We owe the word and the concept of _feeling_ (_Gefühl_ and sometimes also _Empfindung_) principally to the Leibnitzian-Wolfians and to the German thinkers under the influence of Wolff (Mendelssohn, Tetens, Sulzer, Riedel). [Sidenote: _Jacobi and Schleiermacher._] By means of the speculation of Jacobi, on the other hand, feeling was called upon to fulfil the functions of a true and proper metaphysical organ. He had demonstrated in a rigorous and irrefutable manner that the form of the empirical sciences and of the abstract intellect, since it proceeds by nexus of cause and effect, is incapable of attaining to the infinite, and had assigned the affirmation of God to the "sense of the supersensible," to "immediate knowledge," and to "feeling." After Jacobi, the same position was assumed by Schleiermacher, who maintained that it was impossible to know God by means of the intellect and to treat Him as an object, since He is indifference of thought and being. He can be known only by feeling, which is indifference of all determinate functions of ideal and real, of thought and being. The neocriticists and agnostics of to-day, with their appeal to feeling in all truly philosophical questions, are followers, often unconscious and certainly less coherent, of Jacobi and Schleiermacher. The concept of feeling in the Kantian philosophy can be said to derive its importance from the meeting of two unsatisfied wants, namely, that which sought a concept for the æsthetic activity and that which sought a _forma mentis_ proper to philosophy. Indeed, the _Critique of Judgment_ corresponds to feeling, the first part of which consists of an inquiry into the nature of the beautiful and of art. The second part (critique of the theological judgment) is an anticipation of the _concrete concept,_ or of that organ of speculative thought which the _Critique of Pure Reason_ had not discovered. [Sidenote: _Hegel._]