absolute spirit, the supreme life, in which all finite lives have both their beginning and their end, the mover and master of all nature, the principle of all justice and love.
HISTORICAL.
Platner (1744-1818), Professor of Medicine and Philosophy in Leipsic, has been represented by Buhle and Zeller as a disciple of Leibniz. S. finds that this was indeed his attitude in the first edition (1776 and 1782) of the Philosophical Aphorisms. He defines metaphysics in this edition as "the study of the predicates which belong to real things, and the investigation of the true intellectual world by means of the fundamental conceptions of the possible and necessary." He held the Leibnizian doctrine of innate ideas and distinguished these from the ideas of sense, which he regarded as arising from the relation of the mind to outside things. The second edition (1784), however, already showed the influence of Kant's Kritik. According to this edition the chief problems of philosophy are: (1) What is the innermost essence of the world, or the only possible ground of our ideas of real things? (2) What is the only possible ground of our idea of the connection of cause and effect in so far as the world appears as a series in time? (3) What is the only possible ground of what we recognize as perfection and evil in the world? It was already clear to Platner that the principles of reason, as they manifest themselves to us in our theoretical thinking, cannot lead to knowledge of things in themselves. He confines himself in his investigations to our circle of ideas and the grounds of their connection. The third edition of the Aphorisms has undergone many changes which the author acknowledges are due to a study of Kant's writings. The only true philosophy is that which sets out, like Kant's, from an investigation of fundamental principles. Kant, however, often relapses into dogmatism in the construction of the system. Examples of this are his assertions that sense and understanding are separated from each other, that space and time are not objective as well as subjective. In his theory of knowledge P. begins with a critical investigation of the faculties of knowing, setting out from the realistic standpoint that there are things outside of us which, although unknown, are the causes of our ideas. He regards Kant's division of the knowing faculty into sensibility and understanding as without foundation. The same faculty
