raordinarius and
in 1860 ordinaries. In 1864 he was called to Goettingen. In 1874 he
became consistorialrath in the new Prussian establishment for the
Hanoverian Church. He died in 1888. These are the simple outward facts
of a somewhat stormy professional career. There was pietistic influence
in Ritschl's ancestry, as also in Schleiermacher's. Ritschl had,
however, reacted violently against it. His attitude was that of
repudiation of everything mystical. He had strong aversion to the type
of piety which rested its assurance solely upon inward experience. This
aversion is one root of the historic positivism which makes him, at the
last, assert the worthlessness of all supposed revelations outside of
the Bible and of all supposed Christian experience apart from the
influence of the historical Christ. He began his career under the
influence of Hegel. He came to the position in which he felt that the
sole hope for theology was in the elimination from it of all
metaphysical elements. He felt that none of his predecessors had carried
out Schleiermacher's dictum, that religion is not thought, but religious
thought only one of the functions of religion. Yet, of course, he was
not able to discuss fundamental theological questions without
philosophical basis, particularly an explicit theory of knowledge. His
theory of knowledge he had derived eclectically and somewhat
eccentrically, from Lotze and Kant. To this day not all, either of his
friends or foes, are quite certain what it was. It is open to doubt
whether Ritschl really arrived at his theory of cognition and then made
it one of the bases of his theology. It is conceivable that he made his
theology and then propounded his theory of cognition in its defence. In
a word, the basis of distinction between religious and scientific
knowledge is not to be sought in its object. It is to be found in the
sphere of the subject, in the difference of attitude of the subject
toward the object. Religion is concerned with what he calls
_Werthurtheile_, judgments of value, considerations of our relation to
the world, which are of moment solely in accordance with their value in
awakening feelings of pleasure or of pain. The thought of God, for
example, must be treated solely as a judgment of value. It is a
conception which is of worth for the attainment of good, for our
spiritual peace and victory over the world. What God is in himself we
cannot know, an existential Judgment we cannot form wit