wise brings one closer to nature. He regards the countryfolk as really constituting the nation and looks with grave apprehension on the strong drift from the country to the city.
B. The German Philosophy of the Enlightenment
and Lessing
1. Christian Wolff (1679–1754) was the first to give a detailed exposition of modern philosophy in the German language. He popularized the philosophy of Leibnitz. The wide range of his systematic writings drove scholasticism out of the advanced schools of Germany. However, it was not metaphysical idealism and the doctrine of monads that was prominent in his system, but the theologically more acceptable theory of preëstablished harmony. But even this doctrine made him a martyr. King Frederick William I dismissed him from his professorship at Halle on account of his apparent fatalism, and even drove him into exile on the short notice of forty-eight hours. He went to Marburg, but was recalled to Halle during'the first year of Frederick II.—His Vernünftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt, der Seele der Menschen, auch allen Dingen Überhaupt (1719) contains a general outline of his philosophy. His attempt to derive the principle of sufficient reason from the principle of contradiction—because he thinks that origin from nothing involves a contradiction—brings the dogmatico-rationalistic philosophy to its culmination in him. Many of his disciples nevertheless tried to accord due recognition to experience. This led to a combination of the Lockian and Wolffian philosophies in a more or less eclectic fashion. They were especially disposed to place great emphasis on empirical psychology (in which indeed Wolff himself was a famous
