al truths are the Trinity (signifying that God
differentiates and sublates the difference in love), the incarnation (as a
figure of the essential unity of the infinite and finite spirit), the fall,
and Christ's atoning death (this signifies that the realization of the
unity between man and God presupposes the overcoming of naturality and
selfishness).

(3) _Philosophy_.--Finally the task remains of clothing the absolute
content given in religion in the form adequate to it, in the form of the
concept. In philosophy absolute spirit attains the highest stage, its
perfect self-knowledge. It is the self-thinking Idea.

Here we must not look for further detailed explanations: philosophy is
just the course which has been traversed. Its systematic exposition is
encyclopaedia; the consideration of its own actualization, the history
of philosophy, which, as a "philosophical" discipline, has to show the
conformity to law and the rationality of this historical development, to
show the more than mere succession, the genetic succession, of systems,
as well as their connection with the history of culture. Each system
is the product and expression of its time, and as the self-reflection
of each successive stage in culture cannot appear before this has reached
its maturity and is about to be overcome. Not until the approach of the
twilight does the owl of Minerva begin its flight.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE OPPOSITION TO CONSTRUCTIVE IDEALISM: FRIES, HERBART, SCHOPENHAUER.

In Fries, Herbart, and Schopenhauer a threefold opposition was raised
against the idealistic school represented by Fichte, Schelling, and
Hegel. The opposition of Fries is aimed at the method of the constructive
philosophers, that of Herbart against their ontological positions, and that
of Schopenhauer against their estimate of the value of existence. Fries
and Beneke declare that a speculative knowledge of the suprasensible is
impossible, and seek to base philosophy on empirical psychology; to the
monism (panlogism) of the idealists Herbart opposes a pluralism, to their
philosophy of becoming, a philosophy of being; Schopenhauer rejects their
optimism, denying rationality to the world and the world-ground. Among
themselves the thinkers of the opposition have little more in common than
their claim to a better understanding of the Kantian philosophy, and a
development of it more in harmony with the meaning of its author, than it
had experienced at the hands of the ide