antiquity had assigned to it, to supply from scientific insight a foundation for a theory of the world and of human life, where religion was no longer able to meet this need, or at least to meet it alone. In the conviction that it was equal to this task, the philosophy of the eighteenth century, like that of the Greeks, considered it its right and duty to enlighten men with regard to the nature of things, and from this position of insight to rule the life of the individual and of society.
In this position of self-security philosophy was shaken by Kant, who demonstrated the impossibility of a philosophical (i.e. metaphysical) knowledge of the world beside of or above the individual sciences, and thereby restricted once more the conception and the task of philosophy; for after this quitclaim the realm of philosophy, as a particular science, was narrowed to just that critical consideration by Reason of itself, from which Kant had won his decisive insight, and which needed only to be extended systematically to activities other than that of knowing. With this function, could be united what Kant[1] called the universal or cosmical conception of philosophy,—its vocation in the practical direction of life.
It is, to be sure, far from true that this new and apparently final conception of philosophy gained universal acceptance at once. It is rather the case that the great variety of philosophical movements of the nineteenth century has left no earlier form of philosophy unrepeated, and that a luxuriant development of the "metaphysical need"[2] even brought back, for a time, the inclination to swallow up all human knowledge in philosophy, and complete this again as an all-embracing science.
2. In view of these mutations through which the meaning of the word "philosophy" has passed in the course of time, it seems impracticable to pretend to gain a general conception of philosophy from historical comparison. None of those brought forward for this purpose[3] apply to all those structures of mental activity which lay claim to the name. Even the subordination of philosophy under the more general conception "science" is questionable in the case of those types of teaching which place a one-sided emphasis on the
- ↑ Critique of Pure Reason, A. 839; B 866.
- ↑ Schopenhauer, World as Will and Idea, Vol. II, ch. 17.
- ↑ Instead of criticising particular conceptions it is sufficient here to point to the widely diverging formulas in which the attempt has been made to perform this impossible task cf, for example 1 , only the introduction to works such as those of Erdmann, Ueberweg, Kuno Fischer, Zeller, etc. All these conceptions thus determined apply only in so far as the history of philosophy has yielded the result which they express, but they do not apply with reference to the intentions expressed by the philosophers themselves.
