The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/ Summary: Dilthey - Das natürliche System der Geisteswissenschaften im 17. Jahrhundert
The theologico-metaphysical system which had prevailed during the middle ages was overthrown by the reformation and the revival of the ancient humanistic culture, and yet the new movement brought with it no standard of knowledge nor authoritative church, but Europe was filled with divisions, sects, and religious wars. From the necessities of society, then, arose in the seventeenth century a scientific system which furnished universally valid principles for the guidance of life and the conduct of society. This system of natural religion and of natural law transformed the ideas of Europe; morality and art were influenced by its standpoint. According to this system, there lie in the nature of man conceptions, uniform relations, which have always as result the same fundamental ideas of social life, order, moral laws, rules of beauty, belief in and reverence for the Deity. These natural norms and conceptions in our thought, imagination, and social relations are unchangeable and independent of the changes in forms of culture. Three heterogeneous standpoints were combined in producing this natural system: the religious, the Roman Stoic, and that of the new natural science. The first and strongest motive for the formation of this system lay in the division of the church into sects and the state of war into which Europe was plunged as a consequence. The first writer who gave expression to the longing for peace, by calling attention to what is common to all creeds and beliefs, was the Hollander Coornhert, born 1522. Since each sect professes to be in possession of truth, he demanded toleration and a union upon what was common in all creeds. He was devoted to humanistic studies, and was much influenced by Cicero and Seneca. His ideas did not perish with him, but his influence is shown in both contemporaneous and subsequent writers in the Netherlands who emphasized his positions and pointed out that the life of man does not depend upon the subtilities with which scholars are engaged. Among these writers were Koolhaes, the Chancellor Oldenbarneveldt, and Arminius. These seeds of truth found a favorable soil in England. Hooker founds the principles of his Ecclesiastical Polity, not upon authority, but upon reason, and deprecates all theological controversies. Chillingworth, More (in his Utopia), emphasize the idea of a natural theology. But this thought of natural religion, and that of a fundamental truth which is common to all religions, may not seem identical. The connecting thought is that of the rationality of that which forms the basis of all religions. And this rationality presupposes the conception of an innate supply of moral and religious ideas. Such theories never died out in Europe, and are to be found in Thomas Aquinas as well as in Melancthon and Luther. But what was now decisive was that this theory of innate ideas now entered into union with the conviction, that exactly in what is common to all religions is contained that which is essential for the happiness of mankind. Here we see the influence of the Stoic ideas which were due to the study of the ancient classics in the Netherlands.