hine own understanding, become a man, cease
to trust thyself to the guidance of others, and free thyself in all fields
from the yoke of authority," and, although besides such formal injunctions
to freedom of thought, he also shares in certain material tendencies and
convictions (the turning from the world to man, the attempt at a synthesis
of reason and experience, and the belief in a religion of reason); yet in
method and results, he stands like a giant among a race of dwarfs, like one
instructed, who judges from principles, among men of opinion, who merely
stick results together, a methodical systematizer among well-meaning but
impotent eclectics. The philosophy of the Illumination is related to
that of Kant as argument to science, as halting mediation to principiant
resolution, as patchwork to creation out of full resources, yet at the same
time as wish to deed and as negative preparation to positive achievement.
It was undeniably of great value to the Kantian criticism that the
Illumination had created a point of intersection for the various tendencies
of thought, and had brought about the approximation and mutual contact of
the opposing systems which then existed, while, at the same time, it had
crumbled them to pieces, and thus awakened the need for a new, more firmly
and more deeply founded system.

%4. The Faith Philosophy.%

The philosophers of feeling or faith stand in the same relation to the
German Illumination as Rousseau to the French. Here also the rights of
feeling are vindicated against those of the knowing reason. Among the
distinguished representatives of this anti-rationalistic tendency Hamann
led the way, Herder was the most prolific, and Jacobi the clearest. That
the fountain of certitude is to be sought not in discriminating thought,
but in intuition, experience, revelation, and tradition; that the highest
truths can be felt only and not proved; that all existing things are
incomprehensible, because individual--these are convictions which, before
Jacobi defended them as based on scientific principles, had been vehemently
proclaimed by that singular man, J.G. Hamann (died 1788) of Koenigsberg.
From an unprinted review by Hamann, Herder drew the objections which his
"Metacritique" raises against Kant's Critique of Reason--that the division
of matter and form, of sensibility and understanding, is inadmissible;
that Kant misunderstood the significance of language, which is just where
sensibility and