Philosophical System.—Schleiermacher maintained that the world and God are distinct, but correlative, and neither can be conceived without the other. The world without God would be "chaos," and God without the world an empty "phantasm." But though God is transcendent and unknowable he is immanent in the world. In self-consciousness God is present as the basis of the unity of our nature in every transition from an act of knowledge to an act of will, and vice versa. As far as man is the unity of the real and the ideal, God is in him. He is also in all things, inasmuch as in everything the totality of the world and its tran scendental basis is presupposed by virtue of their being and cor relation. The unity of our personal life amidst the multiplicity of its functions is the symbol of God's immanence in the world, though we may not conceive of the Absolute as a person. Though H e may not be conceived as the absolute cause of the world, the idea of absolute causality as symbolized in it may be taken as, the best approximate expression of the contents of the religious con sciousness. The unbroken connection of cause and effect through out the world becomes thus a manifestation of God. God is to be sought in ourselves and in the world. He is completely im manent in the universe. It is impossible that His causality should have any other sphere than the world, which is the totality of being. "No God without a world, and no world without God." The divine omnipotence is quantitatively represented by the sum of the forces of nature, and qualitatively distinguished from them only as the unity of infinite causality from the multiplicity of its finite phenomena. Throughout the world—not excepting the realm of mind—absolute necessity prevails. As a whole the world is as good and perfect as a world could possibly be, evil being only the necessary limitation of individual being.
Ethics.—In his earlier essays Schleiermacher pointed out the defects of ancient and modern ethical thinkers, particularly of Kant and Fichte, favourirtg only Plato and Spinoza. His own ethics connects the moral world by a deductive process with the fundamental idea of knowledge and being ; it offers a view of the entire world of human action ; it presents an arrangement of the matter of the science which tabulates its constituents after the model of the physical sciences ; and it supplies a sharply defined treatment of specific moral phenomena in their relation to the fundamental idea of human life as a whole. Schleiermacher defines ethics as the theory of the nature of the reason, or as the scientific treatment of the effects produced by human reason in the world of nature and man. The ontological basis of ethics is the unity of the real and the ideal, and the psychological and actual basis of the ethical process is the tendency of reason and nature to unite in the form of the complete organization of the latter by the former. The end of the ethical process is that corporeal nature may become the perfect symbol and organ of mind. Conscience, as the subjective expression of the presupposed identity of reason and nature in their bases, guarantees the practicability of our moral vocation. Nature is preordained or constituted to become the symbol and organ of mind, just as mind is endowed with the impulse to realize this end. But the moral law must not be con ceived under the form of an "imperative"; it differs from a law of nature only as being descriptive of the fact that it ranks the mind as conscious will above nature. Strictly speaking, the anti theses of good and bad and of free and necessary have no place in an ethical system, but simply in history, which is obliged to corn pare the actual with the ideal; but as far as the terms "good" and "bad" are used in morals they express the rule or the contrary of reason, or the harmony of the contrary of the particular and the general. The idea of "free" as opposed to necessary expresses simply the fact that the mind can propose to itself ends, though a man cannot alter his own nature. In contrast to Kant and Fichte and modern moral philosophers Schleiermacher assigned pre-eminent importance to the doctrine of the summum bonum, or highest good. It represents in his system the aim of the entire life of man, supplying the ethical view of the conduct of indi viduals in relation to society and the universe, and therewith constituting a philosophy of history at the same time. Moral functions cannot be performed by the individual in isolation but only in relation to the family, the state, the school, the church, and society—all forms of human life which ethical science finds to its hand and leaves to the science of natural history to account for. Duties are divided with reference to the principle that every man make his own the entire moral problem and act at the same time in an existing moral society. This condition gives four gen eral classes of duty : duties of general association or duties with reference to the community (Rechtspflicht), and duties of voca tion (Berufspflicht)—both with a universal reference, duties of the conscience (in which the individual is sole judge), and duties of love or of personal association. It was only the first of the
three sections of the science of ethics—the doctrine of moral ends —that Schleiermacher handled with approximate completeness. In his Christian Ethics he dealt with the subject from the basis of the Christian consciousness instead of from that of reason gen erally ; the ethical phenomena dealt with are the same in both systems, and they throw light on each other, while the Christian system treats more at length and less aphoristically the principal ethical realities—church, state, family, art, science and society.
Religious System.—From Leibniz, Lessing, Fichte, Jacobi and the Romantic school Schleiermacher had imbibed a profound mystical view of human personality. The ego, the person, is an individualization of universal reason; and the primary act of self consciousness is the first conjunction of universal and individual life. Thus every person becomes a specific and original repre sentation of the universe. While therefore we cannot, as we have seen, attain the idea of the supreme unity of thought and being by either cognition or volition, we can find it in our own personality, in immediate self-consciousness or (which is the same in Schleier macher's terminology) feeling. Feeling in this higher sense (as distinguished from "organic" sensibility), which is the minimum of distinct antithetic consciousness, the cessation of the antithesis of subject and object, constitutes likewise the unity of our being, in which the opposite functions of cognition and volition have their permanent background of personality and their transitional link. Having its seat in this central point of our being, or indeed consist ing in the essential fact of self-consciousness, religion lies at the basis of all thought and action. In his earlier days he called it a feeling or intuition of the universe, consciousness of the unity of reason and nature, of the infinite and the eternal within the finite and the temporal. In later life he described it as the feeling of absolute dependence, or, as meaning the same thing, the conscious ness of being in relation to God. As in every affection of our being by individual phenomena we are brought into contact with the whole universe, we are brought into contact with God at the same time as its transcendental cause. This religious feeling is not know ledge in the strict sense, as it is purely subjective or immediate ; but it lies at the basis of all knowledge. The so-called natural as distinguished from positive religion, or the religion of reason, is a mere abstraction. All religions are positive, or their characteristics and value are mainly determined by the manner in which the world is conceived. But these varying conceptions with their religious meaning become religiously productive only in the souls of re ligious heroes, who are the authors of new religions, mediators of the religious life, founders of religious communities. For religion is essentially social, and everywhere forms churches, the necessary organs of its highest life. The specific feature of Christianity is its mediatorial element, its profound feeling of the striving of the finite individual to reach the unity of the infinite whole, and its conception of the way in which Deity deals with this effort by mediatorial agencies, which are both divine and human. Its ad herents are conscious of having been delivered by Christ from a condition in which their religious consciousness was overridden by the sense-consciousness of the world and put into one in which everything is subordinated to it. The mediator is now the Chris tian church, but in the case of Jesus, its originator, it was an entirely new and original factor in the process of religious develop ment, and in so far, like every new and higher stage of being, a supernatural revelation. The appearance of the Saviour in human history is therefore as a divine revelation neither absolutely supernatural nor absolutely beyond reason, and the controversy of the i8th century between the rationalists and supernaturalists rests on false grounds, leads to wrong issues, and each party is right and wrong (see RATIONALISM). As regards Christian theol ogy, it is not its business to establish a system of objective truth, but simply to present in a clear connected form a given body of Christian faith as the contents of the Christian consciousness. Dogmatic theology is a connected accurate account of the doctrine held at a particular time in a given section of the Christian church. But such doctrines as constitute no integral part of the Christian consciousness—e.g., the doctrine of the Trinity—must be ex cluded from the theological system of the evangelical theologian. As regards the relation of theology and philosophy, it is not one of dependence or of opposition, but of complete independence, equal authority, distinct functions and perfect harmsony.