Transcendentalism in New England: A HistoryFrothingham, Octavius Brooks
Philosophy
Transcendentalism in New England: A History
Frothingham, Octavius Brooks
Transcendentalism (New England)
process, so that, at last, the result is looked for there, and there
only. The validity of intuition is disallowed."
Jacobi's polemics were directed therefore against the systems of
Spinoza, Leibnitz, Wolf--in a word against all systems that led to
scepticism and dogmatism; and his positive efforts were employed in
constructing a system of Faith. His key-word was "Faith," by which he
meant intuition, the power of gazing immediately on essential truth; an
intellectual faculty which he finally called Reason, by which
supersensual objects become visible, as material objects become visible
to the physical eye; an inward sense, a spiritual eye, that "gives
evidence of things not seen and substance to things hoped for;" a
faculty of vision to which truths respecting God, Providence,
Immortality, Freedom, the Moral Law, are palpably disclosed. Kant had
pronounced it impossible to prove that the transcendental idea had a
corresponding reality as objective being. Jacobi declared that no such
proof was needed; that the reality was necessarily assumed. Kant had
denied the existence of any faculty that could guarantee the existence
of either a sensual or a supersensual world. Jacobi was above all else
certain that such a faculty there was, that it was altogether
trustworthy, and that it actually furnished material for religious hope
and spiritual life: the only possible material, he went on to say; for
without this capacity of intuition, philosophy could be in his judgment
nothing but an insubstantial fabric, a castle in the air, a thing of
definitions and terminologies, a shifting body of hot and cold vapor.
This, it will be observed, seemed a legitimate consequence of Kant's
method. Kant had admitted the subjective reality of sensible
impressions, and had claimed a similar reality for our mental images of
supersensible things. He allowed the validity _as conceptions_, the
practical validity, of the ideas of God, Duty, Immortality. Jacobi
contended that having gone so far, it was lawful if not compulsory to go
farther; that the subjective reality implied an objective reality; that
the practical inference was as valid as any logical inference could be;
and that through the intuition of reason the mind was placed again in a
living universe of divine realities.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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