xtreme form by B. Hoeijer (died 1812), a
contemporary and admirer of Fichte, who defended the right of philosophical
construction, and more moderately by Christofer Jacob Boestrom (1797-1866),
the most important systematic thinker of his country. As predecessors of
Boestrom we may mention Biberg (died 1827), E.G. Geijer (died 1846), and S.
Grubbe (died 1853), like him professors in Upsala, and of his pupils,
S. Ribbing, known in Germany by his peculiar conception of the Platonic
doctrine of ideas (German translation, 1863-64), the moralist Sahlin
(1877), the historian, of Swedish philosophy[1] (1873 seq.) A. Nyblaeus of
Lund, and H. Edfeldt of Upsala, the editor of Boestrom's works (1883).

[Footnote 1: Cf. Hoeffding, _Die Philosophie in Schweden_ in the
_Philosophische Monatshefte_, vol. xv. 1879, p. 193 seq.]

Boestrom's philosophy is a system of self-activity and personalism which
recalls Leibnitz and Krause. The absolute or being is characterized as a
concrete, systematically articulated, self-conscious unity, which dwells
with its entire content in each of its moments, and whose members both bear
the character of the whole and are immanent in one another, standing in
relations of organic inter-determination. The antithesis between unity and
plurality is only apparent, present only for the divisive view of finite
consciousness. God is infinite, fully determinate personality (for
determination is not limitation), a system of self-dependent living beings,
differing in degree, in which we, as to our true being, are eternally and
unchangeably contained. Every being is a definite, eternal, and living
thought of God; thinking beings with their states and activities alone
exist; all that is real is spiritual, personal. Besides this true,
suprasensible world of Ideas, which is elevated above space, time, motion,
change, and development, and which has not arisen by creation or a process
of production, there exists for man, but only for him--man is formally
perfect, it is true, but materially imperfect (since he represents the real
from a limited standpoint)--a sensuous world of phenomena as the sphere of
his activity. To this he himself belongs, and in it he is spontaneously to
develop the suprasensible content which is eternally given him (i.e., his
true nature), namely, to raise it from the merely potential condition of
obscure presentiment to clear, conscious actuality. Freedom is the power
to overcome our imperfection by