Note 271 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

1. The philosophy of Kant, while giving the theological class a new apparatus of defence as against common-sense freethinking, forced none the less on theistic philosophy a great advance from the orthodox positions. Thus his immediate successors, Fichte and Schelling, produced systems of which one was loudly denounced as atheistic, and the other as pantheistic,271 despite its dualism. Neither seems to have had much influence on concrete religious opinion outside the universities;272 and when Schelling in old age turned Catholic obscurantist, the gain to clericalism was not great. Hegel in turn loosely wrought out a system of which the great merit is to substitute the conception of existence as relation for the nihilistic idealism of Fichte and the unsolved dualism of Schelling. This system he latterly adapted to practical exigencies273 by formulating, as Kant had recently done, a philosophic Trinity and hardily defining Christianity as “Absolute Religion” in comparison with the various forms of “Natural Religion.” Nevertheless, he counted in a great degree as a disintegrating influence, and was in a very practical way anti-Christian. More explicitly than Kant, he admitted that the Aufklärung, the freethinking movement of the past generation, had made good its case so far as it went; and though, by the admission of admirers, he took for granted without justification that it had carried its point with the world at large,274 he was chronically at strife with the theologians as such, charging them on the one hand with deserting the dogmas which he re-stated,275 and on the other declaring that the common run of them “know as little of God as a blind man sees of a painting, even though he handles the frame.”276 Of the belief in miracles he was simply contemptuous. “Whether at the marriage of Cana the guests got a little more wine or a little less is a matter of absolutely no importance; nor is it any more essential to demand whether the man with the withered hand was healed; for millions of men go about with withered and crippled limbs, whose limbs no man heals.” On the story of the marks made for the information of the angel on the Hebrew houses at the Passover he asks: “Would the angel not have known them without these marks?”, adding: “This faith has no real interest for Spirit.”277 Such writing, from the orthodox point of view, was not compensated for by a philosophy of Christianity which denaturalized its dogmas, and a presentment of the God-idea and of moral law which made religion alternately a phase of philosophy and a form of political utilitarianism.