But this movement excited natural and not unwarranted alarm in that great center of theology. For Science, flushed with its hard-won liberty, ignorant of philosophy, and as yet unconscious of its proper limitations, was decidedly aggressive and overconfident. It seemed naturalistic, nay, materialistic, by the law of its being. The logic of Mill, the philosophy of Evolution, the faith in democracy, in freedom, in progress (on material lines), threatened to carry all before them.
What was to be done? Nothing directly; for on its own ground Science seemed invulnerable, and had the knack of crushing the subtlest dialectics by the knockdown force of sheer scientific fact. But might it not be possible to change the venue, to shift the battleground to a region _ubi instabilis terra unda_ (where the land afforded no firm footing), where the frozen sea could not be navigated, where the very air was thick with mists so that phantoms might well pass for realities--the realm, in short, of metaphysics?...
So it was rarely necessary to do more than recite the august table of _a priori_ categories in order to make the most audacious scientist feel that he had got out of his depth; while at the merest mention of the Hegelian dialectic all the "advanced thinkers" of the time would flee affrighted.
Schiller's sense of humor doubtless leads him to exaggerate somewhat the deliberateness of this importation of German metaphysics. That these borrowed transcendental and dialectical systems served their purpose in the warfare of traditional theologies against Science is but half the truth. The other half is that these logical formulas provided certain intelligent believers with a defense, or safe refuge, in their own inner conflicts.
That this is the case, Schiller evidently has little doubt. After discussing Absolutism itself as a sort of religion, and showing that its "catch-words" taken at their face value are not only emotionally barren, but also logically meaningless because "inapplicable to our actual experience," he then proceeds to an examination of the unconscious motives which determine this sort of thinking. His description of these motives, so far as it goes, is an excellent little bit of analytical psychology. He says: