lligibility and agreeableness were made the prime requisites;
the style became light and flowing, the method of treatment facile and
often superficial. This is true not only of the popular philosophers
proper--who, as Windelband pertinently remarks (vol. i. p. 563), did not
seek after the truth, but believed that they already possessed it, and
desired only to disseminate it; who did not aim at the promotion of
investigation, but the instruction of the public--but to a certain extent,
also, of those who were conscious of laboring in the service of science.
Among the representatives of the more polite tendency belong, Moses
Mendelssohn[2] (1729-86); Thomas Abbt (_On Death for the Fatherland_, 1761;
_On Merit_, 1765); J.J. Engel (_The philosopher for the World_, 1775); G.S.
Steinbart (_The Christian Doctrine of Happiness_, 1778); Ernst Platner
(_Philosophical Aphorisms_, 1776, 1782; on Platner cf. M. Heinze, 1880);
G.C. Lichtenberg (died 1799; _Miscellaneous Writings_, 1800 _seq_.; a
selection is given in _Reclam's Bibliothek_); Christian Garve (died 1798;
_Essays_, 1792 _seq.; Translations from the Ethical Works of Aristotle,
Cicero, and Ferguson_); and Friedrich Nicolai[3] (died 1811). Eberhard,
Feder, and Meiners will be mentioned later among the opponents of the
Kantian philosophy.
[Footnote 1: The influence of the English philosophers on the German
philosophy of the eighteenth century is discussed by Gustav Zart, 1881.]
[Footnote 2: Mendelssohn: _Letters on the Sensations_, 1755; _On Evidence
in the Metaphysical Sciences_, a prize essay crowned by the Academy, 1764;
_Phaedo, or on Immortality_, 1767; _Jerusalem_, 1783; _Morning Hours, or on
the Existence of God_, 1785; _To the Friends of Lessing_ (against Jacobi),
1786; _Works_, 1843-44. Cf. on Mendelssohn, Kayserling, 1856, 1862, 1883.]
[Footnote 3: Nicolai: _Library of Belles Lettres_, from 1757; _Letters on
the Most Recent German Literature_, from 1759; _Universal German Library_,
from 1765; _New Universal German Library_, 1793-1805.]
Among the psychologists J.N. Tetens, whose _Philosophical Essays on Human
Nature_, 1776-77, show a remarkable similarity to the views of Kant,[1]
takes the first rank. The two thinkers evidently influenced each other. The
three fold division of the activities of the soul, "knowing, feeling,
and willing," which has now become popular and which appears to us
self-evident, is to be referred to Tetens, from whom Kant took it; in
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