h Thomas Aquinas, with Eckhart,
with Paracelsus, above all, with Jacob Boehme, and Boehme's follower Louis
Claude St. Martin (1743-1804), but does not overlook the value of the
modern German philosophy. With Kant he begins the inquiry with the problem
of knowledge; with Fichte he finds in self-consciousness the essence,
and not merely a property, of spirit; with Hegel he looks on God or
the absolute spirit not only as the object, but also as the subject
of knowledge. He rejects, however, the autonomy of the will and the
spontaneity of thought; and though he criticises the Cartesian separation
between the thought of the creator and that of the creature, he as little
approves the pantheistic identification of the two--human cognition
participates in the divine, without constituting a part of it.

[Footnote 1: Besides Hoffman, Lutterbeck and Hamberger have described and
expounded Baader's system. See also Baumann's paper in the _Philosophische
Monatshefte_, vol. xiv., 1878, p. 321 _seq_.]

In accordance with its three principal objects, "God, Nature, and Man,"
philosophy divides into fundamental science (logic or the theory of
knowledge and theology), the philosophy of nature (cosmology or the
theory of creation and physics), and the philosophy of spirit (ethics and
sociology). In all its parts it must receive religious treatment. Without
God we cannot know God. In our cognition of God he is at once knower
and known; our being and all being is a being known by him; our
self-consciousness is a consciousness of being known by God: _cogitor, ergo
cogito et sum_; my being and thinking are based on my being thought by
God. Conscience is a joint knowing with God's knowing (_conscientia_).
The relation between the known and the knower is threefold. Cognition is
incomplete and lacks the free co-operation of the knower when God merely
pervades (_durchwohnt_) the creature, as is the case with the devil's
timorous and reluctant knowledge of God. A higher stage is reached when the
known is present to the knower and dwells with him (_beiwohnt_). Cognition
becomes really free and perfect when God dwells in (_inwohnt_) the
creature, in which case the finite reason yields itself freely and in
admiration to the divine reason, lets the latter speak in itself, and
feels its rule, not as foreign, but as its own. (Baader maintains a like
threefoldness in the practical sphere: the creature is either the object
or, rather, the passive recipient,