not trust its own power of thought to understand the world has produced one of its most paradoxical fruits.

If one wants to correctly assess Kirchmann's position in intellectual life, one must take into account the great difficulties that someone who had the urge to establish an independent worldview encountered at the time of his appearance. The scientific findings that were bound to have a profound influence on the development of worldviews were still in their infancy. They were just enough to shake people's faith in the classical, idealistic worldview, which had had to erect its proud edifice without the help of modern science. However, it was not easy to arrive at fundamental ideas that would provide a new orientation in the face of the wealth of individual findings. In many circles, people lost the thread that led from scientific knowledge of facts to a satisfying overall view of the world. A certain helplessness in questions of worldview took hold of many. An understanding of a swing of thought, as it had been lived out in Hegel's view, was hardly to be found anymore. Only a few individuals were capable of such understanding. One of the best was Paul Asmus, who died young and published a paper in 1873 entitled “Das Ich und das Ding an sich” (The Self and the Thing in Itself). He shows how, in the way Hegel viewed thinking and the world of ideas, a relationship between humans and the essence of things can be gained. He astutely argues that human thinking is not something unreal, but something full of life and primal reality, into which one need only immerse oneself in order to arrive at the essence of existence. He vividly described the path that the development of worldviews had taken, from Kant, who had regarded the “thing in itself” as something alien and inaccessible to humans, to Hegel, who believed that thought encompassed not only itself as an ideal entity, but also the “thing in itself.” However, such voices were hardly heard. People had forgotten how to think in the Hegelian way. This lack of understanding was most sharply expressed in the call that had become popular in a certain philosophical movement since Eduard Zeller's Heidelberg University lecture “On the Meaning and Task of Epistemology”: “Back to Kant.” The partly unconscious, partly conscious ideas that led to this call are roughly as follows: Natural science has shaken our confidence in independent thinking, which seeks to advance on its own to the highest questions of existence. But we cannot be satisfied with mere scientific results. For they do not go beyond the outer appearance of things. There must be hidden reasons for existence behind this exterior. After all, natural science itself has shown that the world of colors, sounds, etc., that surrounds us is not a reality out there in the objective world, but that it is produced by the structure of our senses and our brain (cf. above $. 71ff. [303 ff.]). So we must ask the questions: To what extent do the findings of natural science point beyond themselves to higher tasks? What is the essence of our cognition? Can this cognition lead to the solution of these higher tasks? Kant had asked such questions in a compelling way. We wanted to see how he had done it in order to take a position on them. People wanted to think through his train of thought with the utmost precision in order to find a way out of their perplexity by continuing his ideas and avoiding his mistakes.

Kirchmann sought the simplest, most sober way out of the confusion. He said: Being as such remains outside; knowledge cannot grasp this being in its original form; it only reflects being in the form of thought. Others did not find the question so easy to deal with. A long line of thinkers struggled to arrive at some conclusion based on Kant's starting points. The most important among them are Hermann Cohen (born 1842), Otto Liebmann (born 1840), Wilhelm Windelband (born 1848), Johannes Volkelt (born 1848), and Benno Erdmann (born 1851). There is much acumen to be found in the writings of these men. A great deal of work has been devoted to investigating the nature and scope of human cognitive ability. However, the lack of intellectual vitality that this entire movement has produced is best illustrated by Johannes Volkelt, who is completely immersed in it, has himself produced a thorough work on “Kant's Theory of Knowledge” (1879), and, drawing on this movement, wrote a book on “Experience and Thought” (1885), in which all the questions that determine this way of thinking are discussed in depth. When Volkelt took up his teaching post in Basel in 1884, he gave a speech in which he proclaimed the complete despondency and fruitlessness of renewed Kantianism as the program of a new worldview. In his view, all thinking that goes beyond the results of the individual factual sciences bears the “restless character of searching and tracing, of trying, rejecting, and conceding; it is a forward movement that nevertheless partially retreats; a yielding that nevertheless reaches a certain degree.” (Volkelt, “On the Possibility of Metaphysics,” Hamburg and Leipzig, 1884) - Otto Liebmann's philosophizing appears even more bleak. This personality certainly does not lack acumen. His writings “On the Analysis of Reality” (1876), “Thoughts and Facts” (1882), “Klimax der Theorien” (1884) are true examples of philosophical criticism. A caustic mind ingeniously uncovers contradictions in the worlds of thought, reveals half-truths in seemingly certain judgments, and thoroughly calculates for the individual sciences what is unsatisfactory about them when their results are brought before the highest tribunal of thought. But Otto Liebmann does not go beyond such decomposition. For example, he calculates the contradictions of Darwinism; he points out its not entirely justified assumptions and gaps in its thinking. He says that there must be something that overcomes the contradictions, fills the gaps, and justifies the assumptions. But he himself finds nothing that is suitable for all these tasks. Liebmann concludes his reflection on the nature of living beings with the words: "The fact that plant seeds do not lose their germination capacity despite lying dry for eons, that, for example, wheat grains found in Egyptian mummy coffins, after having been hermetically buried for thousands of years, thrive excellently when sown in moist fields today; that rotifers and other infusoria, collected completely dried up from the gutter, come back to life and swim around when moistened with rainwater; and that frogs and fish, frozen solid in icy water, regain their lost life when carefully thawed; - this circumstance allows for completely opposite interpretations. ... In short: any categorical denial in this matter would be crude dogmatism. Therefore, we will stop here.“ This ”Therefore, we will stop here" is basically, if not in words, then in spirit, the concluding thought of every Liebmannian consideration. Yes, it is the final result of the whole renewed Kantianism. — The adherents of this school of thought cannot get beyond the fact that they take things into their consciousness, that everything they see, hear, etc. is not outside in the world, but inside themselves; and that they therefore cannot make anything of what is outside. There is a table in front of me, says the neo-Kantian. But no, it only seems that way. Only those who are naive about questions of worldview can say: there is a table outside of me. Those who have shed their naivety say to themselves: something unknown makes an impression on my eye, and this eye and my brain turn this impression into a brown sensation. And because I do not have this brown sensation in a single point, but can let my eye wander over a surface and over four column-like structures, the brownness forms into an object for me, which is precisely the table. And when I touch the table, it resists me. It makes an impression on my sense of touch, which I express by attributing a hardness to the structure created by my eye. So, prompted by some “thing in itself” that I do not know, I have created the table out of myself. The table is my idea. It exists only in my consciousness. Volkelt places this view at the beginning of his book on “Kant's Theory of Knowledge”: "The first fundamental principle that the philosopher must bring to clear consciousness is the realization that our knowledge initially extends to nothing more than our ideas. Our ideas are the only thing we experience directly, experience immediately; and precisely because we experience them directly, even the most radical doubt cannot rob us of our knowledge of them. On the other hand, knowledge that goes beyond my imagination—I use this term here in the broadest sense, so that it encompasses all psychological events—is not protected from doubt. Therefore, at the beginning of philosophizing, all knowledge that goes beyond ideas must be explicitly presented as doubtful." Otto Liebmann even uses this idea to defend the assertion that humans can no more know whether the things they imagine exist outside their consciousness than they can know whether they do exist. "Precisely because no imagining subject can in fact go beyond the sphere of its subjective imagination; precisely because it is never, ever able to grasp and ascertain, by transcending its own consciousness and emancipating itself, what may or may not exist beyond and outside its subjectivity; precisely for this reason, it is absurd to claim that the imagined object does not exist outside the subjective imagination." (O. Liebmann, “Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit” [On the Analysis of Reality], p. 28)

However, both Volkelt and Liebmann endeavor to prove that within his world of ideas, man finds something that is not merely observed or perceived, but is added to what is perceived, and which at least points to the essence of things. Volkelt believes that there is a fact within the realm of imagination itself that points beyond mere imagination to something that lies outside this realm. This fact is that certain ideas impose themselves on humans with logical necessity. "Immediate experience allows us to experience that certain conceptual connections carry with them a highly peculiar compulsion, which is essentially different from all other types of compulsion that accompany ideas. This compulsion forces us not only to think of certain concepts as necessarily belonging together in conscious imagination, but also to assume a corresponding objective necessary belonging together that exists independently of conscious ideas. Furthermore, this compulsion does not force us in such a way that it tells us that if what it prescribes did not take place, our moral satisfaction or our inner happiness, our salvation, etc., would be lost, but rather its compulsion contains the idea that objective being would have to negate itself, lose its possibility of existence, if the opposite of what it prescribes were to exist. The remarkable thing about this compulsion is that the thought that the opposite of the necessity imposed on us should exist immediately reveals itself to us as a demand that reality should rebel against its conditions of existence. As is well known, we refer to this peculiar, immediately experienced compulsion as logical compulsion, as a necessity of thought. The logically necessary reveals itself to us immediately as a statement of the thing itself. And it is the peculiar meaningful significance, the rational illumination that contains everything logical, which testifies with immediate evidence to the factual, real validity of the logical connection of concepts.“ (Volkelt, ”Kant's Theory of Knowledge," p. 208f.) And Otto Liebmann, towards the end of his work “Die Klimax der Theorien” (The Climax of Theories), professes that, in his view, the entire edifice of human knowledge, from the ground floor of observational science to the lofty regions of the highest worldview hypotheses, is permeated by thoughts that point beyond perception, and that the “fragments of perception must first be supplemented, connected, and arranged in a fixed order by means of certain procedures of the intellect, using an extraordinary amount of unobserved material.” But how can one deny human thought the ability to recognize something from within itself, through its own activity, if it must already call upon this activity to help it organize the observed facts of perception? Neo-Kantianism is in a strange position. It wants to remain within consciousness, within the life of the imagination, but must admit that it cannot take a single step within this “inside” that does not lead it out to the left and right.

Nevertheless, although the view that the world of observation is only human imagination must cancel itself out when properly understood, its adherents are numerous. It has been repeated in various shades over the last decades of the century. Ernst Laas (1837-1885) vigorously defends the position that only positive facts of perception may be processed within knowledge. Aloys Riehl (born 1844) explains that, because he starts from the same basic view that there can be no general worldview at all, but that everything that goes beyond the individual sciences must be nothing other than a critique of knowledge. Knowledge is only gained in the individual sciences; philosophy has the task of showing how knowledge is gained and of ensuring that thinking does not interfere with knowledge in any way that cannot be justified by the facts. Richard Wahle takes the most radical approach in his book Das Ganze der Philosophie und ihr Ende (The Whole of Philosophy and Its End, 1894). In the most astute manner imaginable, he separates from knowledge everything that has been added to the “events” of the world by the human mind. In the end, this mind stands there in the sea of passing events, seeing itself in this sea as one such event, and finding nowhere a point of reference to meaningfully explain the events. This mind would have to exert its own power to order the events on its own. But then it is he himself who brings this order into nature. When he says something about the nature of events, he has not taken it from things, but from himself. He could only do this if he conceded that something essential was taking place in his own actions, if he were allowed to assume that what he says also means something for things. According to Wahl's worldview, the spirit must not have this confidence. It must sit idly by and watch what flows around it and within it; and it would deceive itself if it attached any importance to a view it forms about events. "What could the spirit, peering into the world and mulling over questions about the nature and purpose of events, finally find as an answer? It happened to him that, as he stood there seemingly in opposition to the surrounding world, he dissolved and merged with all events in a flight of events. He "no longer knew the world; he said, I am not sure that there are knowers, but events are there per se. They come, of course, in such a way that the concept of knowledge could arise prematurely, unjustifiably ... And "concepts flashed up to shed light on the events, but they were will-o'-the-wisps, souls of the desire for knowledge, pitiful, in their evidence meaningless postulates of an unfulfilled form of knowledge. Unknown factors must prevail in alternation. Their nature was shrouded in darkness. Events are the veil of truth...“ Wahle concludes his book, which is intended to present the ‘legacies’ of philosophy to the individual sciences, theology, physiology, aesthetics, and state pedagogy, with the words: ”May the time come when people will say, once upon a time there was philosophy."

Wahle's book is one of the most significant symptoms of the development of worldviews in the nineteenth century. The distrust of knowledge that began with Kant ends with the complete bankruptcy of all worldviews. How right Hegel was when he said that thinking about the capacity for knowledge in Kant's sense is like trying to learn to swim without going into the water. One can only gain clarity about knowledge if one really decides to approach the things of this world boldly, if one first allows one's thinking power to take on what the world offers us. Those who criticize the capacity for knowledge and the scope of knowledge without plunging into the flow of real cognition are engaging in an activity with unsuitable means. For even what cognition means can only be seen through cognition. So, you also have to bring trust in cognition to the idea of cognition. Having this trust is the first requirement of a worldview. How to attain it, what it is based on, knowing this is as far removed from neo-Kantianism as possible.