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philosopher--namely, the value of religiousness and of piety--he rather
belongs to the second and third of the before-mentioned groups.

Carneri, in his "Three Books of Ethics," gives us a whole philosophic
encyclopedia. In thoughts sometimes rich, but without regularly arranged
and quiet reasoning, and in full command and employment of modern terms
which he uses sometimes like a genius, but often superficially and
unjustly, he develops a view of the world which, although it appears in an
independent way {204} in all its fundamentals, as regards its contents
takes its origin from Spinoza, and as regards form and dialectics from
Hegel, but sometimes, it is true, sinks into weaknesses of which these
philosophers would hardly have been guilty. So, for instance, when he
simply identifies religious faith with conjecture, he takes a superficial
view which he has in common with Haeckel who, among other things, repeatedly
says that faith begins where knowledge ceases. Dialectical motion is
everything to him. In pursuing this dialectical motion, he gives us a
multitude of outlooks into all imaginable realms of knowledge and life, but
he always follows at the same time the formula of dialectical motion, and,
where the difficulties of the real world are most invincibly opposed to
this dialectics, knows, like his master, with almost chivalric ease, to
mingle and confound abstract formalistic reasoning and thoughts naturally
following from the given thought. Want of clearness in general makes the
reading of this otherwise not unimportant book very difficult. On a
Darwinian foundation in his conception of nature and its development, he
puts a Hegelian structure into his conception of human spiritual life, but
finally lets mankind, although it is the highest form of appearance in this
development, sink back into death and destruction.

The God of this view of the world is the causal law; the conception of this
causal law is the worship of the philosopher--a God, of course, so
incapable of filling and quieting a mind longing for God--a worship so
leathern that Carneri himself cannot get rid of the opinion that, with such
religious ideas of reform, he will finally lose the last reader of his
book. The aim of the {205} development, also, does not promise to the mind
any substitute for the rigidness of God, for the aim of the development is
death--the death of the individual as well as of the universe. "He who has
learned to get comfort