History of Modern Philosophy: From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present TimeFalckenberg, Richard
Philosophy
History of Modern Philosophy: From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time
Falckenberg, Richard
Philosophy, Modern -- History
and country that lofty morality which he alone taught and exemplified?
Things of this sort are not invented. The inventor of such deeds would
be more wonderful than the doer of them. Thus again, in the question of
revealed religion, the voice of the heart triumphs over the doubts of the
reason, as, in the question of natural religion, it had done over the
objections of opponents. It is true, however, that this enthusiasm is
paid not to the current Christianity of the priests, but to I the real
Christianity of the gospel.
Rousseau was the conscience of France, which rebelled against the negations
and the bald emptiness of the materialistic and atheistic doctrines. By
vindicating with fervid eloquence the participation of the whole man in
the highest questions, in opposition to the one-sided illumination of the
understanding, he became a pre-Kantian defender of the faith of practical
reason. His emphatic summons aroused a loud and lasting echo, especially in
Germany, in the hearts of Goethe, Kant, and Fichte.
CHAPTER VII.
LEIBNITZ.
In the contemporaries Spinoza and Locke, the two schools of modern
philosophy, the Continental, starting from Descartes, and the English,
which followed Bacon, had reached the extreme of divergence and opposition,
Spinoza was a rationalistic pantheist, Locke, an empirical individualist.
With Leibnitz a twofold approximation begins. As a rationalist he sides
with Spinoza against Locke, as an individualist with Locke against Spinoza.
But he not only separated rationalism from pantheism, but also qualified
it by the recognition (which his historical tendencies had of themselves
suggested to him) of a relative justification for empiricism, since he
distinguished the factual truths of experience from the necessary truths of
reason, gave to the former a noëtical principle of their own, the principle
of sufficient reason, and made sensation an indispensable step to thought.
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