Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843Various
General
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
excluded or subordinated; but in a living experience. To know philosophy,
therefore, first know life. To learn to philosophize, learn to live; and
live not partially, but with the full outspread vitality of human reason.
You go to college, and, as if you were made altogether of head, expect
some Peter Abelard forthwith, by academic disputation, to _reason_ you
into manhood; but neither manhood nor any vital WHOLE ever was learned by
reasoning. Pray, therefore, to the Author of all good, in the first place,
that you may _be_ something rather than that you may _know_ something. Get
yourself planted in God's garden, and learn to GROW. Woo the sun of life,
which is love, and the breeze which is enthusiasm, an impulse from that
same creative Spirit, which, brooding upon the primeval waters, out of
void brought fulness, and out of chaos a world.
[Footnote E: This is Menzel's phrase, not Schlegel's. "Hegel's _centrum war
ein blos denkendes, auf öder Heide spekulirendes, kleines, suffisantes,
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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