§ 171.9. =Mysticism and Theosophy.=--=Oetinger= of Württemburg [Württemberg], the _Magus_ of the South, A.D. 1702-1782, takes rank by himself. He was a pupil of Bengel (§ 167, 3), well grounded in Scripture, but also an admirer of Böhme and sympathising with the spiritualistic visions of Swedenborg. But amid all, with his biblical realism and his theosophy, which held corporeity to be the end of the ways of God, he was firmly rooted in the doctrines of Lutheran orthodoxy.--The best mystic of the Reformed church was =J. Ph. Dutoit= of Lausanne, A.D. 1721-1793, an enthusiastic admirer of Madame Guyon; he added to her quietist mysticism certain theosophical speculations on the original nature of Adam, the creation of woman, the fall, the necessity of the incarnation apart from the fall, the basing of the sinlessness of Christ upon the immaculate conception of his mother, etc. He gathered about him during his lifetime a large number of pious adherents, but after his death his theories were soon forgotten.
§ 171.10. =The German Philosophy.=--As Locke accomplished the descent from Bacon to deism and materialism, so =Wolff= effected the transition from Leibnitz to the popular philosophy. =Kant=, A.D. 1724-1804, saved philosophy from the baldness and self- sufficiency of Wolffianism, and pointed it to its proper element in the spiritual domain. Kant’s own philosophy stood wholly outside of Christianity, on the same platform with rationalistic theology. But by deeper digging in the soil it unearthed many a precious nugget, of whose existence the vulgar rationalism had never dreamed, without any intention of becoming a schoolmaster to lead to Christ. Kant showed the impossibility of a knowledge of the supernatural by means of pure reason, but admitted the ideas of God, freedom, and immortality as postulates of the practical reason and as constituting the principle of all religion, whose only content is the moral law. Christianity and the Bible are to remain the basis of popular instruction, but are to be expounded only in an ethical sense. While in sympathy with rationalism, he admits its baldness and self-sufficiency. His keen criticism of the pure reason, the profound knowledge of human weakness and corruption shown in his doctrine of radical evil, his categorical imperative of the moral law, were well fitted to awaken in more earnest minds a deep distrust of themselves, a modest estimate of the boasted excellences of their age, and a feeling that Christianity could alone meet their necessities.--=F. H. Jacobi=, A.D. 1743-1819, “with the heart a Christian, with the understanding a pagan,” as he characterized himself, took religion out of the region of mere reason into the depths of the universal feelings of the soul, and so awakened a positive aspiration.--=J. G. Fichte=, A.D. 1762-1814, transformed Kantianism, to which he at first adhered, into an idealistic science of knowledge, in which only the _ego_ that posits itself appears as real, and the _non-ego_, only by its being posited by the _ego_; and thus the world and nature are only a reflex of the mind. But when, accused of atheism in A.D. 1798, he was expelled from his position in Jena, he changed his views, rushing from the verge of atheism into a mysticism approaching to Christianity. In his “Guide to a Blessed Life,” A.D. 1806, he delivered religion from being a mere servant to morals, and sought the blessedness of life in the loving surrender of one’s whole being to the universal Spirit, the full expression of which he found in John’s Gospel. Pauline Christianity, on the other hand, with its doctrine of sin and redemption, seemed to him a deterioration, and Christ Himself only the most complete representative of the incarnation of God repeated in all ages and in every pious man.--In the closing years of the century, =Schelling= brought forward his theory of _identity_, which was one of the most powerful instruments in introducing a new era.[521]