59^- THE H EG ELIAN LEFT. also, and Zellcr and Fischer strive back toward Kant, Johannes Volkelt * in Wiirzburg (born 1848), who started from Hegel and advanced through Schopenhauer and Hart- mann, has of late years established an independent noetical position and has done good service by his energetic oppo- sition to positivism {Das Denken als Hulfvorstellungs — TJidtigkeit tmd als Anpassungsvorgang in the Zeitschrift fur Philosophic, vols, xcvi., xcvii., 1889-90). The leaders of the Hegelian left require more detailed consideration. In David Friedrich Strauss f (1808-74, born and died at Ludwigsburg) the philosophy of religion becomes a historical criticism of the Bible and of dog- matics. The biblical narratives are, in great part, not his- tory (this has been the common error alike of the super- naturalistic and of the rationalistic interpreters), but myths, that is, suprasensible facts presented in the form of history and in symbolic language. It is evident from the contradic- tions in the narratives and the impossibility of miracles that we are not here concerned with actual events. The myths possess (speculative, absolute) truth, but no (historical) reality. They are unintentional creations of the popular imagination ; the spirit of the community speaks in the authors of the Gospels, using the historical factor (the life- history of Jesus) with mythical embellishments as an investi- ture for a supra-historical, eternal truth (the speculative Idea of incarnation). The God become man, in which the infinite and the finite, the divine nature and the human, are united, is the human race. The Idea of incarnation mani- fests itself in a multitude of examples which supplement one another, instead of pouring forth its whole fullness in a single one. The (real) Idea of the race is to be substituted
- Volkelt : The Phantasy in Dreams, 1875 ; Kant's Theory of Knowledge,
1879 ; On the Possibility of Metaphysics, inaugural address at Basle. 1884 ; Ex- perience and Thought, Critical Foundation of the Theory of Knowledge, 1886 ; Lectures Introductory to the Philosophy of the Present Time (delivered in Frank- fort-on-the-Main), 1892. t Strauss: The Life of Jesus, 1835-36, 4th ed., 1840 [English translation by George Eliot, 2d. ed., 1893] ; the same "for the German People," 1864 [English translation, 1865]; Christian Dogmatics, 1840-4I ; Voltaire, 1870; Collected Writings, 12 vols., edited by Zeller, 1876-78. On Strauss cf. Zeller, 1874 [English, 1874], and Hausrath. 1876-78.
